I was under the impression, for quite some time, that certain things belonged in the world of business and other things did not. It was made clear in the books and courses and expert speeches that business is one thing and life is another thing.
When this turned out to be a bunch of B.S., I started thinking about how blurring the lines between who you are, what you do and the people you serve and removing the artificial boundaries we’ve been taught to believe in can make decisions much simpler and more clear.
In this episode of the podcast, I talk with consultant to independent buisness-to-business professionals, Robert Middleton, about succeeding with kindness.
Featured links:
ActionPlan.Club
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Transcript:
Jason: Why don’t you tell everybody, if they’re not familiar with Robert Middleton, who you are?
Robert: Well, I am a 67-year-old guy who has been self-employed for 35 years. My company is action plan marketing. What I’ve been doing is working with self-employed professionals and helping them all kinds of ways to attract their ideal clients. There’s a lot to that. There’s all the technical things about networking, and speaking, and the sales process, and writing, and million things. I’ve often found the most interesting things about my business is the psychological things related to the marketing yourself and selling yourself.
Robert: What I’m continually fascinated with is the incredible fear that people have of other people, the fear that we have of reaching out, the fear we have of having conversations with people, the fear we have of being rejected, the fear we have of doing it wrong, making mistakes, looking bad, all that kind of stuff, and helping people get to the other side of that, and just finding ways to naturally express themselves and communicate about what they’re excited about. Everybody is different. Everybody does their marketing their way. It’s been interesting. We get a lot of very interesting conversations. I just got off the phone with a guy in Dubai. I have two clients in Dubai right now and one in India.
Jason: Wow.
Robert: They’re all connected. That’s how I got them. How do you ask to connect to other people? That’s a big conversation I’m having these days. I call it connecting your bubbles and just …
Jason: It’s odd in this day and age. We have more ways to connect and far less connection probably than ever in certain ways.
Robert: Yeah. I think an interesting thing has happened, I started on the internet in 1996, my first website.
Jason: Wow.
Robert: It’s funny. I thought I was late to the party, but I wasn’t very late. I found out recently that in 1996, there was only something like a quarter million websites then.
Jason: Amazing.
Robert: You know how we always feel behind in some ways. Now, there’s 1.9 billion websites. That’s 2000 time and a quarter million. That would be 8,000 times as many websites as there were when I started. If you work diligently at SEO, you could get found online a lot easier than it is now. The thing is, with this proliferation of emails, social media, et cetera, it’s like a minnow in a gigantic sea and it’s very hard to be found. The good thing about that is I think I’m finding it helps people to get back to let’s just create relationships with people, let’s just connect with people, let’s just have conversations with people instead of 10 kazillion messages.