Are You Referral Ready?

Archive for the ‘Connecting with Yourself’ Category

Failing to plan is planning to fail. …you’ve heard that before, but it applies to networking as well. There are many different networking groups and activities to choose from. The best ones for you are the ones that are in alignment with your goals.

People who network without a plan can still get positive results, but those results are random, finite, and impossible to plan for. Referral Ready means taking responsibility for achieving your goals and making strategic choices about what it takes to get there.

Make a list of networking organizations that might interest you. Include a healthy mix of social, business, and community service groups and professional associations. From that list, explore the possibility of joining two or three different kinds of groups.

Just as an investment broker might advise you to diversify your financial portfolio, a networking plan that consists of different types of organizations will strengthen your social capital. Choose wisely, and get involved based on where your skills, interests, and goals intersect.

To become Referral Ready, the single most important concept to master is the ‘give first’ mentality. You either believe that the way to become successful is by helping other people become successful, or you don’t. If you do, there are no limits for what you can achieve through networking.

If you don’t, then you must be planning to be successful all by yourself. Good luck. We all need help somewhere along the way. Do you really expect to make withdrawals from the bank of humanity without having made any deposits along the way?

I’ll bet it wouldn’t take very much time at all for you to play ‘give first’ right now with an influential person in your network. Just a phone call for no reason, or an e-mail with a link to an interesting article or blog post, or a greeting card with just the right sentiment…not because it is almost Christmas, but because the spirit of giving, and expecting nothing in return, is the fuel that makes it all work.

If afterward you don’t feel 100 times better about yourself, the ‘give first’ mentality might not suit you at this time.

If you do feel better, you have connected with the mechanism that makes Referral Ready possible and the real reason we network with others in the first place–to serve more people.

That is why you network…right?

John Suarez

Chief Education Officer

Referral Ready LLC