Building Effective Relationships: What did YOU take away?

At last night's EWN meeting, Debra Knupp of Akina, Inc. spoke on building effective relationships. The full seminar is available for free download as a podcast through EWN radio--you should listen! Debra is a phenomenal speaker, and I think that my biggest challenge was to pay attention to her content instead of taking notes on her speaking style and presentation format!Debra began by saying that her goal was to have us walk away with one thing that we could implement right away--a very plausible and reasonable goal for any presentation. That alone made me sit up a bit straighter. Tired as I was and worried as I always am about the tech (I record and podcast our meetings, and there is always the podcaster's fear of "the mic is on, right? it didn't pull out of the recorder, right? is that lapel brush going to be audible on the recording?"), her message was very clear and came through in a very real way.So, Debra, here is the one thing I walked away with:You don't have to have a one-size-fits-all approach to building relationships. You can choose the tool that works best for you. I liked that one of her messages was this: do what you like. The reason we don't always follow up with phone calls is because some of us don't like to make phone calls. So what do you like to do? What feels natural to you?

• Clip an article and send it?
• Email a link for a funny or informative web site?
• Call and ask for advice with a problem?
• Invite out to coffee?
• Go see a ball game?
• Send a fun gift?

Which one or two of these is within your comfort zone? For me, when she said that for some of us, follow-up calls don't feel natural and that is why we don't make them, a light bulb went off. Doing things within our comfort zones and that reflect our own personalities makes so much more sense. And choosing tasks that we find value in and enjoy has the huge benefit of assuring that we'll actually DO them. She points out that she doesn't like to email links--that's just not her style. But she loves to call and ask people for advice. So that is what she does to keep in touch with many of her contacts: when she hits a challenge, she calls up a few of them and says, "I'd like to run something by you. Could you give me a call back?"For me, the one thing I took away was to be true to yourself and do what's in your comfort zone. If you were there, what did you take away?