Chapter 4: Your Networth and Chapter 5: It's Lonely at the Top - Dealing with Crisis

Chapter 4: Your Networth

The old saying "money doesn't buy you happiness" is in my experience very true. At the end of your life, you won't be thinking about the dollars in your bank account, it is relationships that will matter. I am a firm believer it is not your bank balance that will define your success, it is the relationships that you have with people in your network that will define how successful you are in life. 

Porter Gale is a start-up advisor, public speaker and the former Vice President of Marketing at Virgin America. She has written a book "Your Network is Your Net Worth" . In that book Porter Gale discusses various concepts and states that your social capital or your ability to build a network of authentic personal and professional relationships, not your financial capital, is the most important aspect of your portfolio. When you go out an seek collaboration with others who are similarly aligned it will provide you with not only a great foundation, it will also help you reach greater heights of success. 

For these reasons Porter Gale concludes that you can't base the size of your portfolio on the dollars in your bank account, it is the size of your network and your ability to define and stay true to your passions and values. Making sure that you work with people who believe what you believe and share the same values is what makes a successful life. By doing this you will have greater output and personal fulfillment. 

Have you ever heard the saying "networking is a dirty word" or "I don't network it just seems so fake"? Well in a study produced by Johnson Cornell University titled "The Contaminating Effects of Building Instrumental Ties: How Networking Can Make Us Feel Dirty" researches Tiziana Casciaro, Francesca Gino and Maryam Kouchaki set out to find out why this happens. 

They conclude that the psychological consequences come in two dimensions depending on how you approach the networking; content and approach. They found that instrumental networking in pursuit of professional goals actually impinges on the way that people feel in a negative way. This was contrasted with networking designed to build friendship and emotional support where people generally felt a lot better about the networking and looked at it in a positive way. 

Interestingly from the research the negative feelings made the person feel dirty, whereas when building a relationship, they felt much better generally. This then leads to professionals who engage in networking less frequently and in turn have lower job performance. Where professionals engaged in networking that was more personal this went away, they built better relationships and were much happier in their jobs. It is therefore important to remember that you need to not network for the sake of networking, rather network to make sure that you are building relationships to get the most out of the interaction.

Another study undertaken by Sainburys in the United Kingdom is their "Living Well Index" which is produced with Oxford Economics. In their September 2018 report they also found that personal connections were important for all people in their day to day lives. In this study it was concluded that there was a direct correlation between social interaction and happiness. Where there was a decline in social interactions for certain people they were less happy.

How many people have you heard of that either die early or become sick because they are lonely. Unfortunately this happens all too often, networking and building your networth is a great way to make sure that this doesn't happen to you. At a personal level the study found that people who had better relationships with their neighbours were generally happier than those people who were lonely and didn't interact. 

Moving from busy and stressed to building relationships 

All too often we hear people talking about work life balance. How you spend your time is up to you. You make a choice on how you spend your time. More importantly you decide on who you want to spend your time with. In the last chapter I talked about stress, the affect that this has on your well being. When you are stressed you often don't want anyone to see you in that state, it becomes an excuse, a crutch that stops you from interacting with other people. 

The problem with this approach is that the stress leads to poor relationships with friends, your significant other and dissatisfaction with life in general. It makes you irritable and stops you from being able to sleep. Building better and more long-lasting relationships actually helps reduce the stress, for a number of reasons. Firstly, the mere fact of interaction as discussed from the Sainbury's survey makes people happier. Secondly and even more importantly, building better relationships actually makes you a better person. You can't know everything, and by utilising the knowledge and wisdom of others you can see where other people are going and how to interact with them better.

I have seen this firsthand; business is a lonely place. Even with a business partner when I started my first business I felt lonely. There is so much that happens in life between your business, your significant other (if you have one), your children (if you have them), your family, your friends and the people you interact with every day. Keeping on top of all of it is hard and can cause even the best person a lot of anxiety. So often I felt like I was caught up in doing work that I never stopped to consider what harm it was doing to myself by being busy.

Luckily for me, early on in business, I was approached to join several different groups that weren't networking, they were building real relationships with people that you could trust. This feeling of community was something that I experienced firsthand. It helped me through dark days, it helped me celebrate my successes and kept me on track throughout my business journey. 

Relationships are the key to success

Independence is not ideal, in western cultures like the US, UK and Australia, freedom of the individual is a concept that is so imbedded in our culture that it can seem like we should do everything alone. The problem with this is that loneliness is a threatening concept, it creates a tension and can lead to anxiety and depression if not kept in check. 

There are real health benefits for building and maintaining relationships. Once you are feeling better and have a clearer head you will find that you are able to build a better business, which leads to you being able to build better relationships and it goes around in a circle that benefits you and everyone around you.

Lets examine the effect that loneliness has on stress. Cortisol is a stress hormone that can impair your cognitive performance, compromise your immune system and increase the risk of vascular problems, inflammation and heart disease. Essentially you want to reduce the amount of cortisol that your body generates as it will help you in all facets of your life.

