What if I told you the key to all of our successful relationships was based on the three L’s?
Love, Listening and Looking.
What if I told you that the best networking and marketing practices were based on the same three L’s?
That’s right.The same three. Love, Listening and Looking.
The reason for that is because the very best marketing is built from good relationships with people you trust to deliver the best quality for your value.
That probably doesn’t seem like a lot of the marketing you are experiencing today. We live through a daily onslaught of marketing and advertising, all positioning themselves as the ones we REALLY need, while it’s very clear that the businesses are only looking out for their best needs, not ours. Doesn’t seem like a great marketing plan to me. It seems like dirty rotten business.
To me, the very best marketing happens organically when we don’t even focus on marketing at all and focus on relationships instead.
Let’s talk a little truth
It’s the holiday season now. Would you rather spend your precious dollars somewhere where they don’t care about you or your needs? Or drive the extra mile to see the warm, friendly shopkeeper who has gone out of her way to remember what you wanted and liked and put it aside for you so you don’t have to fight the crowds?
Is cheapest price the one and only indicator of where your dollars go? Or is trust, relationship, honesty and quality part of your decision making? If you do tend to make decisions based on cheapest price alone, how satisfied are you with the service and quality of goods that you are receiving? Are you settling and suffering rather than creating good service relationships that work for you?
Building relationships— in life and in business—is a critical life skill.
If you miss the mark in your personal life, always settling for the quickest fix or the easiest way out of the hard work, you miss out on love, friendship and joy and invite in loneliness and sadness. If you take the easy way out in business, looking for the fastest buck, the next good deal, or quick catch phrase, you miss out on loyal, delightful clients who refer you to other wonderful people just like themselves.
So let’s look at the big three: Love, Listening and Looking to see if you can add a little bit more to both business and your personal life.
The Big Three
Love: The Bible says “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” I happen to think the greatest of all things is love. Period. How you treat the world, your friends, your clients and your family is the basis of it all. There is no greater task on this planet than learning how to love. Love is an action word, taking the time to care, to show charity, compassion and encourage faith and hope. Love is speech on your tongue. Love is the caring thoughts you think when no one is looking. Love is practicing a gracious, forgiving, non-judging life. Are you practicing love? Here is my favorite definition of the word.
1st Corinthians 13, 4-8 “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 8 Love never fails…”
Couldn’t we all use a little more of that kind of love in our lives?
Listening: Do you practice the art of active listening? Or does your mind wander to your grocery list, or to the next thing you want to say? Do you have to focus so hard on what you want to say next that you zone out of the conversation until you are re-engaged by the silent pause? Or are you like me, working so intently on a project that people can be speaking around you and you aren’t even aware, save for the strange buzzing in your ear that you are ignoring?
I have had to train my children to wait until I am actually looking at them before they go on with a story. If they just start talking without getting my attention first—I might not know they are there. (Believe me, I work on this one all the time. It’s no fun to be jolted out of a writing project by a wail of “You aren’t even listening to me!”)
Here is a fact. People who don’t feel listened to, don’t feel valued or loved. They think that you don’t care. This isn’t a good thing for either personal or business relationships. We want to be heard, but we don’t begin by listening to others. Want to improve your relationships? Use two ears and close one mouth. Put your agenda aside and soak up the words. Hear the story. That is a sure-fire recipe for success.
Looking: Sometimes words tell lies. People will say what they think you need to hear instead of the truth. This isn’t because they are trying to lie to you. It’s because they aren’t in touch with their truth. Here is a tip. Words lie, bodies and energy won’t. They can’t. Energy is what it is, it can’t be faked and people’s actions and bodies are simply a reflection of the energy they are projecting. Stop…look…pay attention. If something isn’t jiving, you can help them get closer to their own needs by paying attention to their body and facial language, and taking it a step further, reaching out with your intuition to look deeper into what is going on than what meets the eye.
Do you know how many people walk through this world believing they are socially invisible? On of the greatest compliments you can give another human being is to actually stop long enough to really look at them, care and let them know you SEE them.
In my business at Creative Clarity Coaching, I get a lot of questions about networking and marketing, and here, questions about friends, families and healing wounded relationships.
For both sets of questions, the best place to start is the three L’s.
Love them, listen to them, and really, really look at them.
