DO YOU NEED HELP? THEN STOP BEING FAMILIAR.

I can remember several occurrences in secondary school when I had difficulty with the subject “chemistry”. I will rather prefer to meet someone who is not a very close friend to teach me when I obviously had friends in my circle who could go the extra mile to teach me only if I reached out to them and clearly communicated my needs.

Could it be the way we are by nature? Or was it just me? Does that also happen to you?

In this article, I will help you understand:

• The meaning of familiarity
• The effect of familiarity
• How to stop being familiar

What is Familiarity?

The Merriam Webster dictionary defines “Familiarity as the state of knowing and seeing a person so well. Most of the time, we get familiar with people who are close to us: friends and family members.

I will define familiarity as an act of downplaying or overlooking the abilities of individuals who are close to you. After all the word “A prophet has little honor in his hometown, among his relatives, on the streets he played in as a child.” Is so true.

My life coach defines familiarity as relating to the container and not the content. You might think and say,” Is it not my mum, brother, sister, or very close pal I talk to every day? I will rather reach out to someone else…the fact that it happens to a lot of people is the reason we should consider it.

You have to stop being familiar

The uninteresting fact about familiarity is that you might not really know that you are engaging it.

Familiarity will stop you from making the most of relationships. Imagine you needed to learn a trade or get on a new career path and you go all around looking for career mentors when your brother is also an expert in that field but because you just think someone outside there who you don’t know or have a relationship with will mentor you well. Hmmmm…maybe you are wrong and you have just been too familiar with the container that you don’t value the content.

Familiarity can make you lose out on good business, career, financial opportunities, and a lot of other opportunities.

Do you see that familiarity is not your friend?

Can you think of some relationships you have at the moment and how you have been relating to the container over the content?

How to stop it intentionally

Now that you understand what familiarity is, you are most likely already thinking of how you have been engaging it.

So, I am here again to tell you how to stop it intentionally.

When you start being unfamiliar (by this, I mean relating to the content above the container) you begin to see that the relationships you have with these people get stronger because you are giving them a platform to add value to you. When value flows from one person or a group of people to another, the connection gets stronger.

You know what? Most of the time, you don’t need the new relationships you are looking for, you just need to look within your existing relationships and learn to know how to leverage them.

Regardless of how loving you are to a person or whether they are related to you by blood, if you don’t have a value flow from them or to them and they find someone else who does, they connect more because of the impact of the value.

It will interest you to know that because of the connection you have with these people you don’t have to cajole them or beg them to help you because there is an existing relationship as opposed to someone you just met and you are trying to build trust with.

In recent times, I have been more intentional about sharing growth content with my family members and close friends because I noticed that I find it very easy to relate on growth topics to people who are not so close.

The goal of my write up is to help you see the relationships you have which you have not been leveraging as a result of familiarity and how to start making the most of those relationships.

Can we start now?

• Think and write down the top 3 things you need in your life at the moment
• Quietly think through people in your network who you haven’t necessarily considered that can help with it and match their names to those needs and reach out to them.

Start doing this and thank me later…