Ask Kevin Anything February 2021

Winter 2019/2020 Oslo, Norway Dr. Hogan, I am writing to you because I have a problem with my self-confidence and the organization of my time. I have been working as a sales representative for many years but this happened to me at some point. Would you write something about people like me who have lost themselves? Would you help such people rediscover themselves?  From Plovdiv, Bg.

This specific email/list of questions has been the most common “type” of email I’ve received since about November. The question of discovering your SELF and gaining self  WORTH is the most important question of 2021.

I remember when I took this picture (Below) from the Raddison Blu) in Sofia. It’s just miles from where the gentleman who gave us this massively important question for February is from. I remember thinking, that I was looking at a completely different world than I knew.

I wasn’t just half way around the world from home, I was living in a world that was changing and that world was mine.  Walking this city 100+ days from 2016 – 2018 reminded me that life can be comfortable and uncomfortable at the same time. You can be enjoying things and be frustrated.

You can be lost and found all at the same moment. It took me awhile, lots of conversations with locals as I was the foreigner, and finding out that who I was, was very foreign indeed to most of the people here. I had to get out of the “I’m from the U.S.A. mode, and get into, ‘teach ME,’ mode.”

It took awhile and then I started to get it, like I never dreamed… For all those who have lost themselves…

Self confidence begins with how you evaluate your SELF and what you do to improve that level of skills and then once you have done THAT you secondarily, perhaps a year or several months later you have to meet criteria that say, “Ah, I am a heck of a good salesperson now.

I’ve studied, my sales are as good as anyone in the company and my income is matching other sales people in other industries.” Self confidence thus is found among two much bigger parts. You have REAL SKILLS, AND you have a REAL way to MEASURE just how good those skills are. Self confidence needs to be separate from other people’s “belief in you.”

It’s always nice to have people believe in you but other people can be overly critical or overly generous. Their opinion is probably not very important and generally should be ignored whether too wonderful or too terrible. Meanwhile, you have a boss, a supervisor at the office who has an opinion of your skills. This person’s evaluation of you matters whether he is right or wrong. You must find out what criteria he is using to “rate you.” You must ask, “Hey boss, I want to see my income go up 15% this year. What do I need to do to see that happen?” In sales your boss should come back with, “well if you increase your sales 30% that 15% raise is very reasonable.” Salespeople are paid for performance.

If your company doesn’t pay for better performance, then improve your skills NOW and then leave the company for another company that will pay you based upon what you produce. Self confidence comes with personal improvement and generally that is something that IS measurable. Most people have misperceptions of self confidence. They think it means how much they “like themselves.” Or they believe it means, “I can do anything.” Neither is correct. You can’t do anything, and, how much you like yourself is your self worth or self esteem.

These things are different from self confidence. Self esteem and self worth are the price tag you put on your SELF.

Your VALUE to your family, your children, your wife, your work, your future lifestyle. There are three books I wrote below that will help a great deal at BEGINNING these processes.

1) The 168 Hour Week

2) 12 Factors of Business Success

3) Selling Yourself to Others Next “People who have Lost Themselves.”

What this really means is the person has had their identity threatened or taken away. In other words, they got fired, lost their job because of covid, got divorced, the kids won’t talk to you or other similar BIG LIFE CHANGES where life doesn’t look or FEEL the same. Inside, the person FEELS LOST.

They don’t know where they are because they are stuck in the same place everyday. That’s what a pandemic does to pretty much everyone. Most people believe that “getting lost” is part of leaving the house and getting lost out there on the highway A1 from Plovdiv to Sofia. But that’s only one way people “get lost.”

It’s easy with GPS (a phone with google maps) to get back home after getting lost.

It’s NOT so easy to get back to LIFE after having lost something BIG in life. Someone dies, sales drop for some reason, you become less able to cope with the challenges of life. You become a parent who’s children no longer obey or love like they did before.

Maybe the spouse has changed their behavior to where you don’t recognize them as your spouse. These things are the REAL GETTING LOST, in life. The 3 books I listed above are a good start to “finding your self” again.

Do start with these books but THEN go several steps further.  You want a mentor. This is the first big step and it truly is a big step. What happens is you learn a set of skills as a child and young adult. You get a job, you marry someone. You have kids. Over time ALL of these things change in BIG ways.

This is true for everyone. In the United States we have more than a pandemic. We now have SEVERAL MILLION people who are 30 years old living at home with Mom or Dad.

Yep. Mom and Dad failed at teaching their kids to be ALIVE on this PLANET. They failed at teaching HOW to be ALIVE and HOW to THRIVE in the world. My Mom didn’t know much about money but she drilled two themes into my mind about money, not earning it, but what to do with it.

