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Hello from Sara Grace, Program Director at RelationshipMastersAcademy.com, making a visit to KF.com to share a recent RMA success story.
Academy member Colleen...
Colleen Newvine, who is currently starting a consulting firm for farmers and farmers markets, sent out a generous ping to deli heavyweight Ari Weinzweig. After that, Ari asked how he could be of help to Colleen. She asked him if he'd like to be interviewed on her blog Newvine Growing to talk about his Ann Arbor staple Zingerman’s and new book, A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to Building a Great Business. When you have folks asking how they can be of service to you, you know you’ve engaged them at their core.
Newvine Growing is a favorite of the RMA staff so check it out and read the entire interview with Ari. Congratulations on this new adventure Colleen, please keep us posted on your future successes.
A few weeks ago I was speaking at an event and two fans of our work shared their personal concern, and I could tell disappointment, due to a series of marketing emails that were sent in the run up to the launch of the Relationship Masters Academy. One lady said that Who’s Got Your Back had saved her life and she felt she had to come and see me in person to understand what was the truth – was the real Keith the one in the book or the one in the pushy emails?
That feedback came in the midst of a week of emails, blogs, and tweets echoing the same. I’ve been thinking about the situation ever since. First up, I need to say I’ve been listening. I am truly grateful for such vocal generosity in letting me know that I let you down. Exactly the behavior we all need to practice with those we care for. Thank you for caring.
So let’s talk about how a guy who believes in authenticity, candor, and generosity above all ends up sending out a bunch of crazy-Eddie "act now or else" give away-style emails to his fans and clients.
I think the details will just feel like excuses and are frankly not that important for the purposes of passing on what I’ve learned. But basically, we hired outside experts who have made a science of how to hit the numbers in email campaigns. And our team, new and under pressure to succeed right out of the box in the online consumer space, thought we could control and customize their techniques to avoid messaging that wasn’t in line with my identity. The campaign was a financial success and at the same time we utterly failed. And I am sorry.
As you guys were quick to realize, those emails were just not me. Ironically, even though I didn’t craft them myself, they had a voice and tone that was weirdly reminiscent of that kid I once was at Yale who, in unfamiliar territory, tried to fit in by working hard NOT to be himself. Thank God that back then, enough of me shined through for many to forgive my occasional lapses – maybe some even understood where they came from – and ultimately look to me as a friend and leader. Well, I'm hoping for the same again.
I’ve always said that marketing is really just another word for relationship-building at a distance. With e-mails it’s in a virtual environment, but it’s all about figuring out what people need and offering value (by giving generously), confidently treating people with the utmost of respect (by speaking authentically and candidly) so they will listen to the story you have to tell (sharing deeply and intimately), and finally, making clear promises and then keeping them (by being accountable).
Together with my team, we put together a list of things we learned in the last month, which anybody can benefit from. I’m also hoping you’ll contribute your own rules and insights in the comments section to benefit others.
-KF
Six Rules for Building Relationships Online -- And Off
1. Define your values clearly, both to yourself and to others. The older I get and more success I experience, the more I believe that we win when we authentically believe in what we are selling (products, ideas…) and represent ourselves in a way that makes us proud. That said, the tough thing is that you have to be self aware enough to know exactly what you care about, and then do your best to be true to that. This can be especially challenging when you’re growing and developing your business, but you can’t let others bend who you are. Commit to an ongoing process of self-evaluation.
Recently I received an advanced copy of The Leap, a thought-provoking and inspiring new book by my friend Rick Smith. I met Rick through his work with World 50, the uber-influential executive networking company he founded a few years back.
The Leap is most powerful when it pushes readers to bust through their own personal glass ceilings, to use one of my favorite phrases. To use Rick’s phraseology, we get stuck in a “Now Trap” because our brains are constantly trying to protect us from an uncertain future. So instead of leaping forward toward our dreams, we get mired in psychological warfare between our creative and reactionary aspects.
The key idea here is that the very idea of “potential” is created in our minds. The limits to that potential are created in the very same place. WE are the biggest thing holding us back from greatness. Not only do I agree with that, I’ve experienced it on a profoundly personal level, part of the story I told in Who’s Got Your Back.
