 It's almost Valentine's Day and everyone's thoughts turn to one thing. No, not those little candy hearts with the sayings on them. I'm talking about building and maintaining professional relationships. Welcome back and congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. Valentine's Day puts me in the mood to talk about professional relationships and how important they are to achieving our goals. We really need to be considering and evaluating our professional relationships all year long because we can't do everything by ourselves and having strong professional relationships is what helps us build a strong support network around ourselves. As we consider our existing professional relationships and the kind we'd like to develop in the future it's important to ask ourselves who are the kind of people I want to connect with in the future. The answer is going to be different for everyone but some examples might be I want to connect with people in my similar job and industry and share ideas and techniques with them or I want to connect with people outside of my industry and gain a different perspective and share my perspective with them. Also, I might want to connect with people who share my values and passions but aren't in my industry at all. What's important is as we see to connect with people we really look to make genuine connections with them and aren't out to sell our product or try to get something from them. One of the most important lessons we can learn about developing professional relationships is that if we're trying to connect with a certain type of person we have to go where those people are. Here are some examples of places you can go to meet certain kinds of people. The first is networking events just about every town or city has these and you can find them almost every week. The disadvantage of networking events is it's usually a mixed bag of people from different industries and jobs and you never know who's going to show up until you actually get there. You can also use meetup groups to find people to connect with. These are great because they're usually very specific to a profession or a set of interests and you have a good idea of the membership of the group and who might be showing up to the event before you even show up yourself. There's also conferences and trade shows. These are great if you want to get to know people in a certain profession or industry. However they tend to be multi-day events and can often be very expensive. Conferences and trade shows though often have awesome social events where you can get to connect with people. And finally don't forget that the internet is full of online forums, group discussions, and interactive chats where you can find people with similar interests and values that you can chat with and get to know. But it is hard to get that genuine connection you're looking for from solely online interaction. Once we've found a place where we can connect with the kind of people we want to have professional relationships with, the next is to figure out how to approach them to see if there's someone we want to bring into our network. Now a lot of people get really nervous about this part but here's a few tips you can use to make it a little bit easier. First it's important to remember that our goal is not to sell our product, our service, or even ourselves. What we're trying to do is find people who share our interests and connect with them so we should be trying to find out what they're about and see if there's someone we want to build a professional relationship with not to see what we can get from them. Listening is the key to making this happen. To paraphrase Dale Carnegie, to be interesting, be interested in other people. We should be asking ourselves who can we connect this person to who might share their interests? What can we do to help them out? Is there something we have to offer that could make their lives easier? Finally it's okay to be selective about who we build professional relationships with. If we find that we're not clicking with someone or don't have much in common with them we don't need to build a professional relationship with them. It's better to have a small group of people that we have genuine connection with than it is to have a large group of contacts that we never talk to. Which brings us to the importance of maintaining our professional relationships. Like anything worth doing, maintaining relationships can take a little bit of work sometimes. And it can be easy if the person is someone we see every day like a co-worker or a colleague but if they're not sometimes we need to put in a little bit of additional effort. And it doesn't have to be fancier elaborate just to check an email an hour then or a phone call to see how someone is doing can go a long way. If the kind of person likes to meet up for coffee proposing that can be a great way to catch up with someone. The specifics we use to maintain those relationships aren't as important as that we put the effort in. And as always let's not be concerned with what we can get from someone let's try to make a genuine connection with them. If you found this helpful make sure you follow us on Facebook and Twitter and don't forget that we do a live interactive discussion every Friday at 10 a.m. Pacific time on Blab. Click off on that globe to the right that'll get you to subscribe to our email list and that'll bring all of our content direct to your inbox. Appreciate you watching as always and remember the future is out there. Lead the way.