Month: September 2012 | Chris Zavadowski's Massive Leverage Marketing

Wow. Four years already.

It’s hard to believe it’s been that long.

Here I am sitting in a very familiar waiting room right next to a very familiar fish tank. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve sat here while my Dad gets CT scans, watching the clown fish swimming back and forth

Will the lymph nodes light up differently this time? Nah. These days, I always expect good news, but it wasn’t too long ago we didn’t know what to expect…

You see, four years ago my Dad became very ill…so bad that he had to stay home from work. I’ll spare you all of the “fun” details, but the result was he looked like a pale ghost, with zero appetite or energy.

While dozens of tests started to point toward a lymphoma, his lymph node biopsy continued to baffle the local pathologists and labs. It took almost three months of chasing down doctors and labs (totally unacceptable when you’re dealing with someone’s life!) until we got everything over to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), specifically the National Cancer Institute (NCI).

Then within days this top notch facility finally nailed things down and handed my Dad a confirmed diagnosis: Stage IV Peripheral T-cell Lymphoma, unspecified.

Basically his cancer was as advanced as it could be (appearing in his blood, lymph nodes, bone marrow and metastasized on his leg and a couple ribs). While an estimated 662,789 individuals are living with or are in remission from lymphoma, the type my Dad had was very rare.

Because so few people have this, there’s not really a standard treatment for this…yet. And with “regular” chemotherapy, the chance of survival is just 20% after 5 years.

(SIDE NOTE: Throughout this year-long odyssey, we quickly learned, when someone’s life is involved, don’t settle for only your local doc’s opinion. Do everything in your power to get several experts to weigh in. Second opinions have literally been LIFE-SAVERS for us multiple times!)

We consulted long and hard with all of our lymphoma specialists (note, I didn’t just say oncologists – we worked hard to get my Dad in front of the most qualified experts possible!). They all agreed, a clinical trial was his best chance of survival. That’s why my Dad decided to be part of research “protocol” run by NIH’s NCI (a world-class, amazing facility that gets patients flying in from all over the place).

At the end of the day, it was a simple decision really. While it was a much more aggressive treatment, with increased side effects and risks, it’s also something they were testing specifically for t-cell lymphomas. It involved 5 days of steady chemotherapy…repeated every 3 weeks over a period of about 4 months. A whopping 650 hours of treatment!

Of course over all those months, Mom, Dad and I mixed in theater, movies, trips, funny wigs and as much “life” as we could throughout. Don’t let your cancer totally pause your life — YOU are still in charge!

And thanks to the wonders of modern science, an excellent medical team, a great research protocol and a lot of prayers, my Dad beat the lymphoma in 2008!

The problem is, there were 75,190 new lymphoma cases in 2011 according to the American Cancer Society, and the National Cancer Institute estimates this year, there will be 1,638,910 Americans newly diagnosed with cancer. Fortunately survival rates have increased as detection *and* treatment methods have improved, but we’ve still got a long way to go. In fact, blood cancers are the #3 cancer killer in North America after respiratory and digestive cancers.

Even if you haven’t had to deal with a blood cancer, chances are you or a loved one have been touched by some form of cancer, so you know first-hand how emotional and scary this journey is for an entire family.

Unfortunately, every seven minutes, in the United States alone, someone is newly diagnosed with lymphoma. And just about every 25 minutes, someone dies from lymphoma. Which means in the time it took you to read this post, there’s a new blood cancer case, and someone is saying goodbye to their loved ones. These numbers ARE improving little by little…but only with more research!

By supporting research (either with time, money or by participating in a trial), you improve quality of life and become part of the eventual cure. Heck, my Dad is now a part of the “solution” for cancer – he helped researchers learn more about this crazy disease. And some day down the road when they cure it, he’ll have played his part in that. You go, Dad!

So back to the NIH waiting room adventure from earlier…what did this month’s CT scan and blood work eventually show a few hours later? ALL CLEAR! We just hit the 4-year lymphoma-free mark! Thank God!

