ChatGPT and your relationships

Welcome to all 300 of you who have joined in the past few weeks. If you’re opening this for the first time, or you’ve been so engrossed in Succession that you forgot what this is about - I write weekly on insights and tactics around building an incredible network of clients, collaborators, and community.

ChatGPT. Your Network.

OK, hello to the 50% of you who didn’t just roll your eyes and click away.

This is not going to be yet another post about “how to use ChatGPT for ______.” I’ll add to that conversation at some point. We are all trying to project out how this changes our business and the world around us - now and in the future. It's also fun to share cool tricks - my developers fed in what they had in the fridge and received a full recipe book for dinner that night.

In the past decade or so of building tools for building relationships, I’ve been part of many “AI” launches. “AI” as while they all provided useful insights the end-user couldn’t figure out on their own - some were developed by PhDs, and some basic Excel formulas.

They all were duds, for the most part. Despite the incredible investment and initial excitement - they never saw high adoption.

In a board meeting, one of our newly added board members sat quietly while we rambled through a flurry of new initiatives and improvements. Afterward, he pulled me aside to give his observations.

“As a leader, it’s worth understanding the difference between whether something will make you more effective, or more efficient.”

I eagerly nodded my head - of course, I knew what words too basic for the SAT meant… right?

The more I thought about it, the more it opened my eyes. That mental model still sticks with me to this day.

One of our early smart features was automagically sorting a database by perceived importance. Pretty cool, right? It could definitely help someone be more efficient - focusing on key relationships means better use of time. But if you didn’t make said time to reach out to your sphere, or you didn’t know what to say to that person, it was useless. So it didn’t help you be effective in building your sphere of influence.

Efficient - achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense.

Effective - successful in producing a desired result.

I’m all for utilizing the latest and greatest, as long as we take a hard look at whether something is going to increase our effectiveness, or simply make us more efficient.

The smart tools I’ve been party to - yes, including ChatGPT - will definitely make us more efficient with our time and impact.

If we don’t set aside any time to engage with our sphere, those tools sit idle.

It doesn’t matter how great that AI-generated email is if we hesitate to press send.

What will help you be more effective at nurturing relationships?

Taking Action

Let’s flip that around. One of the questions we ask repeatedly in our coaching:

What is stopping you from being more engaged with your sphere?

List them out. I’ll wait.

If I were to sum them up for you, they would all fall under time and fear.

Knowing what is stopping you - can you come up with some simple solutions?

More on that next week.

Watch This

As I continue feeling my way into video, I posted a video about one of my favorite tactics that is so simple, you have no excuse not to do it right now.

Further Reading

My friend Patrick Ewers at MindMaven shared his thoughts about better openings to conversations - something that is near and dear to me.