Zig Ziglar: Motivation for the Martial Arts Professional

Ziglar has had an appeal that transcends barriers of age, culture, and occupation. Since 1970, he has traveled more than 5 million miles across the world. the world, delivering powerful life improvement messages and cultivating the energy of change. He has shared the platform with such distinguished Americans as Presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush, General Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale and numerous U.S. congressmen and governors. He has also been recognized three times in the Congressional Record of the United States for his work with youth in the drug war and for his dedication to America and the free enterprise system. Sig Ziglar was not always the passionate business dynamo he is today. By his own reckoning, and for the first two and one half years of his sales career, the Yazoo City, Mississippi native was an abject failure, barely able to pay the hospital bill for the birth of his first child.

Following an enlightening conversation with a fellow salesman that prompted a newfound belief in himself and his potential, Ziglar became a world-class salesman. In one company, he placed second among a sales force of 7,000 and first in another company with a sales force of more than 3,000 people. Notwithstanding his sales success, Ziglar decided that he had accomplished all he wanted to during his first career and proceeded to move into a different phase of his life, namely, spreading his life-improvement strategies to as large an audience as possible. Zig Ziglar continues to travel the globe, promoting his faith-inspired message of life improvement and unselfish success. During the decades, his down-to-earth philosophies have been integrated into martial arts schools throughout the world as instructors gradually began to incorporate life skill development, character education, positive thinking, and motivation into their classes.

Today, instructors of every style continue to study and utilize his prolific work for the betterment of themselves, their families, their staffs, and their students. So without further ado, NAPMA members, it is now my sincere pleasure to begin our exclusive martial arts-based interview titled Motivation for the Martial Arts Professional with the legendary Zig Ziglar. Zig Ziglar, welcome to the Sounds of Success. Well, it’s nice to be part of the Sounds of Success, Rob, and thank you for having me. Oh, it’s truly a pleasure. You are a big hit in the martial arts field. So… Let’s go ahead and begin our interview. For starters, Zig, one of your hallmark phrases is, you can get everything in life you want if you help enough other people get what they want. It almost seems like you created this quote for martial arts instructors based upon what they do for a living.

Would you please elaborate on this brilliant philosophy for our listeners today?

Oh, I’ll be more than happy to do so. And the neat thing, Rob, is that this philosophy works in your personal life, your family life, your business life, your physical life that works everywhere. It actually isn’t a daily application of the golden rule that you can’t have everything you want if you’ll help enough other people get what they want. Let me give you a couple of examples just to put it in a very professional perspective. Lou Holtz is a good friend of mine. He was a football coach at Notre Dame for 11 years. During those 11 years, 10 of his assistant coaches became head coach. coaches. Most people, if they stop listening right now and say, well, the assistant coaches are the best of the ones who get the head coaching jobs. Now, where does that leave Lou Holtz?

[04:44] Here’s the answer. When it became known in the world of assistant coaches, and they do have a network that they talk to each other, that Lou Holtz was teaching assistant coaches how to be head coaches. Then a lot of those assistant coaches started applying to Lou to become a head coach there. So not only did Lou replace his best assistant coaches that way, but also the new assistant coaches brought in their high school contacts. Now Lou so persuasive he kept the ones he already had. Now he had new assistants from these new assistant coaches because they brought their high school contacts with them. So he not only replaced to the ones he had, but he also got new recruits, and that was one of the reasons they won the national championship. That’s example number one. Li Keqing is a very wealthy Chinese businessman from Hong Kong.

He built his fortune by financing small companies who had good products, good leadership but were under-capitalized, and he adopted a philosophy. He said, you know, if the going rate of Ownership for financing a small company is 10%, but you could get 11 or 12% for a part ownership. You always take 9% because he said 9% of a thriving company is more than 12% of a struggling one. But more importantly, when the business world sees that you really are interested it in the other person profiting, then all of the good deals will come your way. And that’s exactly what happens. It’s true in every area of life. I couldn’t agree more. And martial arts instructors are always helping to change the lives of their students for the better. And many times, you know, the law of reciprocity kicks in and the benefits come back to them tenfold.

Let’s shift gears for a moment and chat a little bit about motivation. I know that Motivation is a key ingredient for any martial arts teacher, but this skill doesn’t come naturally to some. In general, if an instructor wants to be a more motivational teacher, Zig, what steps should they take?

Okay, let me start by answering the question that we occasionally still hear about people who say, well, motivation is so temporary. And yes, that absolutely is true, but then so is bathing and eating. But if you do both of those on a daily basis, you’ll live longer and smell better. Now, if you do the same thing every day that got you motivated, then you can have daily motivation. So when you start talking about that motivation, what steps do you take?

Well, you start by becoming a student yourself. In my own life, I’ve read an average of over three hours a day for over 30 years. I read my Bible every day, read the paper every day, and that way I know what both sides are up to. But I also read a wide range of things because I’ve discovered that the more new information you acquire, the more useful the old information you already have is. So be a student number one, but more importantly, and I suspect that about and 99% of the martial art instructors already are on this one in as much as they have a passion for what they’re doing. Passion, and you catch a glimpse of your passion as you first get the first peak when you see the results, when you do something that’s unusual.

[08:30] Like, for example, when a martial arts instructor watches one of his students Come in and watches them make serious progress. Then he receives a joy, which creates the passion to enable him to do even more and more. Again, there’s the idea. You can have what you want if you’ll have enough other people get what they want. When that instructor really sees the results, that’s where the passion rises and rises and rises, but you got to keep on learning. You’ve got to keep on believing and that’s the way you develop that passion. I couldn’t agree more. Now let’s narrow this critical topic down to motivating a staff. What are some basic techniques that any instructor can use to motivate his or her staff members to try harder, to do a better job, and to always aim for peak performance?

Well, the research clearly shows that the best way to do that is make certain… And you know, you’re in the instruction business, but forever instruction that says, here’s an even better way to do that. If you start off by understanding that you need to have three times as many praise observation, like, hey, you really did that one well, as versus here’s a way to do it better. Now you’re obligated and must teach them how to do it better. But you start by giving them that praise. If it’s three to one, three times as many praises as, here’s the best way to do it, then the chances of that person being not only motivated, but loyal to you grow dramatically. The same thing is true in our home life as well. But that constant, not constant praise, as a matter of fact, the research shows if you have 13 positives forever instructional, then Well, they begin to believe that you’re not sincere, so you can’t overdo it.

