Are You Relevant?

In my business world of speaking on topics of emotional intelligence, one of the most popular and most requested platforms is Navigating Generational Minefields. As I meet with my clients and prepare to deliver their program or keynote message, I’m constantly reminded of the need to speak relevantly and to model relevancy, especially to my growing audience of the Millennial Generation.

The way I first discovered this need for relevancy was motivating. A friend’s adult Millennial grandchild, upon noticing that she, his very youthful grandmother, was not dependent on nor did she understand/appreciate many of their social media tools and habits, suggested that this made her to some degree “irrelevant” to their generation. You can imagine what a disappointment this pronouncement was to this incredibly talented, highly educated, and sophisticated woman who could experientially and academically run circles around almost any member of the Millennial Generation. Could this be considered truth-telling?

Webster defines “relevant” in several ways – 1. as relating to a subject an appropriate way; 2. having significant and demonstrable bearing on the matter at hand; 3. affording evidence tending to prove or disprove the matter at issue or under discussion ; and 4. having social relevance.

I was intrigued by that last one, having social relevance, and went on to discover further that “relevance” is defined as: the ability (as of an information retrieval system) to retrieve material that satisfies the needs of the user.

So, upon further inspection, I decided that this assertion made by a Millennial offered truth-telling for me. In order to effectively speak into the lives of Millennials, I’m committed to continue to retrieve material “that satisfies their needs” as well as the needs of all my audience members of every generation. This year, the “Millennial” generation is projected to surpass the outsized Baby Boom generation as the nation’s largest living generation.

See that smile on that Millennial member from a recent audience of mine? I’m using that as a relevancy meter.

Is it time for you to practice Millennial relevance too?