Networking has long been suggested as a key part of staying on top of your field. Although it is not logistically feasible to maintain an ongoing, active daily type of relationship with hundreds of people, within the various groups that you may be a member of, three or four people in each group emerge as empowering people. These are people you want to to get to know well, who you could get on the phone and speak with every day, although the frequency is more like once or twice a week.

V.I.P.s to You

Regard your empowering people, the inner group of friends, counselors, and advisors as a very special lot. Grease the skids by periodically sending out articles or information to each of them when you think it would benefit them. Keep them abreast of what you are doing, sending article reprints or e-mails with links to pages announcing your latest book, or whatever is appropriate for you.

Attracting Empowered People to You

As you guessed, you don’t have to be an author-speaker to attract and assemble an array of empowering people in your life. You only have to vigorously pursue what interests you, and these people start showing up.

In case you’re thinking you have to be outgoing and extroverted to attract empowering people, guess again. You can learn to be extroverted in social and business situations because it makes a lot of sense much of the time.

Let Them In

One of the keys to having empowering people in your life is to be open to it. This sounds simple enough, but many people never get past this stage. Think about someone in your own life who always:

• looks forward to hearing from you,
• listens to you closely,
• heeds your advice, and
• is appreciative for having received it.

Is this the kind of person you want to be around? Yes! Is this the kind of person to whom you want to dispense your wisdom freely? Yes! Well, that’s the kind of person you can be to your empowering people. Acting on their advice quickly, when it’s appropriate, is one way to encourage such people to continue to be helpful.

Empower Them As Well

Another key to attracting empowering people into your life is to have something of value to offer them as well. People who empower you are also empowered by you in some way. Otherwise it’s not likely that the relationship will continue for long. The way that you empower them may not always be clear to you. Perhaps simply valuing what they say in a way that few others do fulfills a need in them that prompts them to want to keep the relationship going. The list below contains ways you may be empowering those who empower you:

• The energy and enthusiasm you display in pursuit of your goals may be inspiring to them.
• Your goals in and of themselves may be of great interest to them.
• The questions that you ask may draw answers out of them that they may not have articulated previously, and they value this.
• You expose to them elements of your world and your insights.
• Perhaps few others value them the way you do.

Empowerment is Where You Find It

Okay, so where do you find empowering people in your life? Actually, the answer is everywhere, but more specifically here are some ideas:

• At your professional association meetings, i.e., if you’re an accountant, perhaps you meet somebody at the state chapter meeting of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.
• At civic, social, charitable association groups’ meetings.
• At an adult-ed course you take.
• Through friends.
• At conferences you attend, particularly if they’re a presenter.
• On airplanes, especially if you’re seated in first class.
• When you serve on the same task force, special committee, commission, or other elected or appointed group.
• Online.

Increasingly people are developing relationships with others they meet in cyberspace via chat rooms, news groups, or visiting each other’s Web sites. Even if you never meet in person, there is significant potential for developing an empowering relationship in this manner.

Get Formal

Formalize the process of meeting empowering people. If you want to be a champion goal setter and goal achiever, you’re going to need a lot of empowering people in your life.

How Many is Enough?

Pick an initial goal of how many you wish to have. Perhaps it’s six or twelve or eighteen. There’s nothing magic about the number, fewer could potentially serve you just as well. More, potentially, could work too, although you run the risk of encountering logistics problems. You can only talk to so many people on a regular basis.

If you have too many empowering people you’re likely to give the twentieth or twenty-fifth empowering person short shrift. For openers, let’s say that your initial target is six empowering people. Chances are there are already six such people in your life or six people who hold the potential to serve in this capacity. Could you list at least three right now?

Staying Alive

With each of your empowering people, if the relationship is worth maintaining, you will need to undertake some effort. What will you do to maintain the relationship? With some, you’ll go to lunch occasionally. With some, you’ll mail them things which support their interests or that indicate what you’ve been doing. You’ll certainly call, fax, and e-mail each of them at least monthly, perhaps bi-weekly, and with some, even weekly or more often. You will constantly be on the lookout for opportunities of interest to them.

You don’t approach keeping in touch, however, as some kind of grinding, unrelenting task. Happily, this can come to you almost naturally. Since these six people are important in your life, you’ve posted the full contact information for each in your appointment book or calendar, and you carry it with you all the time. They’re certainly in your e-mail address book. So, maintaining the relationships can occur rather naturally and easily. To facilitate your correspondence with your empowering people you might actually create a label page for each person, 30 labels in all — three labels across and ten down.

Then, if you want to mail something to Bob, simply go to a file folder of all your label pages, peel one off from Bob’s page, and affix it to an envelope. If your computer and printer are so configured, perhaps you can print the address right on your envelope.

This Too May Pass

As with members of your peer group, other people from support groups, mentors, and advisory board members, the relationships with your empowering people may come to an end, hopefully later, rather than sooner. People move, change their direction in life, pass away, or simply lose interest in maintaining the relationship. It’s a part of life.

You didn’t think for a minute that the six people your going to try to have empowering relationships with would be the six forever, did you? Since the process of identifying and nurturing relationships with empowering people is a dynamic one, you’re always bringing new people into the fold, while encountering yet others you suspect will become empowering people in your life.

Networking Upward

If such people are a regular part of your life, slowly, inexorably, if not rapidly and easily, you will move in the direction where their wisdom leads.

You don’t have to be a gung-ho career type. For whatever you’re pursuing, whether it’s spiritual tranquility, deeper religious devotion, more leisure in your life, or a blood pressure reading of 110 over 70 — the empowering people in your life can help you get there while maintaining balance and relative simplicity and, at the least, creating a tad more energy than you would have mustered on your own.