298: How To Elevate Your Success by Learning from Your Network: Fan Favorite Replay

Hi there. You’re listening to the Leading Lady podcast. I’m your host, Allison Loftus, and I’m a certified professional coach specializing in leadership and work-life balance. I work with clients to shift their limiting beliefs, insecurities, and self-doubt. This podcast will be filled with tools and strategies to help high-achieving women like you feel connected, empowered, and in the lead of your life, both personally and professionally. Let’s transform your life starting now. Lead yourself. The rest will follow.

Hi there! For today’s episode, I want to share with you how your networking groups are really more than just referrals. It doesn’t matter where you do your networking, as long as you’re in a group where you feel that you’re surrounded with like-minded professionals who are just as interested in building your business as they are in building theirs. Many of us join networking groups so that we can offer and receive solid referrals to help us build our businesses. Something important that I want to highlight is that your networking group is more than just getting referrals and getting leads. It’s really about building relationships.

Building Relationships, Not Just Referrals

Like I said, with other like-minded professionals, challenging yourself to level up and improve your business practices. But also, it’s a great opportunity to learn from other professionals about how they do their business, what their areas of expertise are, and what skills and strengths they use to really get the most and be the most in the businesses that they have created and that they run.

A little more than two years ago, I created an online group called Leading Ladies with Allison Loftus. We currently have around 4,500 members. Our members include entrepreneurs, leaders of organizations, aspiring leaders, or women who feel that they are leading their own life or leading others, such as their family, an organization, their small business, really just anywhere where they feel that they’re stepping into a leadership role.

And I firmly believe that leadership starts with how we lead ourselves. If we’re showing up as our best selves and really tapping into our core values, our strengths, and our skill set, and using that to live our best lives authentically with purpose and intention.

Something that I allow or invite people to do in my group is, on the first of the month, anyone is allowed to promote or share their business and ask for referrals or leads to support their business and grow their business. I limit that to just the first of the month because, as you can imagine, when you have 4,500 members and they’re all sharing their businesses, it can get a little overwhelming. And the newsfeed on Facebook is just post after post after post of infomercials that maybe aren’t relevant to the entire audience. So I really limit that to only the first of the month, just so other information and posts don’t get lost in the day-to-day.

I’ve had several women that maybe disagree with that limit that I put on the group. They want to come into the group and share their business and promote their business day-to-day. Or they are maybe discouraged because they aren’t getting solid leads or referrals in their posts. And so maybe they decide they don’t want to be part of that community anymore because it isn’t giving them the solid referrals that they would like to see. They think that they’re putting out this really great infomercial or great information about their business and how people can work with them, and they just really aren’t getting a great return on that.

I’ll go deeper into how to create more meaningful content to engage prospective clients. But for today’s episode, I really just want to talk about how you can use groups and platforms and networking events and even networking groups and use them for more than just referrals, but really as a place to be with other professionals and learn from one another.

We are all experts in our own life. We are all skilled at the businesses that we do, the businesses that we’ve created, obviously passionate enough about the services that we offer that we decided to start a business or offer that to the public. And we all carry so many unique skills and strengths. And I think probably one of the most powerful things of being part of a networking group or part of a community of entrepreneurs and leaders is that you really have the opportunity to learn from one another.

Learning as You Build

Many of us didn’t go into business or go to school to become entrepreneurs or to be running our own business. For me, I went to school to be a teacher. I had no idea that I would someday own multiple centers and that I would be coaching other entrepreneurs and leaders. So my skills really were around education and working with young children.

I had to learn so many other skills and really tap into my individual strengths to figure out how I wanted to build my business and how I wanted to get the message out there and engage with my clients, and what type of customer service I wanted to offer. Unless you went to school to get a degree in business or in marketing or management or anything like that, you kind of have to pick up tips and tricks and strategies along the way.

And some of it, you find that you’re really good at it. And sometimes you find that there are some areas in your business that are really hard and that you really struggle with. So part of being in a network or in a community with other entrepreneurs and other leaders is that you get to listen and learn and gain perspective through the things that they have experienced, through their trial and error and through their triumphs.

Learn From the Mistakes of Others

There’s a beautiful quote by Eleanor Roosevelt, and she says, “Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.” That truly resonates with me because I often say we are either winning or learning.

There’s no way for us to make all the mistakes that we need to make in order to learn. Although at times in entrepreneurship, it certainly feels like it’s one mistake after the next. But really learning from others and learning how they built their businesses or what trials they had and what they learned from it, and just being open to learn from each other and share those experiences so that maybe you could help someone not make the same mistakes as you.

Or if you’re looking at someone and you see that that didn’t work in her business, what could you do differently to avoid that mistake?

So it’s important that when you’re part of a networking group or community or a forum such as the Leading Ladies on Facebook that you ask questions. I think that as entrepreneurs, we often feel alone and we often feel shame, or we’re afraid of being humiliated by admitting that we don’t have all the answers.

That really the disservice there is that we’re afraid to ask questions, and we’re afraid to look towards our peers and say, hey, have you ever experienced this? How did you get through it? What were the lessons that you learned?

I find myself always asking my clients, what are you learning from this? If you had to go back 10 years and you started your business knowing what you know now, what are some of the things that you would tell yourself then? What advice would you give to others who are experiencing the same trials that you’re having? Or what advice would you give to someone who’s thinking about starting their business, or launching a new program, or venturing out on something new?

Work On Your Business, Not Just In It

So I think that the main takeaway from this episode today is that I encourage you to not always enter groups, meetings, forums, or communities with the thought that you’re just looking to drum up business. Because you can’t always work in your business. Sometimes you have to work on your business.

Really, the majority of the time you should be working on your business. And part of working on your business is learning from others, taking time to reflect and listen, observe and assess what is not only working or not working for you, but also what’s working or not working in another professional’s business or his or her experiences.

So there’s so much valuable information, and I really try to practice that in all interactions that I have. I am either the teacher or the student. And so I’m either sharing an experience that might help someone else in their business journey or their leadership journey, or I’m learning from them something that can help me navigate my own experiences and circumstances to make me a better professional and small business owner and leader.

So in closing, I just want to encourage you to not only use your networking groups, meetings, and forums to drum up business, but also go in with a curious mind and ask questions, share your experiences, and connect with other professionals so that you can learn from each other and really just pull your strengths and your skills together to help each other be the best versions of yourselves as leaders and entrepreneurs.

So thanks for tuning in, and until next time, thanks for tuning in for another episode of The Leading Lady podcast. You can find all of the links and information mentioned in this episode at www. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe to the show so you don’t miss any future episodes. While you are there, it would mean the world to me if you would take a few seconds and leave me an honest review. This will allow me to be able to help other high-achieving women find inspiration, connection, and develop strategies to live and lead with purpose and intention. See you here next week.