(This post is the second part of a two-part series. Part one can be found here.) 5. Remember, there is no template Like in part one, I'm starting this segment with a psychological hurdle. We often have a perception of what a networker is - someone extraverted, someone who is oftentimes the life of the party, someone with 4,839,234 friends in Facebook. A natural gift of gab certainly helps, but it doesn't mean your destined you can't network well if you aren't. Some of the very best networkers I've come to know are mild-mannered and unassuming. This is important if we want to grow into mega-networkers: it CAN be learned and it ISN'T necessarily tied to our personality. Like in … [Read more...]

I have always found it easy to speak before a crowd, but I've always been a little bit on the shy side when it comes to one-on-one meetings with strangers. It's funny that I never really saw the value of effective networking when I was in Human Resources. As a startup owner though, I gradually found out how extremely critical it was to network effectively. Clients, suppliers, co-startup founders, mentors, friends, advice-mongers - you name it, I've found them all in networking. We all know the cliché, "It's not what you know, it's who you know." I used to scoff at this when I started working, having the image of a social butterfly in mind. I have discovered though, that it's not like … [Read more...]