Renee Warren

When I was in high school I was convinced to join the mountain bike team. With no experience or the right equipment I signed up. What did I have to lose?  On my first day of our team ride I pulled up to the parking lot with my $199.99 Canadian Tire bike, my Walmart jogging pants and an old hoody. I thought I was prepared.

I did this every week, a couple times a week for a few months. Preparing myself for my first race at Hardwood Hills, I had no expectations of what a mountain bike race was like. I thought I was well equipped.

Equipped I was not, but physically and mentally ready I was.  Showing up to the starting line on a cold rainy fall day, smiling ear to ear, I took a few minutes to check out my competition. Umm, Ok. So maybe my bike won’t hold up. On either side of me were girls with $4000.00 bikes, sponsored gear, helmets worth more then my bike and quads bigger then two of mine combined. Crap!

Within a few minutes we were all ligned up ready for the starting gun to go off. When it did I put pedal to the metal and went full tilt off the start line. Mud and elbows flying everywhere, grunts and shouts coming from beside me. Who the heck are these girls? Christ, I think I had applied mascara before this race. These girls barely wore deoderant.

Halfway thru the race I took sometime to finally study the trails and the competition, noticing I had just passed racer after racer. Though it seemed I was still way behind the packed, I soon realized I was passing those same girls I saw at the start line. The ones with the fancy bikes. Ha! I kept going strong. Within minutes I past the finish line, laughing at the fact that I had just finished my first ever mountain bike race, on a cheap bike.

Then I heard my name … “Renee! Renee! Renee!” I turned around to see my parents running at me. “Renee… did you cheat? Did you cut the trails?” My dad asks.  ”What? No!  Why would you think that?” I reply. “Well, it seems as though you placed 15th, out of 55 racers” my dad says with enthusiasm. Well holy crap. I certainly did.

It doesnt always take the best equipment, technology or gear to win a race. It often times takes but sheer determination and a little laughter to get ahead of the pack and finish a race you never thought to enter in the first place.

I am not talking about getting people to click on your Facebook ad, like button or call to action. No.  I am talking about what it takes to click with another person. The ultimate capacity to bond with an acquaintance or stranger. Clicking is finding common grounds with someone you may have known for minutes, hours or years.  There are many people you may click with right away, and others who take a lot of time.  But what are the underlying reasons that people can ‘click’?

I just finished reading both ‘Click – The forces behind how we fully engage with people, work, and everything we do‘ as well as ‘StrengthFinder 2.0‘ and noticed a similarity between my themes from StrengthFinder and the hypothesis in Click: different people click differentially. No two are the same.  I, for example, am a Positive, Harmonious, Includer so find it very easy to click with almost everyone. While others, some good friends of mine, are incredibly secretive and passive that they take much longer to find common grounds with new people. Mostly worried to be too open, it can take them years to really get to know them. Some people have hundreds of friends, acquaintances and close contacts, because they click more often.

Connecting, or clicking, with someone is about two things: proximity and time. The closer you are geographically and the more time you can get to spend with someone, the more likely you will be to click. This is best displayed in the example of the students in a police academy. As explained in the book Click, it is almost 90% predictable who will be close friends throughout the course of the police academy program.  John Adams and Robert Adamson will most likely click as would Steven Warner and Gary Warren. See the pattern? Alphabetical relations. Throughout the course of the program, students are arranged alphabeticaly so spend the majority of their time in proximity to one another, increasing the probability of clicking. And since the program runs over the course of a few months to years, these students spend a lot of time together. However, once the program is complete, it is not necessary that they will remain friends. Location, time and circumstance brought them together.

What makes someone click with you? And how best can you leverage that bond in your personal life or in your business?