Aladdin should have asked the genie for … Strong trusting relationships?? Really?

What do we base most of our decision on? How do you decide?

Most experts today agree that we aren’t as logical as we think and much of our decision making is based on preferences, values, likes, and dislikes. This is why strong relationships are so important, almost every leader I’ve spoken to or worked with has stressed this point.

Many say that it’s one of the biggest challenges that they face, after the business and technical conversation is done, what is left? How is the relationship? Many feel that the relationship is empty. There are uncomfortable silences, they don’t know if they have anything in common other than business.

Some leaders believe that the relationship issue is a vocabulary problem, and others feel that it’s not English fluency the real problem but know that something is holding them back.

There are many reasons to form strong relationships...

• to be trusted by secretaries with information that will make collaboration easier or to be put through to the right “point of contact”

• for colleagues or collaborators to be open to suggestions, and ideas

• or for the new client to believe in what you are offering and choose you and your company

• what can you think of?...

If the person you are talking to doesn’t feel good about you (and your company), and quite quickly, then the trust that is central to all business transactions and collaborations is slow and can be non-existent.

On my journey, before having any level of fluency I made sure that I did everything to be able to form strong relationships. However, this is hard until we have a certain level of basic vocabulary and we actually feel free to be able to do this.

Before being a coach I was a trainer and a big challenge of mine was to become a teacher in French. As I said in a past article I didn’t have the language skills to do this, and my job was to acquire the skills “on the job”. I knew I wanted to help people to reach their professional and personal goals so I became a teacher to learn how people learn.

During my teacher training (Formateur professionnel d’adultes : Diplômé d’état) I was introduced to the possibility of helping people decide what job they wanted to do and to market themselves and go to job interviews with confidence. In France, there are many centers that propose these kinds of integration programs.

My level of French was far from what it is today. Many people thought I was just crazy to put myself into the situations that I did, however, they didn’t know what skills I was applying to make sure that I was going to be successful.

The skill I want to put the spotlight on today is building strong relationships. If I didn’t use all of my abilities and faculties to physically, mentally, and psychologically prepare myself to form a “connection” with people, I would have failed.

I remember once I was training a group on how to market themselves on their CV and they were all riveted to what I was writing on the whiteboard because they were correcting my mistakes!

Many people might say: you were ridiculous! You should have left! Given up!

Really?

As the Leader of this group of people, I was totally focused on our relationship and the value that they were getting from my presence, the results.

This is how I came to be respected by my colleagues and to have a good relationship with the director of the training center who gave me a job after my training. When I think back, this wasn’t a logical decision… Surely a French person who spoke perfect French would have been better?

I believe that I was sufficiently free to impact my colleagues and students, to form strong and trusting relationships. They chose me. This was the beginning of my training career.

What many Leaders that become my clients realize is that when they are in “English mode” they may not be stressed, or sweating but they are not free. They aren’t impacting, flowing...

When I coach and train Leaders to be in a totally social frame of mind, and have the right language tools and reflexes you (supposing you are some form of Leader) become free to impact the listener and form strong relationships.

One client in particular, after becoming Free to create strong relationships, chose to use our coaching time to tell me about the new experiences of collaborating and socializing in English. They noted that collaborators were more open to suggestions, meeting time was cut in half, telephone conversations were a pleasure and they were free to do their job as well in English as in French.

This is the power of forming strong relationships and it all starts with Relationship-Based English Training and Coaching.

Can you imagine what this would be like?

How are your relationships and how would you benefit from English Freedom to form strong professional relationships?

I’d love to hear about your experiences and ideas on this subject.