Grow Your Business Exhibition

The Emotional Bank Account

We can all make mistakes from time to time.  But when we do, how can we ensure that there is enough trust built up that those affected can be confident that things will right themselves?  When dealing with employees, clients or suppliers we need to build up enough of a relationship to cover for these eventualities.  But how?

Stephen Covey in 'The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People' uses the metaphor of the Emotional Bank Account to describe "the amount of trust that’s been built up in a relationship". 

This account begins on a neutral balance. And just as with any bank account, we can make deposits and withdrawals. However, instead of dealing with units of monetary value, we deal with emotional units.

If you make enough deposits with others through courtesy, kindness, honesty and keeping your commitments to them, you build up a reserve.  Others trust in you becomes higher and you can call upon that trust if you need to.  When the trust is high, communication is easy, instant and effective.  When you are kind, honest, caring and friendly to another person, you make deposits on an Emotional Bank Account.

However, if you are unkind, disrespectful, uncaring and mean, you draw from this account. And when we make withdrawals and our balance becomes low or even overdrawn, bitterness, mistrust and discord develops. If we are to salvage the relationship, we must make a conscious effort to make regular deposits.

There are six major deposits we can make to the emotional bank account:

Understanding the individual

One person's mission is another person's minutia.  To make a deposit, what is important to another person must be as important to you as the other person is to you. 

 

Attending to the seemingly insignificant

Kindnesses and courtesies are so important.  Forms of disrespect make large withdrawals.  In relationships, the things that can seem insignificant to you can count for others.

 

Keeping commitments

Keeping a commitment is a major deposit; breaking one is a major withdrawal.  In fact there's probably no larger withdrawal than to make a promise that's important to someone and then not to come through.

 

Clarifying expectations

The cause of many relationship difficulties is often rooted in conflicting or ambiguous expectations around roles and goals.  Unclear expectations will lead to misunderstanding, disappointment and withdrawals of trust.  Many expectations are implicit and the deposit is to make the expectations clear and explicit in the beginning.  This takes a real investment of time and effort up front, but saves great amounts of time and effort in the long run.  When expectations are not clear and shared, simple misunderstandings become compounded, turning into personality clashes and communication breakdowns.   It does, however, take courage.

 

Showing personal integrity

Lack of integrity can undermine almost any other effort to create high trust accounts.  It goes beyond honesty.  Integrity is conforming to the reality of our words - keeping promises and fulfilling expectations.  One way of manifesting integrity is to be loyal to those who are not present.

 

Apologising sincerely when you make a withdrawal

Great deposits come in the sincere words - “I was wrong”, “I showed you no respect”, “I'm sorry”.  It takes a great deal of character strength to apologise.  A person must have a deep sense of security to genuinely apologise.  It is one thing to make a mistake, and quite another not to admit it.

 

We don’t need money to make a deposit on the Emotional Bank Account of any relationship, and won’t feel richer if we withdrew from it. Nevertheless, it is so easy to waste and erode the level of trust by being thoughtless and critical.

 

Caroline runs Zeal Coaching and she will be speaking on Motivating your team at the Grow Your Business event on 13^th May.  To subscribe to her newsletter visit www.zealcoaching.com

 

Take Care of Your Business's Most Valuable Asset

"An apple a day helps you to keep the doctor away"

This is more relevant and true now than ever before. Twenty five years ago, when someone told me this I refused to accept this to be true. Now after several health alerts this year that proved just how vulnerable we are despite all our scientific know-how and advances in medicine. Invasive procedures, operations, plastic surgery, transplant surgery, hip or knee replacement, open heart surgery, bypass and minor surgical procedures will all come to a grinding halt. This is the year we learn that the very technology we’ve created to help us live more comfortable and, yes, often healthier lives will turn around and bite us-hard.

As doctors we forgot what our role in life is and so did the business community. So called “Noble profession” we belong to has taken a lot of battering and is now more likely to come to a grinding halt. People today believe there is no familiarity between patient and doctor, I think it is very true but was this our fault?

Prevention of medical illness, alleviating anxiety, pain, and suffering by sharing our knowledge and experience is our primary duty. We must create a healthy environment for our children to grow. Offering advice, education, and treatment if necessary to prevent young healthy families visiting hospitals and clinics.

Working parents who are contributing financially are not getting the help and support they deserve. With the help of business community and schools, we could bring in changes.

