I’m the person who attends every interesting local event I can find, but the reason why has nothing to do with business or meeting new people – for me it started as therapy. Last Friday, I went to five business events, wrapping up my personal best of nine events over three days.
People have come to know me as the person at all the interesting events, many of them on my ‘event spam list’ which I use to invite 130+ networking friends to all the events I think are worth going to. So I thought it was about time to share the backstory.
I have social anxiety. For me, it can take days to work up to try out a machine at work, or go through a self-serve checkout. Meeting new people is scary, doing new things in front of them even worse, and I’m always wondering if I have food on my face or a foot in my mouth.
Over the past few years, I’ve attended (and talked at) several conferences. I wrote about how scary that was. In 2016, I decided to take the next step.
Ironically, I have a perverse addiction to the adrenaline rush of scaring myself. When I’m too anxious to do something, it makes me angry, because I don’t like being told I can’t do something – even if it’s by my own brain. So, I decided the best thing to do for my social anxiety was to throw myself in the deep end, by going to random events, with complete strangers, in a sector in which I knew very few people. Networking; the one type of event where you’re expected to confidently introduce yourself to complete strangers.
At the first event I attended, I stood by the wall, barely talking. I knew one person, a former teacher, who fortunately invited me to his table. I spent the night trying to be as outgoing as possible, while counting down the minutes till I could politely leave.
At the second event I attended, I sat on a chair, alone, not sure how to join the throngs of people who all seemed to know each other. A fitness instructor sat beside me and talked about he wasn’t sure how to introduce himself; that made me feel better and I soon tried to talk to a handful of people, although I barely met more than five that night.
By the third event, I pushed myself out of my comfort zone enough to introduce myself to a few more people but I still felt scared and out of place. Unsure of what my goal was, and with no business to promote, I began introducing myself with fake titles – from Belgium chocolate maker to Dutch carrot picker.
It took me a year of attending up to four or five events each week, but then I discovered something amazing; there were very few strangers left.
By slowly pushing myself to meet more and more people, to make the first move and introduce myself, by joining circles of people already chatting, and then announcing myself to half a dozen strangers at once, I realised something. It was no longer half as scary. I’d had enough experience that I knew how people reacted to my introduction, how to keep the conversation going, what they’d ask, how often they’d actually contact me or come up to me at another event.
Although I’d first begun attending business and networking events to help myself feel more confident and less anxious, I continued going because I found they had many more accidental side effects. I began to meet interesting new people, hear from fantastic speakers and learn new concepts I’d never been exposed to before.
I still find new things scary and I have to push myself to try new things or meet new people. But now, I have a lot more confidence around how to do that, no matter the situation.
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