Leslie Householder is the best-selling author of the Jackrabbit Factor. Read about a challenge she faced and how she resolved it. How did she transform a failure into a greater success? After you have read her interview, what are five key takeaways? What are five things that you will now do differently? What ideas can you implement? What do you have in common with Leslie?
Avil Beckford: Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it. What lessons did you learn in the process?
Leslie Householder: My biggest challenge besides the typical restraints on time and capital of course was exposure. I was empowered by the principles that I learned from Bob Proctor, so much so that we were able to triple our income in just a few months after going through one of his weekend programs. I was compelled to teach what I learned, and although I was a stay at home mom, with four children at the time and one on the way, I trained to teach his program and have done so ever since 2001. But the challenge I face however was that he didn't supply me with an audience. It was my job to generate my own leads. So getting enough exposure to be profitable was probably the biggest challenge I faced. Without a marketing budget of any kind, I learned to round up exposure on the internet through websites that allowed you to post articles (IdeaMarketers.com and EzineArticles.com) and create a name for yourself on the web.
Avil Beckford: What lessons did you learn in the process?
Leslie Householder:
- I learned to be patient, everything I did seemed to me that it should take only a couple of weeks, or a few months tops, but in reality, the exposure I was after took a few years to develop, and I had to come to terms with the fact that I was in this for the long haul. I was creating a future for me and my family. I was driven to put in the long hours for many months just for the hope that I would create something that would supply passive income.
- I was easily overwhelmed by all that needed doing, so I learned to put all my thoughts, all the things that were swimming around in my mind on to paper and just handle them one at a time. I learned to trust that time wouldn't run out for me. If all I did was keep moving my feet everything would come together in the right time, and it has.
Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?
Leslie Householder: I don't want this to sound wrong, but it's hard for me to call anything I've done a failure even though I've make plenty of mistakes because I have always done the best I could with what I had to work with, my mindset, my resources, my stresses my understanding of things. So what may look like a failure to someone may in reality be a great lesson for me. Every mistake I made has shaped me and made me wiser so I'm grateful for all of it.
But if you want to know something about them, the toughest one we faced happened after my husband and I became actively engaged in helping others achieve prosperity, and so for us to have a major setback in non-prosperity was very difficult. We found a couple of investment properties that promised to yield us more than $200,000 in a couple of months, and at the very end of the process of obtaining them it looked as if we weren't going to be able to pull it off at all.
We needed to float the properties until they were sold. The investors who provided us with funds, wanted us to prove more solidly our ability to pay them back in case the properties didn't flip as soon as we expected. Seeing this obstacle, we had learned over the years how to overcome obstacles. So we saw this as an obstacle and decided to apply the principles of success to make sure that these things happened. We used visualization to get the deals to close, which ended up happening in a pretty miraculous way, but in the end however, we would have been better off had they not closed because these investment properties turned into the biggest money pit we have ever seen, and we ended up losing a lot of money at that time.
What did we learn from that? We learned on a whole new level that you get what you ask for. We wanted it very badly and we got it. We have learned to be more careful, to consult God who we believe in to guide us in choosing worldly desires. Sometimes when we have a desire we'll check to see if it's the right thing to do before we move forward to make it happen because we know that we can get what we ask for and have learned to be more careful.
It left us with the feeling that if we have a goal or desire for our family, and we check our conscience, or pray, or however people consult God in their own way, when we do that and feel the peace of confirmation that this is a worthy and right desire then there is a feeling of being unstoppable because you know that God's on your side then the obstacles are just obstacles and we know that we can get through this because it is a good and worthy desire. It's really hard to go for a goal when you have this underlying question about whether this is the right thing to be asking for. Once you get that settled it makes future successes sweeter.
Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?
Leslie Householder: Mentors have always given me a model of life to aspire toward, a standard to strive for. They keep me reaching higher and stretching farther. They have given me an example. I feel very differently when I spend too much time watching television shows with people living lives that I don't aspire to. I feel differently, and it drains me a little bit, so I'm inspired when I read about, watch programs about, hear audios about people who have achieved great things, and have become great people through overcoming obstacles and what-not, and so it keeps me motivated to look to them as mentors.
Avil Beckford: What's one core message you received from your mentors?
Leslie Householder: That the law of attraction brings opportunities, and that doesn't always show up in the form of something blissful. And it goes back to if a person is going to ask for courage, they are not going to be given courage, they are going to be given an opportunity to be courageous. Now I've noticed that when we set a goal, sometimes instead of attracting piles of money, or great wonderful things, or whatever people expect to attract when they start to live by these principles, instead a challenge shows up, and what that challenge is, is the very experience needed to groom us to prepare us for the blessing that we are asking for on the other side. The problem is that by the time we see the obstacles, the natural thing to do is turnaround and say, "This isn't what I asked for, the law of attraction doesn't work," and that's not the case, it absolutely works, it brings you opportunities to grow you to eventually achieve and receive the thing that you are asking for.
Avil Beckford: How do you integrate your personal and professional life?
Leslie Householder: I consider myself to be spiritually oriented. I was raised that way, and really the same principles that bring me peace of mind and happiness in my personal life, are the same principles that guide my decisions in my business life. To me there is no separation. I am who I am no matter what hat I'm wearing at the moment.
Avil Beckford: What process do you use to generate great ideas?
Leslie Householder: I have found my process to be dependable. The first few times I was, "wow that was really amazing," but I learned it was the same process every time. If I want to generate good ideas I go to a quiet place, I calm down, I clear my mind of all the excess clutter and then I imagine the outcome that I'm seeking. For example, when I was writing The Jackrabbit Factor, my intention, and that was a very key point, was to create an experience for the readers so they would come away from it moved, where it might bring tears to their eyes, where it might give them hope, where it might give them a newfound level of self-esteem. And as I was writing it, I could feel it, as though I was them, and knowing that that was the feeling I was trying to create, the ideas began to flow naturally.
And I think that's how we do it. If we want great ideas then we have to put ourselves in a mindset of enjoying the ultimate outcome. If you're into Quantum Physics, or some of these law of attraction principles, then what you are essentially doing is literally changing your vibration to be in tuned with frequencies like a radio station, to pick up on ideas and thoughts, and amazing things that were hidden from your view prior. If you think about a radio, if I had a radio in this room, and I turned it on and listened to a station, that radio didn't pull the music into the room, the music was already there, it just made it audible. So I think all of the greatest, grandest and amazing ideas that the world could ever see, are already in existence on a frequency, and we tune into that frequency by seeing the end result and it absolutely works every time.
Avil Beckford: How do you define success?
Leslie Householder: I heard this and I don't know where I heard it, but "Success is the progression of a worthy ideal." I think that as long as we are pursuing something worthy we are already successful. It's not a destination.
Avil Beckford: Which one book had a profound impact on your life? What was it about this book that impacted you so deeply?
Leslie Householder: There are so many of them, but the one that comes to mind is James Allen's classic from about 150 years ago, As a Man Thinketh. It's an essay - and it isn't very long - written on how our thoughts affect our circumstances, and it is so profoundly written and so poetic. I started reading it, and if you have a highlighter you start marking the sentences that have great impact, there are very few sentences that wouldn't be highlighted. I love that book.
Avil Beckford: If you had a personal genie and she gave you one wish, what would you wish for? Or, if I gave you a magic wand, what would you use it for?
Leslie Householder: Unlimited free time with my family to explore the world first class.
Complete the following, I am happy when.....
Leslie Householder: I can feel myself growing! There is nothing that brings me greater joy than when I'm expanding in some way.
