Networking to Career Success: Dispelling Common Myths

When you’re building the business of you, you are your own company, your own product, and your own CEO. You can’t go anywhere without people. Networking is crucial to growing the business of you and fulfilling your purpose.

But people have some really funny ideas about networking. They imagine all kinds scenarios: some people imagine networking as a slow and painful crawl, others imagine sprinting out to the next social gathering and flinging themselves into exciting conversations.

In order to grow your networking meaningfully, you need to enter relationship-building activities with the right mindset and attitude toward networking (and not seeing it as a transactional, scary process). Here are some networking myths worth dispelling so you can get on the right track toward building your village.

It’s Not Just Who You Know, It’s Who They Know

Professionals just learning to network often believe their first-degree connections are most likely the ones to help them get to where they want to go. This is a natural assumption, to assume your closest associates have your best interests at heart because they know you.

But just because these connections know us doesn’t mean they are going to immediately act on our behalf. It’s about playing the long game, not the short one. This means you’re going to plug a lot of time into growing connections, which involves expanding outside of your immediate connections into their direct networks—those second-degree connections.

They travel in different social circles and work at different companies or even industries. As a result, they’ll know different people, information, and resources than your close relationships. The goal is not about soliciting opportunities from the first-degree connections but expanding to the second-degree connections for these very reasons. Plus, these second-degree connections won’t view you through the lens of what you’ve done or where you’ve been in the past like your first-degree connections.

It’s Not Transactional, It’s Relational

You don’t need to be ruthless and cutthroat. You aren’t out to exploit anyone. You’re going to be building genuine relationships with the people around you based on mutual satisfaction and mutual gain. As you help their career, they’ll help yours. If you and your new friend are each running “the business of you,” you’ll be building your companies together.

Jordan Harbinger encourages professionals to remember ABG: “always be giving” or “always be generous.” The key to building authentic relationships, says Jordan, is to provide value to others without counting the points and demanding compensation. Focus on providing constant value to others, and they will naturally return the favor with interest.

In other words, focus on taking care of the people around you, and they’ll take care of you.

It’s Not Just Who You Know, It’s How You Invest in Them

Here’s a clarification on what I said earlier. You may know the perfect people and have the perfect network of six hundred contacts. But if you’re aggressively gathering names like an autograph collector, no one is going to want to help you.

Relationships grow based on time and attention. If you’re not cultivating individual relationships with time and attention, they’re going to remain small and unhelpful. You need to invest time in relationships just as you do in your skills. Both will help you advance on your career path, and both are absolutely irreplaceable. If the choice for a promotion comes down to you and a candidate the boss eats lunch with every day, you’ll be out in the cold.

It’s Not about How Hard It Feels, It’s about Exercising Yourself

People without a natural gift for social exuberance often worry they’ll never be able to succeed at networking. Nothing could be further from the truth. Networking is a skill you can learn, just like any other. That skill becomes stronger the more you work at it. If you start lifting weights today for the first time in your life, are you going to be able to break the world record before dinner? Not a chance. In fact, you’ll probably feel exhausted and sore tomorrow. Start small and build your muscles.

Just remember to provide value to the people around you, be grateful to those who help you, and never stop building your network.

This post was adapted from Chapter 6 Building the Business of You. Learn more about Networking Your Way to Your Path in the book or by joining the Business of You e-course.