Do you let the opportunity to build new, fruitful and satisfying relationships escape?
I’ve made it a golden rule for myself that everytime I interact with someone new and I REALLY enjoy talking to them, I ALWAYS follow up and meet them again; this applies to both a business or personal situations. I believe that if someone is boosting my energy, it’s for a reason. When positive energy is flowing between people, opportunities seem to appear magically and any challenges get solved quickly, solving those challenges actually becomes enjoyable.
Over the last few years, especially during the time I was exiting my previous business and embarking on new projects, there were many moments of confusion that I had to move through. I would always ask myself, “What can I do now?” and perhaps the most important for me: “Who can I talk to who can help me?”. And I wouldn’t have been able to talk to the people who helped me if I hadn’t reached out previously to those people who I had felt a connection with, and made the effort to build a relationship based on mutual respect. Running your own small business can be lonely and scary. There’s nobody to tell you what you should be doing and how you should be doing it, no HR department to send you on a relevant (or otherwise!) training course. You have to get the answers yourself. Yes, we can get them from a book, from seminars etc. but we often run into motivation blocks if we rely on those sources alone. When I think back on how my relationships have contributed to my successes in both my personal and professional life, I feel so much gratitude.
Conversely, I now ask, do you regularly interact with people who actually drain your energy? When energy isn’t flowing, when it gets stuck, you simply can’t get positive results or they seem to take forever to come! What is the point? So can you do anything to reduce the amount of interaction you have with these types of people or eventually eliminate them from your life?
I once read a phrase which has always stayed with me: “People are our greatest resource”. Without other people we are bereft of opportunities to expand our businesses, to learn and to enter into rewarding relationships. Without other people we starve ourselves of experiences, positive or negative, that help us define who we are.
Often people just think in the short term, especially in networking circles, thinking about how some one may be able to help them directly in their business. They don’t invest in what is needed in the long term. What is often missing is the feeling element. Nobody is going to really help you if you don’t connect with them and you don’t spend time investing first in the relationship, but always from a basis of integrity. Everything in life has a natural process; it’s important not to rush things, to trust. Having said that, nothing occurs without action. And making the effort to meet up again with someone who raised your energy is taking INSPIRED action, action from the spirit (inspire = in spirit).
I’d like to leave you with the link to a website that I love, a site that helps me put the vision for my business and way of doing business into perspective. A new friend (who I connect with!) forwarded it to me!
http://www.heartofbusiness.com