But one last little example, Andrew Carnegie, the first great industrialist that America produced, came here from Scotland as a penniless youngster. But somebody asked him when he was over 100 years ago, he had 43 millionaires working for him. And a reporter asked him how on earth he managed to hire millionaires and Carnegie said, well, none of them were millionaires when I hired them. So then the obvious question was, what did you do to encourage, inspire, teach them to the point they became so valuable to you that you could pay them enough money that they became millionaires. And he said, well, you develop people the same way you mine gold. You go on a gold mine, you expect to move lots of dirt to find an ounce of gold. But you don’t go in there looking for the dirt, you go in there looking for the gold.

Those, I think, are very important lessons along the lines we’re talking about. Would you agree that the human resource is the most valuable resource?

Men alive. There’s no question about it. The individual, you might have heard me say that the man was designed for a company. He’s engineered for success. He’s endowed with the seeds of greatness. But a body at rest, according to the law that I’ve been reading, remains at rest unless it’s acted on by an outside source. And that’s the instructor’s job, to motivate them, to inspire them, and teach them how to be better at what they’re doing. encouraging them along the way. Encouragement, after all, is the fuel on which hope runs and hope is the foundational quality of all change. Without a doubt. Zig, talk to us a little bit about attitude. Why is having a positive attitude so important for achieving success in any kind of business?

[12:26] Well, you know, a lot of people walk around looking like the cruise director for the Titanic acting like somebody who looked all the red off of their… candy, but research at Harvard and Stanford brings out the fact that 85% of the reason a person gets a job and gets a hit in that job is because of their attitude. Only 15% is because of their technical skills they have in the job. Now, don’t misunderstand. Those technical skills are very important, but they’ll only take you so far. That attitude is a thing that does make all the difference in the world. And in a martial arts school, that’s all important because it has to be an environment of positivity because your students are piling in there every night. They want to get away from the stress. They want to get away from the headaches they have in their own personal lives.

They want instructors that are positive and make them feel like they just took a mini vacation when they walk out the doors. So how can an instructor learn to have a better attitude?

Do you have any tips? Yeah, let me kind of hitchhike on that one just a little bit as well. The research shows that if you are around positive people, if you work around positive people, that your own performance is better. Ninety percent of the workers are attested to that fact. So that is a critically important thing that we keep that encouragement going. We maintain our own attitude and we become what I call good finders. And what we’ve done for many, many years, we learned this from a middle school down in South Texas many years ago. We call it our I like because pad. And we write little notes in our company and to our clients and so forth that make an observation like I like salad because she has such a cheerful beat attitude and is so team oriented or I like John because he brings his projects in under budget and on time.

In other words, something very specific is what you’re doing there. That’s one of the ways that you really do encourage, inspire, and instruct people by example. That is truly excellent advice. Let’s move for a moment into the category of selling. This is one of the most critical yet most misunderstood areas in most martial arts schools out there. One of your best selling books is Secrets of Closing the Sale. Now, I know that selling is a very vast subject, but can you give us some universal tips on how to be more effective when it comes to closing a membership transaction?

Well, we need to remember, and I’m going to tell you a quick little story, which I think makes the point quite well. I love to play golf. My son, when he was a youngster, I lured him out on the golf. Course named played about three games and decided that wasn’t for him and it was several years later before he really got involved in it and That came about when we were out to dinner one evening and stopped by the driving range And we hit a few balls and he had a couple of good ones and so he said that let’s go to the golf course and so next day we were out on the golf course and I never will forget we’ve been playing about two years and and one day we were playing and it was on a par four.

I had a good drive down the middle and my son did the same thing. I hit mine to the green and my son did the same thing. Now he was about 20 feet from the pin and he’s now on his, putting for the third shot. And I showed him how to line it up, you know, and how to stroke the ball. And from about 20, 25 feet away, he knocked it right in the hole. Well, both of us jumped up and down about three and a half feet and hugged each other with joy and so forth. And then all of a sudden I realized now I had a problem. My problem was that I was only about seven or eight feet from the hole. And I knew that if I missed the putt, my son would accuse me of doing it on purpose so he could win.

[16:40] And he had never beaten me a hole of golf at that point. So I determined I was going to do my best so that if I did miss it, I could honestly congratulate my son on winning fair and square. Well, it just happened that I knocked it right in the middle of the hole. Well, when I did that, I looked at my son knowing what it would have meant to him had I missed it because he would have won that first hole. I looked at him and I said, now son, tell me the truth. Were you pulling for dad?

My son looked at me and without any hesitation, said, Dan, I always pull for you. Now in martial arts, when you’re attempting to close the sale, if you really believe that the major beneficiary is going to be the student in yourself, instead of yourself, that the student is going to get much more benefit than you, then you pull for them to buy, not for your benefit, but for their benefit. And the body language is what gives it away. The moment you pull for that person to buy for their benefit, you become more professional. Your heart goes into action and passion enables you to communicate the importance to them. of taking this and then the course the more we know about what we are doing like for example a research at perdue university shows that physically fit people are more intellectually inclined they’re more emotional stable they’re more composed more self-confident more easygoing and relaxed now those are success qualities in the corporate world.

So you got to understand, and many times I would, I would add this little caveat to it by saying, you know, your investment in this martial art training is not going to change your standard of living. In other words, you’re still going to eat food, wear clothes, drive cars, live in houses. But the training and the concepts that go behind martial arts. Yes. Well, not only change your standard of living, but it will change your way of living. Your investment is small. Your benefits can be absolutely enormous. And it’s my responsibility to make absolutely certain that you get the benefits. I believe that will be effective in persuading some of them to do business with their martial arts instructors. You are right on the money. In fact, I have never met a more passionate group of people in my life than the martial arts professionals that I work with.

And I’m a third degree black belt myself, so I can speak from experience there. And passion, I think, can be detected by students. Would you agree with that?

