Hello Reader,
I once left a professional mixer without having a real conversation with a single person.
Not because the room was unfriendly. Because I had no anchor. I knew what I wanted to get out of the event. I hadn't spent one minute thinking about what I was bringing into it.
That's a small difference that turns out to matter a lot. When you don't know what you're offering, every approach feels like an extraction. You can feel it yourself — the slight sense that you're about to ask someone for something. And that feeling stops you before you start. It reads as anxiety or shyness or just not being good at networking. But a lot of the time it's simpler than that: you walked in empty-handed.
This isn't about having an elevator pitch or a polished value statement. It's about a two-minute exercise before you walk through the door. Three questions, one sentence each: What do I know that this group might not? Who do I know who might be useful to someone here? What specific help could I actually use if someone offered?
In a new video this week, I walk through what happens when you skip this, what happens when you don't, and the realization it took me way too long to have about what I specifically brought to a room that others didn't. That last part is worth hearing if you've spent most of your career surrounded by people who do what you do.