Category: Blog

As our world becomes increasingly digitised, personal skills will become more valuable. Many salespeople call these the soft-skills and realise that the old-school hard-sell-skills are no longer as effective. People are less likely to be blown away by some widget and far more likely to remember the way that you’ve made them feel.

It doesn’t really matter if you’re in sales or not, or even in your own business. Networking is a skill that helps us build communities of value, and as we all know, communities are essential for our survival. Becoming a better networker will help in every area of life because, in today’s tiny world of digital space, communication plays a bigger-than-ever role in identifying, attracting, connecting and engaging with other people.

We see it all the time on social media, but we don’t necessarily realise what’s going on. It’s easy to try and self-promote through these channels, whether it’s a business you run, or you’re displaying personal growth and courses you’ve completed; this is often where our understanding of the power of networking grinds to a halt.

But if we realise that we can help other people talk about us, we can intentionally seek out spaces where online conversations are happening that may create the right context for us to engage. These could be community pages, forums or simply in our news feeds – if we know what tags to look for.

Some of this can get quite technical, but at the end of the day, it’s just a bunch of humans trying to engage – and this is why becoming a better networker is helpful. Learning to ask better questions and engage with people one-on-one is one of the most valuable things to do.

In the same way that we might prepare some pitches and introductions before going to a conference, roadshow or in-person networking event, we can prepare and upskill before engaging with people on social media, video calls and direct messaging. We can see this as a virtual alternative to attending a live networking event.

Bob Burg, speaker and author, proposes a powerful list of 10 questions to ask a new prospect that he calls the ‘feel-good questions’. This list works well because it’s underpinned by the premise that people like to talk about themselves more than they want to listen to you talk about yourself. But for most of us, we’re programmed to think that the moment I get to talk, I need to say as much about myself as possible and convince the other person that they want to choose me. If the person you’re talking to is not ready for your product, service or skill set – it will probably go in one ear, and out the other.

If we follow the new narratives, where ​​people are less likely to be blown away by some widget and far more likely to remember the way that you’ve made them feel, then Burg’s questions begin to make a lot of sense. The more you can get people to talk about themselves, the better they will feel and the more likely they will be to remember their engagement with you in a positive light. 

This is one of the secrets to becoming a better networker: make people feel good about themselves.

Here are some of the questions that Burg suggests, and he recommends choosing only two or three at a time.

“How did you get your start in the business you’re in?”

“What do you enjoy most about your profession?”

“What separates you and your company from the competition?”

“What advice would you give someone just starting in your business?”

“What one thing would you do with your business if you knew you could not fail?”

“What significant changes have you seen take place in your profession through the years?”

“What do you see as the coming trends in your industry?”

“What’s the strangest or funniest incident you’ve experienced in your business?”

“What ways have you found to be the most effective for promoting your business?”

“What one sentence would you like people to use in describing the way you do business?”

These are open-ended questions, and they’re all focused on the other person. If you can make people feel good about what they do, and who they are, they will most likely want to speak to you again, opening up the way for a conversational (more than simply a transactional) relationship.

Regardless of what words we want to put to our journey with our money, there are a few realities that we need to face.

First – everything we do is linked to money, whether we pay for it ourselves or rely on a benefactor.

Second – some of our wealth-generation depends on luck and circumstance, but most of it depends on our ability to intentionally earn an income and manage the money we have.

Third – our intention to earn an income is only so good as our ability to act on that intention.

Fourth – external factors will always influence the first three.

In the financial planning profession, there are many titles held and roles played by experienced and qualified people to help us engage with our money in a way that covers all four of the above points. Sometimes they can be handled by one person, and in other cases, you might choose several people to play the different roles in the journey.

Two popular titles are those of financial coach and financial planner. These two roles enable us to have different conversations with our money, and often overlap. A good financial planner will have skills that help you articulate your journey and align your goals and needs with financial products that will add value. The goal is to create a plan that you not only implement, but that can grow and mature with you, your family and your changing needs. This is why a financial planner is not simply a broker – they have skills and knowledge that will help you engage with more than just financial products.

A financial coach is less concerned with the products and the plan and will focus more on identifying behaviours and habits that are holding you back from experiencing the best value from your financial plan. Even the best-laid plans can be left to ruin if they are not appropriately implemented or are derailed by other events and external factors.

It’s helpful to know how these different conversations shape our overall ability to create and keep our wealth in a way that enables us to provide for ourselves and others. It’s easy to look at one area (typically the second or third) and ignore the others because it is a lot to keep in mind, and when we sit with each area, we can be overwhelmed with how intricate and complex they can be.

Working with planning and coaching professionals who are qualified and experienced can help you strengthen your vulnerabilities and fortify your strengths.

It’s easy to think about a financial plan and consider the elements that typically go into it. For instance, we could picture a plan that consists of a retirement savings product, life and health insurance, investment portfolios, and maybe a few things like trusts, wills and estate plans. Or, we could think about what a financial plan can help us avoid, and help us achieve.