Oh, absolutely. There’s no question about it. When great things are done, as a matter of fact, the Greeks did not even write a bit. is they simply asked did he have passion. American independence was won because our founding fathers were passionate about freedom. Now the dictionary says that passion is a strong emotion and ardent love, zeal, eager desire, hope, and joy. It is a great mover and spring and the spring of the soul. A fellow named Spratt had that particular comment to me. Now, passions are either good or bad, according to their objects. Where the object is absolutely good, and that’s what martial art is about, that’s what the instructor is all about, they’re the greatest passion is too little. Where it’s absolutely evil, they’re the least passion is too much. Now, identify that when passions are under control and the motive is right, they can literally turn our world upside down and they can make it, we can make it a better place.

[20:44] To live and that goes right back to the you can have what it is imported in life You can have everything in life you want But we need to be careful that it does not become an obsession because an obsession becomes self-serving and it can be Dominating and not good but man passion. Yeah More of it more of it and when a instructor really finds his troops Passion and most of them already have or they wouldn’t be instructors. Other than they’re on the road. They’ve taken a huge step towards Making a difference in the lives of others. – Well, that is truly one of the best explanations of the power of passion that I’ve ever heard Thank you for that going back to selling I know you’ve produced a variety of programs on the subject of selling which of these programs found on your website Zig Ziglar dot-com Would you most recommend for instructors who want to become better at sales?

Well, actually I recommend two. One of them is My Circus of Clothes and the Sale. We’ve got the CDs on that as well as the book. Incidentally, that was the only pure sales book to ever make the New York Times bestseller list. How about that?

So we’re very proud of that fact. But our other program, The Selling Difference, was written by Brian Flanagan and performed by Brian Flanagan, who was an instructor for IBM and our philosophy had such a huge impact on his life that he joined us and has created that program. The combination of the two really are outstanding. Your instructors will benefit very much from having both of those programs. And so will their staff members. I strongly encourage it. Incidentally, I’m glad you brought that up because one of my favorites, We’re a small company. We only have 22 people aboard. We have five salespeople, but there’s not a person on our team that’s not on our, at our company who’s not completely capable of killing any sale we make. So the question is, should we just train the few who actually do the selling or should we train everybody?

Well, I think the point’s pretty obvious and I use a football example to kind of nail this one down. The year that Denver beat Green Bay in the Super Bowl, on opening day of the practice camps of NFL teams, there were 17, 1,571 players on those rosters. Forty-four of those players came from Notre Dame. Thirty-six came from Penn State. Now, that means over five percent of all of the football players there, those NFL teams came from those. Two teams, five percent. Now, there are hundreds of teams that play football. Why did those two produce so many more participants in the NFL?

Well, it really comes down to not what they added, but what they took away. With the exception of the University of Southern California, those are the only two teams that does not put the name of the players on the jerseys. That’s what Bear Bryant did when he was at Alabama, and you remember the teams that he produced there. But what does it have to do with winning?

[24:00] It’s very simple. In football, the quarterback gets about 50% of all of the publicity. The running back gets about 25%. The wide receivers get about 15%, and everybody else gets their watch left over. But you talk to the coach and ask him a question, Coach, do you really need that big, ugly, 330-pound offensive lineman out there?

There and the coach will tell you only if we want to win. Well, what about that 300-pound defensive end?

Do you really need him? Only if we want to win. And here’s what these teams are doing that put so many players on the NFL rosters. They make that offensive tackle, our defensive end, feel just as important and just as significant as the quarterback does. Who gets all the natural publicity, but the Coach’s job is to make certain every player is recognized as an integral part of the team. I do a lot of work in the coaching field and I get to speak to a lot of athletes. This year, for the second time, I’ll be speaking again to all of the NAACP players in football colleges around. In other words, they have their big meeting and I get to speak to them again. and they’re in complete agreement of that if anything was required to leave one of their players off but that thing would probably lose everyone plays a part in business and the facilities where you teach those martial arts every person there the person who greets him at the door of the worst man says the telephone the person who sent out the mail-in everybody’s important and when they’re made to feel important they perform better and that means everybody wins.

Wow, you’ve really struck a chord here. I’ve always believed that team building and staffing is the limiting factor in the growth and development of most martial arts schools because it’s a people business. Zig, what can you tell us a little bit about team building?

Well, that team building comes with encouragement. The research clearly shows that by account of three to one, you should have those instructions of when you’re talking with a team member, three times you should be praising them for what they’ve done. For every one time, you point out, here’s the way you can do this better. When you do that, you make them feel imported. In marriage, and incidentally later, I believe we’re going to be talking about that, but in marriage, it should be five pluses for every one instruction that you put out in order to make a successful marriage and I’ll talk more about that a little bit later. Wow, fantastic. Now I know you’ve done a whole lot of research and teaching on the subject of self-image. How does having a healthy self-image help one to achieve higher levels of success in business?

Well, I’ll give you a personal example in a moment, but Dr. Joyce Brothers, I think, adequately nailed it when she said, you cannot consistently perform in a manner which is inconsistent with the way you see yourself. In other words, that self-image there is very important. As a youngster, I was small for my age. And I’m the 10th of 12 children. My dad died when I was five, heart of the depression. Mom had a fifth grade education. We had some real financial struggles when I was a youngster because I was also small. And I didn’t realize this until I became an adult. but I was very angry about it and I used to fight everything that moved. If I couldn’t sell a discussion in 10 psychics or less, I’d just rare back and bust him one. Now a Mexican boy broke me of that habit.

But in all fairness to myself, I scared the poor guy after death. I mean, he thought he’d kill me, but anyhow, I got over that. But, what that image was to do and I felt like I had to defend everything that came along. A little later in my life, when I got in sales, I never will forget first two and a half years’ worst complete struggle. Then I went to a meeting and a man named P.C. Merrill, who was everybody’s hero, including mine, he had written the training programs, he had set all of the records. At this small meeting, there were about 20 people there. After it was over, he called me aside and he said, Zig, I’ve been watching you for two years. And I’ve never seen such a waste. And I said, well, Mr.

[28:35] Mayor, what do you mean? He said, well, I believe you could be the national champion. I believe you could go all the way to the top. I believe you could be a great one if you just believed in yourself and went to work on a regular schedule. Well, I’d always been loved, but nobody ever told me I could be a national champion or I could be a great one. Nobody ever said that. But because of his integrity and this is where our personal life is so imported We should be an example and most Marshall and the art instructors are People need to look at us and say, you know, I’d like to be like him or I’d like to be her Well when you set that example and mr. Merrill, let’s set the example Well that year out of seven thousand salespeople I was number two in the nation out of all of them the previous year.

