Networking

To listen to Apple, click here; to listen on Spotify, click here.

Networking has a reputation: big events, stiff small talk, LinkedIn posts, collecting business cards from people you’ll never talk to again. No wonder most of us let it slide to the bottom of the list. So if you know you should be doing more of it but can’t seem to make it stick, I want to offer a different take on what networking can look like and how to make it feel a lot less like a chore. Let’s get into it.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Free 3-Day Time Management Program: https://kellynolan.com/refresh
• Enrollment for October and November start dates for the 10-week Bright Method program is open. Join here: https://kellynolan.com/the-bright-method-time-management-course-with-kelly-nolan

Links you might enjoy:

• ✨ The full Bright Method™️ program: If you’re ready for a full time management system that’s realistic, sustainable, and dare I say… fun, check out the Bright Method program. It’s helped hundreds of professional women take back control of their time – and their peace of mind.
• 🌿 Free 3-Day Time Management Program: Get three short, practical video lessons packed with realistic strategies to help you manage your personal and professional life with more clarity and calm.
• 📱 Follow me on Instagram: Get bite-sized, real-life time management tips for working women – like reminders to set mail holds before travel, anonymous day-in-the-life calendars from other professional women, and behind-the-scenes looks at how I manage my own time.

Full Transcript:

Kelly Nolan: [00:00:00] Welcome to The Bright Method Podcast, where we’ll discuss practical time management strategies designed for the professional working woman. I’m Kelly Nolan, a former patent litigator who now works with women to set up the Bright Method in their lives. The Bright Method is a realistic time management system that helps you manage it all personally and professionally. Let’s get you falling asleep proud of what you got done today and calm about what’s on tap tomorrow. All right, let’s dig in.

Hey, hey, and welcome back. All right. Today, we are gonna talk about something that might not sound exciting — and maybe it is, maybe it’s not — but it is really important, and as much as we dread it, as much as we let it go, all that kind of stuff, I do think it’s really important, and so we’re gonna talk about it today, and that is networking.

Now, before you roll your eyes and feel your stomach sink and think that this is not for you, I think it is. It is one of those things that future you will likely be grateful you did in some regard. I am not like, doom and gloom, layoffs, all that, but in some regard, I think you will appreciate that you did this even if it never comes to that doom and gloom type scenario. [00:01:00]

And so first, let’s talk about the why, because once we figure out the why and you actually feel enthusiastic and motivated about this, I think doing it is a lot easier. The hard part is it feels like eating vegetables and not in a good way, and I think that we just need to get over that and take a different approach than we might have to networking in the past.

At least, this is the journey with networking that I have been on, so you can come join me. The reality is networking very easily falls by the wayside. Almost every woman I talk to right now is like, “I need connections, and I’ve really let it go,” and it is very fair. When you see how full our calendars are, especially once everything is in the calendar, it makes complete sense why you have let it go.

You don’t have a lot of time for it. You have a lot of other things that you want to and need to prioritize over it, and you’re tired. And often socializing, even for extroverts, you know, by the end of the day, after all the work, all the kids, if you have kids, all of that — it’s hard to motivate to reach out to other people. [00:02:00]

You’re like, “I don’t even talk to my friends enough right now. I can’t talk to random people.” And I very much get that, and so that’s what we’re gonna talk about today. First of all, obvious reason, doom and gloom reason, is if you were laid off from your job, it is very helpful to have a safety network to catch you.

And I hear about this a fair amount right now from clients, from other women, just generally — that by the time they hit the job posting, there’s either an internal candidate or it’s being filled by someone who knows someone. We could argue about whether that’s fair or not. I’m just a realist, and I want you to be in the position where you are the person in the network who hears about the job even before it hits the job boards.

And so that is obvious reason number one, smart to do it. We never want it to come to that. I hope it doesn’t come to that. If it does, you will be glad you did some of this networking stuff. But I also wanna talk about that even if you’re like, “I feel pretty good in my job. I got some good job security. I’m feeling pretty safe here,” great. [00:03:00]

I also think that networking can mean a lot of different things, so just stick with me on what it actually means. But basically what we wanna do is create connections for you within your company, within your organization, and outside of it that just are connections, like friendships.

