A Business Network Makes You Powerful – Article 3 of 8

As I mentioned in part two of this article, your success will grow in proportion to your network. At some point, like the Internet, it can just explode, and the growth of your net worth, both personally and financially, can be 20 to 50 times your network. One of the qualities that can accelerate one’s network is magnetism. The more magnetic you are, the more people are drawn to you.

Before we get into this more deeply, let me explain what I mean by magnetism. Like magnets, people have positive and negative or attracting and repelling abilities, respectively. In other words, using your positive abilities draws people to you. When a leader is positively magnetic, employees are motivated and more productive. When sales people are more magnetic, they have more prospects and thus more sales production. As an individual, you make more friends. When we exude negative energy, people are repelled, and the opposite happens.

Regardless of your career path, one skill you should always be working on is to improving your positive magnetism. While some people seem to have been born people magnets, it is really the environment they were raised in that has helped them to be more magnetic than someone else. Magnetism is something that evolves from things we do or do not do.

In the book How Full Is Your Bucket by Tom Rath and Donald O. Clifton, there is a simple but profound analogy of a dipper (or ladle) and a bucket that captures the essence of how to be more magnetic. It looks at every communication or interaction with someone else as an exchange where you are filling or taking away from someone’s bucket. In other words, is it emotionally a positive or negative exchange from the other person’s perspective? If it is positive, you fill their bucket and thus fill yours. If it is negative, you take from their bucket, but you are also emptying yours. When you fill someone’s bucket, you are being magnetic, and when you empty their bucket, you are losing your attractiveness or magnetic power.

The key here is a mindset to choose how we respond and react to situations and to make a mental choice to try to fill other people’s buckets as often as possible. The more buckets we fill and the more frequently we fill them, the more magnetic we are, and the stronger our network will be. 

Here are some simple ideas you can do to fill other people’s buckets:

• Smile more
• Relax more and help others do the same
• Be more helpful
• Find others doing things right and compliment them
• Do not be a critic
• Do not talk negatively of other people (even if you are right)
• Do not talk about other people behind their backs
• Stay out of the blame game
• Stay out of wrong and right conversations

The more magnetic you become the more successful you will be. To be more magnetic you have to identify the behaviors that are causing you to detract from your magnetism and work on those behaviors that will create an environment where you are more magnetic. If you do, you will see your success skyrocket.