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Do people want to be "Connected" to you or do you push them away?
Hey you,
It’s #2.
I’ve been meaning to share these personal improvement notes with you because I believe it’s of massive importance to the success of not only your business life but to the success of your life as a whole.
What Eben covers in his “Connected” program has shown this nerd what he’s been doing to sabotage relationships throughout his entire life. For most of my life I was flying blind because I didn’t learn any of this stuff in school or from my family. Hopefully you haven’t made as many mistakes as I have and this program only serves to show you how to be an even more attractive human being.
Connected: Session 1
Being connected could possibly be the most important asset to you and your career.
Question: In any arena in life what separates the amateurs from the professionals?
Answer: Pro’s are always focused on building their assets and their resources.
The reason 95% of golf players can’t compete with Tiger woods is because he focuses and has focused throughout his life, more time than the average person building up his assets.
Question: What are the assets you need to build to consider yourself a professional in your area of interest?
Knowledge isn’t the only thing. Almost everyone you compete with or interact with has access to knowledge and in this day and age it’s usually free. It’s a commodity. What is an asset in this day and age are the relationships you have in your field.
If you master relationship building this can catapult you into the top 1-2% of your field.
Why is this so?
One of the reasons is because we’re shifting from a physical, labor dominated culture to an economy that has been called the “Information Economy.”
In this paradigm the assets are knowledge/information and relationships. And if you’re the one with super premium information and high quality relationships, you’re gonna win the game because you can always turn assets into money and the majority of your market that you compete with are made up of people who never turn their money into assets.
Most people, as soon as they get some value through either a paycheck or a new credit card, a bonus, usually find something to spend it on(Does the expression: “Money burning a hole in my pocket,” sound familiar?). And yet what they buy is almost never an asset that appreciates in value.
What this program is meant to do is help you see that your community or connections are an asset that can be turned into any kind of value that you choose whether it be financial or friendships.
Super high end masterminds/groups usually require that you do or… have done what they’ve done to kinda prove you’re on their level. Think about the military. For the majority of people who spend years in the military, those years will mark the pinnacle of their discipline, effectiveness and personal growth.
Why is this so?
Because when they immerse themselves an environment that demands that they step up and reach for the best that’s inside them, EVERY DAY, pretty soon they’re playing at level normal/average people could never fathom.
The peers and leaders they’ve connected with hold them to an incredibly high standard. And when they finish serving and go back home, it’s likely that the majority of their small minded, normal, average friends and family will make them guilty if they pursue excellence.
People who are content with bad habits and negative thinking hate it when someone does better than they do. Some people voice this directly but the most common way this behavior shows up is the person smiles to your face and talks shit behind your back.
“DIE FRIEND REPLACEMENTS!!!”
They do so because they fear losing you as a friend or looking bad in comparison to you. And if you start hanging out with top performers, watch out. Your old friends’ll wanna scalp them evil friend replacements for poaching their buddy or contacts.
What petty people don’t understand about connections is that if you connect the right person to someone else, you don’t lose anything. If you go buy a latte, you lose your money and once you’ve downed the latte, you’ve lost that too. With knowledge and connections, the more of it you give away, the more you have.
Connectedness is your path to vast amounts of wealth/fulfillment.
Being connected is the most important factor to long-term business success now and in the future. Being connected isn’t an accident, it’s the result of a set of simple processes and actions that anyone can learn and do.
Eben & Dave believe that if they can do it, anyone can and that it’s the steps they talk about and explain that sound counter-intuitive that are gonna work best.
You must overcome any psychological blocks to being CONNECTED. Next, you must understand the systematic process of how human friendships form and then master it. Finally you’ve gotta use the CONNECETED system to connect to influential people – then create a community with them.
“The Psychology of Getting CONNECTED”
The Friendship Formula
Eben has found that a lot of the people he knew who were un-successful, were also bad at making friends and that people who were very successful were respected and admired.
Sounds like common sense right?
Mental and physical disease are all too common in our culture these days. Even though our standard of living and options are increasing, we’re still in a funk. Studies show this is in part to friendships and human relationships declining.
Research shows that in America that the average person has .75 best friends, confidants they can confide in. That means 25% of Americans don’t have someone to lean on. Why is this so?
Up until the 21st century people lived in small towns and your community was where you found connections and as the population grew and more people were commuting, the depth of community declined here in the U.S.
The reason this is an issue is because community is the basic building block to getting anything done. With the absence of community people resort to throwing themselves into work and they see their income rise but the correlation to increase in income and happiness rising with it, only stay in sync until you hit around the $35,000.00 mark then it plateaus.
This shows up in people who make more and more money but they’re not happier.
What Is Friendship?
Friendship is a combination of 5 key elements…
Connection: Usually starts with something you two have in common. Fear in this area shows up when you ask yourself “What do I have to offer?
Self Disclosure: Taking the risk of letting someone in on something about you that you hide from 99% of people you interact with. There’s a fine line that you walk with this between revealing something that makes you sound too weird and something that’s meaningful. Fear shows it’s face in this area when we feel like we’re being judged or rejected.
The Dialogue of Giving & Getting: A back and forth of putting energy into the friendship bank and taking energy out of the friendship bank. Fear shows up here when you feel like you’re being taken advantage of or ripped off.
The Polarity of Being an Individual & of Being Part of a Group: People like to think for themselves and make their own decisions and yet when two or more people come together they’re a self organizing system and they become an entity. Kind of like a ant separated from it’s colony will die, but while surrounded by millions of other ants, equipped with minimal communication while accomplishing amazing things for a being so small. This starts happening with us when we join with one or more people.