As the following exclusive excerpt from The Leap illustrates, it is our willingness to tackle head on the forces that hold us in place that allows us to achieve our greatest potential. Rick dispels the myths that hold us back, and challenges us to once again dream big. Enjoy!
Excerpt from The Leap: How 3 Simple Changes Can Propel your Career from Good to Great, by Rick Smith
At first glance, we humans would seem to be built for innovation and entrepreneurship. We’re the species that dreams big things, the one that imagines a different future for ourselves, and it all begins with our neural architecture.
For 500 million years, the human brain (and the proto-human one that preceded it) did little more than poke along, not changing materially in size or shape. Then, beginning about 2 to 3 million years ago, our gray matter started to explode. Today, in what amounts to a wink in geological time, we have doubled our average brain volume from that benchmark break point.
But volume is the least of it. Cranial studies and other evidence show conclusively that what grew most dramatically in the brain over the last several million years was the frontal lobe, the part of the brain that allows us to visualize the future and anticipate coming events.
Today, we spend on average 12 percent of our time—3 hours each day, or roughly 10 years in an 80-year life span—contemplating what is to come. This is what makes us different from every other living thing: We live in the present but keep a foot in the past and the future.
Put another way, a cheetah or a great white shark or even our close DNA cousin the orangutan has to prove itself every day. We don’t. We store up canned goods and water in case the power goes out; buy homes on time, via mortgages, in anticipation of rising values and future earning power; save money for our kids’ college education so they can have a better a life than us; and invest in IRAs, Keoghs, and 401(k)s to help feather our own old age.
Torn Between Opposites The planning-dreaming-poet side of the brain, the part that’s ready to leap toward wherever opportunity might wait, is one facet. But there’s another, older, survival-driven part of the brain that works in almost exact opposition.
Encouraged by our huge new frontal lobe, we envision big things to come, but when push comes to shove, our older brain fights like mad to defend the current state of our lives. We court risk in our imagination, then run from it in our daily lives. We are almost compelled to plot out alternative story lines for our lives and careers and families, but we are compelled even more powerfully to avoid what we imagine. That’s the great irony of humankind: we are at once the animal capable of dreaming and the one that holds itself back from achieving its dreams. True, we are wired to think about the future, but in critical ways, we are wired to think about it incorrectly.
Stuck in the present, we fret over how far up the corporate ladder we can climb, whether we will ever make VP of Sales, or what our compensation will be a dozen years out, when we really need to be asking ourselves is what we should be doing with the rest of our lives. If we’re not fulfilled, if we’re not in touch with what we intuit our potential to be, the rest—titles, offices, salary—is all window dressing and empty calories.
The frontal lobe speaks loudly enough in our private daily counsels that we all know this to be true to some extent. We long for the change that will make us fully in touch with out essential selves. We ache for work that will leave us fulfilled and content. But the rest of our brain, conditioned by millions of years of human and prehuman experience, anticipates failure, not success. And because it does, it sends a very different message: The upside of dramatic change isn’t worth the effort and exposure involved.
In effect, we imagine the future not so we can embrace it, but so we can avoid it.
Buying into Your Own Status Quo In effect, you have created a status quo and bought into it; studies have consistently shown that the bigger the bet and the more you fretted over it, the more certain you are that your reasoning is sound and the outcome you have predicted highly likely. That’s the way the brain works. It makes us sweat and strain over our decisions like a crew of ditchdiggers; then, once the decision is made, the brain invokes a psychological defense clause that says, Well, that sounds like a great bet to me. I’ll stick with it through thick and thin.
So it is with jobs and careers and even life patterns. We often invest so heavily in them, and buy into the logic of our investment and decision making so thoroughly, that we see abandoning them at the one extreme as a kind of psychological suicide and at the other as an unnecessary dare, given that the future (as our flawed brains paint it) is so likely to re-create the present. Rather than face up to the potential of positive, dramatic change, we silence the argument within ourselves, and in doing so, we spare ourselves the pain both of a difficult contemplation and of potentially realizing that our assumptions about the future have been fundamentally flawed.
In various branches of science, this is known as a closed system. In more everyday terms, it’s like walking into a dead-end alley. Maybe we should think of it as the “Now Trap.” What is closes in around us. What could be seems impossibly distant. And the space between them appears far too risky to navigate. No wonder our personal ruts seem so hard to escape—they are, in fact, Now Traps every one.
