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As part of the growth plan I am working my way through, I have recently spent some time reflecting on my association with the John Maxwell Team and the value it’s brought to my life.
Several people have told me they wished they could do some of what I’m doing and asked me about my experience with the John Maxwell Team. After returning from Guatemala my (already great) opinion about the JMT is at a new level. What we took part of in Guatemala was “Historic.” John’s Influence and his team at Equip ( his other company) along with two other organizations ( LaRed and Guatemala Prospera) are the reason this amazing Transformation has begun in Guatemala.
Think about this: Three people trained 150 of us coaches over two-and-a-half days. We were then deployed, along with a translator, to go out and teach four-hour work shops sitting in small circles with military, city and country government officials, faculties of schools, clergy, hospital administrators, doctors and nurses, business men and women, and community leaders; we taught them how to facilitate interactive roundtable discussions on the the topics of Laws of Growth and Values, like forgiveness, listening skills, and others.
Gua Natl Civil Police June13 sm  (Me with the National Civil Police, Guatemala City, Guatemala, June 2013, at the end of our session)
In three days we reached ~19,000 people and left them trained and equipped to facilitate a 30-week follow-up using this same process in their areas of influence and with their families.
It was an amazing, life-changing experience! I don’t know if you can imagine but each one of the participants (captains & generals of armies in uniform, city mayors, doctors, clergy, etc) had to get “real” and be “transparent” rating themselves from 1-10 on how they were at, for instance, “listening” or “forgiving others. ” Then they had to say aloud what specific action steps they were going to take in the coming week to improve their performance in that area.
I’ve never seen such transparency. The stories of what happened were crazy-awesome! When people get real and want to grow, TRANSFORMATION begins.
As of mid-August, 45,000 (yes, 45,000!) others were going through this transformation process in small groups led by the people we taught in June.
I’m still on ‘cloud nine’ about the whole thing. Our own country could so benefit from this process. Third world countries don’t have the distractions we have and they want help to bring hope to their future generations. From the president down to the young people, the whole country is in pursuit of hope. Although this was not a faith-based effort per se, all the principles, laws, and values we taught come directly from the wisdom found in the pages of the Bible.
If you are looking for a personal leadership growth track (speaking, coaching, teaching, etc…), want to move toward growing a business, or be a part of a transformational, powerful organization, you can make that a reality for yourself by joining the John Maxwell Team. Give me a call. I can walk you through the process for enrolling, the investment, and the amazing benefits of joining this team.
It truly is the best thing I’ve done for myself in at least 10 years!
I look forward to hearing from you.

Today, let’s spend some time in visualization. Give some thought to where your life will be in one month, three months, six months, and one year, if you follow through on the actions you outlined yesterday. How will others be impacted if you choose a positive attitude rather than a negative one? Write out your thoughts, connected with specific people.

One Month

Three Months

Six Months

One Year

Remember, this is a journey and a process. Don’t set yourself up for frustration with the expectation you must be perfect and respond perfectly to the events that happen in your life. The idea is to experience the experiences, feel the feelings, and make a choice in how you will respond and move forward. My yoga mentor, Diamond Dallas Page, advises us to “live life at 90%,” meaning that 10% is what happens to us in life and 90% is how we choose to deal with it. He focuses on the 90% and strives to make the most and best of that…essentially, choosing one’s attitude.

What will you choose?

This morning, the John Maxwell Team and all of the Guatemala Trip support staff (John Maxwell Company, EQUIP, Guatemala Prospera, and La Red) met in a conference room to prepare to meet our translators. All told, there were probably 170 of us in the room.

Guatemala Prospera (Prosperous Guatemala) arranged for the interpreters who will support us in our mission this week. Some of them are professional translators, some of them — many, in fact — are high school and college students studying English and translation, and they all volunteered to help us this week. We were told there would be more of them than there were of us. This make sense because our schedule is somewhat fluid, and some of them may not be available every time we need them (or for four-hour training sessions). So, they came into the room and filed past all 170 of us, to the front of the conference room we were in. They just kept coming and coming and coming…There were so many of them, it was overwhelming. And they had these expressions on their faces of anticipation and joy and gratitude. They just kept saying “Thank you for coming to help Guatemala,” “Thank you for being here,” Thank you, thank you, thank you…”

For those of you who know me, or maybe you’ve discerned this from reading my posts, you know I am RARELY at a loss for words…but I am today. I cannot adequately describe the feelings from this morning watching them come in to us…the hugs, the hand shakes, the smiles…it was an extremely emotional time for so many of us in the room.

They have been through the same training we’ve been going through this week, so they are familiar with the material. They are excited for the change to come to change their culture and improve their nation. They are familiar with John Maxwell and his teachings and seem pretty overwhelmed to see that John brought a small “army,” so to speak, to help in this endeavor. And they are filled with eagerness and some anxiety.

The woman I worked with is named Marlene. She is a professional translator, most frequently working with pharmaceutical companies, if I understood her correctly. She has two young sons. She does a radio show on Sundays that is broadcast around the country; she shares bible teachings with children and they talk about what they understood and thought of that week’s passage. She is bright and energetic, kind and open, generous with her time and spirit, and just kept thanking me for being here.

We won’t know who our interpreter will be until we get our teaching assignments. Here’s how it’s going to work: At 6 AM tomorrow morning, every one of us will be in the hotel lobby, ready for whatever the day brings. Our logistics folks will tell us where we can find breakfast and give us our assignments for the day. We won’t know, until then, if we are teaching a morning or afternoon session, where the session will be held, how many people will be at the session (average is supposed to be 40, but could be as many as 80), what interpreter we will work with, or who will be driving us to wherever we are going. What we do know is this: Tomorrow, we will be going somewhere, with someone, to teach some group, at some time…

It’s a test of how well we function in chaos, I guess! We will need to be resilient, flexible, and patient. I’ve got the first two down; looks like an opportunity to practice patience may be coming my way!

The way I see it, this whole experience/opportunity is way beyond me and what I ever imagined I might be doing…so I will happily go with the flow, be a river not a reservoir, and do my very best to prepare these people to be confident, competent facilitators of the Roundtables they will lead over the next 30 weeks to begin the transformation of this beautiful place.

Trust that if I find the words that can do the experience justice, I will share them with you.

In the meantime, have an intentional day!