How to Build Your Network to Achieve Your Goals with Jayson Gaignard

Hal Elrod (0:02)

Hello, and welcome to the Achieve Your Goals Podcast, the show that empowers you to wake up to your full potential and achieve your biggest goals and dreams. I am your host, Hal Elrod, and I invite you to join us each week as we share actionable strategies to take your life to the next level, as well as interview world-class experts and entrepreneurs who have achieved extraordinary goals themselves, and we ask them to give you a peek behind the curtain and teach you exactly what you need to do to do the same. Ready? Here we go.

What if you could develop a network of extraordinary people who would help you achieve your most important goals without needing money, status, or a following to attract those folks? I want you to sit with that for a second because your ability to build and harness your network might be the exact thing standing between you and everything you are capable of. My guest today, Jayson Gaignard, will close that gap. He is the author of the brand new book Community Made. When he got married, he had two people at his bachelor party. That's it, two. No network, no following, nothing handed to him. Today, he is the author of Community Made and he just sold 20,000 copies of that book on Kickstarter, a quarter of a million dollars with 2,500 Instagram followers. He is not some huge influencer. What makes this conversation different is that Jayson built his entire world of relationships from nothing using a specific approach that anyone can follow, whether you've got money and status or you're starting exactly where he did from scratch. So stay with us because you're going to learn the three questions that tell you exactly who belongs in your life. You're also going to learn why the most common way we try to help people actually pushes them away that you should never ask, how can I help you? And you're going to learn how somebody with no platform and no clout can still end up in the room with the people who move the needle. It is my great pleasure to bring you this conversation with my good friend, Mr. Jayson Gaignard.

Jason Gaignard, it is good to be with you, brother.

Jayson Gaignard (2:06)

I appreciate you having me, man. It's an honor.

Hal Elrod (2:08)

I've been a fan of yours since I attended Mastermind Talks over a decade ago and just watched your journey ever since, man. So the fact that this book, I have your first book, Mastermind Dinners, and this one is the culmination of all the work since then. So I want to jump right in. You argue that people have been conditioned by society to value being self-made but that nobody builds anything meaningful alone.

What does the self-made myth cause people and especially entrepreneurs like us, who continue believing it?

Jayson Gaignard (2:36)

It's just one of those things that just permeates business culture and the American dream, one could say. I mean, you look at the cover of Forbes, it's usually self-made man or self-made woman. There's usually only one headshot on the cover of Forbes. It just reinforces this kind of nature. It's funny that just nobody questions it. Then when you actually get to know people who have achieved anything in life, even if it's an individual sport, let's take it outside the context of business, they have coaches, they have trainers, they have therapists and all that kind of stuff that have contributed to their success. It's a very clear pattern that no matter what you strive to achieve in life, it will naturally have the fingerprints of others. If you can let go of that notion of being self-made and be in position where you're willing to ask for help and get people to fly in formation to support you, it makes you very conscious as far as where you allocate your energy especially when it comes to relationships. That's really the premise behind the book is planting my flag that the notion of being self-made is both nonsense and it's toxic because it leads to isolation.

Hal Elrod (3:37)

For people listening, you teach us that we can design our peer group instead of simply inheriting it. Most of us, it's like we grew up with these folks, we work with these folks, the people that we met, the inherited peer group, but walk us through your bus framework. How should we decide who gets a seat, where they sit, whether somebody may need to get off the bus, which can be hard sometimes, but walk us through that framework.

Jayson Gaignard (3:59)

Yeah, so a lot of the books in the space, there's almost like two different types of books in the relationship space. There's either the transactional networking books, which feel a little itchy to some people, me included. I want to talk about that in a bit, yeah. That emphasize the importance of relationships, but they don't give you anything tangible to actually forge these relationships, one could say. With Community Made, I set out to hopefully bridge that gap for those that have a desire to build those types of relationships.