Excitement!

Since I have had many years of experience with this emotion and how it relates to the network marketing business, I feel that I have a solid basis for sharing with you what I have learned. Here’s what seems to be the “Excitement Cycle.”

1. Something happens, such as a new product introduction, a positive personal experience with a product, or a company incentive and you are EXCITED!
2. You want to go out and shout to the world about it. So you do...
3. Most of the time your excitement bubble gets shot down, especially by those who are closest to you—your family and friends.
4. You feel hurt and disappointed and ask yourself, “Why can’t they see it like I do?”
5. If you believe in the product and determine that you’re going to stick with it and build your income no matter what, you might decide NOT to talk to your family and friends (i.e., your “warm market”).
6. You might decided that you’re going to “play it safe” and only talk to people you don’t know.
7. The same cycle often happens when you find a “golden nugget distributor” who SAYS he is going to build a business or follow the system you outline or buy a bunch of products when...And you believe him. You get excited and anticipate great things happening, including high purchase volume, only to realize in time that it’s NOT happening. Again, disappointment.

It took me a long time to really understand what a master networker meant when he said, “It’s my job NOT to get excited.” And it took me a long time to learn that my excitement frequently turned people off! That was a difficult thing to learn, but I’m glad I did because it’s naïve to think that my excitement will “rub off” on others and motivate them to “do something”.

Motivation is a personal thing and stimulated by very personal beliefs, wishes and desires. The time has to be right for each person to take a particular action.

This is why I want to “be there” every month with a flyer, a smile and friendly word—steady as she goes—and wait and watch for the opportunity to respond in the best way to (yes!) my family and friends when they express an interest in the products or in following a simple “system.”

When I have “consent to present,” I’ll tell them that this is a “smart thing to be involved in” and help them take that first step. It happens naturally and not forced, just as in nature. You cannot make a flower, tree or your network marketing business grow any faster than it naturally takes.

Please don’t misunderstand and think that I feel negative about great products or wonderful opportunities that help us grow and prosper. I have a powerful and positive expectation that, over time, you and I will achieve even beyond what we originally thought possible. But I also believe that the excitement of another person’s action should come AFTER the fact, not in anticipation of it.

The Doctor's Comments
It's not about US, it's about THEM! It's about correctly communicating with people. We think we're communicating when we send out our excitement. But if we're excited about something that someone has a pre-conceived idea about and we don't have permission to share our excitement, then we're sending the message to that person of "You are dumb! You are wrong!" if he/she doesn't have the same excitement that we have.

This is why so many people do not like the "Rah, Rah" aspects of meetings. If the people in charge don't feel that the crowd is responding enthusiastically enough, they'll often ask for fake enthusiasm. This makes people feel very uncomfortable.

We have to discover what a person's dissatisfactions are as well as their desires for change, instead of trying to change them with our excitement. The more we try to get somebody to do something, the more it tends to push them away. That's why most people cannot influence their warm market. They no longer treat them as friends. They treat them as targets, which in turn tends to alienate them.

Cat Fights

During my growing up years, our family had a number of pets. Two of them especially stick out in my mind. The first was a darling puppy, a mixed breed, mostly Labrador, that dad declared to be a "boy" after taking a quick look at his underside. For some reason, I had the pleasure of naming the wiggly, tongue-licking pooch.

We soon discovered that Figaro was a female so I adjusted her name to Figarina. When we took her in for her shots, the veterinarian's office declared that they had never had a dog in there with that name!

Frosty the cat is the other pet I vividly recall, probably because she was so beautiful. As dramatically white as Figarina was black, her fur was long, soft to the touch and pristine, as she was always manicuring it with her tongue. But she was quite the independent one, going out at night to who knows where, doing the things that cats do--and sometimes coming back with bloody scratches on her lovely face and sorry-looking chunks out of her gorgeous fur.

We moved to Delaware Street when I was in the fourth grade. Of course we took Frosty with us, but somehow she got out the second day we were in the new neighborhood and we never saw her again. I was incredibly sad to think that the pull of her wild side was stronger than her attachment to our family. I guessed that the affection I felt for her was one-sided.

