Nurturing Your Soul By Nurturing Your Business Relationships

In a high-tech, low-touch world of business we have come to accept the concept of nurturing professional relationships through automation. Does that even make sense to you? It sure doesn’t to me. How is sending an automated, pre-scheduled mass email to a client or professional connection nurturing to anyone?

By definition to nurture is to care for and encourage the growth or development of another.

Planning an email based on your assumptions of what someone will be feeling or contemplating at a time in the future is certainly a way to stay top of mind — and I encourage this. But nurturing? We can do better if we really care.

So, let’s get creative about how we care for and encourage the growth or development of our clients and professional connections.

Here are a few things you can do to actually nurture relationships that are important to you. And these tactics don’t only apply to professional business relationships but also to personal relationships we wish to authentically nurture.

· Send hand-written personal notes. Yes it’s time consuming and tedious. AND, unexpected and authentic and rare.

· Schedule a 20 minute check-in just to see how things are going and to get feedback. This is all about them, not you.

· Take time to leave a review on Google, LinkedIn or Facebook. When done without prompting it shows you’re thinking about them and have their best interest in mind.

· Share their posts and articles to help promote their business.

· Share with them interesting, informative articles and introductions that may be relevant.

· Create a client page on your website and include links back to their site. External link backs are great boost their Google rankings and SEO.

Some of these are pretty “old-school” actions. And that is the point. It’s time we remember to approach relationships with a human touch and leave the high-tech automation for other, less personal strategies.

Next time you think nurture, think personal, high-tough, “let’s hold hands and sing”. Ok, maybe not that — or may so?

Here’s the bottom line, when we nurture the relationships that are important to our business we are nurturing our business. And as heart-based entrepreneurs — we ARE our business. So, in essence, we are nurturing our own souls.