Your Network, Your Networth

Hi, and welcome to today’s episode, I am delighted to be talking today about your network, your networth, this is a phrase that so many people will recognise and it’s something that is said quite regularly. Especially if you’re a new business owner, and you’re going to network meetings, and you’re appreciating just that startup awareness of how connecting to other people can benefit you both as a person but essentially for you and your career, your business career.

So I really want to explore the idea behind your network, your networth.  Because there are things that I agree with the the loaded ness of this statement, there are things that I agree with that I think make perfect sense. And then there are other parts of that phrase that make me feel a little bit icky.

So, let’s explore that. So, in terms of your network, your networth, the idea behind this very, very loaded phrase is that you have the opportunity to raise your business and to raise your profile based on the people that you have around you, the people that you have that influence you, the people that you spend time with. Another phrase that sits perfectly into this area is it’s not what you know, but who you know. And again, essentially, the idea behind this is that the people that you have around you, and knowing the right kinds of people will open more doors than it will close okay?

And there’s a very, very pure and truthful thing about both of those phrases in the fact that they are honest in their pursuit of explaining how things do change in your business. They both say a very similar thing, which is such an important part for you, as a human whilst trying to navigate this part of your life, for your career, your purpose, your meaning, your business, and your life goals.

When we start businesses, we do not necessarily always start businesses just based on our passion. Like I wish that every single client that came to me came to me and said, Dawn, I’m doing my life’s work here but that’s just not the case. Often people go into business for a whole myriad of different reasoning. Sometimes it’s out of necessity, sometimes they’ve fallen into the way that they do their business, almost naturally off the back of an evolution of something else. Sometimes they’ve just gotten to the point where they cannot juggle their life and they want to create a different whole life around what they do in order to be able to keep all of the plates spinning, all of the balls in the air.

Now, if you are in a state in your business, where you’re doing something that you don’t love, but you think it’s a viable business idea, or you think that there’s a lot of money in it, or you have this skill set and experience in that area and that’s the main reasoning for why you’re doing it and there isn’t an emotional attachment to your purpose or your passion.  The first thing I would ask you to do is I would ask you to look at that. And is there a way that you could evolve that so that it fits in with you in terms of who you are as a person in terms of how you feel passionately about the world, what it is that you’re here to do, what it is that you feel good about giving to this life whilst we have it, I know I’m going deep.

Those of you that listen to me regularly will know that I do go deep so I don’t want forgiveness. It’s good for you is lovingly good for you.

So yeah, think about that. Once you’re in that space where you are interested, personally from a point of view that it’s actually something that means something to you, then you can start to consider how you move forward in terms of who you allow into your space and who you trust in your journey to moving that forward for you.

So there are 101,000 million trillion online gurus right now, and one of the things that I hear quite regularly from my people, from my Pretties is, oh, it’s so noisy, it’s so noisy online, everybody’s trying to sell to me all the time, everybody’s trying to get something from me, everybody’s always trying to drum up fake relationships. We kind of touched on it in the shady marketing episode of the podcast, if you haven’t listened to that yet, hop on over after this one, and go and have a listen to that too. There are lots of techniques being given at the moment in terms of how you can do kind of a low level shallow social climb.

So let’s talk about social climbing because your network, your networth definitely has an undertone of social climbing. So here’s what social climbing is, social climbing is where you find somebody in your business industry, who you believe to be an influential player, and you strike up a relationship or a friendship with that person on the basis that they can advance your business. Now, what’s funny about this is that actually, there is no need for it. If you’re a genuine person, if you’re in alignment with what it is you’re trying to do, if you find people that you resonate with mentors, peers, you know people that you follow, if you already resonate with them, you automatically like them throughout the whole situation they are asking you to, to know, like and trust them. So if you already feel like you know them, you feel like you trust them, and you definitely like them, then there is the potential for a real relationship there. You don’t have to fake it. There’s no need for social climbing under those conditions, the only time that social climbing is a definitive action away from that, and because I know a lot of you will go, oh my gosh, like I have a friend who is very influential, or there’s somebody that I really care about, there’s somebody that I really like and I’m friendly with them, are they going to think that I’m faking it, the only definition like the thing to split it down between what is real and what is fake, is if you do not like that person. If you do not genuinely like that person, and you are crawling up their butt cheeks to try and get their attention and trying to be their best pal than that is social climbing and it’s not cool. It’s not cool, just don’t do it. Like go find yourself a mentor or a guru that you do like that you do resonate with and open up a real genuine relationship. 

