It can feel daunting to walk
into a large room and then come up to total stranger and strike up a
conversation.
Just seeing the networking event the boss asked you to attend on your calendar can illicit the feeling of waiting in the dentists office and listening to that
drill.
How do you approach them? What do you say?
The first and most important thing you can
do, is give yourself permission to network. According to Dale Carnegie, when
you do the thing you fear to do and keep on doing it, is the
quickest way to conquer fear.
In Never
Eat Alone, Keith Ferrazzi recommends hanging out by the drinks, because
that is the natural place for people to congregate. Almost everyone gets a
bottle of water or a drink at some point in the conference.
By approaching people in a open friendly way, truly listening and finding out
what interests and friends you have in common? What is the worst that could
happen?
“If you eat a frog first thing in
the morning, the rest of your day will be wonderful.” -Mark Twain
What is the ugliest wart-covered thing you
have you been procrastinating with? Write it down on a piece of paper and make
an action plan to over come it. Identify your frog and go eat
it!
By doing what it is that you find most most
difficult, first thing in the morning, everything else in your day seems much
easier.
Last night, I was a judge at the YMCA’s Teen Entrepreneurship
Competition where my good friend Sheena Lindahl
made an incredibly power speech, garnering spontaneous applause from the
whole audience midway through the panel.
She said that our dreams don’t die sudden
deaths. We don’t say "I have a vision and a dream but I am not going to
follow it." Dreams die at a snails pace. They die because we say we need
to get ten more years of experience first, they die because we say we need that
advanced degree first, they die because we need x amount more money, they die
because we don’t give ourselves permission to begin following them today.
But It doesn’t have to be that way. You have
the power to take that first step. You can bite into that frog today.
Bon appetite.