I had not even been in the top I mean, it was bad. And it all came about because that picture I had of myself had radically changed. Second personal story, for years, for 24 years of my adult life, by choice, I weighed well over 200 pounds. I say by choice because I’ve never accidentally eaten anything. And when I choose to eat too much, I’ve chosen to weigh too much. Well, on July 4th, 1972, I got on a sensible eating and exercise program, and the image I had of myself that picture radically changed. Now, I had been on every diet program known to me, and I’d tried every exercise program. Losing weight for me was not a problem, but problem was keeping it off. Well, I had a picture of myself, and as a matter of fact, that’s what probably Most of you who are listening to this and will listen to this, but my youngest daughter was a child, a little tyke about four or five years old.

Incredibly enough, I taught her to call me Fat Boy. Now, how dumb can you get?

Well, the truth of the matter is, I was a Fat Boy. I had a picture of me laying out on the diving board of my swimming pool, at least Part of me was on the diving board. I tried all those nights. I looked in the mirror. I knew I was a fat boy. And then it didn’t make any difference at all how much weight I lost because it was going to come right on back until that picture I had of myself changed. How did I change the picture?

First of all, I went to see Dr. Ken Cooper. Got on a sensible eating and exercise program. Second, I cut out a picture. picture of a fellow in jockey shorts I hung that picture take that picture to my bathroom there and I saw that picture at least I have doesn’t times everyday I was home and I made a decision I was going to be one day like that fella leon there are in that jockey short and I was going to lose that weight I lost that way in nineteen seventy two nineteen seventy three took me 10 months to do it. Now here’s the interesting thing. I figured it out. All I had to do was lose one and nine tenths ounces a day on average every day for 10 months. I lost that weight 72, 73.

Here it is 2005. The weight is still gone. Hey, congratulations. Yep. In other words, that requires discipline. And isn’t that what martial arts is all about?

[32:08] That’s what it’s all about. Discipline, commitment. You know, many people are about as committed as a comic concert pilot on his 39th mission. I mean, they just don’t take it seriously. A classic example. Several years ago, I joined a health club here, and I joined it on about the 30th day, no, right after the first of the year. That’s when it was. And I got over there, you know, and the place was just jam-packed with people. And so I didn’t go back for a couple of days, and then when I did go back, I said, you know, this is just too crowded. And the guy there said, don’t worry about it. In another two weeks, you’ll have a place by yourself. Those New Year’s resolutions were actually New Year’s dreams. There was no commitment behind them.

But it takes commitment to reach anything, I mean to reach any significant goal. And certainly a martial arts instructor absolutely have that commitment and that passion for what they do. Otherwise, they will grow discouraged. But when they start seeing those results, and this is, I never forget when I made my first sale, man, a lie that just motivated me beyond belief. And I wanted to go make another one. Well, when you do something for somebody else, that’s what’s supposed to happen. That brings joy in your life. So I guess you can say that your outer world is a reflection of your inner world. Oh, absolutely. As a matter of fact, and we’re probably going to talk about this a little later, but what happens at home dramatically impacts what happens on the job and vice versa.

Everything affects everything else. Now I know that many martial arts instructors put in very long hours at their school’s gig, and as a result, sometimes their personal lives suffer. How do you recommend martial arts professionals achieve balance in their lives?

Well, let me say first of all, in the process of goal setting, we’ve got to prioritize what’s important in our life. Excuse me. My research shows very clearly that if standard of living is your number one objective, Quality of life almost never improves. But if quality of life is your number one objective, standard of living, invariably improves because you don’t suffer from a lot of the problems that other people have. Let me give you a classic example. I’ll bet every one of your listeners knows who Jason Kidd is. He’s a pretty good basketball player. Well, he also was a wife abuser. Four years ago, he went to counseling and solved that problem. Now, he’s always been a good basketball player, but that year, he came within a whisper of being the most valuable player in the National Basketball Association.

And the next year, he led his team to the final game of the championship and almost won that. This year, he took his team back into the playoffs. Now, what converted?

You know, a good basketball player into a great one. It’s one little word, and that’s called genius. What is genius?

It’s the ability to focus on the issue at hand. When Jason Kidd goes out on the basketball court today, his one objective is to be the best basketball player he can, the best team leader he can possibly be. His entire focus is on winning this game. When he gets home, his entire focus is on how can I be a better husband?

How can I be a better father? And what we focus on, we generally accomplish. And so the martial arts instructor needs to make certain that he has that home court advantage. And the research is quite clear on that. And one of the things that I’m so gung-ho about and grateful for that is the fact for 58 years I’ve had the home court advantage. That redheaded wife of mine has just been such a delight and such an encouragement in everything I do. Today, 58 years later, because we prioritize things, she is far more important to me than anything else or anybody else in this world with exception of my faith. Now, when we get along so well, when I leave home, I’m able to focus entirely on what I’m going to do. I’m seated in my office here at the house, and I’m only 15 steps from the bedroom.

[36:51] Well, I’m able because I know things are right between the two of us. I can focus entirely on this interview. I can also, when I put this phone down and go back to my writing, I then will be able to focus on my writing, because I know all is well at home. And the research clearly validates that. The study done by the Gallup poll revealed that by a count of 10 to 1, when you ask business people what’s the most important thing in their lives, they would say, the relationship with my loved ones are the most important things in my life. Now the unfortunate thing is that’s what they say, but what they do is they spend all of their time or a high percentage of their time seeking a corporate position in books in the bank, which they’ve already said those are less than one-tenth as important as my relationship with the people that I love.

So what is it all boiled down to? We’ve got to set those goals. We’ve got to set those priorities. We’ve got to determine what is really important in our lives. And when we make certain that we do the proper courtship at home, as you know, I’ve written a book, Courtship After Marriage, which is used by a lot of counselors, when things are right at home, we can perform better when we’re there teaching somebody else how to perform better in the martial arts. It’s very important. So if I read you right, Zig, you’re saying that if you’re out of balance and you spend too much time focusing on the money or the growth of the school, then your personal life starts to suffer and you could be working for diminishing returns at the school. Not only that, but your own stress level is substantially higher too.

