People always want to become the business professional others seek out for advice. There are many ways to assume this role, and my advice is to focus on the following aspects of your leadership:
- Become an excellent communicator.
- Constantly improve your skills.
- Show up the way you want others to show up for themselves.
- Have empathy and compassion for others.
- Maintain your health.
Being an effective communicator is one of the most important aspects of becoming someone others want to do business with. It’s important to understand your communication, sales, and presentation styles. As you speak with others, you need to understand the importance of being flexible and creative, as every client and potential client communicates differently. If you are approaching sales as a numbers game, you will continue to chase the numbers rather than build connections through effective communication.Sales is both a numbers game and a science. To become an expert, embrace the science and focus on building connections through effective communication. Part of communicating effectively also means you need to be an avid listener and prioritize listening over talking. There is no way to step into another’s map of reality and make a deep connection without being a great listener. If you are able to communicate effectively, people will stop looking to others for guidance and only look to you.
You must constantly grow yourself and engage in learning. Understand that what you feed grows and what you starve dies. Strengthen and develop yourself. You need to feed the machines that drive your business.Top experts constantly improve themselves by examining their strengths and weaknesses, seeking advice and mentorship. Additionally, experts focus on their strengths and hire help for tasks outside their expertise, in order to avoid wasting their valuable time. This doesn’t mean they don’t attempt to gain an understanding of their deficits. It means that they gain enough insight to hold someone better suited for the role to the standard they demand.
You also need to think about how you are showing up in front of people. It’s important that you are a model of your own messaging. You can only expect others to want to learn from you if you are congruent with your own messaging. In order to be an influencer, you need to be the person you encourage others to be. You need to practice what you preach and walk the walk more than you talk the talk. It’s necessary to believe in who you are and stand on a solid foundation. Bring an authentic, positive mental attitude and know that you are better than your competition. You must model how experts respond to things rather than react and examine the situations when you are reacting rather than responding so you can better model what a positive response looks like to others. Model being decisive and trusting your instincts, unconscious mind, and decisions. Taking control of this mindset and modeling it for others will put you at the top of your field and have others seeking out your expertise.
To become an expert in your industry, you must have empathy and compassion. What are the solutions your potential clients need? What are their pain points and struggles? The easiest way to understand your clients’ needs is to empathize with them. This will lead them to trust and believe that you can fix their problems. Put yourself in a position where you gain the trust of others by avoiding misleading people and being honest about your faults. Take accountability when things go wrong. Have difficult conversations and be compassionate when others need to have difficult conversations with you. Trust takes a lifetime to earn and a second to lose. By being empathetic and honest, you will earn the trust of referral partners, associates, clients, prospective clients, and target markets, who will then connect you with other people.
Finally, you will notice that experts maintain their health. They place importance on their mental and physical well-being because they are aware of how it impacts their performance. If your work-life balance is constantly in flux and you find that you are bogged down with your work, so much so that your health is suffering, you cannot show up to help others. Reflect on your health goals and start attaining them now so you can be the best version of yourself when you attempt to help others.
If you are ready to be the expert that you deserve to be and that your prospective clientele needs and wants, reach out to us today!