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Here are some practical suggestions when connecting:
* Don’t begin by asking for advice: Offer suggestions first; provide ideas before asking for any
* Get to know others before you ask them to know you
* Don’t ask others to be creative or perceptive for you; it’s too much work (Be intuitive, recognizing of course, that given
chance, they’ll manage to complicate this thing as well)
* Be clear about your own ideas — be focused
*Get ready. The question, what are you looking to do… can befuddle unsuspecting person forcing a response that is weak, irrelevant or even fatal
* Move people towards embracing your ideas by listening carefully to theirs Look people in eye and reflect on what you are hearing * Don’t judge
* Ask yourself, Is message getting across; is content clear?
* Don’t use jargon. If someone understands it, they won’t be impressed; if they don’t, they’ll take out a book and read
* Take your ideas, and those you accumulate, to next contact, and so, and so on and so on
* Keep this maxim in mind at all times: You must first build a relationship before you can do business
Like most career professionals, you have a vision for moving onward and upward. Unfolding a career is like charting a new frontier—and sometimes equally as difficult to predict and control. What are your ideas? What do you want to do with them? How do you want to go about it … when?
A vision without a plan is a hallucination Before you spend hundreds of hours hunting for success, spend a few defining it. Consider some of history’s greatest athletes — gold medal Olympians. Early on in their lives they set goals. From then on they squashed everything in their lives that didn’t pertain to those goals, and went on to win gold!
Rob Taub, CCM, is a Senior Consulting Manager for R.L. Stevens & Associates, http://www.interviewing.com, a career marketing firm and organization celebrating over 24 years of providing strategic marketing solutions for its clients’ career transitioning needs.