There were plenty of other cats in the new neighborhood, as evidenced by the nightly noises coming from the wood fence catwalks. At first I thought the sounds were from humans; they were so loud and agonizing. I could relate to the television cartoons of the time showing angry folks throwing shoes and boots at the felines, just to shut them up.

I couldn't understand what the commotion was all about, though. It was incomprehensible that cats could be in such pain just from being hot, particularly in the middle of winter. I asked my mother about it but she acted like she didn't know how to answer me. In fact, a daughter of the Elizabethan era, mother seemed uncomfortable communicating any information about male/female relationships, even though she was a nurse.

With the exception of a Walt Disney teaching movie about menstruation when I was 11 years old, most of the information I gleaned about sex came from my friends and my cousins. I learned that what went on with birds and bees also went on with cats, dogs, horses and cows. I had lots of cousins who lived in the country on farms in Oregon, so even though a city girl, I could also observe nature firsthand.

The most memorable cat fight I ever saw was the one I witnessed while walking home from junior high school when I was 14. A crowd of students quickly formed to watch as shrieks filled the air and flexed claws gouged skin, hair, and eyes--nothing was sacred. The two were out for the kill.

Not being able to stand the bloodbath and butchery, I yelled for a couple of the bigger boys to stop the fight, but they thought it was great sport. I've never seen anything like it since, except in movies. Until then, I didn't know that pony-tailed girls were capable of such aggression and terror. I remembered my own cat fights with my younger sister, but even though we slugged it out when we were young children, we seemed to have had a line over which we wouldn't cross.

These girls, however, even grabbed each other by their blood-spattered hair and jackhammered each other's heads against the rough cement sidewalk. The fight was so out of control and gruesome that it left an indelible mark in my mind's eye.

The recollection returned like a barrage of pounding rain in May 2003 as I read about an incident in Chicago where some high school upper class girls were horribly beating younger girls in a supposedly adult-supervised invitation. Reason vanished as the older girls got into the razing and turned reptilian in the process. The younger girls weren't even battling back in that cat fight!

The Doctor's Comments:
All reason vanishes when anger is the motivating force. One of my favorite quotes about anger is this: "Agree with thine adversary quickly...lest he esteem thee to be thine enemy."

It's always best to never start a battle you cannot win.

Draining the Girls

My parents’ six children came in sets of twos during the 40’s and 50’s. I’m not sure what potty training method they used on the oldest set, but on my set and the younger set, they called it “draining the girls. At least that’s what my father called it.

Before we all piled into the car to go on any trip or excursion, daddy would loudly proclaim, “It’s time to drain the girls!” Like a drill sergeant, he’d march us into the potty and we had to “go” before we could get into the car.

My own drainage challenges were exquisitely painful because I still wet the bed at age eight. My mother held me responsible for causing her extra work and successfully inoculated me with horrible guilt by complaining,” I have to work all night long at the hospital and then come home and wash your wet sheets!” And in a tone full of hurt, she’d add, “You should be more considerate!”

I tried to be more considerate but I just couldn’t seem to wake myself up during the night. Even though my father would get me up at 10:00 o’clock, after I was in a deep sleep, it still didn’t help. I’d be wet again before morning.

One night my dear older cousin Peggy took me to stay with her at a friend’s house and we had a special prayer, asking Father in heaven to “please help me not to wet the Hoit’s bed.” It worked that time! But nothing else worked until mother and daddy heard about a special electronic bedwetting device that my aunt had successfully used.

The machine scared me to death! It consisted of a metallic-like pad, connected by several clamps to a loud, ear-splitting alarm. Whenever the sensor detected fluid, it was supposed to sound the alarm.

The first night I lay awake terrified that this metallic monster was going to go off. The whole household would know! The whole neighborhood would know! I might have been lying on the proverbial pins and needles for the horror that I felt.

Finally, I could stay awake no longer and drifted off to sleep, only to be awakened by the screaming alarm. Dad rushed in, wearing his white winter long johns, jerked me out of bed and plunked me down on the potty. For the life of me, I couldn’t go.

It was a false alarm. Seems I had just turned over and leaned on one of the clamps, causing the alarm to go off. That incident was enough to shock me into sleeping lighter from then on and I never wet the bed again. I had learned the fine art of draining and my parents had a reprieve until the last set of children came along.