“Save 1/3 of what you are earning for taxes and save the rest for you.” This demanded that you work of course. So you had to learn how to get your butt out of bed and work. There was no “unemployment” problem except between the ears of each person in the house.

People can’t find a job because they haven’t figured out WHO THEY ARE and WHAT THEY ARE CAPABLE OF.

That’s how it begins. If you don’t know the answer to the question, don’t worry TAKE NOTES and we’ll help you open some doors to find just where those answers are. This is another part of parenting and managing and teaching that VERY FEW parents, teachers and managers ever get.

Let me be crystal clear: Dad didn’t teach his daughter to be responsible, to focus on family first, to make sure everyone is doing things that will move them forward in life. Because parenting is not easy and because people don’t take parenting seriously. They let it (their children’s future) slide.

“Oh my baby is too young to work at 15, he’ll have plenty of years to work and learn about life.” Stupid mother? Yes. That means when the child LEAVES the mother she will have the world HIT  HER IN THE FACE WITH A BRICK.

LEGENDARY DIRECTIVE: The parent’s job is to assist the child in learning to THINK, to finding MEANING and PURPOSE and help them DEVELOP SKILLS, INTELLIGENCE, WISDOM and the STRONG DESIRE TO WORK so they have MONEY they have EARNED and not been GIVEN.

Children must learn these things from the earliest possible moment. Parents must take responsibility for EDUCATING THEIR CHILDREN just like teachers must take responsibility for educating future citizens. “Get a job, stay there for 40 years and retire.” That’s a lot of people’s advice about how to make it through life. It doesn’t work. It can’t work. It’s a joke.

IT FORCES PEOPLE TO GET LOST and REMAIN LOST. Children and young adults who went to school AND worked every day after school, learned differently. The two aspects of life need to be PAIRED.

You LEARN TODAY and YOU WORK TONIGHT. You train that into your kids and then your employees and people learn they then have a workable LIFE STRUCTURE. People who follow the directive will find they have learned much and have MANY LIFE SKILLS. They have A WAY, A PATH.

And if it isn’t obvious WHERE that path is TODAY, they will MAKE THEIR OWN PATH. It’s embarrassing but true. People who lost themselves were victims who must now become heroes.

People who were taught nothing but how to rot in the video game chair must now make a BIG LIFE CHANGE. The world is NOT prepared for them. The world does not have a start button. The world does not start you off with points or gold at the beginning of the game.

The world does not want to help you. The world does not have a PAUSE button. The world does not give you a new life when you get shot and die. The world does not have a compulsion to teach you to success through mistakes.

So you will parent yourself and find a mentor to accelerate the process that should have been done years ago.

And YOU WILL because you aren’t going to be without VALUE. You will now SELF-PARENT yourself hopefully with the help of a mentor or coach.

Everyone needs a mentor. Everyone needs someone to point you in the right direction, suggest what to do next, help you with the “math of life.” Every great athlete has a coach. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM. And you NEED this person too. For what they can teach you and to give you REAL SUPPORT through the difficult times that WILL COME.

Because life is hard until the person loses their SELF and then something horrifying happens inside. They become depressed because they are LOST. They are sad because they are HOPELESS. They are not succeeding in business because they only learned ONE SET OF SKILLS from a parent. You don’t need 1 set of skills.

You need 10! You better know how to feed yourself. You must know how to work responsibly so when the world changes around you, YOU ARE THE FIRST PERSON SOMEONE WANTS TO HIRE. You learn this best in times of crisis. Like a pandemic. You actually have MUCH more time during a pandemic. It begins with reading but quickly moves to REAL LEARNING about LIFE.

Life is not one path. One path ALWAYS ends and then you have to choose between other paths. Problem is you don’t have the skills yet. So you must teach Your SELF and TRAIN your SELF until someone else will help you train your self. Generally this requires a commitment on your part.

You buy the time of the RIGHT people who take a liking to you and you LISTEN to their advice, you do what they say. You ask them to teach you about money, how to make it, invest it, save it (there is a big difference); how to earn it when that job is over, how to earn MORE with your own BUSINESS which is ALWAYS in business because YOU are ALWAYS CHANGING because LIFE CHANGES in front of you and you change to meet the new circumstances of life. SO it requires learning and listening and THEN you have to learn to be UNIQUE and SPECIAL. You need to find those things you want to do to help the world, the people you will work for and LEARN SEVERAL SETS OF SKILLS.

