🎯 Work Smart Wednesday - October 4, 2023
How to create authentic connections, Your health is your first foundation, and a quote on enjoying the time you have
Work Smart Wednesday
👋 Hey there!
Here is your weekly dose of Work Smart Wednesday
In these emails I will share with you 3 things to help you work smarter in 3 minutes or less. That leaves you with 10,077 more minutes to conquer your goals this week
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1. 🤗 How to Create Authentic Connections
People buy from people. The vast majority of purchasing decisions are driven by emotion, rather than logic. It is extremely valuable when you can connect with your potential customers, not just simply contact them but truly build a sense of connection. However, creating a sense of connection can be difficult - especially at scale.
Fortunately, there is good research on this topic. We know what key activities to do in order to create authentic connections with your potential customers. I have outlined the steps for you below:
How to create authentic connections:
1. Initiate Genuine Conversations: Lead with curiosity about them, not yourself. Much like with sales calls, you get more value from asking questions than you do from simply saying what you do. Foster genuine curiosity, everybody knows something you don’t and can help you in some way, equally you can help them.
2. Offer Value Without Expectation: Share insights or help without requiring or expecting anything in return. While providing help triggers reciprocity, it provides much more than that. People see you as a helpful person, a source of insight, a good and likable person.
3. Maintain Regular Touch Points: Send occasional updates, ask about their lives. Follow up on things happening in their lives in a timely manner. People do genuinely want to know about what you do. Be open and honest, let people see behind the scenes. Seeing behind the scenes is particularly important if your communication is primarily uni-directional, if you do not communicate with individuals but share en-masse (such as with influencers).
4. Recognise Their Achievements: Congratulate them on successes and milestones publicly. Be their biggest fan, and mean it. Positivity is contagious. People like people who like them, when they like you they are more likely to help and to buy.
5. Invite Collaboration: Propose working on projects that mutually benefit both of you. Ask for help and for feedback. This works well with big audiences as well as on an individual scale - people like to feel involved, to feel they helped, to feel like they have had a part in creating something to be proud of. Let them help you to create.
6. Reflect and Refine: Analyse what works, adapt your approach, and repeat with others. Track the data, then implement the insights you get from that data.
Make a habit of: reaching out when you have something to give and asking nothing in return. Also make a habit of searching for relevant value to give to people in your network.
2. ⚕️ Your health underpins everything
Your health underpins everything else. Health is your foundation. It is hard to focus on building your business when you're sick.
How you spend your time underpins your health - do you make time to eat healthy, to exercise, to give yourself space to think freely?
Nothing is more urgent. Nothing is more important.
While some people are aware of this lesson via Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, they often fail to implement it.
You must prioritise your health above all else. That means prioritising your time.
This ties in well with calendar-priority alignment that I discussed in an earlier issue of Work Smart Wednesday. Additionally, many people schedule their calendar backwards - they schedule work first, then family time, then time for themselves (such as working out). Doing this means you will miss out on the things that are truly important to you, much like the story of the sand and stones in a jar, what you schedule first reflects your priorities. Your health should always come first.
Here is a direct quote from one of my client’s newsletters. Jen is a dissertation coach specialising in helping PhD students, particularly people of colour, to complete their dissertations. She dealt with this lesson on health recently after catching Lyme disease (now in recovery).
“There’s an obvious lesson here – one that I woefully neglected. For close on four weeks, my body was telling me that something was wrong. However, I was on holiday, there were people to see, things to do, experiences to have … and then I was back, and there were deadlines to meet and obligations to fulfil. I didn’t have time to be ill.
Well folks – bodies don’t care about that sort of thing. When I didn’t listen to it, mine shouted louder, and eventually marched me down to the ER.
It's easy to fall into the trap of putting mind before body, and trying to power through the physical signs that tell us we need to slow down. This week has been a much-needed reminder that that strategy is never a winner.
So, in this edition, I challenge you to stop work within the next hour and take care of any basic needs you have been neglecting. The work will be there when you get back – but you only get one body.”
Regardless of where you are with your business, make sure you have the right foundations in place and that you do the fundamentals correctly.
3. 💡 Quote I'm pondering
“20 years from now you’d give anything to be this exact age, exactly this healthy, in this exact moment. Take a second to enjoy it.” — Richard Webster
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That's it! I can't wait to hear what you think. What did you find most useful? What do you want more or less of? Reply to this email now and let me know
Also, if you have anything interesting to share, I want to know about it😊
Have a great week,
John
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