Every relationship has a half-life; what are you doing to maintain yours?
Somehow I ended up spending over 12 hours of my Saturday writing emails.
That’s longer than I spend working on most work days; so why did I do it? What were the emails about?
They were emails to all my key clients, connections and former work colleagues giving them my yearly New Year’s greetings.
I used to do it as a Christmas card but switched to a New Year message a few years back because I found myself too busy at Christmas and because the people receiving it were being inundated by other similar messages at the same time so mine was being tuned out by the noise.
Why do I bother?
It’s not just personalised emails that I send each year with well wishes but everyone of my Facebook friends gets a personalised voice note on their birthday and every new LinkedIn connection gets a personalised voice note when we connect.
This might seem like an awful lot of effort but for me I enjoy it and it serves the purpose of keeping the relationship alive.
I realised long ago that sometimes, even with the best will in the world, time can slip by and before you know it even the best friend you used to have, you haven’t spoken to them in months, or even years.
Proximity and recency bias means that old adages like “Out of sight, out of mind” come true.
We tend to favour people who are physically easier to see and who we spend more time with; hence why so many people make friends (or spouses) at work or with their neighbours.
“That’s just a part of life,” you might think but what if you want to maintain those old Relationships?
There’s only so many people who you can physically speak to on a daily or even weekly basis so invariably relationships will slip.
My efforts above are my endeavours to halt that slippage.
Sure you can do the dramatic reunion after many years (I had one of those last weekend when I went to Vienna to catch up with friends, some of whom I hadn’t seen in over 20 years — fortunately we had a couple of dogs to help us overcome some of the inevitable small talk moments).
Whilst I love those big bang events, like most things in life, small and more frequent trumps one big bang (e.g. a 10 minute run every day is better than a 3650 minute run once a year).
So, my yearly email is my attempts to avoid putting too much onus on 20 year reunions.
Yes, it would be even better if I did it more frequently but for me this is a good balance for now and is completely worth the 12 hours on a Saturday.
Does it make a difference?
Many years ago, I was working in a tech company where my job as Sales Director was to find an additional £100m in sales (pretty tricky considering the firm had only made £70m in sales the year before).
One of the key tools we discovered by crunching our own data was the 10 day rule.
This quite simple showed that customers were 4 times as likely to purchase a second product from us in the first 10 days of their first purchase (assuming they had no problems).
After that first 10 days, the likelihood to purchase decreased by half each day; there was a clear half-life to making a second sale, this meant that it was crucial to reach out within those 10 days.
Although I haven’t done quite the same analytical fact finding when it comes to my connections, I find that there is a half-life to the relationships we used to have.
For me, a year is just about good enough to give me a chance to maintain the relationship, after that it gets harder and harder — it may be that 6 months is the optimum time but I’ll have to come back to you on that one.
In fact, anecdotally, when I reach out once a year to my connections about half respond in one form or another so I would say that’s a pretty good return 🙂
More than that, even if they don’t respond, I actually enjoy the trip down memory lane of recording a birthday voice note or writing a personalised email — these people have been a key part of getting me to where I am today.
Also, sometimes people surprise you; it could be 5 years of no response to one of my reach outs and then boom! Regular conversation resumes as those it never stopped.
That simple act of reaching out each year is like keeping a hand out signalling I’m there if ever you need me.
Every year, I never fail to be overjoyed by some relationship I thought I had lost that comes back into my life and sparks joy :))))))
Conclusion
It’s easy to let a relationship wither and die (sometimes this is no bad thing but this happens far too often to good friendships) but with a little bit of effort it doesn’t have to be that way.
You may want to take a step back and find your own way of keeping the plate spinning on some of those relationships that you have liked but are in danger of slipping away.
It doesn’t have to be a voice note or even a Saturday of emails; my top tip is to find something you enjoy doing and incorporate it into your Lifestyle.
Even if you don’t then, if you are a connection of mine, look out for the yearly reach out that will be heading your way 🙂
Faris
Faris is the CEO and Founder of Shiageto Consulting, an innovative consultancy that helps firms and individuals sharpen their effectiveness. Connect with him here
Success = IQ x EQ x FQ
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Originally Published on https://farisaranki.medium.com/
