Yesterday morning, the first appointment on my schedule was to attend a networking event that I had never attended before. To add to my anxiety it was at a location that would take a little bit of thought to figure out where it was.I also had a second networking event at the same time that I usually attend each month that was on my schedule. I knew where that was and knew who would be there.
Listen to a recording of the voices in my head yesterday morning:
"Oh, you don't want to go to (new event) because you won't know anybody."
"You should go to (familiar event), it's safe and you'll meet people you're comfortable with."
"You know you're going to get lost."
"What if they act like you shouldn't be there?"
"Is it really a good use of your time?"
"No, you'd better go, because MB (a friend) invited you."
So I ignored the voices and did go. Guess what!
They didn't look at me like a had two heads.
I actually carried on conversations with a couple people I already knew.
I ran into someone that my presence triggered a question from him.
I made acquaintance with a new person who lives in a area where we are filling one of our Certified Networker classes.
Lesson Learned?
Do the difficult, scary stuff an it won't be so difficult and scary. It might even have a future ROI.
When did you push yourself outside your comfort zone and how did it turn out?
3 comments:
I gave a presentation to a group in the summer of '06 and it resulted in a referral that equaled $6000 worth of business in 2007. Anyone who knows me, knows that am full of butterflies just at the thought of public speaking.
Having just moved to the area, not knowing anyone and wanted to get my business up and running, I felt I was WAY over my head. I called up Kathy Stringham, Coffee News, to chat about advertising. I had no idea who she was, I had never advertised, I was clueless.
I remember saying something like, "I think I just need to jump off this cliff" to her. I began to advertise with Coffee News. She introduced me to Monnie Holman, who introduced me to you.
.....as they say, the rest is history.
Being a technologist (OK, "tech-nerd"), I'm much happier hiding in my office and working on the computer. I started forcing myself to make just three phone calls a day to people in my network. This wasn't traditional "cold-calling". These people actually knew me.
As a result of making those calls every day and just finding out what's going on in peoples lives, I've picked up projects totaling in the thousands of dollars. On top of that, I've been able to make several connections between different members of my network.
Guess what else? No one, yet, has told me to stop calling them because they didn't want to talk to me. I guess I didn't have as much to worry about as I had thought.
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