Are You Seeing So Much That You’re Blind?

Filed Under Marketing, Motivation/Inspiration, Successful Blog | 4 Comments

Finding Your Own Leadership Path

Looking in the Right Direction

Last night, I shared a lovely phone call with Tim Sanders who had just arrived in Chicago after several flight delays and detours. Tim is an amazing traveler. I guess he would have to be a speaker so in demand as he is.

I used to travel like that it takes a certain mindset. To do it well, busy travelers also need to understand how to lower stress and keep our eyes on what’s important. The same is true of people who travel extensively and often.

Does that sound like you?

When I hung up the phone with Tim, I marveled at his energy and generous spirit. I got to thinking about how traveling used to affect me and what I learned that made me a better traveler and a far nicer person to work with.

Are You Seeing So Much That You’re Blind?

Working at a fast pace is much like traveling on too many airplanes. The information coming at as us fast and furious. We become machine-like in our effort to process. We see the details of what we need to navigate. The problem that I found was that I sometimes hyperfocused through to the important navigational and informational details that I was blind to the people in the picture. The people became just more data carriers to inform my goal.

That was a problem. It’s not human. We’re wired to be social not mechanical.

So the more I focused on the information, the more stressed and less social I became. With or without a real itinerary, traveling too fast made see so much I was blind to the people around me.

And when we lose sight of the people around us, they find a way to remind us that they are people not unfeeling data points. Such reminders usually aren’t fun or pretty.

So I learned how to pace my “traveling” with an appropriate amount of “space,” so that my eyes remained open to value the people I meet. Here’s what I do now regularly.

I look at the people I talk with.
I talk more about the people I’m going to see rather than the places I’m going.
I think of every detour, delay, and problem as a chance to meet someone and capture a new story.
I think of myself as a visitor in everyone else’s world.
I make it a point to sit silently for “recess” breaks 3 or 4 times a day — at my desk, on airplanes, in taxis.
DI look at the sky and trees, because it’s hard to feel overly important when I’m face-to-face with creation.

No major magic there. It’s doing what Tim calls feeding our brains, what I call keeping our heads wired to our hearts.

Either way the result is a powerful return on investing.

The more I see the people around me, the more they see good things coming out of me.

What do you do to make sure that you’re not seeing so much that you’re blind?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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7 Ways to an Attractive, Authentic Relationship … With Yourself

Filed Under Marketing, Motivation/Inspiration, Successful Blog | 6 Comments

About this time each year, new folks discover the energy, the community, and the benefits of being online.
About this time each year, folks who’ve been here often get back that “new blogger feeling.”
And some folks even start looking back at where they’ve been to figure out where they might be going.

I do all of that.

And today finds me thinking of what makes successful and lasting online relationships.
The longer I look it, the more I realize it relies on how well we relate to ourselves.

So rather than talk about how to be visible to people you want to meet, how to attract people who care about what you’re doing, why not take a minute spending time on what it takes for you to get to know you?

Top 7 Ways to an Authentic Relationship … With Yourself

If you read down this list, it’s fairly obvious that the same seven apply to relationships with other people as do to the relationship you might want to build with you. The advantage of taking the time to reflect on these seven and yourself is that knowing who you bring to those other relationships is foundational to forging something valuable and lasting at every turn.

Do you treat yourself as well as you expect yourself to treat other people?
Do you give yourself the respect that you deserve?
Do you keep your promises to yourself and value your input?
All of these will build a better relationship with yourself and with other people.

Show up whole and human. Do you see yourself as a person or a worker? Do you hold yourself up to some superhuman standards? Isn’t it unfair (and maybe a little snobby) to set one standard for yourself and another for everyone around you? Show up for everyone. Give yourself the time — and the you — you would give your best friend.
Talk in your authentic voice. A good part of authenticity is knowing when we’re hiding behind our history. Another good part is seeing and admitting when we’re feeling one thing and saying that we feel something quite different. Choose the authentic kind words that express who you are now and what you are feeling. Know when to share them and when to keep them near you. But trust your “self” and your voice to know the authentic life you’re living.
Tell your own truth.We all grew up with “tape recordings in our heads” that contradict what we know is true about ourselves. Why do we talk as if those are the reality? Stop long enough to gather the skills you’ve built. Reflect for the time it takes to appreciate why you might want to be friends with you. Learn what it is you are uniquely good at doing and don’t be afraid to tell the truth about who you are. The world didn’t hold a meeting to decide only one kind of person can be here.
Have room for folks to tell theirs too. Hear the truth when it hides inside what other folks are saying. Ask until you know, believe, and feel that you’re communicating. Make it easy for them to share what might be weighing on their heads and their hearts with you. What you’ll find by listening to their truth with all of your being is that knowing the their truth deeply enough to understand it won’t hurt you. It opens us up to accept our own humanity.
Don’t try to tie ideas up in a bow. Life doesn’t come in boxes that organize well with single labels. It’s rare that one occasion will summon up only one word or emotion. Enjoy the depth and live the kaliedoscope changes. Each breath of color and dimension adds new meaning that will get shut off and cut off if you try to categorize or define every minute. We aren’t meant to define our lives so completely. We’re meant to live them.
Half the show is in the comments. Now and then take a moment to stop, reflect, and collect your own opinion on who you are without outside influence. Sit with yourself in your personal invisible comment box and have a conversation about who you are and where you’re going. If you don’t like the goals and the destinations, change them. If you don’t like the design of your life, get a new one.
Be helpful, not hypeful. . . . Make everything about them not you. Default to what generates energy. Help yourself by helping other people. It’s not natural for a human to be a hermit. When the dark weather settles around you, reach out to help someone who is facing a far worse climate. Don’t think about how people treat you – those who get it wrong, don’t “get” it. Be your own model of how it should work and enjoy being it.