The Roads Not Taken
These are the pranks the brain plays on us. This is the way it builds the Now Trap that holds us in the ruts of our lives and careers. The brain provides us with a massive frontal lobe to imagine the future, then tricks us into believing that whatever lies out there for us will not be all that different than the present. The brain gifts each of us with enormous potential, then convinces us that the risk of pursuing our potential is greater than the reward of achieving it. It allows us to envision what we might become, then tells us we lack the talent and skills to get there.
We can’t help longing after the choices not made, the roads not taken, more than the choices we do make and the roads we do take. That again is part of what being a human being is all about. We’re the decision-making, decision-regretting animal; we have the capacity to rue as well as to anticipate and to envision alternative futures for ourselves. But unlike the poet Robert Frost, we can’t quite bring ourselves to take those roads less traveled, the ones that make, in Frost’s words, “all the difference.”
Our psychological immune system is poised to jump. It wants us to make the Leap. It can deal far more easily with too much courage than with too much cowardice. It’s more comfortable with our stumbling forward than with our hedging our bets. But the brain won’t let us do that without a fight that most of us are not prepared to make.
Thus we wage psychological warfare on ourselves. But—and this is the critical point—we don’t have to. The Now Trap is formidable, but it’s not Houdini proof. We simply have to start looking at life through a different lens. The fact is, the woods are full of ordinary people, everyday Joes and Janes, who have broken free from the Now Trap and transformed rut-stuck careers into deeply fulfilling callings—work that not only has brought them great personal satisfaction but has also had a great and lasting impact on others.
Above all else, remember this: whatever traps we may feel stuck in are largely of our own making. What we have built we can also undo. What we can dream we can achieve.
Question: What fears are stopping you from achieving your full potential -- and to what degree can our relationships help us escape the Now Trap?
The thought of being obligated to another hundred or so people—sending birthday cards, dinner invites, and all that stuff that we do for those close to us—seems outlandishly taxing.
Only, for some, it’s not. These people are super-connectors. People like me who maintain contact with thousands of people. The key, however, is not only that we know thousands of people but that we know thousands of people in many different worlds, and we know them well enough to give them a call.
So here’s the good news for those of you who aren’t so aggressively social: Once you become friendly with a super-connector, you’re only two degrees away from the thousands of different people we know.
Connectors can be found in every imaginable profession, but I’m going to focus on seven professions where they most commonly congregate. Each of these kinds of connectors provides me with a link to an entire world of people, ideas, and information that, in a very significant way, has made my own life a little more fun, helped my career along, or made the businesses I worked for more successful.
1. Restaurateurs
Being a true-blue connector is a requisite for most people who own restaurants. The success of their enterprise depends on a core group of regulars who see the restaurant as a home away from home. And it’s quite easy to get to know a restaurateur: Become a regular.
2. Headhunters
Recruiters. Job-placement counselors. Search executives. They are like gatekeepers. Instead of answering to one executive, however, the really successful ones may answer to hundreds of executives in the field in which they recruit. Headhunters are professional matchmakers, earning their wage by introducing job candidates to companies that are hiring.
Can anyone contact a headhunter? To be honest, headhunters prefer to be the one contacting you. But if you’re careful about not trying to sell yourself and instead offering them access to your network, they’ll be receptive
3. Lobbyists
Well informed, persuasive, and self-confident, lobbyists are generally impressive networkers. By virtue of their job, they are intimately familiar with the ways of large organizations and how local and national government work. They are almost uniformly passionate people whose goal is to sway politicians to vote on legislation in a way that favors the interest they represent.
How do they work? Lobbyists will often host cocktail parties and dinner get-togethers, allowing them to interact with politicians—and their opponents—in a casual atmosphere. Their more grassroots efforts involve long hours spent on the phone and in writing letters, trying to rouse the community to get involved behind an issue. All of which makes them a rather easy group to please. Can you hold an event for them? Volunteer your services? Refer other volunteers to their cause? Introduce them to potential clients?
4. Fundraisers
“Follow the money” are words fundraisers live by. They know where it is, what it will take to get it, and most important, who’s most likely to give it away. As a result, fundraisers, whether they work for a political organization, university, or nonprofit group, tend to know absolutely everybody.
