7. Three Steps to Success

Three steps to success in almost anything. Are you doing enough? Are you doing it well? Are you doing it with enough people?

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Well, hello, ladies and gentlemen. It's Wendy Lloyd Curly coming to you for another Imperfect Podcast. How are you? I hope that everything's going well. You know, one of the things that I haven't started doing with this podcast yet is helping you understand what is really important to me at the beginning of anything I do, and that is a really deep breath. So let's do that together. In through the nose and out through the mouth. Ready? One, two, three. It's a great way to set yourself and center yourself before you do anything. And uh so important. I call it the one-breath meditation. Anyway, um, thank you for joining me today. I actually have something that will help anybody in anything that they do. And if you know me well, you know that I don't say that very often. I'm pretty specific most of the time. But there are some pieces of advice I'd like to give you when it comes to getting the most out of life. And the question number one is: are you doing enough? Are you participating enough? Are you putting in the time? And that's really important. You know, are you are you actively participating in what you do? Now, in a BI sense, this means are you actually doing the work that is being asked of you? Are you putting in time to do one-to-one meetings with your fellow members? Are you attending the meetings yourself when you attend the meetings? Are you writing out or preparing your weekly presentation? And are you writing out or preparing your weekly recap of the week's activities? Are you doing your chapter education units or your continuous education in order to sharpen the skills that you have? Are you inviting people to come? Are you putting in the participation required? And this is a really important element. So it's about activity. So, first thing, are you doing enough? Second thing, are you doing it well enough? This is about the skills that you need, the skills that you have in doing the activities that you're doing. So are you simply doing the activities but not making sure that you're doing them well? This is where skill comes in. So, little elements like your continuous education should be helping you to improve your abilities in all of the activities you do. So, do you feel like you're doing your one-to-ones effectively? Do they have a purpose, an agenda, a length, and an outcome that makes you happy and makes the other person happy? Have you progressed from what you knew before to what you know now? And will you actually be able to improve your abilities to refer each other as a result of doing the one-to-one? Did you even realize that that's the purpose of the one-to-one? The one-to-one's purpose is to increase your ability to refer each other and to increase your ability to impact each other's businesses in a positive way. How fantastic is that? All right. So there's the quality or the skill that you have in setting up one-to-ones, in preparing for the one-to-ones, in conducting the one-to-ones, and then in following up from them. And imagine that over time you get better and better and better at that skill. It's fantastic. What about your ability and skill to attend the meetings? This too gets better and better over time. When you're an early member, you may not know or understand how the system works well enough to take advantage and to provide skill in attendance. But when you're attending the meeting with skill, it means that you arrive early. You enjoy the visitor or experience at the beginning during the open networking part of the meeting. You understand how all of the system works throughout the 20-point agenda, which includes the open networking. You probably proactively participate in some of the activities following the meeting, like calling the visitors and finding out if they need anything, asking if you can support them in any way, or directing them towards a particular member or a particular activity. Inviting them to do something else with you in order to make their experience a positive one. And there's also the skill of inviting visitors. Many people say that this is something that they have difficulty with. And I say that's great. The first step is to identify the problem. You don't have the ability or the skill to invite the visitors, so let's develop that ability. Have you taken some classes in it? Have you done some study in it? Are your chapter education units around visitor inviting something that you are paying attention to in particular since it's a skill that you need to develop? Now, I'm not here to train you in how to invite visitors right now. I'm sure that I will address that in the many, many podcasts that we have. But I would like to say this: that taking the training is a valuable part of developing the skill. But it's more important that you practice what you have learned. Because inviting visitors is a practice that develops over time and consistently can improve when you practice it. So listen to a podcast about inviting a visitor and then go and do it. See what the result is and then keep track of who you've invited in order to remember what they said. Are they not available now, but they'd like to do it later? Great, that's an opportunity for you to call them later. I'd like to put a parenthetical uh section right here. Do you realize, and I hope you do, that when you develop the skill of inviting visitors to come to your chapter meetings, that not only are you developing the skill to grow your contact sphere and to grow the contact spheres of other people in your chapter, which makes your chapter stronger, which means that you will get more referrals, which means that everybody will get more referrals, and means that your business will grow. Not only do you get that, but you also are developing a skill that enables you to grow your business without BI, that enables you to learn how to approach people, actively listening to what they are saying to you, and then enrolling them in an activity, enrolling them in an event that you are running, enrolling them in a webinar that you might put on, enrolling them in an open house that you might want to get them to come to, or enrolling them in a course that you might provide. Whatever your business is, enrolling people in events is something that will help you grow your business. And by learning how to do that through your BI chapter, you're developing a skill that you can use in a lot of different places. So I really hope that you take the time to learn that skill because not only is it going to benefit you in your business, it will benefit all of the members of your chapter. And that's just the truth. One last parenthetical comment about visitors is that when I invite visitors to chapter meetings, I rarely tell them that it's important that they consider that it's a weekly commitment. I rarely tell them that they might be able to get into the chapter because there's an opening. I rarely talk about the commitment and the accountability that BI has because I don't need to. It's simply a networking opportunity for them. Look at this, it's the Imperfect Podcast, and I've gone off on a tangent. Um, so let's stop. Forget the parentheses for now, let's go back to skill. So, have you put the time in to develop the skills to do the five things that are really important for BI members to do? And that's to attend well, to invite visitors regularly, to do good quality one-to-ones, to find great referrals and to give them well, and also to continuously educate ourselves on how to do these things well. So, number one was do you participate a lot? Number two was do you have the skills so that that participation is valuable? And finally, we have number three. Are you doing all of these things with enough people and the right people? And that is where in increasing your network and growing your network with the right kind of people is going to add value to you. This is why I spent a little bit of time talking about the visitors, because when we invite visitors to come to BI, not only are we expanding our networks with visitors, but we are probably expanding the size of our chapter. And when we expand the size of our chapter, we then increase the quality and the quantity of people that we are able to consider part of our network. If we only had five to ten people in our chapters, you can see that that would not be as valuable as it would be if we had 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 or more in our chapters. Because when we have more connections that we have regular participation with at a good skill level, then we are actually going to be able to get more referrals and give more referrals because we have more opportunities to give. That's just all there is to it. So, my friends, I think I should finish. I'm gonna recap. Number one, are you doing enough stuff? Do you have enough activity happening? Number two, are you doing it well enough? Should you take some classes? Should you take some training? Should you ask for some support in specific areas? And are you practicing those skills in order to develop them and grow them and make sure that they come naturally to you? And number three, are you engaging with enough people of good quality? And that means helping to grow your chapter so that you're engaging with more people. These three elements are not just for BI, they are for all kinds of things in life. And I'd like to share them with you today so that you consider thinking about are you doing enough? Are you doing it well enough? And are you doing it with enough people? That's my little hint for today. Hey, listen, you're about to listen to the music that we start this podcast with and we finish it with. My friend Ben Little wrote this song. I'm playing on the rhythm guitar in it. It's a lot of fun, and I hope you enjoy it. And I'll see you next time for more Imperfect Podcast.