Relationships are two way streets, so you need to be receiving something as well as giving something and the other person on the other side of that is just a human being. And this is the thing that everybody seems to forget, like, it doesn’t matter if you’ve got a million pounds in your bank account. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got 60,000 followers on Instagram, you know, 600,000 followers on Instagram, it makes no difference behind all of the fluff the marketing fluff which I love, by the way, but behind all of it. It’s just a real life human being, flesh and blood, spirit in a meet case on this floating rock in the middle of space. Okay?  That person has the potential to be your friend regardless of the situation. I mean, for God’s sake, we’ve all watched Notting Hill, if you’ve watched Notting Hill, Julia Roberts explained it beautifully. Is it’s exactly that kind of thing. Okay? So don’t social climb.

If you have the urge to try and do that, just don’t do it. Just don’t do it. Don’t align yourself with somebody who you are not naturally in alignment with to try and advance your career to try and advance your business. One. It’s very likely that that person who you’re trying to align yourself with is constantly under, like constantly reviewing the people that they have around them, because it will have happened to them so often that they will be totally savvy about it. And they will know when you’re real or you’re not real, okay? They’ll just know, they may doubt, even if you are true, because of the situation they’re in, they may constantly doubt it, or they may constantly keep an eye on it. But that doesn’t mean that they won’t know that it’s real.  People know when it’s real, just don’t do it.

So that’s the kind of sad, shady side of your network is your networth. Or it’s not what you know, is who you know.  But actually, if we’re going to look at the positive sides of those two phrases, there are actually some genuinely good and really positive truths that come from both of those phrases. Because essentially, who you are hanging around with, who you are talking to, who you are consuming information with and from makes a massive difference to your mindset and your perspective.

So these are very, very important things that should be intentional for you in terms of what you surround yourself with. And if you cannot cultivate how you surround yourself, you really do have to allow yourself the opportunity to move into that space, where you can move away and make very, very clear distinctions over who should be in your immediate atmosphere. At the time that you are consuming your business work, at the time that you are doing your strategy, the time that you’re working on your mindset, all of these wonderful things. Okay? 

We all know a little bit about how this feels because for those of us that have taken the entrepreneurial journey and popped it in our backpack, and gone hiking around the world of possibility with it, we’ll know that not everybody understands why we do it. Not everybody understands why it’s important. Not everybody understands why we’re doing the things we do in order to get our businesses to the place where we want them. So there’s probably somebody in your life right now, who doesn’t get it. It might be your partner, it might be your children, it might be your parents, it might be your friends, it might be previous people who you’ve worked with, it could be literally anyone. But if that person has an emotional connection to you, you care about them, you love them, it can be so difficult to be in the situation where you don’t understand why they don’t get it, like why do they not understand.  You need to understand one simple thing. They don’t need to get it as long as you have some support that do get it. If you have people around you right now that don’t understand it, don’t try to convert them, trying to convert people into our way of thinking is not good.  It’s a waste of your energy, it’s frustrating for them, because they are not in the same place. Their perspective will not allow what it is that we’re trying to do. And you don’t need to have everybody on board to be a roaring success. Okay?  You don’t you genuinely do not. You can have different networks within your life, you can have your direct family network, that gives you that grounding stability, it reminds you where you came from, you have people in there that you absolutely adore, you don’t have to move them into a workspace. So many of us do, like I work with my sister, my sister is in my company, we have another sister, and I’m fairly certain at some point, we will bring her in as well. And it’s like we have, we’ve kind of made it a bit of a family business I can we do bring people in. And when I was doing my first businesses and I was creating clothing lines and things, my mom was very much involved. She used to sew on our labels for us. And my husband has helped me with nearly every business venture that I’ve been in, in some part, you know, he’s been involved in supporting me somewhere somehow. So I mean, it’s difficult for me in terms to say to you that you don’t need that, because I can see that I’ve had that. But not everybody’s journey is the same. And you don’t actually need your family to be on board for your business to be a success.  They just have to give you enough respect that you can go and do what you need to do. And you just need to give yourself permission and belief that you will make the decisions that are right for you without having to have permission from that direct family source to do so.

For me, friends didn’t get it, I had loads of friends that didn’t understand it, friends that didn’t appreciate me just dropping off the face of the earth in order to dig in deep and get my business off the ground. I also have lots of friends that did get it, that totally supported me, that constantly messaged me and asked me how I’m doing. And so you know, it is a balance. But think about the people that you have in your atmosphere, think about the people that you have in your life, and put them in networks, like the family network. You know the friends network, the people who are used to work with that particular job network. It’s like, when you throw a big birthday party, or you get married, or you have an anniversary, or you do something like that, and you decide to have a giant party and you think to yourself who are all the people that I want to spend this evening with that I would invite to this party and for the first time in your life, you may actually look at all of the different networks that you’ve been involved in and be like, oh, these are my family, and this is my extended family, and this is their extended family. And then these are the people that I worked with in that job. And these are the people that I worked with in that other job. And these are the people that you know I like to go and play pool with. These are the people that I like to go bowling with. These are the people I like to go skating with. These are the people for my fitness club. These are the people who you know, I work with now, and you bundle all of these people together in one big melting pot. But actually, it’s good to know who these people are in terms of where they sit in your life, what relationships you hold with them. And you don’t try to bleed every single network into each other consistently.  Just don’t just don’t try to do it, it doesn’t work.

