Trust Your Support Network

Trust your network, trust your Mental Wealth Team. Ask them for their help, thoughts and advice and then act upon what information you get. There’s no point in having a support network if you don’t use it, don’t seek their opinions, and worse still, if you don’t take action on their advice.

Trusting my network was really brought home to me recently when I had a particular challenge; it was not a life-challenging situation but a scenario that meant I needed to seek the advice of others.  I had a contact on LinkedIn that wanted to talk to me about they could support me. I didn’t know them, but I noticed that we had many hundreds (not just 10s) of mutual connections, which meant in my head they probably had some good value to add. We talked for a while on a zoom call, asking lots of questions of each other. He could offer support for me and my business, help me access various marketing channels and potentially fully support me in my digital marketing.

However, there was a gut feel nagging away in my stomach. Something didn’t feel right. I did what I challenge others to do and went out to my team and asked for their advice. I scrolled through the 300+ names because there were 300 mutual connections, and I found four that were part of my trusted team, my trusted inner sanctum network and sent them a message. This was just a simple question saying I’d been contacted and had conversations with Bob, how well do you know him, what do you know about his business, is there anything I should know, what’s he like, yes or no?

I got four responses as you would expect from a trusted network, all honest and direct in their feedback. One came back and said they knew this person 10 years ago but didn’t know what they were doing nowadays. Another said they tried a while ago to set up some conversations, which didn’t happen and never went anywhere so can’t provide any positive or negative input aside of the perception that the other person can’t be that hungry for business as they didn’t follow up. The final two were a little shorter in their feedback and both came back with something along the lines of that wonderful movie Forest Gump – Run Forrest, Run. Don’t touch them, don’t work with them, move on.

At which point, I chose to swipe left. I haven’t followed up in any other way. And funnily enough, there’s been no further follow up from Bob. Clearly, they were a waste of time, talking a big story without the backup to see it through or if they believed I failed their pre-vetting process there was a lack of common professional courtesy to say so.

Take that story into your world now. Where have you neglected to go to your inner sanctum, your personally chosen handpicked mental wealth team, and not used their brain power to help you? That is what it’s there for. When you give people permission to support you, to challenge you, to ask more questions than you can think of on your own, you have to use them. And no matter what their answer is, be that positive backing for your thinking or if they come back with an answer you didn’t want to hear, take their advice.

It would have been great if my network had come back with really positive feedback and said they believed Bob was going to open up Pandora’s box and give me access to the crown jewels. But that rarely happens and when they said, “Run Forrest, run”, I acted upon it. There’s no point in having a handpicked network if you’re not going to trust them and act on their advice! Good luck as always and if you need help building that strong mental wealth team and help understanding how to work with it. Let’s have a conversation.