- Be More Relatable
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- Nobody cares. Awesome!
I write weekly about the strategies, habits, and tactics around cultivating the connections that matter to you.
Hi! I renamed The Sphere to Be More Relatable. Thanks for your continued readership and support!
I received this email last week -
I need help getting back on the train and staying on. I've been paying for relatable for months but keep procrastinating getting into it. After 4 months of procrastinating, I did one round of 6-12 LinkedIn messages about 3 weeks ago and then stopped and lost momentum. I also setup effective phone reminders for Monday business networking at 3pm, and daily personal networking but....I literally followed that once and then fell off the bandwagon.
Does this sound familiar?
Over the past decade I’ve received hundreds of emails like this. I used to think that it was primarily due to my failure to build a good product, which would send me into a spiral of self-loathing and a styrofoam tray of gas-station nachos.
I’ve since spent enough time in behavioral research to understand what’s really going on - investing in your network has earned a permanent spot on the should do list.
Unfortunately for us humans, when should becomes didn’t, it’s followed quickly by and I feel really bad about it and should just give up.
So here’s the good news and bad news, and we’ll let Jim from The Office break it to us:
Yep. Nobody cares.
If you haven’t reached out to someone in a few months or years, they don’t care.
It’s not because they don’t like you - it’s because they already have a full plate of to-dos, should dos, didn’t dos, etc. They’re not sitting at their kitchen table, stewing about why you haven’t sent them a LinkedIn message. If anything at all, they may feel the opposite, that they should be reaching out to you.
If six months has gone by and you haven’t cracked open your CRM, it doesn’t care. The database keeps storing things, servers will keep serving, and it’ll happily keep pinging your credit card on the 7th of each month. But it will be there whenever you find time, ready to rock.
If you have a recurring block on your calendar that keeps whizzing past you every week, your calendar doesn’t care.
Feeling bad about what we didn’t do prevents us from taking further action. I encourage you to ditch that story - you really can pick back up at any time.
So here’s what I told them, and I’ll tell you too.
One: You’re human, we all struggle to stay consistent. The good news is nobody is angry at you that you haven’t talked to them- they’ll be happy to hear from you whenever you get to it. So…
Two: Consistency is what will compound over years, so figure out what you need to be consistent. The best solution I’ve found to build up any new habit is to not do it alone. Change that recurring calendar block into a recurring meeting, with 1-2 other people, who do the same thing. For better or for worse, you will let yourself down a hundred times over before you’d ever let someone else down.
Does that help you?
-Zvi
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I’ve spent the past 12 years helping people like you grow their businesses and careers by cultivating the relationships that matter. I took everything I’ve learned and practiced and put it in a professionally produced online course.