People that you know, who you can reach out to, they know who you are, and there’s some goodwill. That’s really what I’m going after with networking. And even if you never are in a layoff situation, what I think is really valuable is that we so often in our day-to-day life live, like, kinda in a little tunnel.

I’m taking my hands and, like, putting them above my eyes, and then, like, looking down as I go. And we just, like, live in this kinda tunnel of our own lives ‘cause we’re so busy, as I talked about, and we’re really focused on our own work, maybe the broader picture of the marketplace, but as it relates to our own work, and then our family. [00:04:00] And sometimes talking to people outside of our organization, learning about their jobs, their markets, their industries, their families, their experiences of life, helps open the aperture a bit so that we start seeing a little bit more.

And I think knowing that the world is a bit bigger than what we might normally see can only benefit us. It helps us understand, you know, what are my options here in terms of jobs? What are other opportunities for me out there? That could be a different job, but that could also be a client base. That could be, you know, speaking opportunities.

I mean, you could take it wherever. But to get there, we kinda have to know there’s a bigger world out there, and so I think that’s a huge benefit. In addition, there are some more obvious ones that I just kinda mentioned of, like, meeting other clients. If you’re a lawyer, like, getting connected to people in different fields could be really valuable.

Even different lawyers who specialize in something else could be valuable for you to know, because if someone they know reaches out to them for something and you’re the specialist and they’re not, they will refer you business. [00:05:00] You know, relationships can hold a lot of value, and if you are seen as someone with a lot of relationships, you have — for lack of a better word, like, a little more power than you would have without those relationships.

And so I share all of this in a little bit of a rambly fashion to say there are real perks — not just, like, job opportunities, but real reasons to network. And again, I just mean have more connections and goodwill out there in the world than just the layoff scenario, but also in that, like, cachet, potential clients, and really just broadening your aperture so that you see a broader world than we typically do.

Plus, if you do it in the way that we’re gonna talk about, I really think it could be enjoyable and fun and bring some more joy into your experience of your career, and that’s wonderful too. So even if you stay in your current job for the rest of your career, it’s really, really valuable to do some of this stuff too.

Now, before I keep going, I wanna go into, like, three things to help with this. I do wanna throw out there that if you are in a phase of life right now, like a season of life, that this is just not where you are at — you’re like, “I got two kids under two,” or, “I am caretaking a parent,” or whatever it might be — fair.

Very fair. [00:06:00] Use your calendar to come back to this when you think you might be able to. So even if you’re like, “Two years from now, I will start my networking, you know, oomph journey,” great. Calendar out two years from now. You know, even put the link to this podcast episode in there and come back to this at that time and let it go.

I think it’s really fair. I love doing that in my own life of like, “I am not gonna do this right now. I really want to. Let me guess when I will be able to do this,” punt it out, and let it go. So I just wanted to be really, really clear about that. Okay, but let’s say you’re like, “I’m either on the fence, I will consider networking. You can convince me,” or you know you’re gonna do it.

Well, I wanna talk about three things around networking that I think, I don’t know, can just help to the extent you need the help with networking, like I did. [00:07:00] The first thing that I discovered — this was my biggest breakthrough with networking — is network in the way that you already like to socialize.

I used to think of networking as this, like, smarmy, exhausting thing that meant, like, going to a bigger event and talking to other people, all of whom are, like, networking and trying to pitch themselves. And it just, bleh, it did not bring me personally joy. I also thought of it as like you have to post on LinkedIn, which I left law in 2017.

I feel like LinkedIn has changed a lot since then, but back then it was not a place I wanted to post. And so just the combination of those two options, I was like, “Yuck, networking.” But what I’ve learned about myself since then is I can network just as I would socialize. I personally like to socialize in smaller groups.

