What took me to Top of the Table was a chance encounter on a bus on the first day of my first MDRT Annual Meeting. When I got on the bus, I felt like a big shot because I made it to the Round Table. To qualify for MDRT, I increased my production by setting daily goals. That worked well — my production, which had been more or less constant for eight years, doubled. Me feeling like a big shot didn’t last long though. While on the bus, I met a guy who told me about Top of the Table.
When I asked him how I could get into that club, and he told me what it took to qualify, I said, “I could never do that.” Then he said those magic words, “We can achieve anything we want to achieve in this business if we just have the courage to believe we can achieve it.”
I didn’t sleep for the week of the Annual Meeting. I lay awake at night thinking, “Is this all it takes? Just believe I can do it?”
I’ve always felt that it’s better to try and not succeed than not to try. After all, if I only made three or four times MDRT production, it wouldn’t be failing. Whatever progress we make is a success, even if we don’t achieve the big goals we dream about.
When I got home from that meeting, I tore up my old goals. I made new goals to make it to Top of the Table. What’s interesting is that I was in the same office, same desk, same chair and seeing the same clients that I had before the meeting. All that changed was my self-belief.
By changing my self-belief, my progress took a different course. By the end of the year, I achieved production for Top of the Table. Because of MDRT, I set those daily goals and my business doubled. Then I found out about Top of the Table, and I started to believe that I could do that. The potential to do this must always have been there. I often wonder how much unrealized potential lies within all of us.
Tony Gordon, of Bristol, England, UK, has been an MDRT member for 46 years. He’s a Top of the Table member and was the 2001 MDRT President.
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