Fortunately for my own four children, I learned what not to do as a parent from my own experiences. When my daughter was four years old and immersed in play, she’d wait until the very last minute before making the long trek to the bathroom. She’d cross her legs and sort of bend in half and say, “Oh, mommy, I have to go to the bathroom but I don’t want to!” I could thoroughly understand her feelings of not wanting to interrupt her playtime.

My son was still wetting the bed at age seven but I resisted purchasing a metallic monster for him. It seemed like there must be a better way and I was going to do my best to find one that suited him. At the very least, I worked at not putting any guilt on him because I knew he didn’t like wetting even more that I didn’t like the extra washing chore.

One morning I had a golden opportunity when my son exclaimed, “Mom, God is not answering my prayers.” When I asked why he thought that, he knowingly replied, “Because I prayed last night that God would help me not to wet the bed and it didn’t work. I wet again!”

“Have you considered asking a different prayer?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” he responded.
“Well, instead of asking Him to help you not to wet the bed, what about asking him to help you wake up when you have to go? And tell you what…as soon as you wake up, just call out to me and I’ll be ready to jump right up and help you down from your bunk. I’ll wait for you to go and then help you back up.”
“Okay, let’s try it,” he agreed.

That night my son called about 2:00 a.m. and I jumped right up and did just as I promised. The next morning he came running into my bedroom to excitedly announce, “Mom, it worked! God answered my prayer!”

The next night we repeated the same procedure, with me jumping up to help him. He was again successful. By the third night, he whispered to me, “I think I can do it by myself now, mom.” And he did.

The Doctor's Comments:
It's best to teach correct principles and our children will learn to govern themselves. The word "discipline" really means providing an experience that results in a worthwhile change in behavior.

Give Away!

As a young child attending Sunday school, I learned a little song that became my mantra. While skating down the street with pigtails flying, I’d belt out the words to the chorus,

“Singing, singing all the day, give away, oh, give away.
Singing, singing all the day, give, oh, give away!”

It’s no wonder that I grew up never having any money. My younger sister was a saver, but whenever I’d get an allowance or babysitting money, I’d take a friend out for a hamburger or a soda.

Don’t get me wrong, I LOVED giving. I became very, very good at it. After all, that was the charitable thing to do, wasn’t it?

While reading “Secrets of the Millionaire Mind” by T. Harv Eker, I learned that giving is great—in its place, of course. We must pay ourselves first and manage the rest of the money so we’ll have all the more to give!

So I made up a new chorus to the song I learned as a child. It goes like this:

“Singing, singing all the day, give, receive and save and play.
Singing, singing all the day, give and save and play!”

I feel much better about this more balanced approach. I’ve learned that by managing my money correctly, I can do it all!

The Doctor's Comments:
Money is a good gift when in need, but the gift of love and time are better indeed! I love the words from the song called Nature Boy, "The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return."

Learning from a Bushel of Oranges

Some time in the ‘70s I read the magnificent book, “The Magic of Believing” by Claude M. Bristol. I read it again in 2006 and while it was inspiring and thought provoking, I just couldn’t seem to be able to believe big enough to have, do and be what I really wanted. But yesterday, I learned a powerful lesson from some oranges.

Nearly every day my friend and I go on a walk, taking the same route past a house with a big orange tree loaded with fruit. As I would pass the tree, I’d casually think about how luscious the oranges looked and how delicious and juicy they must taste.

Yesterday on our walk, the whole world seemed especially beautiful with a bright, blue sky; splendidly tall trees in a number of varieties; hills on the north side of the city providing a majestic backdrop to it all. My friend and I were reveling in the beauties surrounding us as we came to the house with the loaded orange tree.

A few feet before the tree I stopped and held up my arms in a sort of receiving gesture and exclaimed to my friend, “Wouldn’t it be grand to have a bushel of these oranges that we could squeeze into some fresh juice?” I could imagine the sweet, tangy taste of it!

As we continued walking past the tree, the lady of the house burst out of the door and said, “Would you ladies like some of these oranges? I’ve been watching you walk past my house for days now as I work in my office, and today I saw you looking up into the tree.”

