A coach asks two questions to ease networking anxiety: what's the worst that happens, and what's the best? Worst case, nobody talks to you, which just means you leave. Best case, you meet one person, get their name, and grab coffee later. Networking failures aren't catastrophic.
So here's what I ask my coaching clients. What is the actual worst that could happen? And they'll say, um, um, nobody talks to me. Okay. Does your life end because nobody spoke to you? No, it doesn't. It might be the wrong room. If nobody spoke to you at a networking event, you're not in the right room. Hooray. They told you that quickly. Now you can get out and go somewhere else. But what's the best that could happen? The best that could happen is you make any connection at all, one connection with somebody. You learned their name, a little of their story, you got a LinkedIn invite, and you've decided to follow up with a cup of coffee. That's the best outcome. Nowhere in that spectrum do you go out of business and get cussed out or get chased out of the building. If you do, there's other factors at play. So maybe don't catastrophize everything and start realizing that building this network is the best thing you can possibly do.
