How To Begin The Networking Adventure

Whilst family, friends and other easily identifiable contacts are a good place to practice your networking efforts, sooner or later you will need to extend yourself beyond your familiar surroundings and look to attend relevant meetings and/or events.
 
In many ways, the type of meeting or event that you choose is not particularly important. If your hobby is old model trains, and someone advertises an ‘old model train meeting and exhibition’ you are obviously likely to meet lots of people who might become good network contacts. However, this is likely to be the exception rather than the rule.
 
In most cases, meetings or social gatherings of people will be much more general affairs and ones that can only be broadly ‘qualified’ for their possible relevance.
 
Start The Networking Adventure:
 
The trick in networking (if there is one) is to treat all meetings or events as an adventure.
 
Like any adventure, you may have some fear and trepidation about facing the unexpected, but you should also feel some of the thrill of the challenge and excitement in finding new people with whom you can really connect. By making time in your schedule to attend, you can use early opportunities to watch others networking and to get into the habit of talking to the people you meet.
 
Don’t forget, networking successfully means that we sometimes have to stretch ourselves to the edges of our comfort zones – hard at first but much easier with practice.

Be Prepared:
 
Whether it is a formal meeting or event (with one hundred people) or an informal gathering (of only ten or less) being ready or open to network is very important – like the Scout’s motto ‘Be Prepared’.
 
Even if you are shy, introverted, nervous, bored or tired, you just never know when you are going to bump into interesting and useful people.
 
Part of this process of ‘being prepared’ is to have crisp information about yourself available so that your communication is short, focused and clear – not totally unlike an elevator pitch. Some of this is provided by a good business card, however, effective networking is rarely achieved by saying ‘Hello’ and merely handing over a business card – you have also got to give something of yourself as a person.

Tomorrow, I will suggest some appropriate responses to the question: “So, what do you do?”