Welcome to Corporate Caffeine!
This is the written edition of my weekly LinkedIn Live series. Today’s focus is on Building a Bridge to Success.
FYI – I host this series live on Facebook & LinkedIn, post these episodes to YouTube, and have a bonus podcast covering a lot of this content and more. So, let’s dive right in!
Building a success bridge
Sometimes, there’s a gap that can feel like this huge sinking hole you can get lost in. This can be terrible when you need to get to the other side. What do you do?
Well, you need to build a bridge. This is obvious when we’re talking about traffic or getting to the other side of a river. But how does it apply to success? What does “building a bridge to success” mean?
Communicating With Others
One of the main reasons I’m starting with other people is because the vast majority of things you want require others.
People will either help you get something you want or prevent you from doing it. So, you have to make sure you’re focusing on the influence piece, or the team building piece, of working with others.
This may mean recognizing that you might need community, insights, support, or something else. So, so often, you need other people to be successful, and this creates momentum for your goals.
Let’s pretend you want a raise or another common thing.
You have to ask yourself: How do you build a bridge between you and what you want that’s in the hands of the other person? How do you build that bridge?
First of all, you have a name where you both are at. This can be the physical location or the mental one.
And yes, you have to actually name it
Because it tells you where the other person is and where you are as well.
Where are you both at? What’s happening right now? What do you want to know, and how do you describe what you already know? What do you think might help you get what you need?
This will help you to start putting pieces in place on both sides of that bridge, allowing you to meet in the middle. We all have a tendency to just want to bulldoze through the work, but this isn’t what works for most people.
If somebody comes to you and says, “I want this, go do it right now,” how likely are you to do something when instructed like that? Demanding and not caring about anything won’t get anyone anywhere.
That’s not how people work.
You have to be respectful of where someone is at. You might have to approach conversations or progress in a different way.
One Step at a Time
The first step is to understand someone’s location, their space. It’s to identify what’s in it for them. Once you do that, you’re able to clearly see a course. We can all identify this human reaction:
What’s in it for me?
All of a sudden, you can start to get closer and closer in your communication and in the small steps that you make. It allows you to find the middle ground, to find what you both want.
This is how progress moves forward. Most of us are aiming for a yes, but to get to a yes, helps to find a win-win.
I know that sounds cliché, but it’s not.
It’s a mindset. Going into a situation and thinking about how to help other people can create new possibilities that you hadn’t thought of before. It allows you to grow as a person.
How This Connects to Marketing
In marketing, you can’t just go straight ahead. You can’t beat someone over the head. People love to buy, but they hate being sold.
When all you’re doing is focusing on what you want in the future, about selling your product or service, you stop thinking about how to help people decide to opt into whatever you’re offering them.
Let me give you a very specific example when it comes to social media and content. This is very frequent because no matter what, there are communication strategies in everything that we do. Ideas have to turn into words that are communicated to other people.
This will create action.
Let’s take two people who are communicating. One person may represent a company with a million people, but here’s the thing: It doesn’t matter. You’ve got to treat any communication as one-to-one. That’s the only thing that’s interesting and relevant.
We don’t pay attention to stuff that has nothing to do with us, right?
You can build whatever you want in communications, but you can never build a bridge all the way to other people if you don’t speak about what they want to know.
Let me give you an example.
Lots of people come to me with goals, like being social media famous or getting a million followers. In the same conversation, they say they want people to know something specific that the world absolutely needs to hear.
Great. We can start building that messaging, but there’s other messaging that’s going to get you to the audience. The other message is about what they want to know. And you have to go there to build that bridge.
Google is a great example of this.
You follow its recommendations, and then you’re down the rabbit hole. You may start with watching Yellowstone, and then you keep clicking, and suddenly you’re found a video on how Yellowstone can help you learn Spanish.
Maybe this is me, and maybe these search results are specific to my search habits, but it proves a point. You have to speak someone’s language to build that bridge.
Meeting People Where They Are
Think about your area of expertise and the area that you want success in. People are asking questions, but they probably aren’t asking questions about you.
There are tons of standard queries that are already out there. This means you have to build messaging that you want to build, but you must build the bridge.
You have to talk to people about what they want to talk about it.
For instance, for me, I’m not going to sit here and tell you everything about why you should hire a Chief Marketing Officer, why The Marketing Blender is amazing, or why other marketing companies get it wrong.
Instead, what I’m going to be talking about on social media is how I can help you be successful. I’m trying to give real tips. I’m trying to match real curiosity, real queries that real humans actually want to know. Building this content makes people more interested in what I have to say.