5. Public relations people
PR people spend their whole day calling, cajoling, pressuring, and begging journalists to cover their clients. The relationship between media and PR is an uneasy one, but at the end of the day, necessity brings them together like long-lost cousins. A good friend who works in PR can be your entrée into the world of media and, sometimes, celebrity.
6. Politicians Politicians at every level are inveterate networkers. They have to be. They shake hands, kiss babies, give speeches, and go to dinners, all in the name of gaining the trust of enough people to get elected. The stature of politicians is derived from their political power rather than their wealth. Anything you can do to help them gain power with voters, or exercise power in office, will go a long way to ensuring you a place in their inner circle.
7. Journalists
Journalists are powerful (the right exposure can make a company or turn a nobody into a somebody), needy (they’re always looking for a story), and relatively unknown (few have achieved enough celebrity to make them inaccessible).
These are seven different professions tailor-made for superconnectors. Reach out to some. And there are others—lawyers, brokers, etc. Become a part of their network and have them become a part of yours. Seek out ideas from people you don’t ordinarily talk to who inhabit professional worlds you don’t ordinarily travel in.
In one word: Connect. In four better words: Connect with the connectors.
Are we raising a nation of teenagers who r omg totally gr8 texters, but total dopes when it comes to managing face to face communication?
Your teenage child sends and receives 2,272 texts a month and spends 9 hours a week absorbed in social networking sites. According to this Wall Street Journal Online op-ed by an English professor at Emory, there’s major collateral damage: a rising generation who’s deaf and dumb when it comes to real-time interaction and the subtle language of nonverbal cues – tonality, facial expressions, posture, and the like. He’s concerned: His book is called The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.
The professor’s both wrong and dead right.
Jeopardizing our future? Wrong. There’s so much more to celebrate than to gripe about in the Digital Age. The online revolution has wildly expanded our opportunities to share, create, and do more of all the things that tribes have done since the dawn of time – and now at the speed of light. We’re getting more human every day. I’m excited, not afraid, to see what new competencies Gen-Y and Gen-Z bring into the culture.
Here’s where he’s right: While the desire for relationships is innate, building them requires a skill set – one that can and must be learned. I know it can be learned, because I’ve made a lot of money, and my clients a lot of money, by teaching them those very skills. Nonverbal communication is an important part of that skill set, and it’s entirely possible that the professor’s right in worrying that it’s not going to be your kid’s strong suit.
It’s up to you, as parents, to fill the gap in that skill set. Push them toward activities that will develop those abilities that they miss out on while glued to their PC. Here are six tips to kick start your thinking.
6 Tips for Raising a Relationship-Savvy Child - Video Summary
1. Don't be a hypocrite! If you, like the professor, are worried your kids aren't skilled communicators, make sure you’re skilled at their preferred modes of interaction. Technology-facilitated communication is likely to become more, not less, important in the future, so make sure that you’re not overly focused on what worked in the past – you know, back when you had to walk a mile in bare feet in snow to get to school.
2. Set the example: As parents, your social life shouldn’t take place entirely remotely from your children. You’re wasting an opportunity to share with them your own special recipe for the good life – warm times with close friends. So find time to entertain at home. Host a dinner or a holiday party. Without making your kids the center of attention, give them time to interact with guests and “play grown-up.”
3. Set the table: The reality of your life may not make daily family dinners possible – but certainly you can make shared meals happen several times a week. A study reported in the 2003 Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine found that adolescents who frequently sat down to family meals had better grades, less depression, and were less likely to drink alcohol, smoke, or use marijuana than kids who ate with their families less than twice a week.
4. Take turns toasting: This is a must for special events, but also a great tradition even for casual Sunday night dinner. That way yours kids grow up watching and practicing impromptu “public” speaking – and learning to celebrate the small stuff.
5. Activities, activities, activities: Get your kid involved early on in an organization that promotes and rewards offline social interaction – think Boy or Girl Scouts, local theatre, sports clubs, or even a local nonprofit or political campaign. At a certain point, your kid will do what he wants to do, and unless you’re really lucky, it won’t involve the Glee Club. But if you’ve laid the foundation with years of marshmallow roasts and musical theatre, he’ll have the skills at the ready when he’s done being a disaffected teenager.
