When You Help Others, They Will Help You. Including Google Reviews!

September 27, 2018 / in Company Culture, How To, Personal / by Jason Terry

Last week, I asked a question. The question was, “are you feeling overwhelmed?” And one of the solutions I talked about was walking. The reason this works well for me is that it gives my brain some space to work and it also crosses something important off my list… exercise.

The day after my post went live, I went for a walk at the Lenexa Rec center. I’m always looking for something interesting to listen to while I walk, whether it’s a new Spotify playlist or someone talking about an important topic. I’ve mentioned Simon Sinek in past blog posts… and I stumbled on one of his speeches that I hadn’t heard before.

That link will take you to YouTube, and the video is 39 minutes long. My hope is that you can listen to this next time you are walking, on a long drive or have some downtime. I think you will find it worth your while and maybe even inspirational.

When You Help Others, They Will Help You

One of the things I took away from that presentation was the real world examples he used to prove that when you help others, they will help you. He goes into a story about how the military works. How the men and women in service are willing to give their lives for each other. He explains how this happens, and it’s compelling. (Here’s a direct link to that part of his speech.)

Basic training is where this begins. Many of the people joining elite branches of the military are incredibly fit and physically capable. And at first, the goal for some is to try to finish first, to prove how good they are. They want to impress their instructors.

But the military knows that the only way for these men and women to succeed and form a bond with their fellow recruits is to put them in situations that they can’t accomplish on their own. They make obstacles too wide to cross without the help of a teammate. The recruits that aren’t willing to help others get to the finish line, so that everyone can finish, end up being excluded from the group. They learn the hard way that they’re going to succeed as a team or not at all.

This story was part of a bigger idea… paraphrasing, “We have to feel safe with the people we live with and work with. If we don’t feel safe, we’re forced to spend time and energy protecting ourselves from each other. This makes the entire organization weaker and exposes us to external danger.” And the only way we’re going to feel safe with the people we live and work with is by supporting each other through many situations. Consistently.

It really does work… Google Reviews for Blue Gurus

As I was thinking about the idea of helping others, I realized that this happened for me recently.

Blue Gurus only had two reviews on Google… because I’d never really focused on it. I decided to send out about thirty requests to people that I trust, respect and do business with. People that I’ve known for many years. People that I have strong relationships with because we’ve helped each other through many situations.

I asked them if they would be willing to give me a Google review. The shocking and humbling result is that every person went online and gave a 5-star review for Blue Gurus. I even got apologies from some… because it took them a week to get to it. This happened right on the heels of me listening to Simon Sinek talk about how far people will go to support you, when you’ve supported them. Cool.

So in the future, I’m going to share how you can ask people that you trust for a Google review. There’s no easy way to send a link that they can click on to get to the place where they can leave a review. But I figured out how to create that URL and will give you step by step instructions.

Thanks for reading! Please let me know if you end up watching Simon’s presentation, and what you think about his content.