TIN #007 - How To Create A Networking Habit
Keep your network alive by making it part of your daily routine
Morning 👋 - Greg here.
Happy Saturday morning to everyone who is taking action to make new connections.
Today’s issue takes less than 5 minutes to read.
For the past six weeks, I've showed you a step-by-step process to grow your network.
Each Saturday, you've learned one step in the process.
To review:
Start with who you know - Who are your dormant ties? Make a list of all the people you know but have lost contact with over the years.
Re-connect - Get back in touch with your dormant ties. Send a quick LinkedIn message or email to start an online conversation.
Listen - Set up a voice to voice conversation with your connections. Ask them about themselves and listen to what they say.
Give - Find a way to give something to the other person. This can be advice, an idea, or a recommendation.
Be Easy to Help - When your connection asks, "How can I help you," have a specific person or company in mind. Give them your Target Company List.
Create Your Target Company List - The Target Company List identifies places you want to work. It helps your connection introduce you to someone who already works there.
Once your existing connection introduces you to another person, you start the process all over on Step 2.
Introductions to new people.
Think about most of the people you know in your life. How did you meet them?
We meet people in one of two ways:
Proximity: The people who are close to us geographically or organizationally are the people we know. Geographically means our neighbors and the people who occupy the same physical space in the world. As a child, most of your friends were the people who lived close to you. Organizationally means the people you work with or who are in organizations with you. This tends to be how we meet people as adults. If you aren't near someone, you likely don't know them.
Introductions: We meet people because we are introduced to them by a common connection. This happens less often because it requires more effort by everyone involved; however, being introduced to someone accelerates the growth of the relationship.
When you’re introduced to someone, the person introducing you is giving you an endorsement.
He is saying to one of his connections, "This is someone you should know."
His connection already knows him and is implying, "If you already know this person and are introducing me to her, then she must be someone I should know."
This implied endorsement carries a level of trust that allows the connection to move past assessing whether or not he trusts you.
The process of networking is about meeting new people through introduction.
The process I've described over the last 6 weeks creates a cycle.
When you go through the cycle, you'll come to the end of it and get introduced to someone new. Your network grows and you repeat the cycle.
But if you only do this cycle once, your network will stop growing.
You must keep the cycle going
Most people think about professional networking as something to do when you’re looking for a new job.
However, the people with the strongest, most vibrant networks are the ones who engage with their network every day.
At the same time, they don't spend all day, every day, networking.
They make their networking actions small but sustainable.
They create a networking habit.
There has been a lot of research around how humans form habits.
A Stanford professor and researcher named BJ Fogg has created an approach called Tiny Habits to help people create new habits.
He describes his approach in his book called Tiny Habits: The Small Changes that Change Everything.1
The cornerstone of the Tiny Habits approach is to make the action you want to turn into a habit tinier.
Tiny actions help overcome any lack of motivation for doing the action.
The example Fogg frequently gives is the habit of flossing your teeth.
He explains that when you want to create this habit, instead of saying you’re going to floss your teeth, tell yourself you’re going to floss one tooth.
That's it, just one tooth.
Most people believe they can floss one tooth.
The act is so tiny it's almost impossible not to do it.
Once you’ve flossed one tooth, you realize you can floss more teeth, and you’ll floss all of your teeth.
Why does Tiny Habits work?
Most of us face resistance when we think of starting something new.
We think about the work it’s going to be.
We think of the steps we need to take.
We think of how much time we’re going to have to commit to form a new habit or complete a new project.
We get overwhelmed, so we never get started.
In the Tiny Habits method, the things we need to do are made smaller.
Whatever tasks are part of the new habit we want to create are reduced to a ridiculously tiny action to overcome any resistance.
The reduction in the size of the task gets us past our resistance.
After we’ve had success with the tiny action, we feel a sense of accomplishment, and we believe we can keep going.
As we keep going, we form the habit. In time, we can't imagine a time when we didn't do the thing that has become a habit.
How does this approach apply to professional networking?
To apply the Tiny Habits method, you need to think about how you can make all of the actions we have talked about tinier:
Instead of contacting ten dormant ties, contact one.
Instead of sending LinkedIn messages to ten people, send one.
Instead of having five voice-to-voice conversations this week, have one.
Instead of trying to think of seven ways to help someone else, think of one.
As you grow your professional network, when you feel overwhelmed, think to yourself:
How can I make this action tinier?
Let's say you’re extremely motivated to grow your professional network.
You decide this weekend, you’re going to sit down and find 100 dormant ties and send them emails to set up time to talk to them next week.
Do you think it might be tough to do that every weekend?
Do you think that if you did that once, you could keep your network vibrant over the course of time, or would it eventually wither and die because you couldn't consistently keep up that effort?
What if you said to yourself, “I'm going to connect with one person each day for 100 days?”
Assuming you do this every weekday, it will take you 20 weeks, which is just short of 5 months.
Thinking about it that way may be overwhelming.
When was the last time you did anything every day for 5 months?
But if you only have to connect with one person, it’s probably something you could do in a few minutes each day.
When you focus on making the one connection each day, and don't stop, you’ll eventually get to 100 contacts.
Don't focus on the 5 months.
Focus on what’s in front of you today.
Do one thing and connect with one person.
Tomorrow, do the same thing.
Have a great week and let me know in the comments what tiny action you’re taking this week to grow your network!
BJ Fogg, Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020)
This week, I'm going to look at my list of dormant ties and re-connect with one person a day.