Crafting a Lasting Influence

In my early teens, I failed to earn my Environmental Science merit badge as a Boy Scout because I wasn’t willing to follow through on the required 500-word essay. Most of my struggles throughout high school were due to having no interest in similar writing assignments and a complete rebellion against sitting still to read the various books assigned to us. In late 2016, however, I started an email series with the goal of adding value to subscribers while keeping our new business top-of-mind in the leadership development space, a very different sector than I was connected with (at least directly) in my professional career to that point. For quite some time, those emails were random but geared to teach a short lesson that the folks receiving them could apply, averaging four days each week with approximately 500-600 words in every message. I’ve shared repeatedly here that I’ve never felt all that talented in any area of my life, but I’ve always been willing to fall back on a solid work ethic and an extreme discipline for maintaining consistency. Those are what kept me going…

I received occasional replies over the first few years from folks sharing comments about how something struck a chord or how they were able to apply something I shared. I always genuinely appreciated those, and do to this day, but they were usually more of a surprise that anyone was actually paying attention than validation for any kind of measurable impact. Today, those same emails reach a few thousand folks weekly and the subsequent blog posts account for close to 150,000 views on our website each month. One thing I can assure you is that if anything you read or hear from me comes across as articulate, it’s from the sheer power repetition and consistency has in honing any skill. And through all that, I’ve learned to embrace my distinct voice in a way that reaches people I never dreamed of; many of whom I’ll never meet.

Nearly every business relationship that Cindy and I have today is with executives and business owners who are absolute rock stars in their respective industries. While we’ll never be able to do many of the things they do, we’ve been able to foster mutual respect by overcoming the self-imposed limits we battled early on - the same limits that likely prevented some of our initial clients (or prospective clients) from seeing the value we could provide or taking action on what we shared, even though we’ve seen many of them jump through hoops to apply the same things after hearing them from someone else.

Additionally, we frequently run into people who comment on things they see us involved in or share what they learned from us in a session years prior. We never take that for granted! That said, had we depended on that to become confident in our self-worth, there’s no way we could have pressed through all the obstacles along the way. Instead, we found modest strength (and mental toughness) through that intense consistency - something so many others just weren’t willing to commit to. Building that confident self-worth has given us the opportunity to leave a lasting impact through so many amazing professional relationships; relationships we couldn’t have imagined just a few years ago, many of which have developed through things we wrote or shared with groups and we’re only now getting to know the individual we’ve impacted.

Before we turn the page and dig into how knowing your worth can be a key differentiator between obtaining a certification and being the most qualified option holding that certificate, I’ll challenge you to create a plan for intentionally sharing the value you add, with modest confidence, to a colleague or mentee. Unless they know that you know how much value you add, they’re unlikely to see that value in you or receive value from you… When they can do this, though, you’ll see a lasting impact on your professional relationships too!