It’s okay to use these opportunities to advance your career. Asking family, friends, and acquaintances for help will not get in way of your friendships. Actually, it’s opposite. You may be surprised at how many people are more than willing to provide valuable contact information and talk about their jobs or industry. Think about how happy you would be to offer information that could help any one of people on your contact list.

One of most important advantages of using your personal network to explore rewarding opportunities is that you will have name of a mutual acquaintance to use when you contact potential employers. For example, “Jane Doe suggested that I contact you as someone who would be a good person to give me some career advice.” Then, when you connect with this person, you also introduce potential for connecting with their contacts and opportunity to use their name in next introduction, and so on. The power of networking is that people you may never meet may help you advance your career.

Find a networking style that you are comfortable with, and take some time to prepare a few different introductions. Think about what you have to offer that would interest person you are contacting. For example if you are contacting a friend’s friend at your local Chamber of Commerce, highlight your corporate experience, “Hi, my name is Jack Doe. I am a project manager working on ABC project for our municipal government. Prior to this project, I have had great success completing projects for both EFG Corporation and HIJ organization.”

Networking involves establishing and nurturing relationships, sharing information, and having discussions with interesting people, including career related discussions with friends or family. You are prepared! It may seem too simple, but when you are prepared to ask people you know to help in your job search, you increase likelihood of discovering rewarding opportunities.

When asked to what he attributed his success, he replied "Believing in myself, and not picking apart all of my pluses and minuses." He said, "Right from beginning I knew that I could be successful. When I failed first time I suddenly had a lot of free time on my hands since I no longer had a business to run. I figured that I basically had two choices in regard to what to do with my time: 1. Do a lot of thinking about what went wrong and try to correct my many mistakes in future. Or: 2. Take time to relax and gain a new perspective on life. I of course chose latter. From a relaxed state I was able to understand things that I was not able to understand when I was running around trying to be successful. I knew that dissecting what I had done right and wrong would eat up a lot of time and energy, and most likely not give me formula for success. I knew that formula for success was already inside of me, and that my job was to find a way to allow this formula to be expressed. I didn't try to understand what to do, I tried to get myself to point where I was already doing what I needed to do."

To me this story offers a great deal of inspiration. Continuing to believe in myself regardless of challenges to be faced, is a gift that I have often struggled to give myself. It is wonderful to be presented with such a fine example to learn from. The faith this man has in himself can be a gift to all of us. And at same time I can't help but chuckle when thinking what a business consultant might say about this man's method for conducting business.

This story also reminds me of an article I read in a business magazine a number of years ago. The story told of careers of a number of highly successful business people, all of whom had "failed" at least three or four times along way. Each person in their own words said following "I could not be success I am today, had it not been for all of my previous failures!"

Do you have some "failures" in your life that possess seeds of future success? I am guessing that we all do.