If you have followed me on social media at all you know that I love to share. I love to share my experiences and more importantly I love to share my learning moments. I find that sharing really helps me solidify the lesson in my own life and hopefully I can help make an impact in the lives of others. This podcast was the logical progression of my social media sharing and as you may know I love to speak and present. Not to mention that I may have also been told that I have a face for radio ;0) The format for now will be to keep these to 10 minute or so stories of things that I experience and the lessons I learn from them. I will publish weekly or as frequently as I am inspired. The more you let me know you enjoy it the more I will publish.
Why “Connecting the Dots”?
Over the years as I have worked to develop my presentation skills I have continued to seek out and develop my best presentation. One of the things I love to do is to speak to large audiences. The more solid my content the more opportunity I have to present to larger and more diverse audiences. If you listen to most of the presentation gurus and content marketing strategists they will tell you that you need to specialize. That you need to find a specific niche that you can fill. Well for me this became a little disheartening as I searched for that one thing that I was not only expert at but also passionate about. As I continued to be cognizant of what it is I specialize in it started to dawn on me that there may not be any one thing and that perhaps what I was actually expert at was bringing together a number of different things. I have been a closet technology geek since grade 7. I had written many software programs and really understood technology well. I also was an adept mortgage broker and soon realized that when I first started brokering there was not a whole lot of individuals who had as much of a grasp of both technology and our industry as I did. I started looking for ways to use that to my advantage. This passion for both technology and our industry culminated into Axiom Mortgage.
As I looked around I started to realize that perhaps my specialty was in being a bit of a generalist and being able to bring things together. To see the vision of how to interconnect different pieces for a greater outcome. “The whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts”. As I started looking broader, to the market in general I realized that this concept had vast application and really spoke to a lot of different industries and a lot of different aspects of our life.
As a mortgage brokerage leader I have seen many individuals in our industry come and go and I am always fascinated by what makes some successful and others not. I have seen many individuals who, if you had asked me for a checklist of all the things that you need to be a successful mortgage broker, would have checked off every single one on the list. For some reason though they were not able to bring it all together and there are a few I can think of at the moment that have actually left the channel. That to me is a real shame and really spoke to the need for some specialization in this area. In this concept of connecting the dots. Connecting all the pieces and making sure that all the ingredients do in fact lead to success.
I see examples of where this falls apart all over the place and feel that there is a real need to put some focus on a holistic approach to life, leadership and sales.
Business
In an entrepreneurial setting we see it all the time. I will save the full story for another time but my most recent experience buying a vehicle is a perfect demonstration of what happens when a business has not connected the dots. In this case the dealership spent a ton of money on radio advertising to get me in the door to the dealership. This worked fine until I actually got in there. It doesn’t matter how good your marketing or lead generation is. If you can’t deliver on the sales experience it all falls apart there and all that time, money and energy you have spent on driving that customer to you is wasted.
Personal
We often hear about the concept of work/life balance and I am not so sure I believe there is such a thing. We do not live in silos. The days for most of working and shutting off the brain when we get home are long gone. I don’t care how much you try you can’t expect to have a crappy experience in your work life and be able to simply shut it off and not expect it to affect your family life. The counter to that is that you cannot expect to have a stressful family life and not have that affect your work. It is less about balance and more about finding a way to successfully interconnect the two realms.
Fitness/Health
This is a piece that many of us neglect because of time constraints. This is a mistake. Your overall health and fitness is vital to creating a successful life. No matter how you define success. For me, my fitness endeavors center around triathlon at the moment. Triathlon is a perfect analogy for the connecting the dots concept. Not only do you need to focus on the individual components of the swim, bike and run but you need to deal with transition, with nutrition, pacing and a number of other facets. It is one of the things that I love about triathlon. There is so much strategy involved in “Connecting the Dots”.
The bottom line is that we really need to connect all the pieces together to really achieve success. One of my favourite sayings is this: “Success comes when you stop trying to prove to the world how good you are and start trying to prove to yourself how much better you can be”.
My final thought before I sign off is this. I wanted to give a shout out to Mitch Joel and his podcast “Six Pixels of Separation”. I have been enjoying Mitch’s podcasts of late and was impressed to see he is on episode number 427 as of the writing of this article. I thought it would be interesting to jump in the way back machine and go listen to his first episodes. I did that. Mitch works for a marketing company so obviously “brand” is important to him. He talked a little about how he was concerned that the quality of the first podcasts may not be up to their usual high standard but decided to start anyhow. You can rest assured his 427th podcast is substantially better than his first. The lesson I took from that is the fact that he would have never gotten to the 427th if he hadn’t done the first.
If you have the opportunity find someone who you want to emulate, someone who has accomplished what you want to accomplish, go back and find how they did that “thing” when they first started. I think you will be inspired and you may even find that you are not that far behind where they were when they started. They just started first.
So get off your ass and go do “it” ;0)
You can find Six Pixels of Separation here:
https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/six-pixels-separation-marketing/id157616278?mt=2
I’m still finalizing my podcast feed but if you want a sneak peek you can do so here:
http://connectingthedots.libsyn.com/rss You can simply enter that URL in your podcast player. On iPhone I think it will automatically add to your podcast feed.
If you have read this far THANK YOU! I would love your feedback on the concept. Leave me a note in the comments.
