At least once a week I receive an invitation to connect with someone on Linked In who I have not met before.  Being an open-networker, I promptly respond to the person asking for a face to face or virtual meeting so we can get to know each other, understand how to refer one another and determine if there are other ways we can help grow our businesses.  As this other person initially contacted me, I would expect a courteous and prompt response to schedule a meeting.  Unfortunately that is only true about twenty-five percent of the time.  The rest of the time I do not hear from these individuals at all.  To me this is a lack of business etiquette and a lost opportunity.

Why do we connect with others?  Usually it is to gain referrals, find resources and receive new business.  How can any of this be accomplished if all one is doing is clicking the “link” button.  How do I know who to refer you to?  How do I know which articles and resources to share with you?  How could I feel confident enough to refer business?

In this fast-paced electronic age, it is so easy to click a button and believe we are serving our business then frantically moving on to the next task.  I completely understand how busy we all are but we are not serving ourselves professionally or personally by speeding through our relationships.  As a life coach, one of my mantras is telling people to slow down.  When we speed up and focus on the future to-do’s we often miss the present moment.  One of the things we miss when we are focused on the every growing heap of tasks is building the relationships we desire personally and professionally.  These relationships mean more than any single task or accomplishment.  Don’t let the ease of electronics fool you into thinking you are making real connections.

And watch in amazement when you do make real connections.  The other day I received an invitation to connect.  Not knowing the person, I asked for a meeting.  I received an immediate response.  The other person was floored.  He had not been asked to meet before connecting and was excited to meet me.  In preparing for our call, I checked out his profile.  He is a publisher and a terrific resource for me as I complete my first book.  After speaking to him, it is clear he is a wonderful man as well and I am now ever-vigilant in searching out opportunities and connections which may benefit him as well.  Another positive story about real connections is about a woman who connected with me last January.  We had not spoken since then but as she is moving into a new career she reached out again because I had some resources and information she could use.  I was happy to help and she was also willing to speak to another connection of mine whom she may be able to provide guidance.  It is all about giving and receiving.  In order to do either, it is important to make real connections.

How many Linked In contacts do you have?  When is the last time you reached out to them?  Why not find someone you haven’t heard from in a while and drop them a line?  Or why not reach out to someone you can help or who could potentially assist you and see if you can begin a true strong connection?

I love Ted.  No that is not the name of my husband or pet.  In 1984 TED conferences were created to have the best of the best speak about Technology, Entertainment and Design.  But is has grown to so much more and is truly ideas worth spreading.  A friend sent me a link to TED the other day for Marco Tempest’s presentation about The Magic of Truth and Lies (and iPods).  It is surely worth the view if you have five minutes to spare.  But as often happens, once I finish one TED segment, I can’t help to launch into another.  This time the one that caught my eye was Graham Hill’s Less Stuff, More Happiness.  His talk reminded me of my college years and the trips to and from Peoria and then to and from Los Angeles where I lugged and shipped boxes upon boxes of books, a bicycle and goodness knows what else back and forth and back and forth again at great expense and inconvenience with the irony that I don’t know if I ever used more than ten percent of the stuff I moved around.  But what really resonated with me is the idea of downsizing, especially now that my husband and I are dreaming of moving from our twelve-hundred square foot home onto a twenty-seven foot boat.

Don’t get me wrong, I love our house.  We have spent the last eight or so years fixing it up, repairing it and making it truly ours.  Plus we have more remodeling planned for this winter.  But sometimes it feels like so much extra, so much padding, so much just surrounding and not interacting with us.  For instance, our garage attic is filled with boxes from our move years ago which we have never opened!  What is in there?  If we haven’t missed is by now, do we really need to keep it?  There are also rooms in our house which are used infrequently if ever.  Graham mentions that over the last fifty years our homes have tripled in size and we have needed to add outside storage to keep all our stuff, but it has only resulted in credit card debt, excessive environmental footprints and having our happiness flatline over those same years.  Sorry “Keeping up with the Jones’” more stuff does not equal more happiness.

There are so many physical items we keep around us because we believe they are part of us, they are part of our history or they define who we are.  We use them to surround ourselves with comfort and insulate us from harm.  But even if we are not eligible for the next episode of Hoarders, we may have some extraneous items clogging our lives.  Yet getting rid of or “editing our life” as Graham says, can be difficult.  Can you recycle the first love note your husband sent to you?  Can you give away the blanket Aunt Ginny crocheted for you but just doesn’t match your décor?  Can you let go of the mementos of your life?  Thanks to technology, the answer to many of these questions can be yes.  My collection of books will eventually be donated to the library when I add them all to the Kindle I so desire, my husband’s vinyl collection can be moved to MP3, and many of the remembrances of our lives can be scanned or photographed and stored for future viewing.   To me, the physical item is not as important as the memory and the meaning.

Have you ever let go of something which is no longer of use or is just collecting dust?  An amazing thing happens, it makes you lighter.  Really, it does.  Just like Scrooge’s partner Marley with his chain of wrongdoings, our throng of stuff can weigh us down and keep us from enjoying our lives.  This is one of the reason I love moving.  It is a great opportunity to go through the physical elements of our lives and really evaluate what we would like to keep.  Although it can be scary, purging the extraneous things in our lives can open up the door to new and better things arriving – physical or experiential.

Take some time before Thanksgiving to look around your house and find five things you can donate.  Choose clothes you haven’t worn in the last twelve months or check your kitchen for bowls or bakeware you do not use frequently.  Feel what it is like to let go and be a bit more free while possibly helping out someone else in need.