I love a one-on-one dinner, coffee, walk, anything like that. Maybe one on like three. But I like small group things. And so it took me a while to get there, but I realized I can network in a similar way. [00:08:00] I can do smaller groups. I can invite people one-on-one. I can go for a coffee or a walk with someone, or a Zoom chat if that works better for them or for me.

Really redefining the type of networking you do is really freeing, I find. And while there are some bigger events that I am still going to in my business, my approach to those is learn knowledge at those types of events, and then make connections with people I’m interested in getting to know better, but not necessarily, like, putting so much pressure on getting to know them at those events.

Instead, being able to follow up later and do those one-on-one things where I feel more comfortable and feel like I can form a real connection in a better way. That’s okay, too. And so, you know, you don’t have to be like me, but really thinking about, how do I like to socialize? What does that look like, and can I replicate that to a degree when I think about networking?

Would that make it more enjoyable for me? Probably. And that is something that you can start experimenting with. [00:09:00] Okay, point number two is kind of creating a list of people that you would like to network with, in the sense of just, you know, getting to chat and get to know them better. What I wanna say here is don’t look for people in certain positions.

Look for people who you genuinely want to connect with and get to know and get to talk to, because those people are gonna probably shift up in organizations, and you just never know where they’re gonna end up. And I mean, at the end of the day, again, I think the value here is, like, real connections versus, like, actual positions.

And so when you start thinking about your list, just some ideas to kinda, like, get your wheels turning. One is look inside your organization. I don’t think this has to be purely an outside type thing. If you feel more comfortable starting in your organization, and there are just people that you’re like, “Oh, I’ve been meaning to stay in better touch with these people in different departments,” or whatever it is.

And I don’t even mean just mentor roles. I just mean anyone in your organization that you’re like, “I really like this person, and I’ve really fallen off reaching out to them,” — that’s one person that I would reach out to, and I would put them on the list. [00:10:00] Another element of getting to know people internally is I think it’s just great in and of itself.

But also, those people might leave and go somewhere else, and I know of, you know, friends and clients who’ve followed other people to different organizations after they left. And so fostering relationships within your organization can be valuable down the road, even if you decide to leave your organization.

Another pot of people to think about are college friends, grad school friends, high school friends — people you genuinely enjoy, like you used to be really good friends with, and you’ve just, you know, life happened, and you drifted apart. Totally fair. Reconnecting with those people counts in my book. It’s gonna be really fun ‘cause they’re friends.

They’re friends you haven’t talked to in a while. It’s really fun to catch up with people. And you get to really, like, know them in this different context, which I think is really valuable. And again, we’re trying to make networking actually enjoyable and appealing, and starting with friendship groups can really make that part of it. [00:11:00]

Another group of people — and this one came from a woman on Instagram, we were crowdsourcing networking things, this was, like, maybe a year or two ago — and she said this, and I’m a little bit jumping ahead to point three, which shocker is gonna be about calendaring it. Calendaring all this stuff. And she said that when someone from her organization leaves and they send those, like, departure emails, you know, like they’re saying farewell to the organization, she would calendar six to eight weeks from then. I think she would just snooze the email. But calendar it out or snooze the email and then reach out to them and see how, you know, life was treating them and just checking in to say hi and that kind of stuff.

I think that is so smart, and I just think that the people who have left your organization — particularly those you had relationships with before and now are in a new organization — are really smart and such an easy in to reach out to someone and just see how they’re doing, how’s life treating them in the new role, that kind of stuff that doesn’t feel so random. [00:12:00]

And I hope that that helps. I think it’s so easy to think I need to go find totally new people in a position that I’m interested in, in a different company, and then reach out to them. And you absolutely can do that. But I also think that within your organization, within college and grad school friends and high school friends, within, you know, people who’ve left your organization for other organizations — those are so many people just right there, and likely people you really enjoy to some degree.

And I think starting with those people could have amazing ripple effects that could serve all the purpose that we’ve talked about so far without needing to go out beyond that. Plus, then when you get to the place where you’re like, “Okay, maybe I’ll start looking outside of my, you know, known people, friendship groups or, like, known groups,” it’s a lot less scary ‘cause you’ve been doing it for a while.

