How to Make People Think of You for the Sake of Opportunities
If you’ve ever gotten a job or performed because someone “thought of you,” you’ve benefited from networking. Good communication doesn’t require anything dirty or selfish. This requires you to define yourself. This means that you need to pay more attention to how you behave when you meet or catch up with people.
In The Network for Nerds, engineer Benjamin Reinhardt offers a networking plan for people who don’t like to be online. We discussed many of these ideas, such as how to ask for a favor and how to get down to business when contacting. What caught our attention was the method of defining ourselves for others:
Everyone has a “projection” – a small image – of every person they know living in their heads. Do you know this friend who is “a cool front-end designer looking to get into machine learning and consulting?” She has an amazing projection and is easy for her to find. The projection can be clear: “Ben is looking for X, Y, Z and can help with A, B, C.” Or it can be vague: “Ben seems to be the guy with curly hair that I met at that meeting and we talked about a lot of interesting things.”
Instead of your projection, you could call it your storytelling, your slogan, your “deal.” And you project that onto everyone you meet, whether you try it or not. So ask yourself, what would they say if people you know described you and your deal? What do you want them to say?
Explaining how people feel about you doesn’t mean being fake, it actually means being yourself – being the person you want to think about yourself. For example, when people ask what I do, I may be shy or downplayed. Several years ago, my wife pointed this out and encouraged me to describe myself and my work more clearly, including the goals I am currently trying to achieve.
So, to describe my work in Lifehacker, I bring my favorite posts – my main advice – “How to make a cat love you.” People usually like to hear about it, and I can talk about how much fun I had while writing this post, and how I am always looking for new ideas that would allow me to ask some silly questions to the experts. I also talk about one of my side projects, an art podcast called Roommate from Hell , and try to express how much fun and amusing it is. I’m not really saying, “My current goal is to get more listeners,” but I’m making it pretty clear who my target audience is.
So think about how best to define your job, your status, and your goals. Practice a little. Don’t memorize word for word, but have something to say when asked what you do. Everyone would rather hear a little pitch than hear “yeah, like nothing but a little of that, but that doesn’t matter and I really don’t know …” Give them something to cling to to remember and when the next time they hear of a related idea or opportunity, “think of you.”
Nerd Network | Benjamin Reinhardt