Associate with the Right People

By Brian Tracy

Everything in life and business is relationships. Everything you accomplish or fail to accomplish will be bound up with other people in some way. Your ability to form the right relationships with the right people at every stage of your life and career will be the critical determinant of your success and achievement and will have an inordinate impact on how quickly you achieve your goals.

No One Does it Alone
A key part of goal setting is for you to identify the people, groups, and organizations whose help you will require to achieve your goals. To accomplish goals of any kind, you will need the help of lots of people. There are three general categories of people whose help and cooperation you will require in the years ahead. These are the people in and around your business, your family and friends, and people in groups and organizations outside your business and social circle. You need to develop a strategy to work effectively with each group.

Your Key Business Relationships
Start with your business. Who are the most important people in your business life? What is your plan to develop higher quality relationships with them? Make a list of everyone who works inside and outside of your business—your boss, colleagues, co-workers, subordinates and, especially, your customers, suppliers, and vendors. Which of these people has the greater ability to help you or hurt you in the achievement of your business or career goals?

Identify Your Customers
A customer can be defined as anyone who you depend upon for success and advancement in your job or business. A customer can also be defined as anyone who depends on you in any way. By this pair of definitions, almost everyone around you is a customer in some way. For example, your boss is your primary customer at work. Your ability to satisfy your boss will have more of an impact on your future, your income, and your career than any other single skill you have. Your Customer Service Strategy One of the best strategies you can use is to make a list of everything that you believe that you have been hired to do. Answer the question, why am I on the payroll? And write down everything you think of. Then, take this list to your boss and ask your boss to organize this list in order of his or her priority. From that moment onward, discipline yourself to work on your boss’s top task all day long.

Two Key Qualities for Promotability
In a survey in Success Magazine a few years ago, 104 chief executive officers were presented with twenty qualities of an ideal employee and asked to list the most important. First was the ability to set priorities, to separate relevant from irrelevant. Second was the ability to get the job done fast, to execute quickly.

Action Exercise
Make a list of the most important people in your work and business life. Develop a plan to help each person in some way.

About the Author
Brian Tracy is the most listened to audio author on personal and business success in the world today.  His fast-moving talks and seminars on leadership, sales, managerial effectiveness and business strategy are loaded with powerful, proven ideas and strategies that people can immediately apply to get better results in every area.  For more information, please go to www.briantracy.com