We’re all in the business of relationships

It’s a cliché to talk about the importance of relationships in business. We all know that to be successful, we need the best people by our side, whether as clients, clients or colleagues. But do you find that, even though you’re more connected to each other than ever (at least in theory), you still struggle to find the right connections and networks?

Of course, there are many online and in-person communities. But finding those aligned with you can often feel like it’s all down to luck. It doesn’t have to be ⁠—it all starts with connecting to yourself and having a deep, deep understanding of what guides you.

Have a close relationship with yourself and your loved ones, before seek more relationships in business.

What is talked about less in the business world is the importance of prioritizing our relationships with our family. We pay lip service to the notion of work/life balance, but it’s so easy to fall into the trap of thinking you can’t have one without sacrificing the other. It is simply not true.

As I like to say so much: it’s all about intention. Why do we start our business with the intention of achieving success and improving our personal finances? Is it just to have money or is it to improve our life and that of our family? I know a lot of very successful and very wealthy people, and none of them prioritize making money. Money was a happy byproduct of the impact they created. The goal was to create growth, change and expansion.

If you set the intention to expand your business to spend more time with your family, this will influence how you structure your business and the strategic decisions you make. Some cynically minded people might argue that it’s doomed because you’re focusing on things outside the business. But I’m not suggesting that you compromise your strategic decision-making ⁠—rather, you should use the desire for more free time to find the right strategies to facilitate this.

One such example would be task prioritization. If you focus on only spending time on high-return tasks, you’ll eliminate all the stressful, unproductive stuff that keeps you in the office after home and on the phone on the weekends. Don’t worry about the people, places, and things that mean to rob you of your time.

Value your time and guard it jealously.

Thanks to our globalized world, we no longer need to “kiss a bunch of business frogs”. We can enter the virtual and literal room with precisely the right people, eliminating wasted time and inappropriate connections.

Of course it’s not this simple, but the point of being open to the whole world is to make it smaller. Think about how advertising works these days. Why spend on newspaper or local TV ads when you know a lot of that spending is going to fall on deaf ears? You can spend less to target a smaller, but demonstrably engaged audience, which generates a higher rate of return.

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The same goes for how we build relationships.

The “problem” is that, no matter how sophisticated our algorithms, there is still far too much information available for us to manage on our own. We need to enlist the help of others in order to get into the right “rooms”. It’s so important that we do this, not necessarily because of predetermined opportunities, but because we need to share the energy of abundant like-minded people.

Remember that it is possible to win at the wrong game. You may win a lot of money, but life can also be miserable because everything else suffers. Or the reverse could be true. By being in a room with plenty of people lined up, we can start winning the good matches. We can have our cake and eat it too.

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Work on building relationships with abundant people so that you are surrounded by abundant energy. They won’t let you fall back into lack.

Another great tip for finding the right company to keep is to avoid people from “their world” and seek out people from “the world”. You’ve probably met a lot of people from “their world” during your journey as an entrepreneur, and most likely in life in general. They are the kind of people who seek only to change and enrich their world, as opposed to the world. They focus on their own service rather than the world.

This is totally the wrong mentality. They win the wrong game. Think about it: if you want to grow and grow, shouldn’t you focus on serving as many people as possible? Make serving the world your goal and the rest will take care of itself. That’s not to say that how you do what you do isn’t important, but if it doesn’t serve the relationship you have with your clients and clients (i.e. the world), so don’t do it.

If you’re not putting a lot of energy and resources into your relationships, it’s time to start. Cultivate a mindset of being of service to the world, then be open to the infinite possibility of what will come your way. By connecting with abundant people, creating a network of “the Worldly people and by avoiding toxic people, you open yourself up to infinite expansion. Your name ⁠— and by extension, you ⁠— will be in rooms across the world, being connected to opportunities you can’t even conceive of on your own.

As I teach my students: Don’t try to control the “how”. This is very often what prevents our dreams from coming true. We set a clear intention, we dream big and then we try to control how it will happen to us. The problem is that you take the infinite possibility of the universe and try to channel it through your limited field of understanding. That’s not how abundance works.

You just need to do the work of opening yourself up to the infinite number of ways something can come to you. I’m not suggesting that you do nothing. But don’t assume you know more than the universe about when and how opportunities and progress will present themselves. Revel in the fact that resources and gains can come from anywhere, in abundant quantities, as you open up to service the world.

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