Your capabilities are defined by your specific motivations, traits and skills. Understanding the inventory of your own motivations, traits and skills helps you understand how you behave and make decisions even under the extreme pressures you will encounter as an entrepreneur. Understanding motivations, traits, and skills also enables you to better help teammates be and others successful in their decision making by understanding on their motivations, traits and skills. With this specific set of knowledge you can understand how to act and share decision making in more complimentary and less stressful ways (our session 8 on Relationship Building will expand on this).

Most people can tell that they are in a relationship, but most people have a very difficult time describing the relationships they are in. Being able to spot and create shared objectives underpins the ability to knowingly form meaningful and powerful relationships; this ability is key to mastering the relationship building skillset.

A relationship is a connection between two people. The “thing” connecting people in a relationship is called a “shared objective.” A shared objective is anything that two different people aspire to have happen.

To explain how you weave together cooperative, competitive, and retreating shared objectives with individuals that play a big role in helping you make your dreams come true, I will use a real example. My success as an entrepreneur would not have been possible without a deep and productive relationship with my second-in-command.

If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you will need to successfully create new relationships with strangers. This requires that you approach them in such a way that they clearly understand your proposed cooperative shared objective and their share of the potential payoff. There are many ways to do this and here we discuss some of the easiest to master.

The most basic and fundamental of all relationships is formed when two parties communicate. No powerful and productive relationships can form without communication. Communicating always has the shared objective of accurately transferring information and emotion between two people. Understanding the strategies that improve accurately transferring information and emotion is essential to the effectiveness of people working together.