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Entrepreneurs like to be in control of all aspects of their life. Unfortunately, there is one aspect of their life that proves to be more difficult than their business life. When it comes to dating, negotiations and meetings take on a different meaning, I mean you can’t sway a potential life-partner with a business plan.
Or can you?
This article sets out to explore and advise entrepreneurs on an aspect of their life that may well be far outside of their normal comfort zone. We will offer some tips to help them navigate the most unpredictable of things: close human relationships.
1) Apply Your Business Experience to Your Love Life
Entrepreneurs have a skill base that is outside that of most people. They know how to spot openings and move in quickly. By treating the act of meeting potential partners in the same way, all you are doing is utilizing that most important of entrepreneurial skills. The ability to see potential early and act quickly.
This is merely playing to your strengths; it is something entrepreneurs apply to all aspects of their business life. But personal strengths work in private life too! So swap those elevator pitches for a bouquet of roses, a box of chocolates, and a dinner invitation and you may well score that life-changing deal.
Apply the same bold strategies that have served your business life so well and the same success is bound to follow.
2) Cards on the Table Time
Okay, so the advice is to use your business strengths to hook that life partner. This is an analogy that shouldn’t be taken too far though! Business and personal lives have many differences, but one is crucial to building and sustaining a personal relationship.
In business it is often sensible to play one’s cards close to one’s chest. This is something that should be completely reversed in a dating sense. In a close personal relationship secrets can be a time-bomb just waiting to go off and blow the relationship apart. Be open with your potential partner, explain what you do, what your goals and plans are, where you see yourself (and your partner) in a few years’ time. Be an open book!
3) Try a Dating Website
This is an obvious one, but many people still balk at the thought of an online dating website. Don’t! Entrepreneurs are good at selling themselves and a dating website is a platform designed for just that purpose.
Not only can you sell yourself on a dating website, but you can quickly narrow down your options of potential partners too. And if you like to keep your private life just that as far as friends, colleagues and family go, then this might be the perfect solution.
4) Let People Know You’re Available
A dating site is great if you want to keep your intentions to yourself and potential partner. However, another great approach is to do the exact opposite and let friends and family know you are on the lookout for a life-partner.
It’s amazing how many people are always willing to help in this aspect of a friend’s life. Don’t be afraid to ask for recommendations and advice and once that seed is sown, then you are at the forefront of people’s minds when opportunities come along.
5) Choose Carefully
Perhaps this is something you’ve been thinking about for a long while, and now the time is right. You have the free time and energy to apply to the task. Your first instinct might be to jump at the first opportunity. However, this is likely not a philosophy that you apply to your business life, so why apply it to your love life?
You are in a lucky position; the world is at your feet and now you want to spend some time getting that partner to share it with. Why rush this decision? This is both you and your potential partner’s chance of lifelong happiness. Grasping at the first opportunity that comes along should only be done if you are positive this is the right person.
Apply the same criteria as you do to your business life. Ask yourself if this is the right person for you, just as you’d ask yourself if potential employees or business partners are people you could work with.
6) Invest
Invest, because ultimately that is what you are going to have to do! And we’re not just talking money here, although that certainly helps. Here we’re talking about investing yourself, your time, your personality, your dreams and goals. It took time and investment to grow your business and you didn’t think twice about it. Apply the same mindset to your dating life and the payback will come.
When someone sees how much effort you are willing to put into a relationship it immediately builds a solid foundation that can sustain a lifelong relationship.
7) Be Open Minded
Being an entrepreneur, this is likely a mindset that you already apply to your business life. I can virtually guarantee that every day you will see opportunities that just wouldn’t be seen by the average man on the street. It is this open-mindedness that makes you the entrepreneur you are, it is an ability to think outside the box.
Applying the exact same mindset to your private life can be difficult for some entrepreneurs. It seems to be part of the make-up of many of us. However, applying this ability to spot opportunities to your private life can produce the exact results. Success is often just a case of being open-minded.
Balancing Your Business and Relationship
Life can just whizz by in a blur of business deals and late nights in the office. For many entrepreneurs this is enough, but many have also realized too late that they put all their efforts into their business life and none into their private life.
Achieving a work/life balance and a partner with whom to share the fruits of all that hard work, could be just what you need to complete your happiness and get some proper perspective on what is important in life.
Have any more dating advice for entrepreneurs? Let us know down in the comments.
This article originally published on GREY Journal.