I can get more specific with my beliefs than with my philosophy and values. Eventually, that touches the messaging. The audience goes, “Hey, I want to know a little bit more about you,” or starts asking how we work. That’s where the bridge happens.
Here’s the deal.
You can’t only work on one side. People may not be interested in your strengths or your elevator pitch until you have served them well and helped them find the answers to things they were asking.
That means building a tactical bridge. You have to give people what they want.
Your Own Goals
Let me talk about this in a couple more personal places because this isn’t just business stuff. I’m talking about building success from a broad perspective.
What are your personal goals? It doesn’t matter whether it’s about business, family, weight, or whatever. They’re your goals.
When I’m talking about a bridge, it would be easy to think about how you have to name the goal and then put a plan in place to reach it. We’ve all heard this a million times, right?
However, one of the things that I have learned is it doesn’t usually work like that. For me, I can put a plan in place and work on the plan, but if I don’t see a lot of traction, I get defeated.
I’m like everyone else. I get distracted and frustrated.
For some reason, my progress doesn’t tend to be linear, even when I’m in a disciplined mode. Creating progress in a linear fashion doesn’t end up being sustainable for me. I had to go back to myself and ask why.
Am I the only one that just can’t maintain the discipline to move forward?
I don’t think so. But you’ve got to ask the question. And I realized it’s because not only do I have to put the deliberate plan in place, but I have to keep moving towards what’s on the other side.
Who’s on the other side? What’s the other side? It’s not just your goal.
Here’s another question: Who will you be when you get to the other side? That’s really, really important. You know how habits and sustainable next steps, sustainable progress, are how commitment and results actually happen.
It’s because you’re actually changing into a future version of yourself. The things you put in place are turning you into somebody that believes in new things and has learned things that accelerate success, help you communicate differently, or help you help other people.
Plans Aren’t Enough
So, yes, go ahead and put your plans and your next steps in place. However, you also need to start thinking.
Think about who you’ll be in the future and how you’ll think and act differently. Start asking yourself: What are the ways to get there?
I don’t mean tactical ways. I mean ways that you can encourage yourself. Who can you put yourself? What little joys can you put in your life that accelerates and clarify success?
You can start today.
You need to start doing some work on thinking about who’s your future self. How do you start becoming that person?
Keep in mind that this applies to everything:
A promotion. a career, growing a business, growing sales, whatever. There’s always a “both sides” consideration. I know we all love to talk about success hacking and finding shortcuts. Here’s the truth: Those shortcuts just involve getting your butt to go a long way. You can’t lose sight of this fact:
It’s not just about the destination.
It’s about a total transformation that’s got to happen. That’s what building a success bridge is all about. You may feel like me — you take one step forward and three steps back. You still have to trudge through mud.
Two To-Do Lists
I want you to think about having two to-do lists.
The first list might be all the things that you want to do. The second list should be all of the ways you need to grow. And guess what? You always need to work on your to-do list. It’s our society, and it’s part of our DNA.
I have two lists.
My first is about growing my company, supporting my team, and doing client work. But my other list is about what kind of leader I want to become. If those aren’t written down, they’re never going to happen.
When they’re written, I know what I have to work on because it’s right in front of me. It helps me focus my efforts, engage in feedback solicitations, and open up all of these opportunities where I can build on that side of things.
One of my friends came up with a really amazing use for this.
She was talking about how she wanted to do certain things. So, she had that a to-do list that laid out her plans, but when she wrote down and literally mapped out her responsibilities, she realized she didn’t have time for all of that.
It wound up creating a new way of thinking for her and made her rethink her priorities. So, she came up with some really, really cool and really practical things.
For some people, having two lists is like having one that’s urgent and another that’s important. Honestly?
I think it’s even further beyond that.
Both of those still have a tactical, problem-solving nature versus a journey and an exploration.
I would love to hear about your success bridges. I would love to hear about the places where you’re like, “Hey, here’s one!” I love to hear about your experience with that, and I’d also love to hear about what else you guys want to know.
I want to make sure that I’m a part of building a business in a world that’s full of connection and meaning and prosperity. I believe in the potential of every single person, and I want to be a part of that.
To do that, I want to start with you. Suppose there are any specific topics, pieces of advice, examples, or anything like that, please let me know!
Thank you guys so much for hanging out! Please keep reading if this is worth your time, and I hope to keep producing more exciting content that actually serves you.
Onward and upward!
