When you’re working towards a goal, a desire, a destination it’s imperative that you communicate your ambitions with everyone in your social sphere. Often times, we think the people in our immediate surroundings would either:
A. not be able to help us
B. not understand our business challenges, or
C. not care enough to listen and offer helpful suggestions
All of the above are completely incorrect. People are listening. People do care and people would love to help if they could or know someone who could.
The thing is you don’t really know who people know. We’re too eager to judge another based on their geography, career, job title or other (insert bias here ______________)
The absolute best way to get momentum towards your current project or issue is to share your work, challenges, and concerns with people you meet. I say this for a few reasons.
Most of us are terrible at communicating with others. We often either use too much jargon without thinking whether our listener is following or skip over important connector information so the listener has a chance to add context and personal associations to understand your business or industry.
When you seek to inform and assume that your audience would like to learn about who you are and what you do then everyone wins. You get better at explaining your business and the new connection gets a chance to learn more about you and about stuff in general. You will be more top of mind and become more interesting as a result.
You get the benefit of “you’ll never guess what so and so does?” Or “I had a really interesting conversation with so and so today on the ball field. Did you know…?”
Now for the really juicy bit,
All human beings are telling you every thing they know about a subject when they speak.
We do this in order to impart meaning, understanding and hopefully wisdom. We’re all trying to be smart or clever and the best thing is we love connecting people we like and trust with other people we like a trust.
“Us social beings love connecting, helping, supporting, solving problems and overcoming challenges.”
It’s our default mode before we start thinking of ourselves ONLY!
So, what are you waiting for? Get out there and talk, communicate, connect and start allowing more into your business and life.