When we go too far in one direction or the other we risk losing ourselves or the friendship. Fear shows up here when you feel like you’re losing your identity.
Creation of a Unique Shared Space Within a Group (Ultimately Creating That Group): This is where fusion happens and synchronicity begins and people start using the same words and sharing hobbies and viewpoints and tastes which leads to you creating your own little subculture. Fear pokes it’s head up here when you ask “Who am I to launch a group?”
We all have these fears.
How Friends Both Affect and Effect Each Other:
We’re affected by the people we surround ourselves by a degree that we never thought possible.
Most of your decisions are driven by emotion, how you feel inside. What the people around you do, affects your emotions constantly. People in essence push your buttons on programs you’ve been running since you were a kid.
Effects are tied to the results achieved which is what actually happens as a result of the people you hang out with.
You become who you surround yourself with. And whether it’s accomplished consciously or unconsciously, you become them. Your personality and persona really reflects a bunch of little pieces of people surrounded yourself with or books you studied in the past.
Illusion causes you to think you chose who you are but if you take a hard look and line yourself up to the people you’ve been influenced by, you’d see that you were an average of all those people. Not only do you become those people but you also get the effects of how they live their life.
Take the 5 people you hang out with most and average out their weight, money, study habits, pretty much anything and that’s what you’ll have showing up in your life. And, this probably matches your level of self-esteem. Core Point… Whether you choose your friends or not, they are affecting and effecting you very directly the results you get in life.
What’s awesome is that it’s possible to re-invent yourself.
Most people are only born once. They stumble onto a program they grow comfortable with and they latch onto and hang onto it for the rest of their life. 5% of people are what Warren Bennis calls Twice Borners. These are people who take conscious control of who they are and re-define themselves.
If you could define yourself in anyway possible, what would it be? If this was a play and you’re the lead character, who would be in that play?
Most people believe they have no power to change or… they fear the hell out of it.
A small percentage of people believe nothing is permanent about our life and that it’s here for us to mold it the way we’d like and it might as well be as awesome as possible. This small band of people have often found it was easier to do it this way and that they’re having so much fun doing so, they can’t believe it.
Right now we’re in the third great renaissance.
The first happened in Greece where if you happened to speak the right language and we’re male, you got to experience democracy, chemistry, philosophy. But for the majority, they lived a sheltered life where they worked the farm or whatever job they had, ate, and slept.
The next renaissance was in Europe and the same thing happened where a few people got together and discovered art, poetry, and architecture, philosophy, the birth of the scientific method but most people had no access to any of this even if they had an interest in it.
Right now is the only time in history that no matter who you are male, female, young, old, no matter what language you speak, no matter your education, whether you’re from the right family or not, that everyone gets to play.
If people today would recognize that they were born at the exact perfect time for the first time in history and that it’s tippable they might experience a whole new reality and appreciation for what’s wrong or right with their life.
With this realization comes great responsibility because with great power, comes great responsibility and who are we not to exploit this gift?
Why Friendship is At Risk?
We’re down to an average of .75% of best friends. Families are breaking down. Neighbors don’t know each other in America.
With this being the case, people you work with end up being who you’re closest to. Yet, when you mix friendship and work, just as what happens with couples who work with each other, you grow tired of seeing each other so much and the relationship suffers because of it.
Social Networking Sites are helping to erode relationships also. Some kids can easily spend 3 hours or more on these sites. This is 3 hours the kid isn’t out playing with kids in person or hanging with his family.
This isn’t real socializing. It’s fake. This is the equivalent of playing a football video game and saying that you’re playing football. Not the same.
Don’t accept fake friendships. Build real ones. These sites can serve as tools but never forget that relationships are one to one, face to face or in groups in person, even over the phone is better than computers.
Friendships Are a ‘Tug Of War’
When you interact with a person it really shows you another side of yourself. It helps you see a lot of things you didn’t want to look at. This is good to know because when you start hanging with people who are more evolved or successful than you it’s gonna challenge you in a positive way.
Some of it’s gonna feel uncomfortable. Keep tugging. The development you go through will end up being some of the most rewarding of your life.
How People Connect With Each Other
When people meet each other we’re scanning people with an apparatus that’s developed over millions of year that allows you to figure out if a person is a friend or a foe, what they’re about.
There’s a lot of benefits to this AND obstacles because when we jump to conclusions and make these decisions about people in the blink of an eye, we pigeon hole them and put them in box that’s hard to get them out of it.
This means if we want to build friendships, we want to put this process aside and consciously look for connections. Commonality causes this, the more unusual or weird the better. This is different than someone who’s just your boss or someone you work with.
Look to connect with people on a level that most people don’t get.
Start thinking of the parts of you as the guys at Zappos.com would put it, are a little weird. Things that if you connected with another person on, would be really interesting. Dave Logan calls this the NC1701 Effect.
The NC1701 was the first Star Trek Enterprise. Only a fellow Trekkie would have this fact handy. You need an inventory of these to share with people which may allow you to end up meeting someone, sharing the same weird interest and then having that feeling like you’ve known them you’re whole life.
How To Connect With Groups of Others
First, learn how to make friends with anyone. Next, you evolve to helping people make friends with each other. Then you can help groups make friends with each other.
When this happens you become a three legged stool instead of an unstable one or two legger. You do this much the same way you would with building friendship one on one. You share a commonality, you disclose an interest, you give and get, you notice the polarity of the individual and group dynamic, which creates a whole new group.
This is the end of Session 1. Please flip the the cassette over and click here to see Session 2…
Talk soon,
Note Taking Nerd #2
PPS. If you liked what you see here and want the full set of these personal improvement notes on Eben Pagan’s Connected course, you should definitely click here to go check this out
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