Network integrity
I don’t expect you to have all the answers. Don’t feel like you have to pretend that you do. Don’t give me a reason not to trust you as a person by faking it. Be honest with me.
When you don’t know, trust your community – your mentors, advisors, customers, colleagues and friends – to help you figure it out.
This is the power of the network, and its secret sauce is trust.
If you are authentic with yourself, have genuine relationships with others, and behave with integrity towards your community, they will not only trust you, but they will believe in you.
And when the time comes – as it inevitably does – that you don’t believe in yourself or you start doubting yourself, while ever your community believes in you, you can draw from that to rebuild your own self-belief.
This is the superpower of the network, and its secret sauce is integrity.
In these and other situations the network can be immensely powerful. Your responsibility to this source of your power is to make sure your network doesn’t become imbalanced or stale.
If it does, you run the risk of pawning honest feedback, constructive support, challenge, critique and the growth and learning that comes with those for blind sycophancy, lethargic thinking and self-aggrandising hype.
The echo chamber is the shadow of the network, and your best safeguard against that is diversity.
2 Feb 17
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