Before Ricky Mendez became an implementational speaker, he was a successful businessperson with an almost billion-dollar company with seven Southern California offices. However, the inconsistent sales results were occupying Mendez’s mind. Mendez consulted with his mentor, who guided Mendez first to address the problem’s foundation: the mindset rather than sales skills.
Implementational Speaker
“So when I started teaching that [mindset and prosperity planning] and thought sales after that everything changed: We exploded in terms of sales,” Mendez said. “But the most important thing was my reps and team were not sending me text messages about the money they were making and how thankful they were for that, but they were thanking me and sending text messages about what that money afforded them to do for their family and the ones they love and the contribution in the lives they have changed through what they learned in mind rather than in sales.”
Fulfilled by going to the core of the sales problem and the impact that he was making on his team’s lives, Mendez implemented his Mindset, Prosperity Planning, and Sales programs in all companies to build a foundation that would support sustainable growth. However, Mendez’s implementational method is not only for businesses but also for personal lives.
During a wellness event in which Mendez was a speaker on body acidity and alkalinity, one of the participants came up to Mendez and confined him about her problems at home. During the time, Mendez was not coaching yet. “And I said look, I don’t know what that’s like I’m not married I don’t have kids,” Mendez said. “I’m not gonna pretend to know what that’s like; I don’t know what that’s like.
I have never been in that arena, but what I do know a little bit about is how to shift perspective or reframe what’s happening in a way that empowers us. So, I said here, try this.” A few months later, Mendez got an email from his advisee about how her home’s entire dynamics changed for the better.
Feeling very happy about the positive impact Mendez had on someone else’s life, Mendez quit his job and took on implementational speaking and coaching. Since then, Mendez has spoken at national conferences to share his ideas, developed excellent relationships with brands including Home Depot, Costco, and Lululemon, and helped rebuild divisions of mediocre or failing businesses.
IMPLEMENTATION FOR CHANGE
Despite the trending motivational or inspirational speakers, Ricky Mendez considers himself as an implementational speaker. When Mendez witnessed all the notepads left in the conference rooms even though the participants left entirely ‘motivated’, he realized that the motivation-based approach was not sustainable for long-term behavior change.
To create a sustainable change in mindset, Mendez shifted the focus from scale to consistency in implementation. “So motivational speaking is kinda the arena, but if you look at any kinda long term consistent habitual change, you are looking at consistency in implementation,”
Mendez said. “So I deal with very small implementable steps to create a consistency that creates processes over the long enough time frame.”
For Mendez, the journey is crucial for long-term change. While motivation, an exhaustible resource, wears out over time, Mendez’s step-by-step approach creates durable resources for a sustainable mindset through his implementational method. “Motivation’s gonna wear off. It’s an exhaustible resource; it will wear out,” Mendez said. “But if I can stay implementing over a long enough time frame, now I am changing actual habits.”
MINDSET FITNESS: WORKING OUT YOUR MIND WITH CONSISTENT IMPLEMENTATION
While people do everything they can to keep their body active by exercising or attending popular fitness classes, the mind gets lost in the way. By creating Mindset Fitness, Mendez constructed a way to keep the mind active and build the neuroplasticity needed to generate consistency over enough time frames for sustainable change.
When it comes to Mindset Fitness, Mendez again advises focusing on consistent implementation rather than its scale. With Mendez’s implementational method, consistency fuels determination and creates motivation. It becomes a furious foundation for what one wants to achieve. Mendez notes that many try to start their visualization plans at high extremes on a whim of so-called determination and motivation, and yet give up soon after.
“But obviously it’s not scalable, it’s not duplicatable, it’s not sustainable,” Mendez said. “So, when we talk about visualization in terms of doing a little bit a lot, not a lot a little bit, in terms of mindset fitness.” Mendez started his morning routine with 7 seconds every day. Now, each morning Mendez goes through a visualization process of 20-30 minutes, including a gratitude poem, Napoleon Hill’s self-confidence formula, money goals, health goals, relationship goals, contribution goals, quotes, and affirmations.
His greatest tool? Gratitude. “I think it’s the number one antioxidant on the planet, I think it’s the greatest tool to convert energy from negative to positive, but it goes far beyond just thinking positively,” Mendez said. Mendez shares the gratitude poems he writes on his social media.
SHIFTING PERSPECTIVES: ANOTHER LOOK ON THE PANDEMIC
As the whole world simultaneously came to a halt in 2020, the lockdowns created a never-seen-before opportunity to pause to reflect. While the pandemic’s health and economic impacts are already felt, the not-so-visible effects on the mindset vary.
Mendez states that the impact on mindset depends on the perspective one chooses to view through. “This is the greatest time to be alive in human history, in my opinion,” Mendez said. “I don’t believe we will have another time that we have time to grow relationships, to expand our minds to what’s possible, and to really create positive change in the world, and to acquire new skills.”
