Why are people so afraid of networking and building relationships

Networking gets a bad rap. And so many people are afraid of networking. They're afraid of building meaningful relationships. As kids, we were taught, stay away from strangers. But all my friends were once strangers. Everyone in my life was once a stranger. The key is not to stay away from strangers, but to understand where our fear is coming from. Fear stands for false evidence that appears real. And often we're afraid of judgment. We're afraid of other people's opinions. We're afraid of not being prepared enough or of saying the wrong thing and then us being ashamed. And those fears are subconscious. So we stop reaching out to people. We stop building meaningful relationships. We stop being vulnerable because the fear stops us from taking action. You need courage. You need the right preparation. You need the right skills. But courage is what's going to help you once you have the right mindset, the right skillset and the right tools to do networking in a more habitual way, you will need to have courage to overcome the fear. The fear is real. It's false evidence that appears real, but the actual feeling is a real feeling deep down inside. And often we create all these excuses about why we're not building relationships in business, why we are being transactional. Stop being transactional and start being transformational. A lot of people haven't discovered the fears that they have around networking. And I know this because I never thought I had the fear of networking. I just thought I'm a private person. I don't reach out to random people. If I'm good enough, people will reach out to me. It's not true. You can be the greatest person in the world. You can have the best business in the world. If you build it, they will not come. You have to reach out. You have to follow up. And you have to be the leader in your network.