Bottom line, as we wrap up this “Blood Cancer Awareness Month” I want to stress how important it is to continually support cancer research. It’s truly the ONLY way we’ll find a cure. Plug into organizations like the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, go to their special events like “Light the Night“, sign up for their newsletters, use their free resources and make a donation or two.

The fact is, this research WORKS. My family stands here as LIVING proof.

To a world without cancer,
Chris Zavadowski

P.S. Did you know that the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society helped fund the research that developed chemotherapy? In fact, nearly half of the new cancer drugs developed since 2000 were for blood cancer therapies.

Even more exciting is the fact that those drugs are now showing significant promise in breast, ovarian, lung, brain, skin, prostate and many more forms of cancer. Plus they are now used for treatment in Alzheimer’s, rheumatoid arthritis and even to help prevent rejection after organ transplantation. That’s a lot of lives saved with fundraising dollars!

If you feel like saving a life, please visit our special “Light the Night” fundraising page and make a donation today: http://chris.teamzavadowski.com (every amount, NO matter the size, makes a difference!)

And since this is a “business” blog, I’ll do something something special for your business, too. As you’ll see on my fundraising page above, I’ve got a big goal to raise $30,000 by the end of 2012…

So for everyone who donates just $100 or more (which of course is tax-deductible), I’ll flat-out give you a FREE copy of Dan Kennedy’s “Copywriting Clinic” course which normally sells for $129.

When you master the art-and-science of writing powerful direct-response copy for sales letters, emails, websites, postcards, brochures, catalogs, and ads, you can literally write any size paycheck you wish. Being able to create “salesmanship in print” that works multiplies you 100, 1,000, 10,000 times over. It is one of the highest-paid activities that I know of.

At this workshop, Dan covered 97 specific tricks-of-the-trade to creating copy that will reach out and suck money right into your bank account like an out-of-control vacuum cleaner. Each one is hard-learned, valuable, powerful and important. What’s each one worth? Ten bucks? That’d make this a $1,000.00 program.

But you’ll get this entire downloadable audio program and notes…for just a $100 tax-deductible donation to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society by December 31, 2012. Just click here to make your donation and save a life!

Mastering Your Inner Game

We’re going to talk about the inner game of building your business. I believe that the inner game is simply all-important. “The inner game” is a new term for a classic idea explained many different times, many different ways by virtually every success educator, and even philosophers.

In the book Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill reveals the secret using the words, “thoughts are things.” Dennis Waitley has worked with U.S. astronauts and Olympic athletes on their inner games. Author Tim Galloway explores the ideas of his books, The Inner Game of Golf, The Inner Game of Tennis and The Inner Game of Selling.

Interestingly, there is a never-ending connection between the inner game in sport and the inner game in business, allowing experts like Waitley, Galloway, ex-quarterback Fran Tarkenton and golfer Arnold Palmer, among others, to step back and forth between expounding on success techniques in the athletic and business worlds.

In all cases, these people speak much more about attitudes than aptitudes for a good reason. Surveys, studies and research consistently reaffirm that 85% of your success will depend on attitudinal factors, 15% on aptitude.

Yet in your formal education and in most continuing education, the emphasis is on the opposite – 15% on attitude, 85% on aptitude.

Certainly technical knowledge and skills are important. In your profession, you must deliver excellence based on your staying up to date in techniques, products, materials and ideas.

However, such excellence alone will never build a successful, growing, profitable business. The excellence that will is an excellence created and sustained in your own mind. This is the most difficult, least tangible aspect of building your business that we’ll ever talk about, but it is also probably the most important.

Yeah, but what is it?

So what is the inner game? The way I see it, the inner game can be broken down into four major components:

Self esteem
Self image
Self confidence
Self discipline

Quality in these four areas is a necessary foundation to personal and professional success.

Self Esteem

Self Esteem is essentially your feelings of worth. How much success do you deserve? How much money should you make? How much is your time worth?

