How To Stop Thinking Like A Pariah In A Networking Session

Oops, excuse me. Harvard, 24, VP Marketing. Pardon me. Stanford, 27, CEO. I’m so sorry…didn’t see you coming. Yale, 22, acting CTO. This unique cajun curry is awesome! Carnegie Mellon, 30, VC. Do these sound like real people to you? Because they probably are. Prestigious degree holders, younglings (early twenties!), yet they have made it. What is this elusive term defined as? Oh well, “success” for one. What happens when you find yourself surrounded by such illustrious people only to feel like a pariah? As if you don’t belong? Well, get out. Chuck that fear aside and look at yourself, and stomp the rest out in your mind. You’re great and have lots of potential within you, it does you no good at all to compare yourself to others. But, but…, you stutter…

You don’t know what to say to these people? Right on. That’s exactly what everyone else is thinking in that same stuffy room, filled with like-minded networking wannabes who treat the refreshments served as potential topics of conversation. You’re not alone in fearing to look stupid in front of others. Face it, everyone isn’t there to listen to the panel’s latest theories and conjectures on Web 2.0 (okay, maybe 10% of the attendees), but rather, the prime aim is to indulge oneself in a (wishfully) copious amount of barter trade in the extremely free currency – business cards. Yes, everyone can’t wait to hand his or hers out like flyers at the bottom of the escalator at Lido. But hopefully everyone is just as keen to receive them with open arms. But you see, therein lies the catch, the more one wants, the less one gets. The wrong attitude can be smelt from 10 metres away. Don’t go around hawking for those little printed details of information. Instead, it would do you much good to stay focused on the person you’re talking to, or trying to talk to. Of course, they say, maintain eye contact. Yeah, definitely.

But how long can you sustain looking interested at someone’s eyebrows or after you’ve analyzed the way your counterpart’s eyelashes droop suddenly after 3mm – when you have nothing to say? Rack your brains, you tell yourself. Not working, the red light flashes. To get the green going, and to keep up the conversation and not look or sound stupid, all you have to do is to be yourself (unless you’re Mr. Bean, I have nothing further to add). This may elicit sudden outbursts of panic in your heart with an attack threatening to take place, but I find that people are at their best when they are the most comfortable.

So, lesson to be learnt today? Forget the schools they were from, forget their young ages and don’t lament to yourself on how accomplished they already are when you were still slogging at a multinational company when you were at that age. Do the opposite, focus on yourself and let yourself go.

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