How I developed my networking skills.

Go and talk to people…

Networking and attending events can be daunting for anyone but especially when you’ve just started in your career. When I was 20, I started working at an events company and I remember attending my first conference. The Managing Director (who I have a lot of respect for) said “Right, go and talk to people.” My heart sank into my stomach and I felt sick at the thought of having to talk to strangers much older than I was. I didn’t know what to say to anyone or how to approach people. As there was an expectation that I would be talking to delegates, I just had to get on with it that day. I remember on the way home thinking how awful it was trying to force conversation with people that day and said to myself I never wanted to feel like that again. So here’s what I did:

Reading

I couldn’t afford to send myself off on courses and I wasn’t sure how many of them would have been relevant back then so I decided to research what books I could get my hands on. Unfortunately, I have passed these books on to others so I can’t remember all of the titles but two that stood out to me where:

-           How to talk to anyone – Dale Carnegie

-           A book by the Financial Times on business networking

The FT book was good as a broad overview of building a networking and the first one gave me skills to talk to very senior people without struggling for words.

One suggestion from the book that I always do is to read the paper and always pick a section you would normally skip over.

Practice

Fortunately for me, given the nature of my job I was able to attend multiple conferences regularly which allowed me to practice my craft. I would say by the time I left, I had been to more business events than most people at my level and I felt very confident of just approaching people I didn’t know. I know not everyone is in my position but there are so many free events nowadays which would allow you to practice.  Just google “business events” and “your city” and you will find some.

Confidence

I don’t think there was one particular thing I did to help with this but definitely practising, reading and educating myself so I felt a bit more comfortable going to events and asking more senior people about what they talk about at events. I asked senior people within my family about what they did and how they feel about going to events. There’s so much advice on LinkedIn and online broadly that even reading an article a week will all help.

If I could go back and tell my 20 year old self one thing, it would be that the people going to the event are just people who have their own lives and issues and are normally open to having conversations with different people. They’re not something to be scared of and by practicing and feeling a bit more confident you will soon find attending networking events to be a breeze.

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