Relationship Networking

Much of my day is full of networking. Being in business development many relationships are started and built from networking. But going from one networking event to the next I found myself getting lost within the networking world. I was finding myself doing more networking than business relationship development. It was as if I couldn’t get out of first gear, I couldn’t get past the joy of handshakes and exchanging numbers. I was starting to enjoy the feeling I would get as I come back to report my day and name drop name after name. Handshake after handshake started to become these little minnie trophies I would hang on to, because I would go back to that moment when I needed some joy. I started to put the networking in front of the relationship development. The goal is to develop business relationships within our community and the first step is networking. But the first step was starting to become the overall goal.

I had to take a moment and walk this thought out. The more of my need of fulfillment and worth was being met by being more focused on shaking hands and exchanging contact info the more I was losing focus. The business relationships within our community were starting to fade away as I was no longer focused on developing relationships but marketing my skills. Marketing Me as the representative sent forth by my organization for you to see Me, Sorry I mean Us. I was no longer relationship networking but networking relationships. I was more focused on networking the relationships I had as if they were poker chips, throwing the chips aka name dropping, gambling, hoping that I hit and move on to the Big Boss round. I was losing focus as community relationships were suffering. It started to get to a point where I was getting burned out and I couldn’t really understand why.

As the focus was shifting to networking relationships, I was getting burned out more and more. I was eating the right food, getting the right amount of rest, exercising, literally doing everything by the book. Still, I was getting burned out more and more. The more I was networking relationships the more I felt tight, stressed, overworked, tired. The more I focused on how can I get this done the more my body would burn out. I was starting to realize I was no longer focused on the assignment but focused on these chased feelings, I was burning myself out. I couldn’t be effective the right way because I was taking myself out of the game way too early. Unless I shifted my focus back to the assignment, I was going to remain drained.

I had to make the choice to shift back to the original assignment and put things back in order. My job, my duty is to overall develop business relationships and one tool I can utilize is marketing. Instead of making the tool or resource the goal I had to go back to the original assignment. The assignment is to develop and build relationships through effective tools and resources with the relationships as the main goal not the tools or resources. It was time to go back to Relationship Networking, with the over goal never taking the back seat.