By Penny Power – Business Author & Human-Centred Speaker
How we connect with people and find the right new relationships in our lives is definitely not easy. This week I am pondering something that applies equally to our friendships, our families and our working lives: the importance of being proactive.
Over the past year, as I have been writing my book, Significance, I have worked really hard to articulate why creating and maintaining significant relationships can sometimes feel so complicated.
I have identified four Human Factors that influence our relationships: the capacity we have for one another, our personality differences, our ability to feel safe when we attach to people, and our emotional intelligence and all the different ways that shows up.
When you consider all these differences between us, perhaps it is actually quite incredible that we manage to build strong, long lasting relationships at all!
But there is another aspect I have been thinking about a great deal recently, and that is proactivity.
I cannot tell you how many people I wait to hear from. People I hope will send me a message, ask me for a coffee, or simply say, “I was thinking about you.”
I open WhatsApp and my emails far too often with that little hope sitting somewhere inside me. And I don’t think I am alone.
I am naturally a very proactive person, yet even I sometimes find myself thinking, “Someone reach out to me.”
Not because they need something. Not because they want to sell me something. Simply because I entered their mind and they wanted me to know.
There is something incredibly powerful about that.
When someone contacts us unexpectedly, they are communicating something much bigger than the words contained in the message. They are telling us that we existed in their thoughts even though we weren’t standing in front of them.
In that moment, we feel remembered.
And being remembered is one of the ways we feel significant.
The first Human Factor I explore in my book is Capacity, and I have realised just how enormously this varies between people.
I have a very high capacity for communication. I don’t find it difficult to manage my inbox and keep it empty. WhatsApp doesn’t overwhelm me. I can have many conversations happening at once and instinctively know which ones need my attention.
Other people are completely different.
Neither is right or wrong. We simply have different capacities.
I have also noticed that within my most significant relationships there tends to be a healthy balance between proactive and reactive communication. Neither person is constantly waiting for the other. We both initiate. We both remember. We both reach out.
Perhaps it is the relationships slightly further out in our lives that need more conscious attention.
I call these my Steady relationships. We are not deeply interdependent. We don’t need to communicate every week and there is no expectation that we should. But these people still matter to us, and because they aren’t part of our everyday communication, they can quietly disappear beneath the tasks, messages and responsibilities of life.
I decided to test this recently.
I proactively contacted seven friends I hadn’t seen for a while.
Every single one responded warmly, and we arranged to meet.
What I discovered when we did was fascinating. Some were dealing with elderly parents. Others had grandchildren occupying their time. Some simply had established routines with their existing friendship circles and rarely thought about stepping outside them.
I interrupted those routines for a moment.
And it was lovely.
Nobody had rejected me. Nobody had deliberately forgotten me. Life had simply become full.
The same principle applies in business.
Our son Ross is currently teaching our BIP100 members how to create an AI Sales Assistant.
One of the things I have loved watching is members rediscovering old connections and previous clients they had simply lost touch with.
They are proactively restarting conversations.
And some of those conversations are becoming opportunities to work together again.
The relationship hadn’t necessarily ended. The communication had.
I wonder how many relationships in our lives and businesses are sitting quietly waiting for one person to make the first move?
We live in a world of extraordinary amounts of communication, but much of it is reactive or transactional. Someone messages us and we reply. Someone emails and we respond. Someone asks something of us and we answer.
Perhaps we are confusing responding with connecting.
Significant relationships require something more.
They require us, occasionally, to be the person who goes first.
So this week, perhaps ask yourself: How proactive am I with the people who matter to me?
Think about somebody in your personal life you haven’t spoken to for a while. Think about an old client, colleague or business friend who once mattered to you. Don’t wait for them to remember you.
Remember them.
Send the WhatsApp. Make the call. Suggest the coffee. Ask the question.
Not because you want anything.
Simply because they entered your mind.
Because perhaps somewhere, on somebody else’s phone, there is a person quietly hoping for exactly the same thing.
To be remembered.
To be thought about.
To know that they still matter.
With love,
Penny x
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