Progressive Learning Session 7 (Continue advocating, learning and interacting).
What do we mean by advocacy?
Following is a great relevant quote about advocacy:
Advocacy is more potent than a mere referral. It is the active support of an idea.
When you know, like and trust someone and another person in business raises a problem they would desperately like to solve, you feel confident in saying something like:
“I can’t believe you just said that! I know someone who specialises in solving precisely that problem.
It would be great for you to have a quick chat with them to gain their thoughts on your issue.
As you might expect, they always have a great deal of work on, but if you like, I’ll contact them and see how they are placed for a quick chat.”
When the person looking for a solution says, “thank you so much, it would be so great to speak with your contact”, you then contact the person you are advocating for and arrange a meeting between them and the person who may be able to use their services.
In other words, you proactively work to arrange the meeting (even though you have no immediate direct benefit).
Why does Advocacy work so well?
- Because you are not selling yourself!
- Instead, you are enthusiastically promoting someone else.
- And as we all know only too well:
- Anyone can promote anyone except themselves!
- When you genuinely trust that someone you know can be of invaluable help to someone else, it is effortless ‘to go the extra mile’ to advocate for them.
- The payback for you putting in this effort is that you build enormous trust with the person you are advocating for; and
- The law of reciprocity says they will advocate for you
- And often, they reciprocate in a much bigger way than you could have possibly imagined!
What is trust, and how is it built?
When someone in business is considering a potential business partner, employee, supplier, consultant or customer, what do they most want to know about the candidates before them?
- Do they have integrity (in other words, will they do what they say they are going to)?
- Are they consistent?
- Are they good team players?
- Are they prepared to ‘go the extra mile’?
- Are they loyal?
- What is their emotional intelligence like?
- Do they have initiative and creativity?
- Do they have leadership potential?
- Do they have aligned values?
Many people “talk a good game” at the interview but turn out to be quite disappointing 6 months down the track.
When you are helping someone build their network, you will come to know the answers to the above all-important questions over time.
As time goes on, you begin to like and trust a few people because they continually demonstrate the right attributes. So, you will be genuinely excited about promoting such people to others. You know they will do their best to perform (short and long term) – just as they have demonstrated when building their network with you.
So, in effect, when you advocate for someone, you are doing two people a great favour:
- The person you are advocating for.
- The person you are advocating them to.
It is incredibly uplifting, inspiring and motivating to be working in a community of like-minded others.
It’s great to be associated with influential and experienced leaders who want to help aspiring others.
It feels great to know you are making a difference in someone’s life and the only condition is that they “Pay it forward”.
Ultimately, your attitude is the key to achieving outstanding results and enjoying the process.
We encourage people to build their networks regardless of their current circumstances.
- You don’t need to be currently in business.
- When you build a trusted network before owning a business, you often discover ideas and mentors that will help you make a better business choice.
- Many people fall into the trap of becoming a slave to their business because they did not choose the right business in the first place.
- For example, you may discover a business that will help you live better because it can produce increasing amounts of income with decreasing amounts of effort required to earn that income.
- You may already have a great job or income stream
- Dig the well before you need the water!
- Enhance what you are currently doing and build the network for future endeavours
- Engage with a great community of like-minded others
- You may lack confidence
- In this case, you’ll find others will help you build your confidence
- You may have failed in several ventures
- In this case, it’s possible you were lacking an advocating network and some good mentors.
- You may be time-poor.
- In that case, an excellent question to ask is: what can I do to allocate my time differently?
- What are your options for setting up a better future?
- Start by building a trust-based network and see what ideas you discover – you may be pleasantly surprised.
One of the best ways to simultaneously learn while building great relationships is by attending meetings.
The 4 meeting types we have are:
- Weekly workshops
- Weekly results accelerators
- Special Interest Groups (known in our jargon as SIGs)
- Our monthly leadership meetings for those who have achieved at least Core-5
You can see the times for these meetings by accessing the “What’s On” calendar from the Builders menu.
In addition to the above meetings, your team leader will often organise valuable meetings in which you can participate.
Our weekly workshops are our most important meetings.
These workshops are great for learning and interacting with others.
When you Zoom in to the Workshop, you will be placed in a breakout room with a random group of 4 or 5 other people for 10 to 15 minutes. This gives you a chance to meet others.
