Women of Wisdom Coffee Chat: Building and Nurturing a Strong Professional Network

When: Friday, October 11, 9-10 am (we have the space reserved from 8:30 am until 10:30 am)

Where: Red Rock Coffee, 201 Castro Street, Mountain View, CA 94041 (walking distance from Mountain View Caltrain station).

Price: FREE

THIS EVENT IS NOW OVER. SIGN UP FOR OUR UPCOMING EVENTS HERE.

This is the first installment in what will hopefully become a monthly gathering for the Women of Wisdom community.

We will meet upstairs in a private “nook” at the Red Rock Coffee house in Mountain View, located at 201 Castro Street – easy walking distance from the Mountain View Caltrain station.

We have the space reserved from 8:30 am to 10:30 am, so feel free to come early or stay after the main event 9-10 am. If you can only join us for 1 hour, then come to the main event 9-10 am. Grab your own coffee and breakfast downstairs and join us.

Space is limited to 12 people and we are now fully booked.

You can request to be added to a wait list and we’ll let you know if a spot opens up.

The topic of this morning’s coffee chat is “Building and Nurturing a Strong Professional Network”.

Whether you want to improve your networking skills or an  expert networker who can share what has worked well for you, we’d love to have you join us!

Building and growing your professional network can be challenging, for many reasons:

• Maybe you’re an introvert, and engaging in small talk with people you don’t know feels daunting and energy-depleting.
• Maybe the entire concept of “networking” feels yucky, bringing memories of a conference or a networking event where everyone seems to be looking for their next “target” to talk to while they are chatting with you.
• Maybe you are too busy with a full-time job, a family, and a multitude of professional and personal commitments, and maintaining your network feels like yet another “job” you have to do.
• Or maybe you are not in a full-time career with a built-in professional network of colleagues, and you don’t know how to grow your professional network, despite having had decades of experience in your industry.

Yet intuitively you know that you need a robust professional network to find your next gig (be it full-time, or advisory, consulting or fractional work), to secure new customers or partners for your startup or small business, to get a mentor or sponsor who can help you reach the next step in your career, or to land your dream board role. As Porter Gale put it in the book of the same title, “Your network is your net worth”.

In today’s talk, we will exchange tips and tricks for building and growing your professional network in a way that feels authentic and organic to you and that helps you accomplish your unique goals. We will discuss strategies for leveraging LinkedIn and effective methods for identifying communities that you could join or conferences and events that you could attend (and how to get the most out of them). We will talk about the “give, give, get” approach to networking, how to balance breadth and depth of your network, and how to maintain and nurture your network even as life invariably gets busy.

We had a great event! Thanks to all of you who attended! You can sign up for our upcoming events here.