And I talk a lot about stress and incidentally, because I know you’ll have listeners who’ve just been married a year or so. two years or ten years. But let me simply say, one of the reasons my wife and I get along so well is we are perfectly balanced. She was the fifth smartest in a class of 400, and I was in the part of the class that made the top half possible. So on balance, it just worked out really good. But on the very serious side, the support, and let me give you this little example. kind of nail this one down, then we’ll move on. The first 25 years of our marriage, we had real financial difficulties. I mean, it was a struggle for survival over and over. I made the wrong moves, the wrong mistakes, and so forth.

In one five-year stretch, I was in 17 different deals, and that’s all they were, was deals. And yet during all of those years, not one time did the redhead. Now, some of you know when I I talk about my wife always called her the redhead. She’s a decided redhead. I mean, one day she just decided she was going to be a redhead. She actually made a deal with her hairdresser. She said, look, you keep me in the red and I’ll keep you in the black. Well, anyhow, what is really developed out of all of this is the fact that during all of those 25 years, not one time did I ever hear her say, honey, it sure would be nice. So we had a little more money. I love better ballast income. You know, one month is good.

[40:19] One month is bad. She never said those things. It was always, you can do it. Tomorrow’s going to be better. And then the two things that rang my bell then and keep it ringing to this day. I love you and I believe in you. Right. I can’t begin to tell you what it meant to me to have a cheerleader cheering me on every day of my life and praying for me every night. completely comfortable in saying that you would not be listening to me right now had it not been for the love, the support and encouragement that she has given me over the years. Her love for me has enabled me to perform better for you and the other people that I serve. The same will be true of the martial arts instructors. Now, Zayeg, I know for sure that many people listening to this interview do not have clearly defined goals.

Written out on a sheet of paper or in their computer. Zig, why is it so important to become a master at goal setting?

Well, the research again clearly shows and Dave Jensen of UCLA did a specific study on me and what I do. He came through our signature Born to Win, which people attend from all over the world. He attended a number of the Peter Lowe seminars where thousands of people attend the interview didn’t evaluate at the key for the people who had attended and they came from every walk of life and what he discovered was and you know everybody has individual goals I mean you know bank robbers and drug addicts and alcoholics have goals individual goals but what he found was this and this letter includes the contrast effective business people salespeople sales managers dot professors, college professors, it included every walk of life. Those with a balanced goals program earned more than twice as much money. They were happier, they were healthier, and they got along better with the folks at home.

What goal setting really does is it brings the future into the present so you can do something about it now. And those with goals just simply do much better. And the goal-setting process is not something you sit down and say, well, here’s what I’m going to do. But you think it carefully through. You evaluate what your priorities are, what’s really important. Then you look at the way you spend your time. Where does your time go?

I spend the time doing looking at a balanced life. In other words, I set aside time for exercise. I set aside time for reading. I set aside time for preparing to make those presentations. In other words, it takes a certain amount of time to do all of these things. But unless I look at it and figure out how much time I spent in the wrong place, am I entertaining myself?

Am I watching television? too much or am I spending time with the people I love?

Do I understand what balance really is? And when I put it all together, I look at the physical, the mental, and the spiritual because we are physical, mental, and spiritual. And if we don’t deal with all three of them, we will never be able to do the things we are qualified and capable of doing or learning to do. And to get back to one little bit on motivation to go along with this, several years ago, I heard a speaker in Atlanta, Steve Brown, make a statement that anything worth doing is worth doing poorly until you can learn to do it well. Now, that’s a tremendous motivational point because when your instructors have their first People that come in, or they come in for the first time, they’re not going to be an expert. But learning a martial arts is really worth doing.

[44:27] And if it’s worth doing, then it’s worth doing poorly until you can learn to do it well. One of the reasons that people do not really embrace learning is because it embraces change. And they are afraid they’re going to look bad doing this new thing. And I guarantee you, every student you’ve ever had when they come in for the first time, they’re not overly confident that they can do all the things you want them to do. But when they take that first little step, and that step is built on by the instructor, that’s where their motivation continues to grow. If I didn’t know better, Zig, I would think that you owned a martial arts school. You know, and I’m a big believer in goal setting. I hope that if everybody listening takes just one thing out of this interview that they go home and write down their goals as you said they should.

Question on that, when you’re planning your goals, should you write down five, six, eight, ten big goals or hundreds of little goals?

I’ve heard people recommend both approaches. What do you recommend?

Well, what I recommend is you start by writing down everything you can possibly imagine that you want to be, do, or have. And a lot of people think that’ll take about three days to do it, but I guarantee you in about an hour or an hour and a half, you will have written down the things that you really want to be, do, or have. Then what you do is you lay it aside, don’t do anything else with it, for 24 to 48 hours. And then you will discover, when I say let us out, not completely, because you’ll remember some other things that you want to be, do, or have, you add them to it. Now, 48 hours later, then you take that entire list, which is going to be ridiculously long, and you ask yourself after each one, why do I want to be, do, or have this?

And you will quickly discover that those are not the things that are important to you, right?

Now. And so you eliminate them. And then you look at it again and ask the question, and this is one that we’ve been teaching for years, we’ll reach in this goal, and these are the things that we’ve discovered all over the world that everybody wants. They want to be happy, healthy, at least reasonably prosperous and secure. They want to have friends, peace of mind, good family relationships, and they hope that their future is going to be even better. So, they look at that list and ask themselves the next question, if I reach this goal, will it have a positive effect on each one of these things?

Some it will, some it won’t. Most of them, it won’t. So, what you do is decide what is really important now. You’ve reduced your list about 90% at this particular point. Then you can focus and I encourage people to really focus initially on about four or five goals and keep your daily running record as you break the goals into pieces. Simple example, I needed to lose 37 pounds. That’s what Dr. Cooper told me I needed to lose. Well, I figured I was going to do that in 10 months. Now that meant that in 10 months time, all I had to do is lose one and nine, 10 ounces a day on average to reach that objective. Now I broke it down. First of all, in how much do I have to lose a month?

[48:06] How much do I have to lose a week?

How much do I have to lose a day?

And sensible eating and a regular exercise program enabled me to do exactly that. kept a running list of each day of my activity. And a lot of people disagree with this, but I weighed myself every day. And the reason I did was, you know, you can go hog wild one day and end up looking like a hog. You can gain two pounds if you just go wild on it. I want to make certain that I did not all of a sudden find myself ten pounds heavier than I had. I thought I was going to be at this stage. So the balance was there. Sensible eating, regular exercise, regular is the key. When I started my running, this is literally true. The first day I was able to run one block, literally one block. Next day I ran a block in a mailbox, done a block in two mailboxes.