After this, we welcome new people and encourage everyone to put Good News stories into the Zoom chat. These messages are simply prefixed with GNS. Good news stories are either about your network building success or breakthroughs or how you have been able to advocate for or build good business relationships with others in the CC.
Any quick announcements follow this.
Any guests you invite will go into a breakout room where one of our experienced CC builders will explain the CC in more detail.
If this is the first Workshop of the month, we split CC members into random groups of 4 or 5 people for about 40 minutes to get to know each other better and especially to learn more about the services provided by each person. This is a great way to build relationships and learn how to advocate for others.
If this is not the first workshop of the month, we provide a list of workshop breakout rooms. If this is the first workshop you are attending, you should choose Workshop number 1; “Welcome and orientation”. Then you should attend the Workshops in the following sequence:
- Workshop number 2; is simply called “Why”.
- Workshop number 3; “Who do you know”.
- Workshop number 4; “How to find great network-building partners”.
- Workshop number 5; “My Most Trusted”, searching and messaging.
Then we have 2 special workshops called Workshop 5a and Workshop 5b.
- Workshop 5;a is there to help with anything you may be struggling with so far.
- Workshop 5;b is there to help you achieve better results with various aspects of your process.
- Workshop 6 is all about creating consistent, productive habits
- Workshop 7 covers team-building basics
- Workshop 8 is about developing leadership skills
- Workshop 9 is there to help you make the best use of your network building time.
- Workshop 10 covers some great Productivity Tools.
- Workshop 11 has a different presenter covering professional and personal development topics every week.
As you attend each workshop, it’s a good idea to have the Workshops sheet of your Activity Workbook open in a separate tab of your web browser. This will enable you to record notes & reminders about each workshop conveniently.
Our Weekly Results Accelerators are top-rated.
The meetings are very popular and typically generate great results for the presenter.
The format of these meetings is as follows:
- People who have not previously attended a Results Accelerator are invited to introduce themselves briefly.
- This is followed by those attending talking about their CC-related good news stories. These Good news stories can be about network-building successes, breakthroughs, or advocacy.
- This is followed by a presentation from this week’s featured presenter. The presenter is chosen from those that have consistently attended the Results Accelerator to support others.
- Typically the presenter will give some background on themselves, their family and why they are passionate about what they do.
- The final 10 minutes of the Results Accelerator meeting is the most critical 10 minutes as it allows the attendees to think about how they may best help the person who has just presented.
Once again, we recommend that you have your Activity Workbook open to make notes and reminders in the Advocacy sheet of this workbook.
Although there are multiple results accelerator meetings each week, we recommend only attending one of these meetings per week.
Many of our members benefit by using the Special Interest Groups meetings, otherwise known as SIGs.
SIG’s are led and organised by trusted CC members who have a passion for facilitating a group of members with a business interest in a particular industry.
An excellent example of a SIG would be the Tech enablement SIG.
Most businesses today depend heavily on tech. However, business owners often don’t have the time to understand what’s possible. The tech enablement group has many professionals willing to help guide business owners to make the best use of tech given their business size, rate of growth funds available, etc.
Business owners who attend and benefit from the Tech Enablement SIG will praise the professionals participating in that SIG. This, in turn, helps those professionals by providing business for them.
You can see what SIG meetings are being held, their Zoom link, and scheduled times from the What’s on Calendar. You can join one of these meetings, see what they are about and ask to be on any communication list provided by those organising the SIG.
If you attend a SIG meeting, don’t just be a passenger. Instead, contribute and be an active member and work hard to support the other members of the SIG.
Our Monthly leadership meetings for all those who have qualified Core at any time are massively inspiring.
These leadership meetings occur after the first Workshop of the month.
There is nothing like hearing pearls of wisdom from great speakers.
One of the many benefits of achieving Core-5 is qualifying to attend these leadership meetings.
Where possible, you should also attend any team meeting organised by the leader of a team you are part of.
If you want to maximise the benefits of building your network, it makes sense to participate in and contribute to team meetings.
Team meetings enable you to build close relationships and trust with others in the same team as you.
Team meetings typically have a great fun atmosphere.
One of the benefits of attending meetings is what you learn from others. Another great way of learning is to continually listen to the Podcasts you can access through the Builders menu.
Once you have mastered the basics of the NBS, we highly recommend that you establish a habit of listening to the great content available on the Classics Podcast.