6. Enforce No Cell Phone/Blackberry family outings: Yes, your kids will hate you. And it you’re hooked on the Crackberry yourself, you’ll probably mean it when you say, “This is hurting me more than it’s hurting you.” But it’s good for everyone to take a break. For a few hours, anyway.
Those who are the best at building relationships will always have a competitive edge. Relationships drive success; everything we do in life is with and through other people. That’s not changing.
Now let's hear your take: How are you approaching these issues with your kids? Or maybe you're a teenager - are all these grownups worried about nothing?
Failing to plan, as they say, is planning to fail. So it goes with outreach. Most people’s efforts are scattershot. But if you want to make the most of your network – and give the most to your network – you need to get organized.
Here’s the method I use to make maintaining my network of contacts, colleagues, and friends easier. It's a strategy that can be adapted for use with any number of applications out there today for tracking contacts. The basic steps are: Categorize, Prioritize, Track, and Schedule Weekly Outreach.
1. Divide your network into categories. There’s no standard method here. Create a segmentation that works for you and your objectives. Personally, I use five categories: Personal, Customers, Prospects, Important Business Associates (which includes both people I’m in business with, and people I plan to be), and Aspirational Contacts. The “personal” category I don’t include on call lists, because these are people who I’m in contact with organically; the relationship is established, and when we talk, it’s as if we’d been in touch every day.
2. Prioritize the list to decide how often to contact each person. I’ll go down my master list (which includes all the categories) and add the numbers 1, 2, or 3 next to each name. A “1” gets contacted at least each month; a “2” gets a quarterly call or email; a “3” I try to reach once a year, probably through a group communication like a holiday card.
3. Schedule weekly outreach. I do this by segmenting my network into call lists. In time, your master list will become too unwieldy to work from directly.Your call lists will save you time and keep your efforts focused. They can be organized by your number ratings, by geography, by industry, and so on. It’s totally flexible. I make a habit of reviewing my master list at the end of the week and crosschecking it with the activities and travel plans I have for the following week. In this way, I stay up-to-date and have my trusty lists at my side all week long.
4. Track your outreach. Each time I reach out to a person, I like to include a very short note next to their name telling me the last time I contacted them and how. If last month I sent an e-mail saying hello to a potential customer rated “1,” this month I’ll give a call.
With a plan in place, I guarantee you'll keep in touch with people you otherwise would have forgotten - until the moment you needed them. In other words, TOO LATE!
Today we celebrate the contributions of the American worker - at a time when umployment is at its highest in 26 years. Why not use the holiday to set some intentions around contributing to the greater good this week - and of course, beyond this week. We're not going to come out of crisis by government edict. It's going to take everyone's commitment.
A few suggestions - and feel free to add your own in comments.
1. Call the people you know who are out of work and ask them a very simple question: "What can I do to help?" Then be prepared to follow through.
2. Bring in a home cooked meal or cater lunch for your team or a couple colleagues at work, and focus the conversation on positive intentions.
3. Have an opinion on the health care debate? Write your rep.
And here, from Chris Brogan, are suggestions for kind acts you can accomplish without leaving your desk chair.
Curtsy while you're thinking. It saves time. – the Queen of Hearts
How do I meet everyone I want to meet during the course of a week? Someone once remarked cynically, “I’d have to clone myself to take all the meetings you take.”
“Ah, you’re onto something,” I responded. “I don’t clone myself. I clone the event.”
Here’s what I mean. Say I’m in NY for two days with three people I want to see and only one available time slot. I solve the problem by “cloning” the dinner – I invite all of them to join me at once. Each of them gets benefit from knowing the others, and I get the opportunity to catch up with all of them. If I need some one-on-one, I'll ask that person to come a little early or stay a little late.
Some specific ideas to guide your cloning:
Multitask: Constantly look for ways to include others in what you’re doing. Sometimes I’ll take potential employees for a workout and conduct the interview over a run. As a makeshift staff meeting, I’ll occasionally ask a few employees to share a car ride with me to the airport. Like so many, I couldn't do what I do without multitasking.
Think prophylactic: Cloning is a good way to ensure that a meeting or get together is worthwhile. When meeting someone whom you don’t know that well, invite someone you do know just to make sure the meeting doesn't become a waste of time.
