Question – What is the role of an upline in a network marketing business?

Is he (a) a leader like a loud army general who plants fear into the hearts of his downlines or (b) a slow and patient mentor who exudes confidence and inspires others with motivating words?

We know for sure that an upline has an important role to play, besides just overriding the commissions of his / her downlines. If as an upline, you are there simply to take advantage of your people and get commissions without doing anything, then you have completely missed the point about network marketing.

A good upline has the mindset of a leader, mentor, helper, servant and friend all rolled into one. You need to be someone who willingly helps others to achieve their goals.  As explained by Zig Ziglar, you can only achieve success in your business when you help enough others to achieve success in their businesses as well.

Just consider this – if you turn your downline into a superstar recruiter, do you think it will benefit you greatly? Of course it will! In fact, you will be laughing all the way to the bank!

You must go all out to ensure the success of your downlines at whatever cost it requires. Forget about money or ‘PV’ – if you obsess about these, your downlines will regard you as nothing more than a materialistic monkey who is out there only to catch hold of their money.

A point to note -  your downlines are not there for you to boss around either. You just can’t preach about network marketing being the way out of J-O-B and firing-your-boss if you are turning into a boss that is worse than the one they are trying to shake off!

A good upline doesn’t just motivate their downlines using the carrot-and-stick approach either. There is actually a third motivation factor that can be more long lasting and that is, personal empowerment.

This comes when a downline achieves self-actualization about their dreams and their business goals. You will want to train a lot of downlines like these but it would require a lot of patience from you because not everyone will make it to this ‘level’. You just have to keep on believing in people.

Whether your own upline adopts this mindset is irrelevant. What’s more important is to focus on you and your business. You can’t possibly let your upline do all the thinking for you and expect to have the right mindset as an upline yourself, can you?