Recently, I been reading about business strategies and the word “leverage,” came up. Typically in business, the word “leverage” refers to the amount of debt a company has in its mix of debt and equity, but I began to explore what it means on a personal individual basis, as well.
The synonyms for the word “leverage” are influence, power, authority, weight, sway, control, say, ascendancy, dominance, advantage, pressure, edge, standing, prestige, and rank.
When you consider these descriptors, it’s easier to put the weight of the word into actionable terms for both the person and the business or organization.
Whether you’re trying to bring value to the marketplace, your community or circle of influence, it’s much easier to do if you have “leverage.”
Your leverage is the people you know. It’s the contracts you hold, the successful work that you’ve performed or the product that’s done well in the marketplace. So many times, we fail to capitalize on past successes. I’m guilty of that myself. We do the work and the project or product is a great success. We happily we clap our hands or give ourselves a well-deserved pat on the back, and then we put our heads down to conquer then next giant.
I propose that it would be much easier to use that success to open doors to the next project, instead of taking on a totally new task.
When we unabashedly use our connections and our past successes as a beacon to say “see look what great thing happened, join in and let’s do great things together,” then we find fellows in the work, kindred spirits who can help push our goals further down the path.
I realized how many times I had failed to leverage my successes as I looked back on the past year of accomplishments. I was extremely proud of all that I had accomplished, but I was so busy moving on to the next thing on the list, that I didn’t stop long enough to draw a connecting arrow from one accomplishment to the other.
By failing to do so, I created work for myself and I missed opportunities to grow the business more organically.
So moving forward, I’ve committed to being more mindful about leveraging every accomplishment and every success as much as possible. In other words, I’m going to squeeze every bit of juice out of the lemon, so that I don’t have to keep planting lemon trees.