Now more than ever, the world needs positivity and empowerment. By focusing on what is possible and growing advancing those possibilities, the pandemic serves as a moment to create more positive change in the world — If you have the right perspective. “So this can be the thing that destroys people, it can be the biggest light that some people have ever seen,” Mendez said. “I work every single day to condition my mind to see the latter.”
RICKY MENDEZ ADVISES
TWO SIMPLE RULES
Ricky Mendez has two simple pieces of advice for people navigating through business or looking to improve their personal lives: Asking for help and always being a learner. “So my number one rule is to ask for help,” Mendez said. “I have two choices: I can try to go do everything myself, go through all the trials, all the tribulations or somebody who has paid the dummy tax for me, I can learn more efficiently than ever before.”
While asking for help makes the journey smoother for one, it also creates a wave of positive energies as people help one another. Mendez notes that the response to asking for help is irrelevant; it is the act itself that generates positiveness by breaking the fear-fueled ego barrier and allowing others a chance to feel the content of honoring the ones who have helped them before.
“Some will say yes, some will say no, but just asking helps you put that out in the world, that’s a good energy, frequency, vibration – whatever label we wanna give it – that’s a good thing to keep putting out,” Mendez said. “And guess what, if I keep asking, people will say yes.” Mendez’s second rule is always to be a learner and saturate oneself with information.
By consistently implementing a learner’s perspective, one can seek to understand and be understood even in most heated disputes. Mendez believes that the world can get rid of its judgment pandemic on a collective level by always being a learner. “I think that’s a great way to set the ego aside,” Mendez said. “If I come from radical humility and I look to learn from every situation, number one, it helps me to retain more information, I believe, but also if I’m continuously the learner, then I tend to judge less.”
FOR THE ENTREPRENEURS: THE MUST-READ SALES BOOK BY RICKY MENDEZ’S MASSIVE MENTOR
Persistence is critical when it comes to entrepreneurship in any industry. According to Mendez, the best sales book ever written is no other than Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss. The specialty of the book? Asking persistently. “It’s the most simplistic sales book for any entrepreneur, whether you’re a startup or whether you’re in business for 40 years, whether your revenue is 100 dollars or a hundred million,” Mendez said. “I think that book is kinda foundational for any entrepreneur.”
FOR THE ENTREPRENEURS: FIND YOUR PURPOSE AND SHARE YOUR GOALS
While the business world is saturated with for-profit and nonprofit organizations, Mendez urges the entrepreneurs to add a contributional aspect to their Profit and Loss Statements (PNL).
As the original one-to-one company, Toms Shoes is the best well-known example of a for-purpose business by donating a pair for each pair purchased. Once an entrepreneur identifies their purpose, Mendez highlights the importance of sharing that with others. “So what part of your business is for-purpose and then share it,” Mendez said. “It’s something that whenever you’re going on a mission, or you have a vision for your company, share, share that vision!”
While sharing their vision and mission helps a business reach out to potential resources and generate help by asking through its purpose, it also creates a chain reaction towards a positive mindset through implementation. With his upcoming children’s book, Mendez aims to solve the world’s happiness problem. “I think we have a happiness problem,”
Mendez said. “In the United States, we’re taking more pills than ever, and we’re sicker than we have ever been; why is that? Well, the marvelous, miraculous, inconceivably powerful force the world has known, we’re using it to work against us, not for us. And if we start young with children, they are the eternal optimists; kids are the eternal optimists. So this is the reason why that fires me up, and I think we can change the world collectively like that; it changes the consciousness of the world.”
Implementational Speaker Ricky Mendez With Fashinnovation Founder Jordana Guimarães
RICKY MENDEZ X FASHION INDUSTRY: IMPLEMENTATION FROM INSIDE-OUT
Mindset is a crucial aspect of sustainable entrepreneurship. The implementational method of Ricky Mendez, focusing on small, consistent actions rather than the scale, creates a sustainable change in the long-term towards a positive entrepreneurial mindset.
According to Mendez, when you train your brain and condition your mind, opportunities open up, and fashion is a great way to facilitate that. ‘Before we know the ‘why’ we gotta know the ‘what’,” Mendez said. “What is it that we want, why do we want what we do, what is the impact that we are making, and how can we bring this to the world.
The things that I have learned through fashion, I had no idea how much waste there was in fashion, how much plastic there was in fashion, how much water was used in fashion, I had no idea about all these things.” When Mendez heard about the impacts fashion entrepreneurs were making through their sustainability missions, he was excited to be a part of the progress.
Similarly, Mendez believes that training the brain and conditioning the mind can help raise awareness, achieve sustainable change in the fashion industry from inside out, and get other parties involved in the mission. “Because a lot of times you’ll find out that people really align with something they almost say ‘Hey I wanna help.’,” Mendez said. “And I think that’s a really cool way when we start to shift that mindset into ‘This is the impact that we are making, who else believes in this impact?’ I think that’s a really cool way to bring that to the market.”
To hear more from Ricky Mendez, watch his Blue Carpet interview, #fashionistolove spotlight, and his panel talk from 2nd Worldwide Talks. By Elif Kesikbas
