Humans are social. We build tribes, neighborhoods, online communities, clubs, cities, counties, states, and nations. Our survival depends on the good will of other people. Expand the number and range of people you can count on to support you by making genuine friends and friendly acquaintances, and you expand your potential to succeed at anything you might attempt in ways you cannot possibly yet imagine.

Your Circle of Control

Write your name on a sheet of paper. Now draw a circle around your name. This is your circle of control. You are able to control everyone inside this circle. Currently, the circle only has your name inside of it. This is as it should be, because you cannot control anyone but yourself. Try though you might using threats of leaving, displays of anger, bribes, pleading, or overly long lectures - other people are beyond your control. They do as they choose to do. You can only control yourself.

Your Circle of Friends

Draw another circle much farther out. Inside the wider circle, and outside the smaller one, write the names of the people whom you are 100% sure will support you when the poop hits the fan. These are your closest friends - the ones who tell the media following your arrest that you are innocent of all charges even though they will be portrayed as morons by the media. These people will not waver.

Who goes inside this circle? Your mom? Your two closest friends? Perhaps someone that you might not expect belongs in there but you are unaware of it. At any rate, the number of people who are inside your circle of friends are probably very few. Disturbingly few, if you really are completely honest and leave out those people who should support you about whom you have some doubts. When things get bad, often everyone abandons us except the very, very few.

What is important to remember is that we are so often wrong about who goes in this circle.

Your Circle of Influence

Draw another circle even wider still, and inside that circle, write all of the names of the people with whom you have influence. These people will allow you to pitch your ideas, will give them full consideration, and are likely to support you because you have a good relationship with them. They may not be your closest friends. They might not even know where you live. But you are friendly with them during conversations, smile at them as they walk by, listen to them when they have a problem, are courteous to them in interactions, and you have perhaps supported them in the past and have earned their respect. You know them, they know you, and they like you.

These people are inside your circle of influence.

Outside of Your Influence

Write the names of people who fall outside of this category outside of your circle of influence. These are the people you are not able to influence or have little or no relationship with. When you are headed into a meeting, these are the people who are likely to shake their heads “no” even before you finish presenting your ideas.

Your mission, from now until the end of your life, is to move names from outside of the circle of influence to the inside of that circle.

How To Expand The Circles

If we are social creatures all of us, then the more names that are inside the circle of influence, the more supporters we have. With more supporters comes more constructive criticism, more feedback, more creative input, more suggestions and guidance, and more helping hands pulling us up. The fewer people inside the circle, the more socially weak we are and therefore the more likely to find ourselves isolated and unsuccessful.

It takes more than some cash, a good idea, and some brains to succeed in business. Many small start up businesses fail every year, but they do not fail because of poor judgment. They fail because the owner was convinced that he could do it all himself and essentially did not like people.

All business is working with people. Other people are the key to success at everything. Athletes need excellent coaches and cheering fans plus sponsors to foot the bill. Businesses need raving fans to spread the good news about the business by word of mouth. People working the phones in a call center need the goodwill of their team mates and management before they will be promoted to management. A politician running for office needs the support of other politicians, a political party, sponsors, advertisers, media outlets, and not the least of which is voters.

In fact, though we might find the concept a bitter pill to swallow, we are all politicians all the time. We are continuously and forever bumping into people and having conversations that basically amount to job interviews. We are forever reaching out to others to help us. When we are ill, we need someone to take us to the doctor. When we are old, we need someone to visit us. When we are up for promotion, we hope that no one in the office is in a closed-door session with HR listing our many failures for them to review and investigate.

How do we move names from outside the circle of influence to the inside of it? First, read the article on acquiring power and consider some of those concepts. Here are some in addition to those:

1. Draw your circles. Actually do the exercise above with a big sheet of paper. List the people that you work with and know in your life and put them on your map of circles. Identify the people around your office, neighborhood and even your family that you do not yet have influence with.
2. Make a plan. Mark Horstman defines a plan as “Who is going to what by when.” In this plan, the who is always you. The what is meeting someone who is outside your circle of influence and spending time on someone inside your circle of influence. The when? How about a goal of two people per week?
3. Set up a repeating practice. There is a business book out there about never eating lunch alone. The title says it all - spend time meeting new people and strengthening your existing relationships with family, friends, and acquaintences. As the circles widen, you’ll need a system for doing this - pop up reminders, calendar entries, a paper tickler file - something that you can use to remind you to reach out to others on a regular basis.
4. Join in. A great way to set up a repeating practice is to join organizations that exist around your office and neighborhood. Take a class at school. Participate in golf or tennis matches. Go to parties and cookouts. Attend all family events no matter how minor. Be at everything that everyone has. This may not be your nature to do this kind of thing, but the rewards outweigh the cost. Be seen and go see. Go from being that guy that is never there and who rolls his eyes at everyone’s activities to that guy who is never absent from group activities.
5. Make a database of personal information. Keep up with people’s interests and family members. Ask after them. Send little messages to them congratulating them on their birthdays and anniversaries.

As you make contact with others, your circle of influence widens. You meet new people and just the act of introducing yourself builds a bridge, however weak, that was not there before. Each successive contact, no matter how small, adds to the bridge. Slowly, gradually, your personal influence in your corner of the world increases as you expand these circles outward. It is amazing just how little effort is required to take yourself from deplorably anti-social to sufficiently social to double your prospects of success.

Enlightened Self-Interest

The thing of it is… our own self-interest is to do the right thing for others. We are most likely to succeed if we help and show genuine interest in others. We might think we are making ourselves our own top priority when we act selfishly and work to get our own way all of the time. If we truly want to be politically expedient and act strategically in our own interest, we have to focus on others, not ourselves.

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» Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is the source for the concept of a circle of influence.
» Manager Tools, the excellent site with hundreds of brilliant podcasts run by Mark Horstman and Mike Auzenne, has a great podcast about the topic of expanding your circle of influence called Building A Network.