What a basketball can teach us

Happy Tuesday! If randomly clicked your way over here, I send an email once a week exploring how we leverage our most important asset - relationships - to build strong networks of clients, co-creators, and community.

Today I’m going to talk about a basketball.

Just to be clear, not me playing basketball - no one wants to see that.

A basketball. And how it forever altered a relationship, and taught me so much.

In a past life, I spent a lot of my time recruiting senior leaders to join our team. Often, these were the executives that didn’t fill out a job post on LinkedIn, or even get introduced to you - you had to find them, schmooze them, and stay in touch for the likely chance that they would put their antennae up for a new role.

On a perfectly frigid morning, I met up with one such candidate at a cafe in Virginia. The conversation about his skills and our needs was, as expected from a quick LinkedIn review, productive. But they weren’t looking, so we planned to stay in touch. As we were making our way through the tables, dreading having to climb back into our frozen cars, we exchanged notes about our weekend plans, then parted ways.

Fascinating story, right? The insight is what happened afterwards.

When I went to send him the conventionally appropriate followup, I paused. Instead of writing a completely milquetoast thank you e-mail, I recalled a small detail from our conversation. When going over his weekend plans, he mentioned that his kid was really into basketball. So instead of the email, I went on Amazon, picked out a simple basketball, and shipped it to his house with a small thank you note.

You can likely safely intuit the rest of the story - what happens when someone receives a personal gift instead of a throwaway email, especially when it’s something he will see in his driveway daily. Otherwise I wouldn’t tell you that story.

It taught me so much.

The barrier to taking action and showing you care is absurdly low.

Taking Action

When it comes to nurturing our relationships, we project it as a monstrous task requires large blocks of time, family sacrifices, and work, work, work.

This is one of the biggest stumbling blocks that lead people to seek out GoodSphere, my training company. If I ask an incoming class how many had spent more than 3+ hours at a time organizing their database, most hands go up. When a number of people scoff when I stake the claim that they’ll be able to easily update 20 contacts in 5 minutes (not 5 contacts in 20!), I know we recruited the right students.

We have envision herculean efforts when it can actually be broken down into small atomic steps, sometimes less than a minute.

How long does it take to ask someone about their weekend plans?

How long does it take to make a quick note about their kids hobbies?

How long does it take to find someone’s mailing address?

How long does it take to purchase a basketball online and write a quick note?

Simple actions, done repeatedly, has become one of our core mantras in our coaching business.

What is the simple action you can do today to deepen or reconnect with someone you care about?