I’ll always be a big advocate of networking and here’s why! ✨
If I could put my October into words, It’d literally be, “Keep Going, you never know who’s watching”… literally!
In my younger years, I really struggled with networking. Conquering my introverted self, taking the conscious effort to actually get out of bed, shower and dress for networking events has definitely been one for my books this year. If you’ve been around here for a while, or an avid reader of my blog posts, then you definitely know I’m a monster at setting and achieving goals. Once I put my mind into something, I go all out to achieve it. My big goal this year was definitely on networking. Why big? It required me to get uncomfortable. (You know what they say, that if it doesn’t make you uncomfortable, then you aren’t growing)
As with many of my goals, I set this uncomfortable goal at the beginning of January 2023. I get so specific with my goals, for example:
- Attend a minimum of X social media events this year (Feb – Dec)
- Apply for X number of awards this year (here I write down what those awards are)
- Grow my Blog Followers by X numbers every month
…and so on and so forth. I get so specific with my goals so that as I go through the year, I already know what my goals are for each month.
With networking, I honestly shivered at setting specific goals. I was scared, and in doubt of myself. I just knew I’d want to network, but the plan wasn’t really clear. I did not have specifics for this one goal. When it comes to scary goals, I try not to limit myself to specifics because at times, as I’m reviewing my goals through the year, I might sit down and get so scared that I immediately become unmotivated to pursue them. With networking, I just left it open, with a “So help me, God”.
I already had a list of events I knew I’d want to attend, so I wrote these down. But as I progressed through the year, I read something about why it was important to walk with mentors in one’s journey. I reached out to one amazing lady whom I had always looked upto in the social media and digital marketing space, and the rest is history.
Having a mentor (especially if you’re an introvert), pushes you waaay further than you’d push, or move, if you’re doing it all alone. My mentor kept me accountable to my career goals, and even went ahead to introduce me to people within her network which made me scale up faster.
One attitude I find particularly annoying with Gen Z, is that we want quick wins, but we do not want to do the hard work. It’s Q4 2023, on a scale of 1 to 10… how much personal effort would you say you’ve put in to make yourself better when it comes to your career? Are you still waiting for luck to find you? Because I can tell you for free… even if luck comes your way, it won’t last if you don’t know how to utilize your moment of luck. I live by the mantra that anything good in life takes hard work, and hard work leads to being smart. Being smart will lead you to opportunity, but then, if you have opportunity but you are not prepared, then that too will pass you.
How self aware are you when it comes to building yourself, or your career? A smart mind definitely knows that we are moving past the times where you have to know someone in an organization to get a job. Smart Gen Z’s are slowly changing the game. If you want to move fast, play the short game (connections and relying on uncles to find you jobs), but if you want to accelerate, play the long game (work on yourself). This, I find, is an approach that works well for anything worth having in life. We need to practice delayed gratification by playing long game more often.
Due to my networking efforts, I got a chance to be a guest speaker at Janet Machuka’s X Spaces mid October. Anyone who knows Janet knows she’s a big deal, and that was definitely a huge move for me. I got to talk about “Building a Brand as a Beginner SMM”, and would you know it? More than 1k people tuned it, so that was definitely a first for me!! Did I feel scared? Very much YES. Did I back down? HELL NO!!! Incase you missed out on the episode, feel free to listen to the replay and while you’re at it, please follow me on X (Formerly Twitter). (PS: If interested in the topic, you should find a summary of the topic with useful links amongst my top/latest tweets, which is downloadable and free!)
As I conclude this somewhat long post on networking, I hope to urge more of us to be conscious about networking to build your brand. Prioritize human connection as much as possible. Virtual events are good, but as we almost say goodbye to 2023 and anticipate for 2024, let’s have a strategy for physical networking in place, Identify a couple of events within your industry that you can plug into and meet new people. If it seems to scary, you can start with what I did – just have networking as part of your goals, and end that with a “So help me, God”. If you’re intentional about it, it works!
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