This blog post is about how we can create the kind of communication we receive from our downlines, by giving our uplines what we would love to receive.

Everything Duplicates

If you’ve been around this business for a month or two and attended any kind of forum where the business is discussed, you will likely have heard the mantra ‘Everything Duplicates’.

What it suggests is that the ‘Monkey see, monkey do’ principle is very much alive and well in the dōTERRA business. A lot of what we do in the business is trained by modelling it, and having people learn by watching what we do. We teach a class, and our downline will pick up a great deal of our style, our attitudes, and our beliefs. But it isn’t just the things that we intend to teach that duplicate, everything we do and are can duplicate, and we have seen our own blocks and those of our leaders show up in our respective trees.

Our Success is Mutual

In our ranking structures we succeed when we have effectively collaborated with our upline and downline, allowing all of us to succeed in Unison.

When our three downline get to Silver, we become Platinum, and if our upline has five other Platinums or above and we reach Platinum to become their sixth, they will reach Presidential Diamond.

None of us get there alone. At the lower ranks we may do a majority of the work in some cases, but the higher you rank, the more that strategy falls apart. At Presidential Diamond you have 54 Elites across the bottom of your tree under your 18 Silvers, and 6 Platinums. No matter how good an enroller you are, you can’t prop up 54 Elites.

Communicating Like the Downline We Want

One of the things Pj and I have prided ourselves on is keeping our uplines Vanessa-Jean and Paul Ovens appraised routinely throughout the month.

There are three phases of communication through the month:

1. The Strategic and Tactical Plans for the Month
2. The Mid-Month Status Check
3. Final Days

Firstly we would call our uplines at the start of the month.

• We would ask them where they were at with their ranking plans (because we cared about our upline’s journey as well as our own), and we would share where we felt we were. We’d reality test those plans together, drawing on our upline’s experience, and our intimate knowledge of our team, and come to some kind of a shared understanding.
• We’d let them know what classes and leadership or teaching activities we had. scheduled, how invites and acceptances were looking, and we’d talk about how that level of activity related to our strategic intentions, and we’d talk about where our leaders were at with the same types of tactical plans.
• Invariably there would be legs overachieving what we needed from them. Some start earlier, some leaders have different life circumstances, networks, skills, and life priorities. Then there would be legs where the leaders were not at that same level on their journey, so if we wanted to help them catch up to our other leaders we needed to be backing them and helping them to get there. So we would discuss what extra support we or our uplines could provide. Sometimes it was incentives, sometimes training, sometimes tap-rooting some personal enrolment

The Mid-Month Status Check would be a call or a message after the 15th of the month Salt Lake City time, once all of the LRP’s set to process to get the free Product of the Month had been shipped.

• By this time we would have a good idea which legs were looking strong and on target, and which ones still needed more volume. I would have entered the OV’s (Overall Volume) for each of our leaders and their ranking leaders into a Rank Tracking Spreadsheet, like the one below (only with slightly less silly names), so I’d know how many gaps we were looking at.
• If you  don’t have a rank tracking spreadsheet, here’s mine with dummy data
• With this information we knew where to focus as Priority One for the remainder of the month, and we could strategise on events to run, incentives to create, and support to provide.

The Final Days call/s is not as apocalyptic as it sounds. But lets be clear it’s not an End of Month Call, on the last day.

• If you are checking in on where you are at with hours to go, the game is close to over. If you are checking in with 3 days to go, even with some massive gaps, we have personally achieved miracles, like the month we went Platinum (Dec 15) and Vanessa and Paul went Presidential Diamond. We had as I recall about 20,000 OV to go 3 days out. Our left brains didn’t know how we were going to get there, but we knew in our hearts we were not giving up and that we were in the flow. We brain stormed, we buoyed one another with our hearts, and we agreed to ignore our confused left brains. There were many calls in the Final Days of that month, and we got there as the chequered flag was falling in the final minutes of the month.
• Your uplines are fantastic at helping you understand the impossible is possible, and there are many of our leaders who have made the call to us say, “I can’t make it, the gap is too big” who have ranked that month, after we’ve convinced them not to let go”.
• If the business looks complicated at your level, there is always someone upline who has it even more complicated. When we were busting a valve to go Platinum, Vanessa and Paul had two fairly mature legs already at Diamond, and four other legs either getting to Platinum for the first time, or still maturing and with lots of gaps. I say again, there are 54 Elites across the bottom of a Presidential Diamond Tree. Track that.
• The more we can help our upline, the more they can support us and their other leaders on the things we really need help on. We need to know what is in control in our own business, and succinctly communicate what we are working on that is tracking well, and what is not working well, where we need help.
• Very often when I called Paul with my Rank Tracker open on my screen, he would cite back to me the stats for our tree. He already knew. Of course he did if you know him! However it is our tree, and what he didn’t always know was the context behind the numbers.

We have been Diamond since August 2016, and therefore overachieving what Vanessa and Paul need from us for them to rank to Presidential Diamond. Yet we still send the updates. We still let them know what work we are doing to progress our tree towards Blue Diamond, and will continue doing so until we are Presidential.

Community & Alchemy

What do you want from your downline. Would you like to receive the phone calls and messages I have described? Would it make your life easier.

We need each other.

Like the beautiful George (the Distiller) says on the Vetiver Video “Even if I have a Distillery, and I don’t have those people (the growers), I won’t be able to work, and even those people have their field full of Vetiver, and they don’t have their Distillery, nobody will be able, we are like the chain on a motorcycle or a bicycle, that is going teeth after teeth, you know, so we have been doing that work, and having a company like dōTERRA, you know, coming with the same vision, then all the Haitians in the Vetiver Field have a better life, including myself”.

Like George and the Growers in Haiti, we need each other, and our destinies are intertwined.

Very often it can be humbling, with the level of the support you get from your uplines. Well apart from gratitude, there is something you can do. You can be that downline who makes an upline’s life that little bit easier.

You know what the truth of it is? When you are that giving, and that professional, the real beneficiary is you, because it will duplicate in your tree. It may be less visible to your downlines, than say how you do classes, but they see. They see your relationship with your upline, and they feel it even more so, and they witness it in the product of the planning you do together when you come to them with joint initiatives you’ve cooked up.

But it goes beyond that too. A proactive highly conscious and functional relationship with your upline lets you both operate at the level of alchemy where you are tuned into the quantum field and creating in unison. At this level your 1 + your uplines 1, or as in our cases our 2 + 2 did not equal 4, it went exponential. That is the energy that creates a true tree of love (as Vanessa coined it), and that is the energy that engages an entire community and makes a Presidential Diamond tree.

Ura P Auckland
Diamond Leader with Petah-Jane Auckland-Hall,
Writer & Authentic Essential Oil Entrepreur
Earth Spirit Pathways

Image Attributions:

1. Leadership Tree – Screen shot by Ura P Auckland
2. Rank Tracking Spreadsheet – Screen shot by Ura P Auckland