I have a friend who’s been self-employed in one way or another for more than ten years. She’s brilliant, caring and a really good communicator. Anyone who works with her immediately sees her huge range of gifts.

But this friend of mine – whose name I’m not going to mention – hasn’t made much of her business. Well, I should say businesses.

You see over the past twelve years or so she’s had, maybe, eight businesses. All have focused on providing some array of services based on her varied background. Each one has taken a somewhat unique approach to helping people overcome various problems in their lives. And each one could have probably been quite successful.

But here she sits, more than a decade later, struggling to make ends meat. She keeps wondering how she’s not successful when she has all these great ideas of how to help people and make money doing it. Yet she never sticks long enough in one business concept to see it become successful for her.

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If you’re an educator, coach, consultant or advisor you usually want one main thing for your clients – that they use your advice.

That only makes sense, right? They’re paying you fees, sometimes large fees, to help them either change something or accomplish something that they just can’t manage on their own. It doesn’t matter whether you’re hired to give advice, as a consultant might do, or be more hands-on in helping with change as a coach might – the desired outcome is still the same.

This sometimes leads to pressure to help our clients get results. A little pressure on the client to change is good. After all, change is seldom easy and often requires a little push to get started (okay, and sometimes a big push).

Yet any good coach or consultant knows that we have to manage our clients and how they progress with a bit of skill. Sometimes we can put it all out there and people get it. Other times we have to pull back a bit and offer change in small steps. So we give each client what they can handle in the way they can implement it best. As I’ve seen it, this is the art to being an effective coach or consultant – and even to being an effective teacher, parent, spouse, or friend really.

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I was thinking this morning about what makes a great relationship.

According to James from Audio Mecca, it’s necessary to accept “that the other fellow is not a moron.”

I keep saying again and again that conversation leads to relationship and relationship leads to business. No matter whether we’re talking about clients and customers, referrals and affiliates, partnerships or friends – it all begins with building relationships.

That’s why I find James’ comment so interesting. It’s true! We need to believe that the people we get into conversations with, and ultimately building relationships with, are not idiots. Don’t they have a point? Aren’t their comments, perceptions and ideas important in some way?

If they’re not, why are we in the conversation with them in the first place?

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I get asked all the time why a business owner should be blogging or engaged in social media.

The answer I give almost always revolves around creating relationships. If you’ve been reading a while, you know one of my favorite statements is people don’t do business with businesses, they do business with people. So relationships become key to business success.

Before the internet, before social media, much of the business world seemed to focus on producing and selling. You’d produce a product or create a service and do everything you could to get people to buy. In other words, marketing was about peddling what you had.

Today, however, [ continue reading & share your thoughts → ]

A couple of years ago John was laid off from his job working in the assembly plant for Ford Motor company. He’d been there 15 years and came to work on a Tuesday to find out he was being laid off.

John had worked at some sort of job since he was nine. He had a paper route, then three. When he was eleven he started mowing lawns for neighbors. That quickly grew to raking leaves and shoveling snow.

John never much liked school and so as many of his friends went off to college after graduation, John landed a job with Ford assembling dashboard parts on the assembly line. Good work – and great pay – for a eighteen year-old.

Now, at thirty-four John found himself out of work. John hadn’t married yet – though he was dating the woman who would become his wife. And living a simple life in a modest house he managed to sock away a nice little nest egg.

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Have you ever considered quitting?

Neither had I. But since hearing Seth Godin speak about his book, The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches you When to Quit (and When to Stick), last year it’s constantly been on my mind.

In The Dip, Seth suggests that all successful people know one thing before they become successful – they know when to quit. They know when to recognize when what they’re doing isn’t going to generate success. So what do successful people do? They quit. They quit doing what’s not leading them toward success so they can put their efforts into things that can lead to success.

As with Seth’s usual approach, he uses The Dip to talk about how to become the best in the world. This seems to be his new way of saying do something remarkable. But the core message is the same – be great to those who think you’re great. In other words – find your niche and become known as being great to those who you interact and work with.

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A couple weeks ago I got into a nice, heated debate with a friend over how manipulated we are by media – specifically commercials.

My friend’s position was that you’re manipulated only if you’re ‘weak of mind.’ He believes that if you’re aware that someone’s trying to manipulate you with subliminal messages, it doesn’t have any affect on you.

My opinion is quite the opposite. I feel that advertising companies are highly advanced at subtly manipulating us through constant subliminal messaging. Those subliminal messages, then, set us up for being highly suggestive to whatever stimulus is meant to get us to buy. Think about the last time a simple conversation with someone brought up the desire to have a Big Mac.

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