One of the things that I learned from my eldest sister, is the power of understanding friendships that you have in your circle and understanding the importance of them to you and making as much effort in each area as possible.

So my eldest sister, our eldest sister, I should say she, like she doesn’t sit still, she works a really, really, really tough job really long hours, for not the right level of pay for the amount of effort she puts in, for the amount of heart that she puts in. And in the in between time, she is consistently organising, travelling and visiting her friends and family almost in equal measure. And every single year, like she is actively coming up with strategy to visit people that she cares about and have time with them. She doesn’t leave anything to chance, like it’s all planned and strategized out and she’s always on the move and it’s really important to her that she gets to see every single camp.

And this is what I mean about your networks. Like if anybody has seen the film Inside Out, you know that there is this amazing awareness of our inner brain work, and the way that they described it in this amazing Disney film, and if you haven’t seen it, please, please do go watch it. It’s an amazing insight into the way our brain works, and into the way that we actually can segregate all of these different areas for ourselves internally, and allow that to be a really good framework for us to conduct ourselves externally so that we feel like we’re in balance. And we have a great like, myriad of positive relationships in our life. And basically, everything becomes an island and there’s like Family Island, and Hockey Island and all of these different areas. And this is what you want to kind of internalise with your network. Are these people, the people who are your friends? Are these people your family? Are these people collaborators in your business? Are these people acquaintances in your business? Are these people clients in your business?

This something that I don’t think people talk about enough. We talk about the friendzone when it comes to relationships that could have a romantic core, but end up going past that stage and therefore don’t allow themselves to become romantically linked, and then just turn into platonic friendships and it’s called being friendzoned. Okay? There is such a thing that you need to do, where you basically friendzone people who are in your business network right now. And within that, you have to make a dedication that if you are friends with that person, you are never going to try and sell to them in a salesy way. Now, I teach how to sell without being salesy anyway, because I don’t believe that you need to actually be the traditional bro-marketing salesy to make a successful business, I have friends that buy with me, and feel comfortable buying with me, because they know that if they didn’t buy with me, they would totally still be my friend. They have the opportunity and freedom to look at the offers that I have, to look at the expertise that I can support and we are able to move our relationship from personal friendship, business personal friendship, but still personal friendship into client you know, client and coach relationship and back in a seamless transition, that makes no difference to our relationship. In fact, sometimes it has made the bond stronger, okay? But you need to know that if you friendzone people, you cannot be Salesy McSalesman with that person because you kill that friendship.

And the reason why you kill that friendship is because the network is your networth mentality. The social climbing mentality has this whole feeling of fake relationships, people who don’t genuinely care, people who are friending you on Facebook for the sake of friending you, and not actually interested in what in what you have to offer the world, in who you are, not interested in making genuine connections. There is a sweet balance here. A sweet, sweet balance between making genuine connections, getting out there, getting seen, creating these fabulous networks for yourself that you can actually go and spend positive time in, places where you can actually be a positive influence and support other people as well without having to be fake.

Now, what I always think is very strange is that people who are extremely kind, people who walk their talk in terms of saying that they are non judgmental and accepting are often the ones that get labelled as being the fake people, because people cannot understand nice people like we just, for some reason, we are scared that it’s not real, it looks too good to be true, right? So it couldn’t be true. And in some element, it is too good to be true. And it’s not all true. Like, no matter how lovely a person is, or they seem on the outside, they’re going to be a real human being and sometimes they’re going to be flawed. And sometimes they’re going to be not the best versions for themselves are going to get themselves triggered, they’re going to react, they’re going to be all of the different things with human condition. But that doesn’t mean that them going around spreading kindness all over the internet makes them fake, you will be able to tell a fake, because a fake can’t keep it up for long. 

If you’ve known somebody and they’ve been generally lovely for 12 months or more, it’s very likely that they’re just a generally lovely person. And it’s safe for you to add them to one of your networks of friends that you trust, and you know, that you that you want to have in your life.

