4 Ways Dating Can Help Your Business Relationships

When people say dating has started to feel like a business, it is difficult not to take it negatively. Personal connections themselves feel a little impossible today, with how networking, presentation and influencing on social media can make interactions seem superficial. 

However, relationship coach and businesswoman Megan Weks reveals that actually, personal and business regularly go hand in hand: maintaining relationships with both require hard work, persistence, and empathy to be successful. While it can be easy to see the rewards in one to be frivolous and then the other to be materialistic, both can, if you let it, lead to rewarding opportunities towards progress.

Visualizing You And Your Potential First

When Weks was 35, she set out to get married within the year— not just to anyone, but the person who was “not 80%... but 100% who she wanted.” To Weks, business goals require the same commitment to herself and her visualized potential — she is deserving of her goals and won’t “settle” for a compromise. “There's a little bit of magic involved in creating relationships,” Weks said. “The steps I take to manifest something into reality are to 1) Visualize 2) Feel a positive emotional excitement around it happening 3) Take action by taking steps toward the goal.”

Of course, in this process it is hard not to fall victim to your own negativity. Weks advises to watch out for toxic of negative thought patterns that may target yourself or even the other person in the relationship. By welcoming yourself to good energy, you are able to successfully build the charisma you need to convince and comfort others in the relationship through your warmth and admiration. 

Keep The Funnel Full

Weks’ program, The Manfunnel, is based off the popular sales term used to discuss potential leads in business: like the shape, you will only close the deal with 20% of the people in the funnel, so it’s important to keep your options plenty in the beginning. With her background in business development, Weks applied the same thinking to dating: in the year she committed to getting married, she would go on two to three dates per week, so even if she met someone she liked, she wouldn’t have all her eggs in one basket. “When we explore many people it is a learning process about ourselves and others. Keep a full prospect funnel and you'll have higher quality options within the funnel,” Weks said. “To keep a full funnel you do need elbow grease. Worthwhile personal connections take just that… connection. A relationship goes two ways and must be built through real human-human interaction.”

Get To Know Their Essence

Once you are confident in yourself and your goals, you are able to provide and care for others. Whether on a date or a business meeting, it is important to get personal with the person you are meeting: according to Weks, it is important that the other person understands that you care for who they are. This means getting engaged, getting invested: listen to them without thinking about what you are going to say next, and listen to the stories they tell you — these are essential to treating the other person as a human and not just as a potential match or as a business partner. 

But of course, while it is important to give yourself to the other person, don’t put them on a pedestal or let them devalue you.“We all have pain, hopes, dreams, fears and doubts,” Weks said. “The person you hold in such high regard may be able to learn something profound from you. Don't lose sight of that fact. If you put them on a higher plane they will sense it as a clue of your value or lack of confidence.” 

Know When To Fold

In business, just like in dating - know when to walk away. Most importantly, it is okay if the relationship doesn’t work out. It is easy in relationships to see a collapse as a bad reflection of who you are as a person, but often it just means you weren’t the right fit. It is important to instead take this relationship as a lesson, and realize that you are worthy of other and greater options. “Some people are just not our cup of tea and we are not theirs,” Weks said. “That’s okay. Realize you can find a common ground with any personality type if you learn what makes them tick, what they love, what they want to learn, what they stand for, and what they may need help with in their lives or business.”