112. Compliments and Curiosity

If you’ve experienced anything like I have on the LinkedIn platform, you’ve received countless messages from people trying to get something from you. So and so will want to “connect”, then when you accept the invitation they send you a sales pitch private message. Surely one that’s been copy and pasted from their prior attempts to solicit new business.

If you’re wondering if I have any time to hop on a quick 15 minute call, I do not.

I do, however, have time to respond to you if you lead by complimenting me on something I deeply care about. Generally, I don’t respond to LinkedIn messages, but I did recently when a message made me feel good.

Imagine how more apt your network would be to help you when you need it if you had a tendency to make them feel good. What if you found out what people care about and dished out related compliments as much as LinkedIn salespeople dished out sales pitches?

For me and my business, things go much smoother when people feel complimented when they’re around me. The next time you greet someone, greet them with a compliment. See what happens. See what happens when the next time you say goodbye to someone, you leave them with a compliment to hold on to for the rest of the day.

There are plenty of things to feel poorly about as an individual in this world, so be someone who makes people feel a little better then before they knew you. Their lives will be enriched, and I’m telling you, yours will too.

If you would like to start feeling better about yourself, begin by helping others feel better about themselves. You’ll get your turn. Your benefit will come. Just focus on someone else for a moment and trust that your effort will not be wasted.

It never is, and it’s the foundation of our entire business.

In our business, it’s not uncommon for people to come to us when they’re not feeling great about themselves. Therefore, among other things, it’s our job to help them feel better about themselves.

How?

By giving them a place where they’ll be congratulated for who they are and what they’re doing no matter what. By giving compliments, by supporting and encouraging, and by giving more compliments. Don’t get me wrong, we do the hard work to create lasting change, but without this foundation, we don’t earn enough time to get the results our clients are looking for.

I know this to be true because a week doesn’t go by where someone doesn’t say they never thought they’d love going to the gym.

Unprompted, someone said this one day recently. We had a nice conversation at the end of their session and I dismissed them with a compliment on the day’s efforts. I then watched them leave and say goodbye to the other coaches and clients in the gym, all of whom decided it was their time to pump the tires of my client. Compliments left, right and centre all the way out the door. I smiled while I observed this happening and thought to myself no wonder they like coming here.

The next time this client came back I asked “is it okay if I run your credit card for a new batch of sessions?”, and what do you think they said? Not no in case you’re wondering.

Now before you go off complimenting people for your own benefit let’s get one thing clear.

It has to be genuine.

You have the be thoughtful.

People aren’t stupid, and they’ll know if you’re puffing smoke up their butt.

Plenty of folks trying to sell on LinkedIn forget this. They’ll try the compliment route, but it won’t be genuine because you can tell they just pasted a phrase from your website or bio into their generic greeting message. On the other hand, it’s easy to recognize someone who actually looked at your profile, looked at your business and curated a thoughtful comment on what they saw. Like the one I actually responded to.

So how do you go about being genuine? First of all, listen. Say less. Let people talk, and you’ll find out what’s important to them.

Secondly, be curious. For real. Ask questions and actually pay attention to the answer. The more you know the better you’ll be, and the more you know the more you’ll realize how much you don’t know and the more questions you’ll know you need to ask.

Got it?

Find out about people’s lives if you want yours to be better. Compliment the efforts of others if you want your own to be recognized. You’re not alone in trying to figure all of this out. Life, that is.

Like Josh Eckert might say, it just riiiiips when someone takes the time to learn a bit about what you’re doing and says you’re awesome for doing that.

Make someone feel awesome today. Then do it again tomorrow. String a few of those days together and see what happens. Let me know if you do.

— Cody

PS: If you have thoughts about this or any other issue of Coffee With Cody, I’d love to hear them.

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See you next Thursday.

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