Why is Mid-Career Networking So Cringey?
Illustration by The Laundry Room
By Carita Rizzo
The networking event sounded so good on paper. International young professionals getting to know each other in a bar setting? Sign me up! Along with a few friends, I RSVP’d. In photos from previous events, everyone was smiling. People were chatting. It was once we got there that I realized: This was my own personal hell. It was like I’d forgotten I hated not only small talk, but approaching strangers.
But we were there, so we staked out a corner where we met two other women, both two decades our junior. It seemed assumed all-around that we would never see each other again. This hardly felt like a win.
Is networking always painful, or was I just really bad at it? “The fact that you made two new connections is still two connections you didn’t have before,” says goal strategist Debra Eckerling, who helps clients apply her methodology to networking and was ever encouraging about my experience. “What you did at the event was make a success out of nothing.”
In speaking with Eckerling about the challenges of mid-career networking, I realized the awkwardness isn’t just me. “A big anxiety is ‘Where do I start?’” she says. “‘How do I introduce myself?’ Fifteen years ago, if you were a hyphenate, you were nuts. The advice was to introduce yourself the same way to everyone. These days, if you're only one thing, people look at you like you're crazy. Everybody's a hyphenate. The question is: How do I introduce myself without boring people?”
I relate. As a Finnish national who grew up all over the place, “Where are you from?” always seems to ignite an existential crisis. Never mind what I write about as a freelance journalist. (Enter vague gestures.) When you have two, three, even more decades in your field, an elevator pitch can be even harder to narrow down.
Eckerling recommends finding a quick, simple phrase that allows people to find common ground with you, while maybe making them more curious. “People don't want to hear your life story, they want to hear right away who you are and what you might have in common,” she says. “Because I'm launching a food podcast, I've been leading with that a lot lately, because everybody likes to talk about food. We all eat. Most people cook. Or if they don't cook, they've got their cooking hacks. When you go to an event and you're like, ‘Hi, I do this,’ it opens things up.”
But before you even get to introducing yourself to people, you should ask yourself why you are there in the first place. “Before the event, decide what's going to be a win for you. You can't get what you want unless you know what that is,” says Eckerling, whose system follows an easy formula. “Determine your mission. Explore your options. Brainstorm your path. You can apply ‘DEB’ to anything. When you're looking at your business, your mission is how you help others. Sometimes your mission is to help yourself so you can build your business so you can help others. The same principles apply.”
If one already has a fairly solid group of friends and our careers are plugging along, why is it still important to network? Because, says Alysha January, the founder of Gal Pal events in Baltimore, people are constantly on the move, whether they’re relocating or changing jobs. “You can get stuck, like, ‘Oh my God, everyone's gone,’ but you didn't keep up meeting new people and having new energy in your life,” she says. And whatever goals we have in life, we need others to help us get there. “You need your people, whether they're personal goals or professional goals,” says Eckerling. “We should always be in that ‘expand our circle’ mode. As you add more people to your tribe, their network is your network.”
January’s networking events were born out of necessity. The Charm City-transplant wanted to expand her circle in her new home, but found that the events already being organized did not serve her purpose. “I would meet maybe one person or two people at an event,” she says. “I was building community in a way of, ‘Okay, I'm recognizing faces,’ but I wanted to connect with more people.”
She realized others were also struggling to make meaningful connections at bigger events, so she polled the women she had met, telling them she wanted to bring a group together for a more intimate brunch. “I was like, ‘Okay, what does every woman like?’ And it was food and mimosas,” she says. “In the beginning, I was really particular with who I invited to make sure they meshed well. Then, once that core got tight, they would start inviting someone and then that person would invite someone. It grew organically.”
She also found that, by taking the pressure off herself to find a forever friend, getting to know new people became a lot more pleasant. “I read this woman's blog that said, ‘Stop trying to make a best friend. You already have a best friend. What you need to find are people that you can just go do things with: Your yoga friend, your coffee friend, your dinner friend, your museum friend.’ If it develops into a more genuine relationship, beautiful. But if not, that's cool too, because that's your yoga friend,” says January. “Once I took that approach, it made it so much easier. Networking events put so much pressure on you to make a connection. We have too many other stressors in our lives. It should be fun.”
That night in the hotel bar, I found that I was not having fun. I was also navigating somewhat unfamiliar territory. After 10 years single, where even misinterpreted flirting was entertaining, I was now in a relationship with no outside markers like a wedding band — and it was like I’d forgotten how to interact with the opposite sex in a way that wasn’t awkward. The bar felt like a pick-up scene — from the parade of men that tried to convince the young woman we befriended that they spoke her mother tongue, Italian (they did not), to the guy who asked my friend if she’s a gold digger. “If something feels icky, most of the time it is,” says Eckerling. “Usually what happens is a guy will mention in the first 30 seconds his girlfriend or his wife, so if you can find a way to subtly work in your partner, that's the only real solution,” she says. “It used to really bother me. ‘Why is he mentioning that he has a girlfriend? I'm not interested in him. I'm just talking to him.’ And then someone said, ‘But isn't it nice that he's being that upfront about it?’ And then I stopped being annoyed. It's just a matter of perspective. ‘No, he's being respectful of the significant other.’"
Inspired by their enthusiasm, I decided to try January and Eckerling’s advice at a second event a few weeks later. This felt lower-stakes because I knew the host personally and was aware that most guests were also freelance writers. Openers were a piece of cake. But, while I spoke to more than a handful of people I’d never met before, I still wondered how meaningful these interactions really were. Still, Eckerling’s words echoed through my head: “You never know.”
There was another thing Eckerling told me that I took to heart. “If you are not having fun, it's okay to leave,” she says. “You make your own rules. The secret to everything is there is no secret, it's only what works for you. And if going to an event and sticking it out for 30 minutes is a win, then you got a win. Sometimes the goal is just to have an adventure.”