I have been thinking a lot lately about the type of relationships I have and their impact on the growth of my business. Maybe this will help you too.
Recently I got on a call within the John Maxwell Team (JMT). Now for those of you that don’t know about the JMT, just understand that is amazing. I will do a longer talk and post on it later. But the day I got on the call, my mentor and friend, Paul Martinelli was teaching. After he taught briefly he opened up the call to Q&A to answer questions from the people on the call.
I was the first person in the Q and asked Paul what the first step was in him growing out of his original core geographic area. I didn’t want to know how he became a worldwide thought leader. Just what was his first step. He proceeded to ask me, “Rich, is there any value in coaching?” Without thinking I answered, “YES! My clients love the coaching process.” His response floored me. He came back with, “I don’t think so Rich.” I knew immediately that I was about to learn something profound and valuable to me and my business. I asked what he meant by that. His reply, “I don’t believe there is value in coaching. The reason is there are good coaches and there are bad coaches. All value lies in the relationship between two people.” Oh man was that good. It resonated with me immediately. He followed up to his response with the encouragement I needed, “Rich I believe you can live a good life in the area you serve, I dare say though, that you need to develop deeper relationships with your people and help them in the space they are in and help move them to the space they want to be in.” BOOM. That was awesome.
In the days and weeks and months ahead I studied the art of relationships and worked to apply the principles of good relationships to people I knew. I took the people I knew and went deeper into understanding them. That is why I talk about relationships now in the form of thin crust pizza and deep dish style pizza. I prefer and will continue to work to develop deep dish relationships with people. It has helped and my business has grown as a result.
Two of the principles I want to share with you the have helped me the most are:
- Put energy into being likable. Smile. Give encouragement. Support them. Ask them questions about them instead of having surface conversation and talking about myself/yourself. Show them you care.
- Know their interests and what they value. Ok this is really two different principles. What do they want? What in their business or life is of interest to them? What do they value? How can you or I add value to them if we don’t know what they value?
I want to encourage you to develop deeper relationships in a day in age where we are all busy and don’t give time to the relationships right in front of us. We only go surface level and thin crust on the relationship and that isn’t enough.
I hope you find this beneficial. If you would like to have a deeper conversation about other principles I have applied that have helped me double my business in a short time reach out to me via my contact page on my website and lets schedule time to talk. Also, check out the link for “What is Coaching” and or the page to schedule a FREE Coaching session to experience what coaching can do for you.
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To your success and more WOOHOOing!
Rich