So just throwing that out there that I think the people you already know could be so valuable in doing this. You don’t have to go find, like, cold new people. [00:13:00] In terms of reaching out to those people, you know, you’re really smart. Everyone listening to this is very smart. I don’t need to give you some sort of script or anything like that.

I also know that sometimes these skills can be rusty and it can be helpful to have, like, some guidance on what to talk about. I don’t pretend to be an expert here, so, you know, take what you want, leave the rest, figure out your own approach that feels good to you. I think that giving a bit of clarity on what you hope to talk to them about is really valuable.

So really retiring the phrase like, “Can I pick your brain?” Don’t say that. But instead just giving some specifics on what you’re interested in talking about. If it’s an old friend, you know, just saying catching up is totally fine in my book. I would love to hear, you know, what you’re up to these days — that kind of stuff.

Maybe not the most compelling thing to say, but I think also fine. If it’s a decently good friend, you don’t wanna be too formal in the reach out. You know, you’re just trying to catch up and hear how they’re doing. [00:14:00] But if it’s, you know, a former colleague or someone you’ve never really talked to all that much before, just giving some context to why you’re interested in reaching out to them is wonderful.

You know, you could say something like, “I’m considering this type of move. I would love to hear about your day-to-day life, what you enjoy about your job, and what you don’t.” I think that just leaving it at that is compelling enough, at least for me. When people reach out to me and ask me, you know, “I’m thinking about leaving, you know, my historical job to start something on my own, and I’m interested in your experience and any advice you have,” that’s great.

Like, that’s sufficient, at least for me. I’m sure there are people who differ, but that could be great. And if there’s any other reason that you’re interested in talking to them, just having, like, a one-sentence thing in there to give context — that shows that you have clarity, that you’re not just gonna sit there and stare at them, and instead have some idea of where you wanna take this — I think is really wonderful.

And again, old friend, just say, you know, you wanna catch up. But just trying to give some context for people where it might be a little bit more random that you reach out to them — just having that context is, I think, just enough. [00:15:00] And just as an aside, I love those types of conversations where you’re not job searching, you’re not looking for a job.

You know, you might have no intention of leaving, but it’s so fun to hear about people’s day-to-day life. What do they like about their job? What do they not like about their job? Like, when there’s no pressure to come off a certain way or pitch yourself a certain way — you know, I think we all have reputations we should always be mindful of, but, like, on the whole, when you can just really lead with curiosity and learn, it’s so fun.

I think of, you know, my How I Structure My Day series on Substack, and I just think people love learning. I think people love curiosity of, like, what is that job like? What is their day-to-day life like? And if you can kind of embrace that curiosity with these conversations, awesome. And I should note, I’m just kinda rambling now at this point — you know, be prepared for the reverse type of questions.

You know, if they don’t ask you questions, that’s totally fine. [00:16:00] But if they do ask you questions, you wanna think about how you wanna present. And I don’t mean, like, over-engineer and, like, not be yourself, but, you know, sometimes I’m like, “Oh, I don’t know, my life is pretty boring right now,” and, like, you just wanna be a little bit more thoughtful about how you wanna present — like, what are the cool projects you’re working on at work?

Or what is going on in your home life that’s interesting? And that kind of stuff, so that you can be a little bit more on it when those questions come back to you, too. Okay, turning to point three — again, no surprise — is calendar it. Now, I do recommend calendaring networking if it’s something that you wanna be doing right now.

But as with any new goal, start small. You know, if you use the Bright Method, you know how full your days are. If you don’t, you probably still have a good sense that you are very full. And don’t be the person who goes from, like, zero workouts to calendaring five workouts a week. Like, really think about, would once a month be good? [00:17:00]

Would once a month working on your list of people to reach out to, and reaching out to two people to get together to chat — via email, via phone call, via actual in-person coffee, that kind of thing — like, would that feel doable and would it help? And if you want, even calendar, like, the reason, like the purpose of why you’re doing this at the very top of that, you know, calendar description section so you’re reminded about why you wanna do this all the time.