Took me about two weeks to be able to run around the block, which was a long block. When I did that, I almost literally woke the family up to tell them what I’d done. But then one day I ran a half mile, then one day I ran a mile, then one day I ran two miles. And over a period of time, when I was 45 years old, when I started all of this, by the time I was 50 years old, I was able to stay on the treadmill longer than any active player in the NFL who had gone through the Cooper Clinic, and many of them had. Now, let me qualify that just a little bit. In athletics, they train for sprints. I trained for distance, and there is quite a difference. I’m completely aware of the fact that any wide receiver or running back could train for distance for two weeks and leave me in the dust.

But the reality is, when I was 50 years old, I did stay on the treadmill longer than anyone who had been trained, gone through the Cooper Clinic on that. In other words, what I’m saying is it’s never too late to really get started. And you’ve already heard me say, I believe, that when I was 74, I stayed on the treadmill longer than I could when I was 45, but we’re waiting out of shape. So these guys come in, and I know everybody that comes into your nut in great physical condition. But when you can give them the hope that down the path, being patient, being consistent, following the procedures, they can have some remarkable success. Now, Sigm, a minute ago you were talking about how it’s important to have balance in your life and then you were talking about goal setting and it almost seems like the two kind of work hand in hand together, don’t they?

Oh, absolutely. The only way you can have balance is to plan it. Otherwise, the tyranny of the moment will always take over, the emergencies will come up and unless you plan for those things and map out a schedule, and you never can make a perfect schedule because they’re still going to happen, but you can control the major ones and when what’s important to you now dominates, then you can do a much better job of bringing that balance into your life. Well put. Now you once said, and I quote, Better performance comes when skills, activities, and attitudes come together to achieve measurable results. Please expound upon this for our audience today. What did you mean by this?

Well, I simply mean that when you put things together, and this is again, it’s just another way of saying balance is, you know, is the key that we’re looking for. Being a positive thinker is part of it. but not all of it and I get disturbed when somebody says, man with positive thinking you can just do anything which is ridiculous. I’m a positive thinker but I’m not a scratch golfer and I love the game. It takes some skill to go along with that attitude. It takes commitment to go with that attitude. It takes all of these things that will make a difference. And when in our training we deal with the IQ, the EQ, and the SQ. Now IQ of course is the intelligent quotient. How do we deal with that?

[52:28] Well research at Georgetown Medical School shows that in 100% of the cases, no exception, when your vocabulary goes up, so does your IQ. Now, intelligence is not the most important thing in the world, but it is an There’s the emotional quotient. We need this to develop the will that allows us to become passionate about that which we pursue in making a life. We’ve got to bring that into the formula. Finally, the SQ, that’s the spiritual quotient. The guidance of the Holy Spirit allows us to gain balance between the skill areas and the will areas in our daily life. endeavors. The only way you achieve significance in one of my resource books is an 1828 Noah Webster dictionary. In this dictionary, they read the definition of inspiration. The definition they give is that is the input or the influence of the Holy Spirit.

In other words, God enters the picture there on a big time basis and the research shows that we will be dead a lot longer than we’re going to be alive. So we need to have long-range goals as well. I frequently tell people, I get all excited about birthdays. I recently celebrated the 57th anniversary of my 21st birthday. And for the Mathematically Challenge, that means I’m 78. And I get excited about birthdays because my research also shows that the more birthdays you have, the longer you’ll live. And as you probably have gathered by now that one of the trademarks and one of the things we all need is a sense of humor. We need to be able to life and if we can life it ourselves then it doesn’t bother us when somebody else laughs at us because we know we can handle it if we can life it ourselves.

That’s so great. You know you were just talking about EQ and that inspires me to ask you my next question. Many instructors I speak with tell me that they’ve fallen into a rut from the day-to-day grind of running their school and they need to somehow re-motivate themselves. What action steps would you recommend for an instructor who might be feeling a little bit low?

Well, I would say without any hesitation that they do what. One of the things I do is I’m fortunate enough I get a lot of letters. People, matter of fact, the last thing I do in my public seminars is I show a picture of myself behind my desk and in front of me there are over 5,000 letters literally from all over the world saying what our philosophy has meant in their lives. Now every instructor they need to do a little recording in their own little manual. Sally was in here today and she was so exuberant she said this has enabled her to be more patient with their husband and things are going so much better for them. A couple of days later, Bill comes in and says, you know, my energy level is so much higher than it was.

The boss has even commented on how much more effective I am. They need to take all of those things and they need to really, you know, read them over and over because although they might be going through the same procedure over and over and over, this with a different and this person is the one who needs my attention right now at this specific moment. And when we look at what we’ve been able to do with others, that inspires us to believe that we can do the same thing with whoever it is in front of us. I’m sure you guys and gals have got a thousand examples of people who came in and they were physical wrecks. And two years later, they were winning some trophies. take those things and refer to them over and over. I was reading some letters just yesterday from Dr.

[56:34] Lewis Cady, a psychiatrist from up in Indiana who had taken our training and the bottom line is he went out then on his own and is light years ahead in his personal life, his professional life, and every other phase of his life because of following the principles of goal setting and good self-image. book, Ziggin, what inspired you to write it?

That they are loved unconditionally, not because they pick up after themselves, not because they’re beautiful or handsome, not because they do exactly what they’re told. They’re loved without any condition ever attached to it. That’s important. Number two, if mom and dad, if you’ve got a two-parent family, and that’s the ideal, if you’ve got a two-parent family, the way the kids see their parents react Interchange and interact with each other gives them a great deal of either nervousness or stability. Each of my children over the years have told me and their mother how much they have appreciated the fact that they were never worried about us because they knew we would always be together. That gave them a lot of comfort. Number three, with our children, starting at, oh, about age. two or three, the way we put them to bed and get them up will make a big difference in their lives.

So many times during the first couple of three years we do it with love and gentleness and care and everything else. By the time they get about five years old, if they don’t get up on demand, we go screaming and time to get up. You know, yesterday we waited and waited and waited. We’re not going to do it today. Well, no adult would want to be waked up that way. You go in, regardless of age, and if you’ve got a child right now that’s 12 years old, you better warn them in advance. Tomorrow morning, you’re gonna have a little surprise. I’m gonna wake you up a little differently. You gently knock on the door. You crack it to make certain the child is not in a state of undress. You go in, you sit on the side of the bed.