When we think of our financial plan in terms of the products that comprise the overall portfolio, we risk becoming detached from our financial plan. For most of us, products are not interesting, and some of us find them intangible and boring. But – when we think of how these products can help us, or why we might choose them in the first place, we can increase our level of enthusiasm and engagement. This is when our financial plan starts to become a life-financial plan.

When life gets complicated, busy and full of stuff, we can quickly find ourselves with no direction or exit strategy – even if we have managed to save up lots of money and build what we perceive to be a successful life.

Life’s complexities make things messy, and through the ensuing stress and lack of quality time, we can miss obvious areas where we aren’t transferring business or work success into personal wealth and health. Spending quality time with people we love, engaging in downtime, and practising self-care are all important to our overall wellbeing and should be part of a better financial planning process.

There are also risks to consider and provide protection for, from income protection to health care provision. It’s not so much about the products we choose, but about the people and lifestyle that we choose to protect and provide for.

A better financial plan can help us consider risks and avoid them, and it can also help us achieve more in life as we integrate it with our daily choices. We can work towards things like 4-day work weeks, annual or quarterly holidays, or paying down debt to become less reliant on credit.

Inside of a financial plan that considers the people, the lives and the relationships – we can have complete peace of mind and confidence. Financial planning is not just about ticking boxes or trying to keep up with the Joneses; it’s about changing lives. We can only do this with better conversations when we sit down to work on financial plans, conversations that help us achieve and live the life we want with the money we have.

In the next few years, we are likely to see a significant increase in small businesses, from home enterprises to startups. Many people have had to create sideline income or recover from losing their jobs in a shrinking job market. Jobs seeing the fastest decline are in production or administration support, primarily due to automation and digitisation of platforms and processes.

With the meteoric growth of social media, personal marketing has become an attractive option for those who don’t have a budget for marketing and advertising. Leveraging digital marketing is an incredible way to build a small business, but one needs to be strategic about it.

When a business is started inside of an urgent need to generate an income, the entrepreneur’s focus is often on earning money as fast as possible. Two common pitfalls of this situation are that they either try to grow too quickly and can’t sustain the growth, or the marketing messages focus more on the product or service and not on the people using it and how they will benefit.

The first pitfall requires better business modeling and less marketing; the second pitfall requires better marketing.

Startups who are struggling with marketing often think that they have a problem with discoverability, but the problem could be more complex and harder to see. It was in the mid-1990s that Bill Gates said, “Content is king!” and it has formed the baseline strategy for most self-marketers, often to their detriment. Too much time is spent trying to create new content (or feeling bad for not creating content), and not enough time is spent on positioning and distributing content.

If you’re not relevant and not “out there”, the right customers and clients won’t find you.

To build relevance, you need to position your message well. When there is pressure to generate income, we focus on the money. Wherever we can, we must focus on the difference we make. Keep reminding people why and how you help them.

To be “out there”, you need to distribute your content. Social media is great, but it’s not the only way to find and engage with your network. Email, direct messaging, and live events are still incredible options. Any way to deliver content to your ideal client is worth exploring and exploiting. Don’t limit yourself to Facebook. 

Begin with the people who know and like you already, starting with your existing customer or client base and creating opportunities for word-of-mouth marketing. This is savvy distribution as you don’t have to manage it all yourself; you simply create the momentum (distribution) and the direction (positioning) and let your network sustain the flow.

They say that getting old happens slowly, and then all at once. Most of the change around us occurs so gradually that we barely notice it; ageing, losing or gaining our fitness, losing or gaining weight, intimacy in relationships, and debt and investing. These are some of the areas of incrementally-unnoticeable change with which we’re most familiar.

Often, our experience begins with gaining or losing “Just one more”. Just one more day before we arrange that video call, one more day of rest before returning to our exercise, one more helping of food before we’re full, one more credit account.

It’s okay to have just one more, in the wrong direction… as long as we can recognise when it’s a habit before it becomes unhealthy for us. Obviously, we’d like to be in the practice of having just one more in the right direction. For example, just one more lap in the pool, one more yoga video, one more glass of water, one more payment on my credit card.

When change happens slowly, it’s easy to think that nothing is really changing yet. This is why it doesn’t seem to happen until it happens all at once. We can carry small changes for a long time, but the longer we carry them, the more noticeable they become.

Debt and unhealthy financial choices can seem small and manageable when they occur, but slowly, over time and with compounding interest (in the wrong direction), we can become overwhelmed. This is because it’s not the weight that matters; it’s how long we’re carrying it for that matters.

Imagine holding a glass of water out in front of you. It’s easy to do because it’s not heavy. But what if you had to hold that glass of water in front of you for an hour or an entire day. What if you tried to keep it in that position for a month?

The glass doesn’t get heavy; our arm gets tired. The same is true for our unhealthy habits. We can think that accounts here and there, a credit card here and there, are manageable, but over time if we keep adding just one more, we will be overwhelmed.

Luckily, the same principle applies in the opposite direction! If we decide to make just one more payment on our credit card, instead of one more payment from our credit card, we will slowly start to pay it off.

If each day, week or month, whatever is workable, we decide to reinforce one more healthy habit and release one more unhealthy habit, we may not see any change until all at once; we’re debt-free, healthier and happier. Not because of what we have, but because of the person we’ve become.