Building a Professional Community (BAPC – 1) – Turn Off Your TV
In our private lives, turning off the tv is easy – a little intestinal fortitude and a thumb on the power button, followed by a flick of the power bar switch to turn off the phantom power suckage. But what does it mean to me in the professional realm?
To me, regularly scheduled network and cable television is all about:
- imposing a schedule on my time – less so with time shifting
- bombarding me with endlessly repetitive marketing messages that tell me what’s good – better – best
- artificial comedy (kill the laugh track), overactive drama (life = soap opera) and the lowest common denominator of humanity (reality tv)
To build professional community, we need to be in control of our time – and schedule for the events that are meaningful – whether they are personal or professional (and the line between the two is increasingly blurred). A successful professional is rarely a couch potato, slave to the remote control. Nothing wrong with watching your favourite programs (in real time or via time-shifting) – but I hate it when I hear things like “I can’t attend the <insert professional networking event here> because that’s the night I watch Survivor. That get’s you voted off my island.
There are sales and marketing geniuses out there that believe we should “Always Be Selling” – but building professional community is about more than the pure commerce of business. The word community implies a sharing of knowledge, a flowing of resources, a fairness of exchange, and compassion for each other as human beings. It is more important to be interesting than to be aggressive. Hve your elevator pitch ready, but make sure you more to say to another human being than your 30 seconds of blatant self promotion. When I meet you, I want to know “What’s in it for ME” – not “What’s in it for YOU” – and I hope you feel the same way. We can then meet in the middle and discover what new and exciting ideas can be developed as we determine “What’s in it for BOTH OF US.”
Personally, I hate programs that exploit the foibles and weaknesses of people – I think that slapstick is a form of bullying, and that low comedy deprives us of compassion. Similarly, I have friends who act like they are starring characters in “As the Stomach Turns” – their emotional response is so immediate, dramatic, over the top – to life’s everyday frictions and frissions that honest open hearted relationships become fragile things. Reality TV makes survival an adversarial pursuit. While I believe in healthy competition, I don’t believe that the only way to get ahead is at the expense of others. I’ve met sociopaths, and I don’t like them.
So turn off the tv, and the bad social behavior it inspires and endorses. Be more interesting than what you watch. Bring more to the table than decisions determined by how many commercials and infomercials you watch – do your own market research and don’t believe the hype.
Next BAPC Topic: Leave Your House (ooooh….. scarey). Tell me what you think so far.
Enjoy the day,
Susan
I recall from an old video I saw, a line saying “Overnight success doesn’t watch a lot of television lately.”
Media consumption – indeed, any information consumption regardless of platform – is very passive in nature. I think this clashes pretty thoroughly with the idea of community in general, as participation can’t be passive at its core.
If you want community, you have to participate – otherwise, you’re a wallflower, an observer.
Ian M Rountree recently posted..Attending the Manitoba Business Awards
My favourite saying about community is “If you want to co-create, you must participate” – and passive voyeurism is abdication nor participation. Thanks for the comment!
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