You reach over, and you stroke their hair. You lean over and give them a little kiss. and say, oh, you’re so beautiful or you’re so handsome and I just love you so much. Oh, today is so good and you’re going to have fun today. I can’t wait for you to get home from school so you can tell me about all the fun you had. Get them started with the day right. In the evening, if bedtime is, let’s say, 9 o’clock, at 8 o’clock you say, okay, kids, they’re going to go to bed in one hour. If you need to put the cat out and bring the bicycle in and call Charlie about their homework and get both drinks of water and take all three trips to the bathroom because at exactly nine o’clock we go to bed and you lead them to the bed at nine o’clock.

[1:00:20] You turn the TV off. It’s an insulting to a child to put them to bed while the you know commercial is on. They say well I know mom and dad love me but they don’t need to do this. Escort them to bed, and I understand the greatest con artists walking are between ages 5 and 13. They can’t wait to get you back there and let you put them into bed because they’ve got 101 silly questions they want to ask. Let them. They’ll ask about three silly ones, and then they’ll get serious. And you can bond with your child more in the next 10 minutes than you’ve been able to do all day long. Get them up properly, put them to bed properly, and the time in between is going to be a whole lot better. And let them see the affection between husband and wife.

That gives them much security. You never let them see anything they cannot participate in. That’s very important. And the names you call each other, I have pet names for all of my children and all of my grandchildren. And for what it’s worth, had we known grandchildren were going to be so much fun, we’d have certainly been nicer to their parents. So anyhow, raising those kids, both two of our prayers, as Frank and Delano Roosevelt said, we cannot always prepare the future for our kids, but we can prepare the kids for the future. Hoover made this observation that if we were to raise just one generation of children, who were loving and law-abiding and followed the rules of the game. 90% of all the governmental problems would be automatically solved. Interesting. Wow. Raising positive kids in a negative world, yes, there is some negativity out there, no doubt about it.

And I think that kids are exposed to more and more of it these days with the internet and cable television and many of the things that are going on out there in the world just to keep it short. If you owned a martial arts school, Zig, would you utilize that concept in your marketing to attract more students to the school?

I emphatically would, because most parents recognize all of the problems that they have to deal with. The TV is just absolutely x-rated. The internet is really a threat. The language on the streets and everywhere else is the same. I would say to the in the sales process I would say one of the really neat things here is that you come into an environment where not only will you be safe but you’ll learn some things that will enable you to secure your family and your kids some processes and when the kids see what you’re doing they would want to follow the example. How many times have you noticed that a parent comes in and gets benefits and then the next thing you know they’re bringing the kids in. All the time. They’re exactly the same thing. That’s right.

All the time. So it’s a great teaching tool for raising those kids, but I would certainly make the information available to them that they can do it this way and it’ll do even better. But love is the key. Respect is the key. So many times, and there’s a difference, you know, in the way we instruct our children. In our particular case, we talked about everything, but if it was illegal, immoral, or dangerous, then it was off the table. That was not available to them. But we would always close every conversation with a comma. never a period. We will talk about this anytime you want to talk about this. That’s great. Ziggah, if someone wants to come to one of your seminars, are you still doing seminars?

[1:04:25] Absolutely. We have one coming up in July. Unfortunately, I don’t have the date at my fingertips, but people literally have come from all over the world to attend it. It’s a two-and-a-half day life-changing event. people from every walk of life, everything from a psychiatrist to truck drivers who come through. Is that out in Dallas?

I’m sorry? Is that out in Dallas? Yes it is. Okay, great. It sure is. And I’m sure that information is available on your website. If any of you would… Or they can call our watch number, I mean, yeah, our long distance number and one of our people can give you all of the details about it. Moving on, as you know, martial arts is very much a people business, a service business, if you will. What tips would you give to instructors who want to dramatically improve their level of customer service and really anchor in the long-term loyalty of their students?

How do we get our students to keep coming back for more?

Well, one of the things you can do and always incidentally our Born to Win seminar is in August that we were talking about a moment ago and it takes place on August 7. I believe it’s the 18th to the 20th right here in Dallas. To get them to keep on coming in, that was the question, wasn’t it?

Yeah, about retention. How do we retain our students better?

What would you recommend? Well, if we understand what Dr. Dean Ornish of Harvard University said our relationships with the people we love is more important to our physical health than the food we eat, the exercise. program we are on or even the genes we have inherited and all of that simply to say the relationship you build with the people you are teaching is the key to get them coming on in. If they are simply a client or a customer or a participant then that’s one thing but if they know that you genuinely care about them and you do that by learning things about them, you know, finding out how many children they have. What is their job?

Where are they from? What’s their favorite activity? what would you like most in life?

I mean, simple little, as you go along questions that will enable you to demonstrate that you have a great interest in that person as a person, not as a clients. And one of the best ways to keep them coming is to ask them to recommend to their friends what you’re doing. You can even encourage them to bring in, and I don’t know what your rules are on this, to bring in a friend so they can watch some of the activities one day to see what the teaching really is all about. Encourage them to bring their friends in, but because if they can bring somebody else with them, my wife is very active in curves, you know, the exercise facility for women only. And what they have found is if they’ve got a friend who comes with them, the likelihood of both of them continuing is much higher than if only one person alone comes.

So have them bring in a friend. Well we say the family that kicks together sticks together. I think what you’re saying is you want your students to know that you really genuinely care about them and it’s more or less a family environment and retention is based upon relationship building. Oh no question about it. That relationship is the key and another little personal example. The greatest people person I’ve ever known I’m married and that’s my wife. Her older sister is in a nursing home over in Shreveport, Louisiana and her mind is good but you know she has MS and so she needs physical help. We go over there periodically and when we go in frankly it’s very difficult for me because when I see a problem, I think I’m supposed to offer a solution. Well, my wife doesn’t feel that way.