And when you make that relationship with yourself, you’ll find you’re the kind that attracts other people. They’ll see that you value what you bring and that what you offer is real.

So go ahead, what could be wrong with being someone you like, respect, and want to be with?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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A Checklist for Building a Solid Partner Relationship

Filed Under Checklists, Successful Blog | 3 Comments

Moving With New Tools to New Relationships

The past few years bloggers and brands have worked together to move messages through communities and across the Internet. It was a natural transition for a broadcast-based system to move some of their marketing and advertising from print publishers to online audiences.

In many cases, what has occurred is that brands have chosen to use the new tools with an outdated view to how reaching customers work. Though the brands have given this new relationship a new name – blogger outreach – that implies relationship, the goal behind the outreach is often still product mentions in the form of blog posts and eyeballs looking at them.

It may be easier on the short term to hire a blog post or offer something free in hopes of getting bloggers to write about it than to develop a relationship, but as more big and little brands bombard big and little blogs with pitches and product samples, the less attention any brand can get.

And it always was true that …

Old thinking and old methods aren’t the best use of new tools in a new cultural mix. The best brands — businesses big and small — are already making the move from outreach and focus groups to partnerships. The best business bloggers are taking the initiative to build relationships like that too.

A Checklist for Building a Solid Partner Relationship

Great brands, savvy small businesses, and the best business bloggers know the best business relationships are a partnership in which both sides align goals and work together on a shared mission not a single campaign or opportunity. Here’s a checklist for building a solid partner relationship that can do that.

Check for similar team size and bias toward action. What you’re looking for is a similar time-goal orientation. If your business can turn on a dime and needs one person to make a decision, you’ll be at a disadvantage working with a business that is highly driven by several step processes. The business with the most approval stages always wins control.
Check for shared values and like standards. What you want to determine is that you and your partner agree on what makes great work and great service to each other, the business, and the customers. These intangibles can’t be described in a contract. They have to be discussed deliberately. Do that.
Check that you have the same vision and mission in view. What’s important to determine here is that your mission critical goals for the work are truly aligned, that you see the same ending outcome, and that you’re sharing the same kind of risk. Find out before the work starts if your views don’t match — you don’t want to find out later that you were building a partnership and the other team thought of you as a channel of distribution.
Check that you agree on roles, process, and vocabulary. What you want is concreteness of the “how” the partnership will work. This conversation will bring you to who owns which part and what responsibilities go with that.
Check that you have clear boundaries and realize differences in your time-goal orientation. What you want to bring up here is the idea of “scope creep.” How will you alert each other when the relationship needs re-balancing? What will be the communication methods for changes to the plan, the process, or resource and budgetary needs?
Check that you have discussed how you will share the risk and share the benefits. What is important here is a conversation about how the vision will play out, what will be required from both teams to secure the win, and how the rewards will be shared when you bring it in.

This checklist is a conversation that stands outside the making of a deal memo or a contract. It’s a relationship meeting of the minds. The accuracy of the conversation needs to be tested after you’ve gone through the checklist. You can do that easily by following these two rules.

Take one small unit of work through the process to verify your thinking about the roles and the scope of the work. At each step of that prototype, keep what worked and revise what didn’t.
Throughout the relationship, review the results quickly, constantly, consistently and adjust to keep improving the process and the relationship. As you build trust, sleek down the checkpoints to let each partner do their work without unnecessary interruption.

Sound like a lot? It’s really not. If you think about it, it’s two meetings and keeping your head, heart, and vision in the partnership. They say a good partner can divide grief and multiply success. I can tell you that this process can bring you a lot closer to ensuring that.

How do you build a solid partner relationships?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
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Leadership … It’s All in Your Head!

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The theme of SOBCon this year, The New Leaderrship and Loyalty Businesss, has me thinking, why do we work so hard to do what we do? … and how much of our success and leadership is in how we see ourselves?

