Working From the Outside, In

People have often asked me, “How can I build strong relationships?”  It’s a good question and one that each of us should be asking ourselves every day.  Relationships are at the very center of all your success; professional, personal, family, recreation, everything.  In fact, if you do a little reading about building your personal brand these days you can spend hour upon hour reading about networking and how to do it.  Unfortunately, many people reading such advice can’t follow it effectively because they don’t understand the true basis for a proper network; relationship building.

So, if you’re looking to have a better life, in any area of your life, you can have what you’re looking for in a very rapid fashion.  It just takes some time, effort and caring.

I say caring because when people tell me that networking doesn’t work it’s because they have usually joined a networking group full of people who are there for one reason; to get leads for their business.  How do you think that goes when everyone is there to receive and not to give?

It’s just that obvious! And, what is also obvious is that the opposite is also true. It will lead you to the opposite result.  The perfect example of how this works is the time my daughter Kilee spent with me this last weekend.

I’ve been a small rancher for quite some time now and wanting to expand my interests to include a vineyard.  My daughter Kilee has become a very good gardener so I asked her to help me pick and order some varieties of root stock to plant.  When the plants arrived, I asked her to come and help me plant the first row and enjoyed her teach me the art of planting grape vines.

We spent the afternoon on Saturday planting the recently arrived root stock, and it gave us time to have wonderful talks about her life, work and dreams.  Then toward the end of the afternoon, as she continued to help me, I taught her more about drip irrigation as we installed it at the base of each vine.  Through all of this process we created the beginnings of my vineyard and deepened our relationship at the same time.  We could never accomplish the same quality of relationship building had we not been giving of ourselves first from the outside through work!

Creating a strong relationship with another person always requires that you work your way from the outside in!  You only gain access to another person’s heart after you’ve demonstrated caring through your external behavior.  You must gain their trust by being the one to offer help, assistance and care.  Then you must make good on that promise by being the initiator of action.  It is through your actions of caring and kindness that other people will see that you are the type of person they want to have a relationship with.  If you try it any other way every single person will see that you are - a fraud; you are only there to use them and take what you can.

You deserve to have strong, long lasting relationships that will enrich your life as well as the lives of those you love and want to love more.  Take an opportunity to build stronger relationships today by giving yourself to others by working from the outside, in.