[1:08:44] When she walks in, she hugs everything that moves. I mean, literally, I tease her about being the happy hugger because if it’s moving, she’ll stop it and hug it. And if it’s not moving, she’ll dust it off and sell it. But when she goes in, it doesn’t make any difference whether they’re black or white. Most of them desperately need attention, love, and affection. My wife just grabs and hugs, and they gather around her like you cannot believe. I will never forget the day when I saw that, and I simply could not take it. I walked out, and I started praying. I said, Lord, give me that kind of heart. Help me to uncondition and love all of these people. people as my wife loves them. Well interestingly enough at that point I was writing my book Over the Top.

I sent the manuscript to the publisher. He wrote me back and said you’ll have to divine the top before you can tell people how to go over the top. Well my first thought was well that’ll be easy. I wrestled and I wrestled and I wrestled and Every time I looked at something I’d written, it wasn’t any good. That day, from the nursing home, we went back to the car, went back into the dining room where also they had been gathered together. And I took my receipt from the motel we just checked out, and I wrote 15 things that you could do to identify the top. And the bottom line is, as a result of that, in less than 15 minutes, I’d written down the 15 things that define what the top is all about. And it was the right result of the fact that I had become wrapped up in doing something for somebody else.

I didn’t even think about this when I was doing my praying. But the bottom line is because of that and my interest in doing those things the ideas started to flow. There’s something about joy that comes when you do things for other people. And so I wrote those 15 things in a matter of minutes and it’s been, sermons have been preached on that literally almost all over the world and it’s been very impactful for a lot of people’s lives. What a charming story. You know, I want to talk for a moment, Zig, about what is perhaps the most important topic of all for martial arts instructors. Leadership. Martial arts instructors are in a leadership position by the very nature of what they do. But the truth is that many instructors have never studied leadership. Please help us to understand what strong leadership truly entails.

Well, first of all, let me kind of bop. that by saying if you will pick up Fred Smith’s book and you get it through the Charlie Jones organization, leadership is one of those critical things, but you’ve got to have somebody to lead before you can lead. You’ve got to find out what that person really does want out of life, and if you can help them get that, and that’s what martial arts really is about, it will enable you to be more effective in getting that. Now in my book, not only in Over the Top, but See You at the Top, you’ll find that leadership is defined more by character than by anything else. People have got to trust you before they will follow you. As a matter of fact, Francis Fukuyama, a Japanese scientist, wrote a book titled Trust.

[1:12:41] And he said you could determine the progress of a nation by the level of trust that exists in that nation. In the world of business, the employees who do not trust leadership are always looking for another job. Whereas those who trust leadership will undergo a lot of difficulties if they know that the company is straight. When we understand that everything is not relative, some things are right and some things are wrong. Period. When we understand that basic thing, then we’re off to a pretty good start in leadership. Arthur Friedman said this, men of genius are admired, men of wealth are envied, men of power are feared, but only men of character are trusted. Years ago I bought a Cadillac automobile. Now I’d already been to two dealerships looking at Cadlaxner exactly the model I wanted, the color I wanted, what I wanted on it and so forth.

Called a friend of mine and he said well don’t do anything until you go see Chuck Bellas. Whatever Chuck tells you can absolutely depend on. Well I went to see Chuck Bellas. I’d never seen him before, never heard of him before. But I went to see him and within 15 minutes we had made the deal. Now the reason we made the deal so quickly was because Chuck Bellas had been working on me for 23 years. Now you heard me say a minute ago that I’d never seen him, never even heard him. What do you mean he’s been working on you for 23 years?

23 years earlier he’d gone to work for Roger Myer Cadillac and made the commitment this is where I will finish my career. This is my lifestyle. Now, in order for me to stay right here, I’ve got to deal straight off the top of the deck. I’ve got to deal with people in a way that they will come to trust me and like me and bring me their business back and send their friends here. Well, I bought it because Chuck Bellis had been working on me by following that for those 23 years. Your individual instructors, same story. people come to trust them, they will go nowhere else. When they’re getting the instruction they need, the encouragement they need, and the relationship that they want to build, it’s more than just, here’s the way you do this better.

It’s here’s what I want you to do because this will help you in every phase of your lifetime thing. Back to the fact you can have everything in life you want if you’ll just help enough other people get what they want. Zig, in closing, at NAPMA we’re all about education. That’s the very essence of what we do, and I know it’s been the basis of your illustrious career. Please reinforce for our listeners the importance of always being a student. Well, I think that one of the wisest statements I ever heard was a statement made a number of years ago by Eric Hoffer he said the educated person, the well-educated person of today is brilliantly prepared for a future that no longer exists. It is only the constant student who is ready for the world than which we now live.

[1:16:04] A classic example, my executive assistant, Larry Majors, whom one or two of you have talked with, finished the 10th grade. A few years ago we evaluated our key personnel. She checked out at slightly above the master’s degree level. She’s a constant student. Every day in automobile university on the way home she listens to information she wants to know, inspiration on CDs. She’s a prolific reader. She talks to people who know things that she does not know. and the by-chair goes to good seminars. The bottom line is a few years ago we evaluated our key personnel. She checked out at slightly above the master’s degree level. Now she didn’t move from 10th grade to master’s degree in one easy step or even a year step or even 10 years. She’s been with me 28 years. She’s been a constant growing person all of those years.

You know, earthquakes and hurricanes get all the publicity, but termites do more damage than both of them combined. And they take little bitty bites, but they take a lot of them, and there’s so many. When we take little steps every day to reach our objectives, little steps to be better at what we teach, little steps to build those relationships that endure through trust and really genuine care. concern then we have a much better chance of getting that career. As you heard me say earlier, I’m a constant student. I almost never listen to the radio when I’m in my automobile. I’m listening to CDs or I’m listening to things that I want to know and need to know and you can do all of that in Automobile University. Steven Jopane, a Native American from Bottlesville, Oklahoma got his GED in finished high school when he was 23 years old.

Ten years ago, fifteen years ago now, he came through our Born to Win seminar, bought the idea of Automobile University. Today he is fluent in eight languages. He translates for his company in both French and, let’s see, what was the other one?

I found Spanish. His security is dramatically better, his income is dramatically better, and he told me he learned over 90% of that in automobile university. RCDs, that’s what people listen to all the time, because I experienced this being that if you listen until you can finish the summits, then it becomes self-talk. That’s when the power kicks in. That’s when it’s effective, miss kicks in. It’s been a wonderful experience for me and I blow every moment. Thank you sir and on behalf of the entire industry we give you a heartfelt bow of appreciation. Thank you so much.