Women of Wisdom Coffee Chat: How to Build and Grow Your 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 (upstairs in the private “Nook”), 201 Castro Street, Mountain View, CA 94041 (walking distance from Mountain View Caltrain station).
Price: $25
Seats remaining: 7
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 as of now, we have 7 seats remaining. Your $25 fee goes to cover the cost of the “nook” reservation so that we have the space to ourselves.
The topic of this morning’s coffee chat is “How to Build and Grow Your Professional Network”.
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, for identifying communities that you could join or conferences and events that you could attend (and how to get the most out of them), and how to maintain and nurture your network even as life invariably gets busy. We will talk about the “give, give, get” approach to networking.
Space is limited, reserve your spot today!