Challenge Yourself To Network For 30 Days
Connect authentically by doing just one networking act each day.
Inspired by friend (and yes, interviewee in Build Your Dream Network) Amanda Ellis Cuban and a month long client-development outreach initiative she instigated, here’s a 30-day networking challenge for you (no, just because we're heading into summer in the northern hemisphere doesn't mean you get to take your foot off the network building gas pedal).
For the next 30-days do 1 thing each day to genuinely reconnect with someone in your network.
ONE thing.
Just one.
Each day for 30-days.
What on earth could you do to reconnect, you say to yourself? – and yes, I heard those thoughts in your head!
It doesn’t need to be much, as long as it is genuine.
Here are a few ideas I came up with (while writing this post) on how to network each day by doing just one thing:
- Endorse them on LinkedIn
- RSVP to a meetup (and yes, attend)
- Customize a regret note for an event you cannot attend
- Organize a carpool
- Volunteer to lend a hand
- Send a birthday card (or belated birthday card)
- Email a mentor and let her/him know how you’re applying their advice
- Invite a colleague to join you at an event you’re attending
- Fire off a congratulatory text
- Recommend a book
- Comment on a social media post
- Pick up the damn phone
- Wave to your neighbor (assuming you’re on friendly terms)
- Rush out to grab lunch together
- Send along an article of interest
- Ask how they’re doing
- Tag them in a social media post
- Donate to their cause
- Subscribe to and rate their podcast (if they have one)
- Meet for a coffee
- Take a walk together
- Forward info to help their business grow or send along a job lead
- Ask for advice
- Organize a games night
- Find an accountability partner
- Share insights or takeaways from a webinar
- Chat on the elevator
- Send an apology
- Slide into the DMs
- Repeat any of the suggestions listed above
⭐️ Bonus points if you come up with 30 different ways to connect with 30 different people in your network.
And you can find Amanda Ellis Cuban’s #BYDN networking roadmap at page 158 of Build Your Dream Network.
Listen up!
I was delighted to sit down again as a guest on the Branding Room Only podcast, where host Paula Edgar and I got into the networking weeds on topics such as:
- Why so many professionals are doing “all the right things” and still not seeing results
- The network structure high-achieving women actually use
- How your personal brand determines who advocates for you behind closed doors
- And why the biggest opportunity you’re looking for might already exist in your current network
Find this, the 100th episode of the Branding Room Only podcast, The Social Billionaire: Networking, Personal Brand, and the Wealth Hiding in Plain Sight, here.
What if acts of service that we can feel but can’t always measure expand our capacity for connection and trust?
Read "We Are the Ones We've Been Waiting For" on the Yield Giving blog.
I'm a social capital strategist, and author who has spent her career making the case that the right relationships change everything. Behind all my posts and musings are years of research, extensive client work on the power of social capital, and my personal experience - that is, my own hard-won reinvention to the subject. The Social Billionaire: A Networking Roadmap for Women Seeking to Flourish and Achieve More - is my second book on networks — and is the advice I wish I'd had when navigating numerous career twists, turns and transitions.
