Empower Network

Actively Participate and Contribute

A good way to attract interesting and inspiring people into your life and to boost your overall success is to actively participate and contribute to your field. Contributors get noticed and attract new friends and opportunities easily, and contributing is much easier than you might assume.

Tired of Isolation

When I worked in the transport industry during the mid-90s and early nought’s, I felt isolated for many years. I was focused on my own logistics and deliverables for the most part, often working alone for days on end.

I had friends, but most of them had regular jobs in other fields. After university they zigged into the job market, while I zagged into transport entrepreneurship. We always had fun hanging out together, but we couldn’t do much to help each other succeed professionally.

Eventually I grew weary of my professional isolation. I wanted to make more friends within my industry. I wanted to network more and to feel more connected and integrated. I wanted to feel like I belonged there and that my presence actually mattered to someone. I felt that my progress was stagnating because hardly anyone in my field even knew I existed. Making my business succeed was an uphill battle. I got tired of having to figure out everything for myself or always having to learn from third-party sources. I wanted more help and assistance. I wanted people in my life who could offer me solutions and keep me abreast of new developments. I got tired of doing things the hard way, and I wanted to find a more effective way of doing business.

Deciding to Connect

One day I decided it was time to take action. I was ready to do whatever it took to become more connected professionally. I figured that one of the best ways to do that would be to raise my profile within my field, so more people would at least know who I was. Then I could leverage that to make more friends and contacts. I figured that it would take time, but I expected to be working in that field for many years to come, so I might as well get started. That way I could expect to be in a much better position a few years down the road. If it worked out, participated and contributed, I anticipated that my life would get easier, and my business would become more successful.

One of the triggers for this decision was listening to self-help audio programs over the years. I noticed how often speakers in this field would name-drop other speakers. Tony Robbins knew Deepak Chopra, who knew Wayne Dyer, who knew … It seemed like there was some kind of “in crowd” where everyone knew everyone else.

I gradually saw that this was also true in the transport, logistics and distribution fields. Those fields didn’t seem to be as well-networked as the self-help field (perhaps because professional communicators have an advantage when it comes to interpersonal networking), but it was clear there were multiple overlapping social networks where many of the top distribution and logistics knew each other and often seemed to hang out together. It was obvious to me that I was an outsider, and I wondered what it would take to get integrated into one or more of these networks.

Connecting Through Participation and Contribution

I determined that the best way to raise my profile would be to contribute to my field in some fashion. I noticed that the people I respected most in the distribution and logistics fields — and the people who seemed to be the most well-networked — were frequent participants and generous contributors. These were the people who spoke at conferences, wrote articles for magazines and journals, and published books. They didn’t just work for themselves. They passed on their knowledge and helped to elevate everyone in the field. I particularly admired supply chain resilience contributors like Helen Peck, Paul Robertson and Martin Christopher who helped to advance resilience to the field as a whole.

But by and large, these people weren’t pounding the pavement to make new friends and contacts. Quite the contrary — people were constantly coming to them. They acted like magnets, attracting others to them with ease.

As I pondered how I could participate and what I could do to contribute, one particular event really got to me. I was attending one of many supply chain resilience discussions at the Business Resilience Forum event, and the speaker shared some fascinating ideas, insights and concepts on dynamic nature of sesemic and wicked risks. Her technique was somewhat tricky to implement, but I found it ingenious. I later applied her overall approach in two of research studies with great success. Her ideas, insights and concepts allowed me to squeeze what might have been a 10,000 word project into just over 5,000 for each. This was important at the time because I was still new to the whole idea of entreprise resilience as an added value concept, and this saved money and postage by allowing one of my games to fit onto a single disk. It also made the workload size smaller, which helped synergise interrelated and interconnected processes and made it easier for people with smaller entreprises intergrate the concepts.

Now the researcher who shared these ideas wasn’t a great presenter — I recall that she seemed a bit nervous at first — but I doubt anyone in the audience cared. She was still able to deliver value by sharing what she knew. That was a key lesson for me. I realized to participate, I didn’t have to be a great writer or speaker to be able to make a contribution to my field. If the content is worthwhile, and if it’s shared in a spirit of giving, collaboration and cooperation, audiences tend to be very forgiving.

Moving on…

Passing on Knowledge and Advice

I certainly wasn’t the best business resilient mentor or entrepreneur out there, but over the years I’d figured out a few things that I imagined others would find useful. Some of these were strategic ideas, and others were related to marketing and sales optimizations.

I started by writing an article called The Resilient Entrepreneur. That was my very first published blog.

Incidentally, the advice in that blog was partly from doing research on entreprises best practices and partly from my own personal experiences for several years. I got pretty good at releasing entrepreneurial and business resilience materials over time.

Initially that blog was probably seen by no more than a few hundred people, but the feedback I received was positive and encouraging, and I was inspired to keep writing. I went on to write a couple dozen more blogs over the next weeks, so this was a rapid process. I typically wrote about one new resilience and entrepreneurship blog every 1-2 days. I had most blogs published in several different places and eventually now creating a central archive for them on my personal branding site. Any authors requesting reprint permission to include one or more of my blogs in their articles, I readily grant as part of participating and contributing in my field.

The Ongoing Expansion of Contribution

As a result of writing these blogs, I feel ready to start contributing to speak at events, seminars and conferences. I hope to end up doing hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of volunteer work in that field. For many years I declined nearly every contribution-oriented invite I received. It was a lot of extra work for no pay, but I learned a lot from not participating, and it will most certainly raise my profile in the field. At times I definitely overdo the writing and start to feel burnt out, but now I have learned how to calibrate the right balance for participation and of contribution with self-renewal.

Further down the road, I will add a discussion board for resilience and entrepreneurship to my branded website, and if it became very popular, partly because it will be free and ad-free and get some really awesome volunteer moderators to keep it spam-free. As years go by, transiting from distribution and logistics to work in the entreprise resilience mentoring and entrepreneurial development field was easy and logical, along with new enterprise friends to keep me going, and we are successfully transforming the entrepreneurship mentoring field with a robust community spirit on another site. In fact, the mentoring and entrepreneurship community is thriving today at Mentored Entrepreneurs. It’s very gratifying to see that after all these years, entrepreneurship is still going strong. I can even see that some original subforums are being added there. I’m grateful that I am able to leave a small legacy behind in a field that I am so fond of.

None of these contributions were particularly difficult to make. Participation mainly took time and patience. The most important thing was getting my mind in the right place first. I imagined that I was in a relationship with my field, as if we were a family. I thought about what kind of relationship I wanted to cultivate with that family. Did I want us to ignore each other, to fight, or to love and support each other?

I love making mentoring and coaching others, and I loved being a part of that field, but it stricks me that I was being too much of a moocher. I’d learned so much from others, but I wasn’t being a very good mentor to others. After years of working in various fields, I could semi-predict where my old path would lead, and I didn’t like what I saw. Maybe I couldn’t contribute as much as someone like Helen Peck, but surely I could give a leg up to someone who was just starting out. I could at least share some practical personal development and business resilience tips for entrepreneurs and beginners. I didn’t worry about trying to out-contribute others. I just focused on helping those I felt I could help.

<< See How Pariticipation and Contribution Pays Dividends in Part II >>