Don't Reduce Your Sphere of Influence to the People You Feel Safe With
I was on a zoom call a few months ago, in the build-up to attending the Inner Development Goals Summit, where the speaker was Frederic Laloux.
Laloux is probably most renowned for his book, Reinventing Organisations, one of the most significant contributors to the idea that organisations could be designed differently, to help humanity deal with a shifting stage of consciosuness.
The workshop, however, focused on his more recent work: The Week, a framework to engage people to action around the climate crisis.
Amongst his fascinating case study on getting people from inaction to action around such a complex problem, the biggest insight for me actually came when Laloux shared the biggest insight for him.
He had stepped out into a breakout room to join in as a participant, and when he came back he shared the biggest insight he had had from that breakout. And it was something like this:
I reduce my sphere of influence to people where I feel safe, but it is much greater than I think.
And what - he invited us to wonder - if we were to talk to people where we don’t feel safe to do it? What if we spoke to the people who it is outside our comfort zone to speak to, where we might be scared? How much would our sphere of influence grow?
I see this regularly with people I work with who want to activate their network, whether that’s for sales in a new business or to create more impact in their organisation or something else.
They might make a list of the people they will reach out to. Let’s say 1/3 of these it’s easy to reach out to, 1/3 it’s uncomfortable and 1/3 it’s REALLY tough to even imagine contacting them.
Usually they find it impossible to imagine, too, that there are more people who they might connect with beyond this list.
And then they work through the list.
It takes commitment, and courage. And on the other side of it, they are more competent about authentically connecting with people, and they are more confident.
And suddenly they have a bunch more ideas of people to add to their list.
People who didn’t even occur to them before, because they were reducing their sphere of influence to people where they feel safe.
When I was first starting my coaching business, one of my mentors gave me a challenge: invite 30 people into a coaching session in the month of May.
I’ve talked elsewhere about the power of a challenge like that for me, and in this challenge, I emailed inspiring acadmics, famous musicians, journalists I loved, and even got an invitation across the desk of a Premier League manager. And honestly, it didn’t take much effort.
It just took courage.
Now none of those led to any work (yet!), but after that, my level of competence and confidence is different.
My comfort zone is greater.
And my sphere of influence feels more reflective of what it actually is. Less resitricted by my fear.
For anyone who wants to create change in the world - whether that be their organisation, or their neighbourhood, or the world at large - our sphere of influence matters.
In fact, in some ways, it’s all that matters.
Sometimes it’s about being able to reach out to famous people or people with resources; sometimes it’s about being willing to talk about something that matters to you to someone out of context (hmm, my neighbour does have a job in the kind of industry I’d like to connect with, but we’ve only ever said 10 words to each other!)
So slow down.
Think about your influence.
Think about where it ends.
Then imagine that there is someone out there, just beyond that point, who - if you could find a little more courage - you could connect with.
Find the way to do it so that you connecting is both generous and gentle, but still authentic and clear (it’s one of my absolute favourite things to help people do this, so if you need help crafting a way to reach out, email me and I’ll help you, free of charge).
And then begin to practise.
Jennifer Garvey Berger, in her book Unleash Your Complexity Genius, writes about the health of a forest ecosystem: just like all complex systems, the health of the systems doesn’t come from the strength of the individual trees, but from the number and nature of the connections between the trees.
Tend to your connections.
And remember: you may be restricting your sphere of influence by your desire for safety.
Time to be brave.
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PS You might be interested in my latest long-read article. It’s about Mohamed Al-Fayed, Enron and Omar Little from The Wire. It’s called A Man Got to Have a Code: https://www.robbieswale.com/writing/2024/10/11/a-man-got-to-have-a-code-leading-with-honour-iii
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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.