Have you ever thought about how spotting someone can help you understand relationships better? One of my recent talks on the Bounce Pep Channel was about spotting and networking, so I wanted to write about it in more detail for my readers. By the way, if you’re not subscribed to the Bounce Channel, you’re missing out on valuable insights, so get subscribed and stay inspired.

Spend enough time in the gym, and you’ll see someone spotting another person who’s lifting. You may even have been a spotter for someone before. The two primary reasons for spotting someone are to help them complete their most challenging reps and prevent them from injuring themselves while doing so. Safety is paramount, especially when lifting heavy weights. No one wants to fail the last rep of a bench press, for example, and have all that weight come crashing down onto their chest.

As a spotter, you operate in a spirit of goodwill. You’re there as a helper, and you show care and compassion to the lifter. Care, because you want them to overcome their plateaus and achieve gains. And compassion, because you don’t want them to injure themselves in the process. Your focus is on what the lifter can achieve.

This has two downstream effects. The first is that you establish or strengthen a connection with the person you’re spotting. He or she allows you to connect with them by trusting you. In fact, the spotter’s help and the lifter’s trust are key components of the next effect, which is a sense of community. People in healthy networks, like healthy communities, help and trust each other.

To summarize, we can say that spotting shows caring and compassion, and it builds connection and community. This is the spotter's 4C framework for networking that can help anyone become a person of influence.

Here’s the bottom line if you want to be a better networker: it’s about how you can help. A lot of people hate the idea of networking because they believe it’s contrived, robotic, and transactional, and it is when the person initiating it is not doing it to help someone else. If you approach networking as a mere means to get what you want, you will never be great at it because the other person has no reason to be interested.

Be a helper first, and the other person is more likely to want to help you out in return. When help becomes reciprocal, it establishes and expands networks. So, now that you understand the 4C framework, go out into the world and make it work for you. 

Sayonara until next time.

*This message has not been authored in whole or in part by any artificial intelligence tools.