How exciting to be at the beginning of a new year—twelve new unused months lie ahead. A new year where anything can happen and everything is possible!
The beginning of a new year has always been an important time for me. I try to do an evaluation of the past year's performance in all aspects of my life. This can be a sobering experience as I often come up short in some of what I had hoped to do and to become. Nevertheless, it is important to reflect and to renew the determination to keep pushing forward. As we all know, it is in the “struggle” that we develop the strength and refinements that bring lasting satisfaction.
I’m certain that there are those who did not achieve all of their goals for 2009. Each of us has had years when we didn’t really get where we wanted to go—or at least as far as we wanted. A year like that can be absolutely critical to our future happiness—if we choose our response to it correctly.
If we choose to mope about or engage in self-pity or worse yet, in blaming others, we are most likely to repeat the unsatisfying year or do even worse. On the other hand, if we learn from our mistakes, build on our successes, and reignite our enthusiasm, then that disappointing year becomes the platform for our future success.
All of the really important successes that I have been blessed to enjoy have come after a disappointment. In fact, it was from the failure to achieve that I learned what I needed to know to get what I really wanted.
I believe that success is neither magical nor mysterious. Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying basic fundamentals. One fundamental lesson I learned early in life is that hard work is the great equalizer.
You may not have all the talents another person enjoys but you can work hard enough to be equal to, or even greater, in achievement. In my 20s, I realized that there were a lot of people more talented than I am and
smarter than I am. I decided that if I was going Be, Do and Have, all that I had dreamed, I would have to work harder than those more talented people.
I consider that decision to be one of the most important decisions of my life. What about you? Your gifts and talents are what they are, but your choices are yours to make every minute of every day and it is in your choices that success is determined.
An important part of my evaluation has been our progress as a company. Unicity has enjoyed another good year. We certainly had our “struggles” yet we kept our focus on our goals and built on the success of 2008. I am pleased to say that we continued the trend of increasing success in each of our business metrics. I know that many of you also had strong growth in your respective businesses. Some of you have set records for yourself and a few have set records in the company. I applaud your success and hope that you will drive forward and build on that success in 2010.
This year, I continued visiting our global markets as often as possible—traveling more than 225,000 miles in airplanes. I crossed the Pacific Ocean 20 times and the Atlantic 8 times. Occasionally I’m asked, in the age of email, instant messaging, video conferencing, and VOIP why do I travel at all? Why don’t I let technology do the work? Does personally being there really matter? Aren’t I running myself ragged?
I confess that there are occasions when those technologies come in handy. And there are times when being away from home is downright painful. But I can tell you this: personally being there matters. It’s important to me to sit knee-to-knee and eye-to-eye with a
leader, a government official, or a prospect. It’s important to me that they can sense my love and commitment to making life better. Traveling two days for a two-hour meeting on the surface may not seem efficient, but in the right situation, it is very effective.
As a company, our passion, our unique ability, and how we create significant value in this world is that we build people. I have learned that building people happens best one person at a time and usually face to face.
Certainly, we improve health by offering state-of-the-art nutritional products. In addition, our Make Life Better Foundation has raised and donated millions of dollars to charities.
However, another company may be able to match our service projects and charitable contributions, in fact, other companies may try to imitate our products; but they will never be able to match our passion and our matchless, one-of-a-kind capacity to build new distributors into thriving, prosperous Franchise Owners.
We offer people the tools, training, support, and encouragement they need to prosper—and they can’t get this anywhere else. Building people is about showing them how to create a growing income, how to build a business that gives them control of their life and allowing more time to spend on the things that are most important. Building people is about giving them choices, power, motivation, education, and helping them see the possibilities.
Something magical happens when people start to grow into their potential.
We teach people how to teach people and how to live better. In short: we teach people how to be leaders. Building leaders always requires getting
knee-to-knee and eye-to-eye. It requires building and sustaining value driven relationships. Dag Hammarskjold, past Secretary-General of the United Nations, said, “It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses.” Just imagine the growth of Unicity if next year every single Franchise Owner worldwide taught just one other person how to be an effective and self-reliant leader!
Leadership is about vision and imagination and stretching for greater heights. It’s about affirmation and encouragement. It’s about teaching and correcting. It’s about good listening and good coaching. It’s about planning with a purpose and working hard to turn good plans into good results. It’s about changing lives for the better.
When you become a more effective leader—with your Franchise Organization, or at home, at church, in the community and elsewhere—your life changes for the better, too.
Let us make 2010 a personal call to leadership. Becoming and creating leaders should be our highest priority, our greatest strength, our most significant contribution, and our solemn promise.
All the best,
Stewart Hughes
CEO
Unicity International
He lost his father when he was just 5 and his mother at 8. His grandmother cared for him until she passed away when he was 13. During these years he had to work long days at any kind of work he could get to help put food on the table. After age 13 he was completely on his own. He taught himself how to survive. He somehow managed to learn how to read and write. Before he found Unicity the most money he had ever had at one time was 6,000 Bhat (about $175.00). Now he makes a lot more than that every month. Life is better for him in ways that are beyond his ability to express. Leadership is what changed his life--a Unicity leader found him and helped him develop the skills, habits and mindset to transform his world and now he is doing that same thing for others. I was inspired--I hope you are too.
He lost his father when he was just 5 and his mother at 8. His grandmother cared for him until she passed away when he was 13. During these years he had to work long days at any kind of work he could get to help put food on the table. After age 13 he was completely on his own. He taught himself how to survive. He somehow managed to learn how to read and write. Before he found Unicity the most money he had ever had at one time was 6,000 Bhat (about $175.00). Now he makes a lot more than that every month. Life is better for him in ways that are beyond his ability to express. Leadership is what changed his life--a Unicity leader found him and helped him develop the skills, habits and mindset to transform his world and now he is doing that same thing for others. I was inspired--I hope you are too.