I told her we’d LOVE some oranges and did she have a sack? She went into the house and brought us back two large grocery bags and a pair of clippers. We found out her name was Laura and she invited us to come and make ourselves at home and pick oranges, and even tangerines from her side yard, any time we wanted, even if she wasn’t there. Not only did we get a bushel of oranges, but we also made a new friend!

What I learned from the oranges experience was that before I could believe something, I needed to actually FEEL it and IMAGINE it first! I finally understood what I’ve been learning from the movie, The Secret, that we can have, and do, and be anything we want if we can imagine ourselves as already having, doing and being it. The key is to FEEL it!

I hadn’t tried hard to believe in having the oranges. I didn’t question whether or not I was going to get them, or when I was going to get them. I simply and naturally, without force, imagined what it would FEEL like having them—juicy, tangy, delicious—and there they were, attracted right to me!

So I think that the magic of FEELING is the first logical step to the magic of believing. When the bible says, “…as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he…” (Proverbs 23:7, para) I believe the key words “in his heart” refers to thinking with our feelings, not just with our intellect.

Now, having learned a great lesson from the oranges, I’m having fun FEELING what it’s like to have, do and be what I really want. I’m also believing it and I know that in the right time, all that I desire will be manifested into my life just as the oranges were!

Muriel Donaldson
February 17, 2007

The Doctor's Comments:
Attitude is EVERYTHING!

The Accident

THE ACCIDENT
Written in October 2005, upon breaking my hip. It kept me occupied and made everyone chuckle!

Comfy little socks
Pretty little throw rug
Ring! Ring! Ring! Get it quick!
Around the chair…
Slips and slides
The comfy little socks and pretty little throw rug
Feet a flying,
SPLAT!
BAM!
BANG!

Oh! Oh! Oh! Writhing pain!
Now I’ve fallen, seeing stars
Can’t get up—afraid to move…

The cell phone’s near, imagine that!
A GREAT thing to have when your
Hip goes splat!

The ER
Ouch! Don’t move me!
Swirling, twirling, spinning.
Feeling yucky, passing out,
Falling down,
down,
down…
X-Rays
Delays
CAT Scan
Bedpan
Wristband
Ouch! Don’t move me!

The Operation
Smiling, dimpled Dr. Smith
Here to turn out my lights.
Shifted with a sheet from bed to table,
I see the backs of two blue, bedecked doctors preparing their tools.

Looking and looking,
wondering and wondering,
What does it take to anchor
three pins?

That’s all I remember till awake I became.
Oh! Oh! Oh! Give me something for pain!!

So…what does it take to anchor the pins?
A great big hammer is where it begins!

Bang! Bang! Bang! Goes the doctor in blue.
My sister, a nurse, told me
So I know it is true!

Post-Op
Wheeled into my room
My heart leaps with joy
Flowers await, what a beautiful site!

The troops assemble, not just a few:
Doctors, technicians, nurses, and therapists too.
I welcome them all with thanks and a smile
Grateful for the care they give all the while.

Now the visitors are coming
To give me some cheer.
I can’t run for my makeup—Oh golly! Oh dear!
They’ll see me as I am—what a horrible site,
Worse in my mind than Halloween night!


Physical Therapy
Ankle up, Ankle down
Side to side
And around

Press in with the butts,
Count to five and AGAIN
Until we do it over and over times 10.

Press in with the knees
Just like with the butts
No cheating! She’s counting.
This really takes guts!

And now the finale, the end of the train,
She bends the left knee to my shouting refrain:
NO PAIN! NO GAIN!
NO PAIN! NO GAIN!
(while the nurses laughed…)


Convalescing
Hairy, hairy legs
Walker and a pot
A pile of pillows, cheery calls
Friends a-visiting, well wishes galore.

Magazines
Books
Movies
And bills

Cards
Letters
And calcium pills

But, oh that first shower, heaven divine!
Life’s simple pleasures truly are mine!!

The Doctor's Comments:
This is an excellent example of "you don't cry over spilled milk." Another great quote from Proverbs is this: "A merry heart doeth good like a medicine."