Please visit us and we will offer you the help and support you need to create healthy work force contributing to the success of your business.

Dr Kadiyali M Srivatsa runs Medifix, a private medical surgery designed to work around the needs of your growing business and family. You can see him at the Grow Your Business event on 30th April where he and his team will be offering free healthchecks.

Adding Polish Adds to PROFITS! Business attire in the summer

Your outfit speaks loudly about your professionalism, casual dress - casual attitude. Think business first and casual second, as inappropriate dress is distracting and takes the attention away from the business at hand; therefore good boundaries need to be established in a business environment. People become more casual in the hot weather as they wear more relaxed clothes but that doesn't mean their grooming should and this is what can let people look sloppy and untidy.

Five Grooming reminders:
Your outfit needs to always be well pressed and wrinkle free to look professional.
"No ironing" is not appropriate and indicates you may well be a person who lacks attention to detail!
Items should be in good repair.
Hair should be neat and tidy all day not just when you arrive at the office. Check it out when you visit the cloakroom/toilet.
Manicure and pedicure regularly.

Angela Marshall runs Appearance Management. You can find out more about her business image service by visiting her website.

Do you know it takes 7 times?

7 times to do what?

To get your neighbour to stop parking their car across your drive way?

To get a 5 year old to eat brussel sprouts? To get your partner to buy you flowers on your birthday?

No! On average, you have to communicate with a potential customer 7 times before they will buy something from you.

What! 7 times I hear you cry. If I want someone to buy something from me, I have to speak to them or send them something 7 times before they are willing to part with their hard-earned money?

Yup, that's right.

Now, obviously some people will buy on impulse and buy something or a service from you there and then.

But if the average figure is 7, that also means that it could take some people 20 times or more before they are willing to trust you enough to buy from you.

Think about your own buying habits. You are watching Ugly Betty on a Friday night and an advert comes on for a new moisturiser. You open the magazine supplements on a Sunday morning and there is a full colour page advert for that same moisturiser and you kind of recognise it but you are not sure where from.

On Monday you are chatting away to a girlfriend who mentions that she has recently bought this amazing new moisturiser. And so it goes it on until you find yourself at Boots on the high street and you are standing opposite a big display stand promoting that very same moisturiser.

What the hell, you think and you throw it in to your shopping basket.

If you hadn't had seen the TV advert, glanced at the newspaper or heard your friend raving about the product, there would have been every chance you would have walked straight past that promo stand.

If you are running your own business, there is a very high probability that you do not have the budget to advertise during Ugly Betty nor take out a full colour ad in the Sunday Times Style magazine.

But you can create a buzz and get people talking about you and what your business offers.
Communicating with a potential customer doesn't always have to be about advertising (although it can certainly help if you target the right publications) and as a small business, probably on a budget, there are dozens and dozens of ways of communicating with your potential customers.

From speaking at local events to contributing on online discussion forums. From sending people Christmas cards to forwarding them interesting and relevant emails. From talking to people at networking events to phoning someone up to ask their opinion on something.

Communication opportunities are open to you each and every day. And if you think it can take, on average, 7 times of communicating with someone before they are willing to buy from you, isn't it worth being conscious on how you can improve your communication opportunities?

One of the most effective and cheapest way of ensuring you are communicating 7 times is publishing your own email newsletter.

Karen Skidmore runs CanDoCanBe.com which helps women build successful (and profitable!) home based businesses. She'll be speaking on Email Newsletters Made Easy at the Grow Your Business Event on 30th April.

Email Newsletters - Get Personal

It may be tempting when you run a business from home to “pretend” to be bigger than you actually are. You may not want your customers to know that you work from the kitchen table and sort out your washing between answering emails.

However, when building relationships with potential customers, especially building relationships online, the more personal you make your email newsletters, the better.

You don’t need to share your stories about how drunk you got at your cousin’s wedding last weekend or how your daughter has just been awarded a prize for her mathematical ability. But when you write your articles and “talk” to your subscribers, show your personality.

Be fun, be creative, be serious. You decide – it’s your personality. By showing your personality you will be more likely to open up the doors of communication and start to build relationships with the types of customers you want to work with.

Make it personal. After all it is your business.

Karen Skidmore runs CanDoCanBe.com which helps women build successful (and profitable!) home based businesses. She'll be speaking on Email Newsletters Made Easy at the Grow Your Business Event on 30th April.