And I touched on the idea of positive relationships and this is something that we teach in positive psychology. And I don’t know how many people know but I am actually a certified positive psychology coach. So I am able to help people pull out the areas of their life that will enrich their wellbeing, which actually is an absolute success practice.  It is soul lead and it is so good and one of the things that we that we teach, one of the things that we discuss is positive relationships. And I remember when I was learning this, and somebody said to me, can you make a list of all the positive relationships in your life and in terms of positive relationships, I want to know about people who are lifting you up, who are telling you you can, who are giving you fantastic support in lots of different areas, somebody that you know that you can go to, and they will just get it or they will just be there for you. And if they don’t get it, they will be supportive, they will trust you, they will believe in you, they will give you the genuine 100% energy that you need in terms of being able to feel that confidence from an external force, that positive relationship that just holds you.

And it was a bit of an epiphany for me because I have lots of relationships that I adore. And I have lots of relationships that are you know, multifaceted, where there will be snippets of that, and there will be moments of that, but very few relationships and I think this is probably true of everybody, a very few relationships that contain that enormous amount of positive energy in terms of acceptance, belief and just truly, truly all the way through deeply, deeply supporting me as a being.  And the reason why this is so important to me is because I have actually curated my business life and a massive portion of my real personal life into the business because I very much am fully in it. I’ve curated this whole situation to be around people of that energy and I actually have the most amazing networks, the free group that we have Social Pretties I talk about it all time, if you haven’t joined, please do take a look in the description and join us, this is one of those spaces that I’m talking about absolutely mental in terms of how beautiful that whole community is. Our pro members which is our membership, which is even more intimate is just an extension of that it’s people who are in my network Pretties like yourself that just have that great energy that just genuinely care about people and genuinely want people to do things, good things and fulfil their purpose.

And then more recently than that, two of literally the best humans I’ve ever met in my life and I came up with an amazing support system a new support that is different to anything else that’s previously been out there and we called it the Mentorship and I know so many people who follow me and have been watching what we’re doing will have already seen but me Abby Hugo and Fran Excel we consider ourselves to be the type of people that are just heart centered and I know it is so difficult to describe yourself with these words because they’ve been over marketed they’ve been overused. So heart centred triggers a lot of people because it’s used so often, but it’s truth, it’s truth and we can’t go back from the truth. And the idea behind the Mentorship was knowing that you can have a support system that is not within the confines of a very, very strict framework.

And that’s not to suggest that there isn’t a framework with this offer, of course there is. But what we really wanted to achieve is, you can go to a one to one situation, and you can have somebody’s attention on your business one to one, which is fantastic. Or you can go to a group programme situation where it’s a course, and you can have lots of information given to you in one go. And you have to find out how to apply that to your situation, you have to do the work. Or you can go to a mastermind, and a mastermind is very much like a networking situation where obviously, all together, you work together and you create fantastic ideas, you overcome blocks, you create solutions. But essentially, you still have to go away and do what you do by yourself. You do have the support of the community, which is lovely, but there’s a very, very strict framework, it’s nobody’s going to hold your hand there. Nor should they, because that’s not the way that works.

So we really wanted to create something that was different. We wanted to give people the opportunity that we will hold your hand a little bit, like we’re not gonna do it for you, but we will do it with you. And we will be there with you. On the level where you have a different deeper level of nurture, throughout the time of working with us. It’s not just about having a hype team, it’s about having an actual genuine connection, a genuine situation where you are held and given these positive relationships, times three, by the three of us, and obviously the other people that are joining, and I’ve got to say we opened this up for application only like a month ago, I think. And it has blown my mind speaking to people about the Mentorship and having them join. It’s been absolutely fantastic. And it’s not been right for everybody. There’s been a few people that need to go away and do some other things for themselves before they’re ready, who are going to join us the next intake. But oh my goodness, it has been a real journey.

Your network versus your networth, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know, you need to decide who you are surrounding yourself with those positive relationships are so important for your business to thrive. But not just your business, the core of your business, the important bit of it all, which is you. So, if you haven’t already got yourself an amazing network of positive relationships, please seek them out. Do not go through the whole business spectrum, the journey alone. And if anybody wants to talk about the Mentorship, we do still have the applications open for another couple of weeks. So you can contact me and we can discuss it. But it doesn’t really matter where you find those positive relationships as long as you have them. Find communities of people that will support you. And don’t just social climb. Find real people that you connect with that get you that you can truly be vulnerable with and you can allow yourself to relax with because when you can sit down in that cosy chair, take a load off and know that you’ll be fully supported, there is nothing better for you as a person, there’s nothing better for your business success. Thank you for listening today, Pretties I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. And until next time, I’ll see then.