You must learn how to be a parent even if your kids are all grown up, because parents are a lot like managers at the office. Some of them are good, some bad, but the best listen to the people who work for them, let them make mistakes, show them how to fix them quickly and how to get up off their butts and move FORWARD. People LOSE THEMSELVES when they BLAME other people.

“Who is to blame for the economy? The pandemic? The milk that spilled on the floor? Who is to blame for the car accident?” People who blame have NO LIFE SKILLS. Instead of becoming experts on teaching people how to avoid similar problems in the future they simply point the finger and say, “it’s your fault.”

STAY AWAY FROM THESE PEOPLE THEY ARE DEADLY TO LIFE. Rebuild your friendships and relationships so you connect with people who want to be responsible, have self discipline like the black belt in karate, but this is for the karate of life. The people you want to spend time with are the people who master the first dozen skills and then learn advanced skills.

You CAN learn the basics of karate in books. Really! But you can’t master the skills. That requires other people and one heck of a good teacher. Your parent needs to teach you how to play cribbage, poker, scrabble, card games, thinking games recently popularized by the Germans and now big in the States in smart families.

These learnings are FUN and they teach you at ANY AGE to become excellent. You didn’t get this as a child? No problem. Start TODAY. Because all of these games require intelligence, learning, the ability to get smarter, faster, better and SIT WITH HUMANS and NEVER BE AFRAID. Games that require humans in front of you and I love role playing games (RPG’s) but NOT for the intent of personal growth. You need to experience life in interactive form because you won’t be in a RPG when you are selling, when you have friends over. If you don’t know how to communicate, to have a personality, to be charismatic, to love, to teach your friends and kids to play games you can play at the DINING ROOM TABLE, then you need to start now.

If Mom and Dad sucked at this then you need to parent yourself and find someone to parent you. This is how you begin to find YOUR SELF.

When you can interact with people on many levels and see how people respond to you. When you watch people appreciate you because you are now spending TIME with them doing something FUN that makes them all BETTER people in so many ways. REDISCOVERING YOUR SELF Sometimes you will see that the person you were simply won’t function in 2021.

If you were a waiter in a restaurant, you are in trouble in 2021 because now you have a mask, or a closed restaurant, you are fired from a job or there are no restaurants to work at because people who were faster and smarter (at least temporarily!) found HOW to get that rare waiter job in 2021. The world has changed quickly. And it will continue to change.

The one thing you can bet on is that whatever is happening in life now, WILL CHANGE AGAIN SOON and the person who is a) LUCKY or b) PREPARED for CHANGE will survive and if (B) thrive. Lucky requires having learned 20 skills and as change occurs you have skill #3, #7 and #17 which is just right for a new job or a new relationship. But if you only learned 10 life skills, you don’t have #17 and you were cheated first by your elders and second you cheated your SELF for not getting up and learning the next 10 skills. You didn’t know what the skills were that you needed to learn? Your mentor would have, had you learned how to find the right person to mentor you.

You REDISCOVER that YOU CAN LEARN, YOU CAN CHANGE. You can do things you are NOT good at and you can do things you are GREAT at. The more you learn and the more you DO, the more experiences that ARE DIFFERENT give you MORE CONFIDENCE. If you learn how to vacuum a house and do it for 10 years that’s great! But you didn’t really learn much after the first year. So hopefully you learned 19 OTHER life skills and then 29 other life skills that show you that YOU HAVE VALUE TO THE WORLD and when you have VALUE to the world, you have VALUE to yourself and to everyone who knows you.

This is when you become in demand again. As the expert at vacuuming you learned a lot but you had a minimal value because you only had one skill. Didn’t learn anything but ONE THING? You will now. Being a great waiter in 2019 meant you could make a great income for your family. In 2021, it means you’re lucky to be surviving. People who rely on one or two ways to earn money become worthless pretty quickly in life. Remember when people who built websites could earn $60 per hour? (It’s true!) Today there are 10,000,000 people who can build a website in no time for next to nothing. The skill is like making a sandwich.

Anyone can do it. Yes, learn how to build a website but realize that skill has limited value in real life. Now you have to find 20 other skills you will be good at including communicating so people listen, starting multiple projects so a few succeed over the next few years because you are smart enough to know that most will fail but you NEVER LOSE YOUR SELF because you know those “failures” are just things that didn’t work at the time. In 15 years they’ll work.

Rediscover your SELF as you think about the dreams you had when you were young and see if you can find some of those dreams that you can spend a LITTLE time on right now in the present so that in the future you will be good or at least enjoying, the things you dreamed of as a child.