Here, briefly, are seven ideas for strengthening self-esteem:

Establish worthwhile, meaningful goals and values.
Take massive action to get your own financial house in order if it isn’t now. Reduce debt, bring expenses under income, and invest every single month.
Give yourself recognition for each and every accomplishment.
Manage your time productively. Procrastination and disorganization rob many people of their self-esteem.
Associate with positive-minded, happy people who encourage and motivate you. Don’t hang out with folks who are negative, unhappy, critical or jealous.
Continually acquire new know-how in you profession and in the areas of business, sales and communication.
Regularly invest in improving your office and home environments, tools and equipment, wardrobe and other external things that impact on your attitudes.

Self Image

Self-image is how you see yourself; it’s who you think you are. Your self-image is controlled mostly by self-imposed limits. Very few people ever perform beyond those self-imposed limits.

A salesman whose father never earned more than $25,000 a year in his life may well see himself as a $25,000 a year guy. And he will subconsciously screw up the opportunities to earn more that come his way.

In the financial area, the controversial Reverend Ike calls this a money rejection syndrome, and I am convinced that such a thing definitely exists. One man I know, who made over $100 million in his business in its first three years from scratch, had gone broke in business several times before. After the three years of remarkable success, he said, “Making $100 million is about the easiest thing I’ve ever done. Believing it could happen to me was the hard part that took 20 years.”

Your self-image was created and is sustained through self talk, the use of affirmations – and that is also the method you can use to alter and modify your self image, literally as you wish.

I call the process self image goal setting, because most people who set goals set only “to get” and “to have” goals; they fail to set “to be” goals. I encourage you to balance your approach to goal setting by including some self-image modification.

Self Discipline

Self-Disciple, the fourth component of the inner game, is quite possibly the most important.

Success lecturer Jim Rohn says that most people do not associate lack of discipline with lack of success.

Most people think of failure as one earth-shattering event, such as a company going out of business or a home being foreclosed on. This, however, Jim Rohn says, is how failure happens.

Failure is rarely the result of some isolated event; rather, it is a consequence of a long list of accumulated little failures, which happen as a result of too little discipline. I agree. I find that most people understandably tend to look everywhere but in the mirror for the sources of their failures as well as the victories.

I’m here to tell you it’s not the town you’re in, not your location, not the economy, not the weather, not your competitors – it’s your own discipline that makes the difference between excellence or mediocrity, between getting by or getting rich.

It’s interesting to observe professionals. I often say to my associates, “Let me watch the professional’s behavior before, during and after the seminar, and I’ll guess his annual income within a few thousand dollars.” It’s actually pretty easy to do.

Jim Rohn says that discipline is the bridge between thought and accomplishment.

I’d encourage you to take the self-discipline challenge very seriously.

Select those areas that you know are your weakest links – timely paperwork, punctuality, daily self-improvement study, being happy and enthusiastic first thing in the morning, whatever your personal stumbling blocks are – and apply new, tough, demanding disciplines to yourself in those areas.

You’ll find that success in these particular areas of your day-to-day life will roll over into greater success in all parts of you life.

For example, let’s look at the ultimate game players – professional football players. A pro ball player knows that every single moment of his on-the-job performance is recorded on film, to be replayed and reviewed later in stop-action slow motion, for critique by his superiors and co-workers.

If your day was filmed and reviewed, how would you feel during the replay?

Of course, the professional football players who have to put up with this sort of thing are highly paid.

Yes, the inner game stuff is tough. If being a big success were easy, everybody would be one. You’ve got to decide what you really want to be, do, have, accomplish – and decide whether or not you’re willing to adhere to the disciplines necessary to get it.

In order to have the opportunity to accomplish virtually any goals you honestly desire, you must accept the related responsibility for everything you get.

– By Dan S. Kennedy, serial entrepreneur, from-scratch multi-millionaire, speaker, consultant, coach, author of 13 books including the No B.S. series, and editor of The No B.S. Marketing Letter. FOR A SPECIAL FREE GIFT FROM DAN FOR YOU including newsletters, audio CD’s and more: visit: www.FreeDanKennedyNewsletter.com