And so think about what makes sense for you. Is it once a month? Is it once every other month right now? Is it half an hour? And what do you do during it? And I’d really think about that calendar entry and, like, put the purpose of it at the top, and then give yourself a little agenda of what you do. You know, work on this list of people, hyperlink to it, reach out to two people for…

And then you could have ideas: coffee, a walk, a Zoom chat, whatever makes sense. Maybe it’s just sending someone an article that you thought might be interesting. That is a little bit hard to schedule ‘cause, you know, you see something and you can send it on. [00:18:00] But really thinking through, like, how do you connect with people, what do you wanna use that time for, and just help kinda spoon-feed future you the motivation and the steps to do it, because you know that you’re not gonna probably want to do it, and so you wanna, like, really help motivate her and help her know what to do.

And then the other thing you can calendar is follow-up. So if you hear from someone, you respond to them, you could snooze out that email for another, like, eight weeks, and then follow up with that person down the road. So you could use email snooze functionality, or you can use your calendar to remind yourself on the follow-up.

And then tying back in that, you know, farewell email thing that a woman on Instagram shared — anytime you get those farewell emails, so long as you remotely liked the person, calendar eight weeks later to check in with them, see how they’re doing, and then you could snooze it for, like, three months or whatever it is.

More to the point, we do not remember or motivate to do this stuff on our own. We have so much other stuff going on, and it is very fair and understandable that we do not do this on our own. [00:19:00] So help future you know when to do it and what to do when it comes time, so she can do it and then get back to the rest of life.

And to wrap this up, I know networking can be so hard, and it’s almost hard to shift the narrative that we’ve created in our head. If you are like me, it’s been decades of dreading networking to some degree. But I hope that shifting it to kinda have a broader purpose than just if I need another job, but instead broadening the aperture and having just all these other benefits follow, and then shifting into the types of networking that you might actually enjoy because they mirror what you do in your social life, and then having the clarity of who to talk to — and that it doesn’t have to be, like, cold, new people.

It can be friends that you’ve just fallen out of touch with over time. I hope the combination of all of those things helps you feel more motivated and more excited about doing it because it’s actually verging on just creating friendships again. [00:20:00] And then you use your calendar to help carry the mental load of doing all of that work.

I personally find this approach far more fun and natural and enjoyable for me compared to my previous understanding of what networking is, and I hope that it helps you to some degree. You know, whether you just need to put it in your calendar, or it helps motivate you to do it, or whatever it might be, I think that we are all better off with more connections, just even from the friendship element alone, and then also the broader, like, safety network in our careers as well.

And this is just a small taste of how you can leverage your calendar to help you show up in your life in the ways that you want to, in a realistic way. Again, we are doing this realistically — once a month, once every other month. We are not aiming for huge because we don’t have huge time to give this, but we are aiming for realistic and using our calendar to help us get there.

And this could have a lot of ripple effects for you in your life just by doing this with your calendar. [00:21:00] This is such a teeny, tiny example, and I hope you see the bigger picture of how to use your calendar to help you start building out the life and showing up in the roles in the way that you want to, without it being on your brain to remember this all the time.

If you want more of a taste of The Bright Method, check out my free three-day program, The Reset and Refresh. The link will be in the show notes, and you can also go to kellynolan.com/refresh. Thank you for being here, and I’ll catch you in the next one.

Links you might enjoy:

✨ The full Bright Method™️ program If you’re ready for a full time management system that’s realistic, sustainable, and dare I say… fun, check out the Bright Method program. It’s helped hundreds of professional women take back control of their time—and their peace of mind.

🌿 Free 3-Day Time Management Program Get three short, practical video lessons packed with realistic strategies to help you manage your personal and professional life with more clarity and calm.

📱 Follow me on Instagram Get bite-sized, real-life time management tips for working women—like reminders to set mail holds before travel, anonymous day-in-the-life calendars from other professional women, and behind-the-scenes looks at how I manage my own time.