We all have our area of influence in society. This is that part of society with which we interact intentionally or otherwise. Within this area of influence our standing or performance in society is indicated by how other people accept us – how many and what types of friends we have; how many subscribers, leads, customers, critics, well-wishers we have and are able to retain. A notional leader will have entire country in his area of influence. Of course, it is up to each of us to determine our area of influence, but how other people behave with us is an indicator of our social performance much like scoreboard in sports that indicates performance of teams and players participating in game.

Let us put this concept in a statement:

Statement No. 1 : Behavior of other people determines and indicates our performance in society.

Now, how do people behave with us? Why do they behave in a particular way? Why do people want to subscribe to one newsletter in large numbers and are reluctant to subscribe to another? How are some people able to pull in lot of customers while others are not so successful?

The fact of matter is that WE teach others to behave with us. WE tell other people how they should treat us, how they should respond to our gesture, whether they should trust us, ignore us, or get rid of us. In all our communications we reveal something of ourselves, we allow them to make judgment about us. This is true of all means of communication we may choose to adopt – face-to-face interaction using verbal communication with body language, thru internet, thru printed message or any other. It is ultimately thru our own behavior that we invite people to deal with us as it suits them.

Statement No. 2: Behavior of other people towards us is influenced by our own behavior.

What you’ve got + What you need = What you want .... Right? Well... maybe or maybe not. We often strive to fill that gap between what we’ve got and what we want focusing our attention on weaknesses. In fact, I often have suggested this strategy myself in coaching sessions. Yet recently I have been investigating another point of view. Are we spending so much time and energy trying to get up to speed where we are lacking that we miss opportunity to leverage and maximize strengths, talents, and resources that we already have?

Even our brain seems to develop to our strengths and talents. In Now, Discover Your Strengths, a book based on Gallup study of over 2 million people, by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D. authors explain how brain’s threads are woven. To summarize, they say that your “synapses create your talents”. The synapse is a connection between your brain cells, called neurons. Your brain grows quickly and by age 3 you have about a hundred billion neurons with fifteen thousand synaptic connections. The odd part is by your 16th birthday you have lost 1/2 of your connections. Don’t be concerned though, authors explain “your smartness and your effectiveness depend on how well you capitalize on your strongest connections. Nature forces you to shut down billions of connections precisely so that you can be freed up to exploit ones remaining.”