Heather Chastain Talks with Gloria Mayfield Banks
Each month on DSN’s newest podcast, Iconic Insights, social-selling thought leader Heather Chastain talks with one of the leading minds in today’s business world. This month, Heather talks with global speaker, coach and author Gloria Mayfield Banks, who last year retired from a record-breaking 33-year career with Mary Kay, where she was the company’s top earner.
Gloria had already earned her MBA from Harvard Business School and was a highly paid executive when a friend invited her to attend a Mary Kay meeting. That evening changed the trajectory not only of her life, but the lives of countless people she has mentored, coached and inspired over the years.
She explains that while she got into direct selling because she wanted to increase her income, she fell in love with it because of the recognition. You can listen to this podcast or watch the video. Here’s a portion of their conversation.
Heather Chastain: That’s so important to hear. We say all the time that people stay for recognition; how important recognition is; and what a value that brings.
Gloria Mayfield Banks: It made a major difference for me. You don’t necessarily realize it at the time, but when you look back, I tell people, “I had no clue I needed friends.” I was so head-down in my career and head-down in providing for my family. I wasn’t thinking about having friends. I wasn’t thinking about a positive environment. I wasn’t thinking about role models.
But the recognition piqued my interest so hard, and then the competition made me personally grow. That was where the personal growth, the desire for personal growth, was sparked over and over and over again.
Heather: And you rose to the top—you were number one.
Gloria: Right. There were 3.5 million women in Mary Kay in over 40 countries, and I rose to number one, especially in the North America market, which at the time was the biggest market for us. And our markets work together, so the recognition that I would receive at home, I also received internationally, so it was big.
Heather: It gave you that visibility to a bigger stage. And that all led you to writing your book, Quantum Leaps: 10 Steps to Help You Soar. I love that you wrote it through the lens of a direct selling leader, an entrepreneur. If you look at it and you read it with an idea of sort of a broader umbrella—anybody who’s trying to succeed, quite frankly, running your own business or being an executive in a business—there’s a lot of commonalities around those things.
Gloria: We need to understand that direct selling really is entrepreneurship. I’ve done a lot training with women that work within companies and men that work within companies that want to take their life and their career to a higher level. It has a great umbrella, but you’re right. Because my lens after 33 years was in the lens of direct selling, but it started in a baseline of entrepreneurship.
Heather: Those things that led to your success—there’s a timelessness to many of them, but what, in your point of view, has changed the most in the last four or five years? And I’m not even really talking COVID stuff. That’s some of it, of course, because that changed our environment, but what is, in your mind, the thing that’s changing the most?
Gloria: No I go to the area that I call Gloria STEM Program: I call it skill management, time management, emotional management and money management. Those four things to me are really powerful when people have to change or when people get frustrated.
I tell leaders all the time, “If someone walks in your office and they’re frustrated, you stop and you ask them, ‘Which category does this fall under? Are you lacking in your skill? Are you lacking in the ability to manage your time effectively? Is it emotional? Are you being emotional, or is it the emotional management of others that you have to master? Or is it your financial situation? Which one of those is it?’”
I think that what has happened in our current situation, even over the last three years—and then bam, you put COVID on top of that—is people’s ability to acknowledge their frustration; acknowledge that they have to be different strategically; and embrace the opportunity for strategy instead of saying that it is a dredge-like, “Ugh, I hate to change.” It’s like, “Woo, I get to change!”
Heather: I would imagine there’s a series of questions you could probably ask even without being quite so overt to suss it out. “Is this a skilled challenge that I need to address?” And that will change how I’m working with you versus time, versus financial, versus emotional.
Gloria: It helps them identify, not just that they’re frustrated, but why they’re frustrated, and there’s something that can be done about their frustration. One of the things that we always work to master is retention. How do I hold this person to the next point, to the next mountain to climb, to the next level of frustration or disappointment that they have to go through? To me, it narrows down to an understanding, an understanding of acknowledgement and an understanding that there’s something I can do about it..
Heather: When you’ve done those coachings with team members or when you train people to do that, do you train them to just ask it that overtly to just say, “Hey, I think about my own frustration and what I’ve learned over the years is that it usually applies to one of these things… Let’s talk about them.” Is that the words you would use?
Gloria: I do. I go right for it. And the clarity helps them quickly. In this industry, because it’s so much personal development, frustration can come out of so many areas. They have nowhere else to go but to themselves, because they don’t get to blame a boss; they don’t get to blame a coworker. They have to take control over themselves.
It really does make a difference that they can say, “Oh, this is a skill that I need to have. I’m being emotional right now.” But it’s not just being emotional. It’s justified emotions.
Heather: What do you think has changed? Because one of the things that I’ve really noticed is just that nature of what defines a quality relationship has changed so much.
Gloria: I was going to say the same thing. I want to talk about this, Heather, because this is close to my heart. The way that we communicate has changed. The degree of expectation of our communication has changed, especially for the leaders out there, because they feel like they have to be on 24/7.
And if they’re not careful, they’re not there for their family. They’re not present to their mate. They’re not present to the parents that they’re working with. This is a theme that I’ve said all the time: Teach people how to treat you. Teach people how to treat you so that you can manage your time and they can manage theirs.
One of the things that affects people from thinking that they are going to want to stay, or want to lead, or want to grow is, “What’s my responsibility going to be and how much do I have to be invested in other people’s lives?” Not their business—their lives.
Heather: What do you think is next for entrepreneurship in general? Where do you see us going?
Gloria: This has been one of the most incredible times for people to evaluate what they’re willing to do and what they’re not willing to put up with anymore. The direct selling industry has an opportunity, and entrepreneurs have an opportunity right now to define what the future looks like. We’re always defining it, but right now…just look at driving down the street. Who wants to deal with traffic? All these things have made a difference. How people work, especially in the gig economy, because now they can work it as their full-time job if they want to. They can smell, touch, feel entrepreneurship, and then they can grow it.
We are at such a pivotal time and people like to shop differently. It has changed so much the way we do things. So now, entrepreneurship is huge. And the number of people that are going into entrepreneurship is huge. There are so many places where you can personally find out your superpower. You don’t have to be great at everything; you just have to be great at something good.
From the March 2022 issue of Direct Selling News magazine.
