Are You That Friend?

I’m writing this to you while my head is swimming with amazing information shared during CMB’s Fall 2020 Virtual Summits. As usual, I’m getting my money’s worth! (Well, the boss paid. So, her money’s worth.) With all this useful information though, there’s a danger of feeling inferior and paralyzed. I don’t want it to go to waste, so I’ve been chewing on a simple filter I’ll run this information through. I doubt I came up with this myself, but I also don’t know where I copied it from. The filter is: “Am I THAT friend?”

Am I that friend my listener is excited to go on a drive with? On social media, am I that friend my listener clicks “get notifications from”? Do they care about me enough to visit my profile if I don’t organically show up in their feed? Could I be the friend they’d want to take on vacation? Am I that friend my listener would invite into their messy home? Or am I the one that has to call ahead so my listener can frantically clean first? As much as I appreciate sitting in on a clean couch, man, the kind of friendship that doesn’t require the frantic clean is a lot more intimate than the one that does. This is the kind of air talent I aspire to be and the kind of friend I hope the brands that I program can be.

With that filter, I can more easily go through my notes and ideas and see which of them help me start or deepen that friendship. You can strategize and implement all the convention notes and research takeaways on the planet and be absolutely nowhere if you aren’t, above all else, a genuine friend to your listener.