In a study titled "Loneliness and Cortisol: Momentary, Day-to-day, and Trait Associations" authors Leah Doane and Emma Adam attempted to understand the relationship between loneliness and stress. They found that there was a strong association between measures of loneliness, physiological stress and physical and mental health outcomes. In other words being lonely generates cortisol, it has a negative impact on your health which spirals you downwards in, sometimes, uncontrollable ways. In a study conducted of mostly young people Leah Doane and Emma Adam attempted to ascertain the associations between loneliness and cortisol and whether they caused stress. 

The results showed that where the participants were lonely, whether the day before, or at the time their levels of cortisol increased. This means that the mere fact of being lonely is bad for your health, it causes stress which produces cortisol and is something that you should avoid at all costs.

This is backed up by an article published on headspace website , in that article they showed that social interaction not only reduces the level of cortisol, being able to feel physical relief that they experience from bottling something up inside. They list out 5 other negative effects that being lonely has on your physical state as follows:

1. Your nervous system goes into fight or flight mode, making it harder to sleep. 

2. Your white blood cells elevate, causing possible long-term inflammation

3. You become colder - literally

4. Your lovey-dovey brain falls victim to co-dependent cuffing season

5. you die faster.

I am not saying that you need people around you all of the time, the mere fact of having someone to talk to though reduces stress and makes you feel better. This is where I see a lot of business owners falling down, they don't want to share their problems and issues so they bottle them up. The negative impact this has on their health is very real and therefore building better relationships are therefore better for you both mentally and physically. 

Conclusion 

Building your network is a great way to improve your business as well as your health and improving your state of being. You are probably thinking "that’s easy for you to say" or "okay but how do I do that". I have been there before, it’s okay there is a way out and a way that we can make sure that you build a great network. I use the networth audit and this is why I built the companion course to help you build out your network. If you go to www.jeremystreten.com/networth-audit you can follow my course on building your networth audit.

Once you have the audit completed (or even as you are completing it), use the document to connect with others. Connect with people via email, social media, or telephone and have a chat to them. It’s amazing how better you will feel from those interactions and you have no idea what they will lead to for the success of your business. 

Also check out www.jeremystreten.com/grow for other links to the resources I have developed for this book.

QUESTIONS AND TASKS

Before you move on to the next chapter I encourage you to really think through these questions:

1. How well can you define your networth?

2. Actually build the networth audit.

3. Critical Thinking Question - what other areas do you need to focus in on to build your networth? Here you are looking for tasks and ideas that you have that can help you to build a bigger network and make sure that you engage with that network.

Visit jeremystreten.com/grow for more on this topic.

Chapter 5: Its Lonely at the Top - Dealing with Crisis

I originally wrote a chapter like this as a companion chapter to my first book The Business Legal Lifecycle. However the concepts that I set out in this chapter apply to business in general so I have adapted the text to this book. As context I wrote the original draft of this chapter in the beginning of the Corona Crisis in March/April 2020. I have edited the chapter to be applicable to the concepts of this book. The messages in this book are as important today (whenever you are reading this) as they were at the time, you never know when change will strike so you better be ready for it.

I have created a page https://www.businesslegallifecycle.com/chapter-14 with links to all of the information referred to in this chapter which is also on the jeremystreten.com/grow companion site with this book.

Crisis

Unfortunately no matter how well you think you are going (or the world is going) there is always the potential for crisis to occur. I knew this in 2020, the economy was travelling well, business confidence and stock markets around the world were at record highs. Then the world felt like it had been turned upside down as governments around the world shut down industries and required their citizens to stay home. Every crisis is different, it was not the Global Financial Crisis, it was not a normal rescission and wasn't the dot com bubble. 

As governments around the world closed entire industries, social distancing, a term that I had never heard before became one of the most common words that you could see on social media and in businesses around the world. To help avoid an economic and social catastrophe, governments around the world injected billions and trillions of dollars into their economies. The aim of this was to stop a mass of people who are unable to work from going without. These changes occurred in a matter of days, not weeks, months or years but days. The importance of remembering this is that this could happen again and you need to be prepared.

What you can Control

At a time of crisis there is a lot of advice out there about what you need to do. There are things you can and things you can't control. Three things that you can control are, how you use your time, what you put into your mind and how you nurture your network. In my view these are the 3 important parts of any professionals journey in growing their business. If you can control these 3 aspects of your life you will be able to come through any crisis in the best way possible.

Time

When you control your time you take control over what you do and how you do your work. An issue that I see time and time again with business owners is that they say that they never have enough time. The truth of it is that we all have the same amount of time it's what you do with it that will determine your success. By putting together a default diary of how you will use your time you can ensure that you maximise the time that you spend doing your most valuable work (as specified above, for instructions on how to do that visit https://jeremystreten.com/default-diary also visit jeremystreten.com/grow for more resources). 

