How Do Other People Perceive You?

December 25, 2009

Interview with Mike Cook, author of the book Thrive: Standing on Your Own Two Feet in a Borderless World

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Mike Carruthers:
You can't really get ahead in life or in your career without the help of other people, so how other people perceive you is very important.

Mike Cook:
And can you honestly say that when you encounter people at work, that when you're complete with an interaction with them that they're looking forward to the next time that they get to see you.

Mike Cook, author of the book Thrive: Standing on Your Own Two Feet in a Borderless World says the ability to work well with other people, creating that interdependence, is not something we're all necessarily good at.

I find that in many cases people really don't embrace interdependency - they brace against interdependency. Meaning they work with other people not because they see that as the pathway to larger, bigger, better things, they work with people because they have to.

Many of us don't like the idea that we really need people.

And the truth of the matter is that we all need each other, unless we scale our lives back to such a small degree that whatever it is that we want, we can do by ourselves and that's not a very big life.

And Mike says to need other people is not the same thing as being needy.

I think needy is where I'm not really offering you anything in exchange, what I'm saying to you is, "You've got to help me because I'm just helpless." The sort of thing that I'm talking about where it's "need", my approach there to life is to say, "Well of course I need but so do you, so let's talk about what we can do for each other and both get what we want."