Invite Mentees: They’ll get a special kick out of sitting in on meetings — and it can be a great learning opportunity. It gets them face time with you and a chance to see business in action — as long as you make sure your reason for the meeting gets accomplished. In most cases, the kid ends up contributing something to the meeting as well. Don’t underestimate young people’s ability to find creative new insight.
Be selective: Pay special attention to the chemistry between various people in your professional network. Do you have a sense of who will get on well with each other? It doesn’t mean that everyone has to have the same background and sensibility. In fact, a nice mix of different professions and personalities can be the perfect recipe for a terrific gathering. Trust your instincts, or use this question as a litmus test: Will I have fun? If the answer is yes, that is usually a good sign that the dynamic will work.
A question about this last point: How many of you are like George "World's colliding" Costanza - wary of mixing different personal/professional groups?
Mick Jagger sang that you can’t always get what you want. Maybe not, but when it comes to meetings, you certainly want to do everything in your power to get what you need.
Here’s one 4-part play to quickly establish yourself and your agenda in a first meeting. I'm not talking about a casual meet-and-greet; I'm talking about those times when you have one chance and only one chance to make your case. The steps are based on my NEA interview with the “Madame of Moxie,” veteran consultant DeAnne Rosenberg, who learned early in her career that confidence and audacity are often the keys to leaving a meeting with what you need – and what you want.
State the situation as you see it. This sets the stage for their candid response. Before you can speak persuasively—that is, before you speak from a position of passion and personal knowledge—you need to know where you stand.
Communicate your feelings. We downplay the influence of emotions in our day-to-day contacts, especially in the business world. We’re told that vulnerability is a bad thing and we should be wary of revealing our feelings. But as we gain comfort using “I feel” with others, our encounters take on depth and sincerity. Your emotions are a gift of respect and caring to your listeners.
Deliver the bottom line. This is the moment of truth when you state, with utter clarity, what it is you want. If you’re going to put your neck on the line, you’d better know why. The truth is the fastest route to a solution, but be realistic. Made sure your ask is appropriate.
Use an open-ended question. A request that is expressed as a question—one that cannot be answered by a yes or no—is less threatening. How do you feel about this? How can we solve this problem? The issue has been raised, your feelings expressed, your desires articulated. With an open-ended suggestion or question, you invite the other person to work toward a solution with you. It takes pressure out of the interaction.
“Your best customers are the customers you have right now.”
If you’re in sales, you’ve probably heard that before. The idea is that your most successful leads come from the selling you’ve already done. The highest returns don’t come from new sales; they come on top of the customer base you’ve already established. It’s easiest to reach out to those people who are at least tangentially part of your network.
Likewise with expanding your general network. The big hurdles of networking revolve around the cold calls, meeting of new people, and all the activities that involve engaging the unknown. So if you want to forward quickly, concentrate on the people who are already part of your existing network. Everyone from your family to your mailman is a portal to an entirely new set of folks. I bet you have no idea how vast and widespread your network already is.
Today, take a moment to create a list of all the people you already know, and a schedule to reach out to them over the next weeks. Who knows what leads they'll generate?
Here are a few starting categories to get you thinking:
• Relatives
• Friends of relatives
• All your spouse’s relatives and contacts
• Current colleagues
• Members of professional and social organizations
• Current and former customers and clients
• Parents of your children’s friends
• Neighbors, past and present
Leave no stone unturned!
Who has ideas for other pockets in your current network that might hold opportunities?
Hello from Sara Grace, Program Director at RelationshipMastersAcademy.com, making a visit to KF.com to share a recent RMA success story.
Recently I received an advanced copy of 
The thought of being obligated to another hundred or so people—sending birthday cards, dinner invites, and all that stuff that we do for those close to us—seems outlandishly taxing.
Today we celebrate the contributions of the American worker - at a time when umployment is at its highest in 26 years. Why not use the holiday to set some intentions around contributing to the greater good this week - and of course, beyond this week. We're not going to come out of crisis by government edict. It's going to take everyone's commitment.
Mick Jagger sang that you can’t always get what you want. Maybe not, but when it comes to meetings, you certainly want to do everything in your power to get what you need.