It can’t be solely economic. We could find easier ways to put in a good day’s work for a good day’s pay.

It’s not just political. We can raise our station in life and our job roles by trying less visible, more traditional ways.

It’s a reaching out to leadership. Leaders are givers. Leaders give their learning, their loyalty, their love to build something lasting and solid with others that no one person can build alone.

Why do we choose the road less traveled, the rockier road that’s bound to be just that much harder if only because it’s not paved? In the end does that make us leaders or victims of the route we’ve chosen to take? At it’s core, it’s the “what” or even the “how” of what we do that makes a leader, but the “why.”

Leadership … It’s All In Your Head

Still, the calling to build something lasting and solid is simply a calling without the leadership thinking to fuel the “what” and “how” of making that vision a reality. To attract those other someones who help build that solid something a leader has to have the right “why” working. the right “why” is leadership thinking. Leadership is really all in our heads.

Did you ever notice that what people value most is what they give away?

Leaders understand that giving to others won’t get us what we not given to ourselves.

I have a friend who is a promiscuous truster. He extends his trust almost immediately to everyone he meets. He NEEDS to trust other people in order to get their trust back. His need to feel trusted gets filled that way. He’s often the victim of untrustworthy types find him attractive and find it easy to take advantage. He often burned, sometimes badly. My friend’s problem is that he doesn’t trust himself first.

The “why” he’s doing it is because he NEEDS to be trusted that is what undercuts his leadership.

Suppose that he decided (killed off all other options) to find himself trustworthy first?

That would simply be a change in thinking — all in his head.

He would move from possible victim to leadership.

If he found himself trustworthy, he wouldn’t NEED to trust other people almost immediately but he still could.
Now he would be doing it from a position of strength. Now he could trust almost everyone until he got to the untrustworthy takers. Now, because he didn’t NEED their trust (which he wasn’t getting anyway) he could smile and leave them alone.

Leaders own what they give away.

Doing that is all inside our heads. How is the leadership inside your head going?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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What Do You Get from the Pizza Party at My Dad’s Saloon?

Filed Under Marketing, Successful Blog | 9 Comments

At What Price?

Near the end of my freshman year in college, we found out that my boyfriend’s fraternity brother — a guy I knew — was getting married. What was amazing, interesting, exciting was that he was getting married in the town of about 20,000 people where I grew up. The wedding would take place on a Saturday that summer. They college kids I knew would be staying for the weekend to party and enjoy each other’s company right now the street from my dad’s saloon.

My dad was a quiet and generous man who had the wonderful idea that the sun rose and set on my head. He was for almost anything that could bring a smile to me. So when I asked if some of the college folks could come to his saloon that Sunday afternoon for pizza and conversation, his answer was a smile of we can’t have them leaving town hungry. His words were “how many and what time?”

And as it turned out that my estimate of 10-20 and 2 hours for a pizza reunion became something more like 40-60 and 5 hours of talking. Pizza and fried chicken, beer and soda and other beverages were non-stop for the entire time. The whole while, I got to introduce college friends to my dad as sort of held court and sort of worked the bar.

Near the end of the afternoon, I noticed one friend looking a little nervous.
I asked, “How might I help?”
He said, “I’d like to talk with your dad.”
“Easy!”

I introduced my friend to my dad. They shook hands.
Then my friend said, “I’d like to pay the bill. Could you tell me what we owe for all of this?”

My dad smiled and nodded. He washed a glass or two and set them on the bar. before he reached out for a small white pad of paper and a tiny orange pencil with no eraser. He began writing, figuring on the pad that was enveloped in his huge hands. He looked up and surveyed the room, then wrote something down. I bet he did that survey five or six times without saying a word, without even a question in his eyes or looking at me.

My nervous friend waited patiently with his wallet out.
I could tell he was wondering whether their would be room on his credit card.

About then, my dad stepped back held the white pad out about arm’s length as if he were doing the math in his head — which could well be. Then he stepped forward again, tore off the slip on paper on which he’d been figuring, and set it in front of my nervous friend.

My dad said, “I’ve been over this twice, and as far as I can figure this is what you owe — no tipping on Sunday.”

The piece of paper read ” $1.50″ — 40-60 people and 5 hours of beer and beverages — one dollar and 50 cents.

“Hope you don’t mind if I rounded it up. We don’t keep pennies in the register.”

I learned a lot watching that sale.

What do you take from this story? Do you see something worth remembering that I might not see?

Be irresistible … like my dad.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
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Liz Strauss at Successful Blog

Thinking, writing, business ideas … You're only a stranger once.

Looking in the Right Direction

Are You Seeing So Much That You’re Blind?

Top 7 Ways to an Authentic Relationship … With Yourself

Moving With New Tools to New Relationships

A Checklist for Building a Solid Partner Relationship

Leadership … It’s All In Your Head

At What Price?

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