Mind

Being deliberate with what you put into your mind is also crucial. Especially in a time of crisis avoid news and minimise the amount of negative input. You should focus on filling your mind with great information and inspirational material (for my recommendations see https://jeremystreten.com/podcasts and https://jeremystreten.com/reading-resources also visit jeremystreten.com/grow for more resources). 

Network

Finally you need to acknowledge and serve your network. One of the goals of this book is to set yourself to have a business that is in a salable position because at some point you will exit your business. When you do exit your business, you still must live and interact with your network. So make sure that you have a well defined network and that you maintain it (for instructions on building a networth audit, which will help you to understand the strength of your network go to https://jeremystreten.com/networth-audit also visit jeremystreten.com/grow for these resources).

The Stages of Change 

The change curve is based on a model developed by Swiss physician Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in the late 1960's to explain the grieving process. 

Figure 1: the Change Curve

The Change Curve is a graphic that has changed and adapted over the years and takes a number of different forms. They are all based on Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's 5 stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. They all start when something about a persons life or business changes and follow the basic human emotions that all human beings feel. Each one of the 7.5 billion people on this planet experience things differently and so the way you will feel and how long you experience each stage will be different depending on you. This is a guide to how you will deal with change and grief.

In this model the stages are as follows:

Stage 1 - Shock

Usually when change occurs there is shock, how long you are in shock and how quickly you can progress through this stage will depend on you. Shock is a defense response that is natural in all people. The reasons for the shock vary but can generally come from a lack of understanding that falls into 3 categories:

? Numbness, a feeling that you can't feel anything

? Disbelief that something that you weren't expecting just happened

? Confusion as to what to do next

Stage 2 - Denial 

Once you move through the shock stage generally you will move into the denial phase. This is most often categorised when you feel that everything was okay and will go back to the way it was quickly. You will feel a:

? Fear of being a failure

? Feeling that the way you knew the world must be right 

? Being comfortable with the status quo.

The problem with this denial stage is that the world is changing at a remarkable pace, you need to realise that in many ways life and business will not go back to the way they were. Often this stage will be prolonged if you haven't experienced major change in the past or haven't dealt with it very well. 

Stage 3 - Anger 

Here you will look for a scapegoat, in the shape of a company, politician, ethnic group or some individual. You start looking for someone to blame which fosters below the line statements for example:

? Suspicion

? Skepticism

? Frustration

Stage 4 - Depression

Once you go through the anger stage you will find yourself thinking that you are moving into acceptance, which is usually depression. This is the lowest point on the change curve, as anger diminishes you start to realise that change is happening and you can't stop the change. Often your morale will be low and your self doubt and anxiety will reach its peak. You know you are here when you start to think that nothing will ever get better and is associated with feelings of:

? Apathy

? Isolation 

? Remoteness

Unfortunately it is at this stage that you start to fixate on the little things which distract you from what you need to be doing. You start to be reassured that other people, including family and peers are having the same feelings.

Stage 5 - Acceptance and Integration

No matter how quickly or slowly you go through the first 4 stages you will always come out the other side. It's here that you accept that the change is inevitable and that you need to adapt. You begin to then look at the ways that you integrate the change into your life. Often you will be thinking of:

? Exciting new opportunities

? Relief that the change has happened 

? You survived the change

? Impatience that the change is not yet complete.

? Hope for the future.

Ultimately you need to get yourself to this stage as quickly as possible, you can't skip the other stages. You can however step through them quickly and efficiently so that you can accept the change and then make the change that you need to make in your business.

Your plan

Whether you are reading this book during a crisis or when times are good you need to consider a plan for dealing with crisis. I hope that you spent some time thinking about how these stages apply to you. If not I encourage you to go back and spend some critical thinking time thinking through how you can deal with change when it occurs. 

As I have said before every person in the world will be on a different trajectory through the change curve. Different events will happen that cause you to have different change curves, and different starting points. You may go through multiple change curves depending on the upheaval in your life and business. The one thing that will be the same is at the end you will need to move into acceptance and integration. 

What to do next? 

The skill of planning is one that you need to get good at, if you have never really planned before then this is the time to start. Planning is a skill that will help you immensely going forward and one that you will build a bit like a muscle through repeated workouts.

Once you have developed a plan go and implement it, if it doesn't work then learn from your mistakes. I like the term 'successful failure' popularised by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, a failure is okay so long as you learn from it and then it becomes a success. Understanding that will help set yourself to come out any crisis in a great way. Know that change is inevitable, it is scary but that you will get through it and so will everyone else. When you get to acceptance and look at ways to integrate the change into your life then you will set yourself up for success. 

QUESTIONS AND TASKS

Before you move on to the next chapter I encourage you to really think through these questions:

1. Where am I in the Change Curve?

2. Have I been through all of the stages?

3. What have I missed?

4. Critical Thinking question - What is my plan for the future success of my business? Looking back at how you handled different crisis what could be improved? What could you do better next time?

Visit jeremystreten.com/grow for more on this topic.