Getting Personal with Customers: You Can’t Create Trust without Connection

Just curious… have you ever heard the advice from a boss to leave your problems at home?  I have and if you are like me, I became the king of compartmentalizing.

We tend to separate business and personal, keeping home life in a different compartment from work life. The longer I lead my company, the more I believe those boundaries need to be lifted.  

It may feel like you can’t, and it can be challenging to make the shift, but it’s now the only way I know to make it all work. 

I didn’t always see it like that. I had my business life on one side, and my personal relationships and my own self development on the other. For a long time, I thought I could keep them separate, that it was necessary to divide them. 

As a result, I spent an entire lifetime flipping the switch back and forth. And being an entrepreneur, it’s very difficult to turn that off. If you’re like me, holding emotion in a compartment feels like I’m storing energy within my body. In reality, not letting that energy flow just bottles it up and creates barriers for authentic connection, which can lead to unintended outlets, i.e. why am I yelling at my kids over trivial stuff…?

I’m the kind of person who wants to experience life to its fullest, be healthy, have good relationships, reach my full potential. But it turns out all those things need to intermingle and flow (energy and emotion in motion) – not get bottled. I began to realize this when my most important relationship, my marriage, failed. 

At the time, I needed to figure out how to create more balance—and not just to improve my relationships but to be a better entrepreneur, too.

Because a company isn’t just its leader. It’s all those people in their roles doing their best every day, that’s what a successful company is. The only way I’ve found to get the best out of people is to have their trust that I’m a leader worth following. 

That was the real awakening for me. 

I spent a lot of time developing myself to give me, my team, and my business the best chance of success.  Note sure if everyone believes this, but I’ll take an inspired and talented team any day over the most brilliant strategy. Consequently, the more balance I bring to developing other important areas in life: self, health, relationships and giving back, the better I’m able to relate and inspire great teams to do great things.

But the big “aha” moment was realizing none of it means anything if you don’t create deep connections with others by understanding their goals, dreams, challenges, and lessons. The way I learn now is by getting out every day and connecting with my customers, with my employees, and with my network.

It’s connecting one-on-one that creates inspiration and helps folks do the things they wouldn’t normally do or think they could do. People aren’t going to buy from you, or partner with you, or work for you, if they don’t trust you. And you can’t create trust without that connection. 

If you’ve been thinking about how to achieve more satisfaction from life, or feel like you’re compartmentalizing emotion, we should talk.