What does building relationships mean? Relationship building happens when the mutual understanding between or among individuals is increased and in a way that is of mutual benefit to all parties. Some examples of this are as follows: Creating a supportive environment for you, your employees, colleagues, clients and customers. Ensuring each interaction is memorable, positive, inspiring and motivational. Enjoying the process of creating a positive and enjoyable experience for all parties means relationships will get better and better Positive feedback and acknowledging great work. If we make time to give positive feedback to others this will come back to you. By giving positive feedback to someone you can absolutely make their day, it’s like giving a gift, something special to them and costs absolutely nothing. Imagine how you feel when someone has ‘given’ this to you, giving back means it will come back to you in spades full. Respect which
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Whether personally or professionally we all want to earn a great reputation for what we do and don’t want to lose that reputation, but how can we do this and what happens if something happens to affect this? We know that bad news travels fast, no-one wants to hear good news. And there’s the old adage, there’s no smoke without fire. Nowadays, a bad review or comment can hugely affect a business and hurt business owners too. We can work tirelessly as business owners to ensure we keep a great profile and a good reputation and there are a few things we can do to help us do that. Retain clients – as business owners we are of course wanting to generate income and grow our businesses, however, it’s not always about just gaining or acquiring new clients. If we don’t look after the clients or customers, we have then
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We all say we are listening to others’, don’t we? However, are we just hearing and what’s the difference? Hearing and listening may seem very similar, however, there are quite specific differences. Here are some differences for you to ponder. Perhaps you can see how much you really listen or are you mainly just hearing. HEARING is a passive process whilst LISTENING is an active process. HEARING does not require an understanding of the other person whilst LISTENING depends on the person really understanding what the other person is meaning. HEARING is easy requiring little if no real effort, whilst HEARING requires a degree of concentration, focus and attention of what the other person is saying and meaning. We can go through the physical process of hearing a sound or what someone has said, however, listening involves us understanding and responding to what we have heard and being empathetic of
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I’m sure you like me have gotten to the stage when you’ve just wanted to give up. You’ve picked yourself up several times before and there becomes a time when you feel it’s just not worth getting up again just to be knocked down. The last two to three years has been and continues to be a challenge for all of us and at times when things are tough and challenges feel just too hard and ongoing, we feel like giving in and giving up. But why do we give up and is there a way in which we can help ourselves by developing strategies and tools to protect ourselves from feeling like we want to give up or give in. Below are some examples of why we might feel like giving up – see if any of them resonate with you. Expecting quick results or quick fixes Lack of
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Are you a good listener? I said are you a good listener? Do you feel you hear as well as listen? Do you understand what the difference between hearing and listening is? Do you have good active listening skills? And do you know what active listening skills are? We all think and feel we are good listeners, but how good are we really? We love to hear people’s stories don’t we, however, we are also often bursting to share our story also. Or we are listening to someone and ‘know’ (or assume) we know what they are saying or going to say and so stop listening. And what happens? We have picked up the wrong end of the stick, misunderstood, or worse still gone and done the thing we weren’t meant to or vice versa. Recognise the story? I believe we can all improve our listening skills and focus more
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