In this solo coaching video, certified high‑performance coach Sean Buttner presents the fifth pillar of his week‑long "Five Pillars of High Performance" series: building relationships and influence. He explains why strong relationships are critical to success in business and personal life, drawing on classic advice from Dale Carnegie and his own experiences at Apple and Walmart. Buttner shares practical, low‑effort tactics such as observing people’s surroundings, asking interest‑based questions, and offering encouragement, illustrating how these habits can improve collaboration, speed up processes, and increase personal influence. He also warns of the pitfalls of abrasive behavior that damages trust, using a story about a manager who alienated admin staff. The video concludes with a call‑to‑action inviting viewers to a free one‑hour strategy session via shabutter.com, positioning his coaching service as a way to apply the high‑performance lens across health, work, and personal growth.
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Your day. Great. Start your day with a coach. I am your certified High performance coach, Sean Butner. And this week we've been talking about the five pillars of high performance. So Monday we talked about clarity, finding higher and sustained levels of clarity in your life. Tuesday was energy. Wednesday is courage and being bold. Yesterday was focus and productivity. And today is all about building relationships and influence because we know that if you're able to build strong relationships and keep relationships that will directly relate to your level of success in business, in your personal life, and out in the world in general. So it's such an important thing to think about, especially like this might be weird from someone that spent 15ish years in technology and software, but really getting things done on projects was all about understanding the people on the project and how you could push and produce in a way that didn't turn them off or prevent them from wanting to help you later on. Right. You know, the adage goes that you can, you know, attract more bees with honey or something like that. I probably should have thought about that metaphor a little bit more before trying to run through it. But really, like, the idea is from classic books like how to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, that, you know, taking interest in others and building relationships is a huge part of just the human experience. Right. And there's a way that can make you effective at it and there's a way that can hurt you going forward. And, you know, a prime example is when I was working at Apple early on, probably that was about seven years ago, ish, six, seven years ago. There's a new manager that had joined the team, was leading our team and really would always have to ask somebody else on the team to go to the admin to ask for equipment or for, you know, just basic stuff that, you know, our awesome admins would do because he had burned the bridge with them just by being very, very abrupt and brash and demanding and only showing up when he needed something. And eventually, like, it got so bad that they just said, we're not going to help you or put that at the bottom of the priority list. So he quickly found out that he had lost that relationship and needed other people to kind of make asks in a way that, you know, actually got the new equipment, got the accounts set up or whatever it was. So it's a quick, you know, story to illustrate how important it is to always be thinking about your relationship to other people, especially in a work setting, especially with admins who are gatekeepers for a lot of functions inside a big organization. So, you know, it behooves you to not classify yourself as being above other people in that regard, because you never know what you might need, never know what your timeline might be. And someone can either really help you and pull through in that instance or not. And so how do you build relationships? It's really like a common sense thing is just notice people, right? If you're in an office or you're out of zoom like this, or you know, video conference video, you know, take a look at what's on people's desks or in their background, right? So like for mine, you can see a bookcase, you can see guitar, you can see some art cards. Over this way, I might notice an extra computer. So there's a ton of questions you could ask about, hey, like, what kind of music are you into? Do you play guitar? Do you play any other instruments? What kind of books do you like to read? What's up with all the technology, you know, that kind of stuff. And these very simple basic questions of just showing interest in someone can really help you. One, like just learn how people operate, learn how people think, learn what people are interested in. And so when you're like, hey, I'm gonna go to this cool concert, oh, maybe I should talk to Sean. I know he plays guitar. I know he likes the Saint, like similar type of music or he likes this band, you know, it's just a little touch, soft touch point that a lot of people forget, right? You know, another example of how this can be really helpful is if you've ever worked on a project and you needed help from other teams so you don't have maybe formal authority or influence over another group in your organization. You know, having friends, having people that trust you, or having people that like you could be the difference between having to go through a two week process to set up accounts. And this really happened to me when I worked at Walmart, or you know, getting it done in 10 minutes because it was a very simple thing. But there's a process and it's like, why are we doing the process? If you could just do the thing and we're done with it, you know, so that's how effective and awesome. Building persuasion skills. So notice things in people's backgrounds or in their office space, wherever they work. That's a really great way to start asking questions to get to know somebody better. If you know that somebody loves the something like bicycling or ice cream or pizza or whatever, you know, that's always something. Hey, how's it going Guy, you know, did you check out the pizza at this new pizza place? Or hey, how did your race go this past weekend? It's all, you know, just that simple touch of humanity before, okay, now we need to talk about all the things that we got to get done today can help build those relationships. Another thing to do is to just encourage people, right? Everyone has interests and everyone, it's very free to be like, hey, you want to go and be a manager? What are you doing to, to get there? You know, what are you doing? How are you training? How are you leveling up? What are you struggling with? What, what is, you know, the roadblocks to you from getting promoted or you know, stuff like that. But yeah, just being that cheerleader, being that positive force. Like people, if they have to choose between working with someone that is a jerk or someone that is encouraging and has a positive energy, most folks will choose positive energy assuming that competence is equal. So that's how I would, you know, a couple of points I would talk about and influence and this is also something that I talk about a lot with my coaching clients and I know this year with people transitioning to working from home, you know, sometimes you could lose some type of channels of communication or influence in organizations. But that's what we talk about in high performance coaching. It's one of the five things that we talk about went through the five pillars this week. So if you're interested in having a more in depth conversation related to your life, how you can live into your full potential and really excel in your work, in your health, in your personal life and general well being, go to shabutter.com coaching to watch a video and fill out an application for a free one hour strategy session. I love doing it. People get so much value out of it. Get a lot of insights going through your life with this high performance lens. So if that's you, make sure you go there and sign up. I'd love to help you out with a free hour of coaching just to get a taste for it and then if you like it and I think we can work together, we can talk about further actions there. Full disclosure, but the whole goal of the strategy session is to make sure you walk away with a plan and see the value of the process. So we will take care of that first. So okay. Happy Friday everyone. Hope you enjoyed this series. We'll be back at it next week and this Sean Binder saying, go live with more joy, more personal growth and more impact in your communities and I'll see you soon.
