Build your Network Big and Strong

It is a small world. You never know who knows who, and what a meeting with a new person can lead to! Someone you know knows somebody else who knows someone... and suddenly you have a contact on a completely new place in the world! That is one of the exciting parts when building a network of people around the globe.

Always keep an open mind and meet every new person with curiosity and respect. Every person you meet has something to teach you if you just use your ears and listen attentatively and without prejudgement. This is the reason why we have two ears but only one mouth... We need to become better listeners! If we listen close enough and follow all the leads we get from listening then our network will grow both in numbers and geographically!

I will give you a fun example! During a coffee break I talked to a person who attended the same course that I did. She told me about a friend she knew who she wanted me to meet, and told me she should ask her friend to call me. I forgot about it until some weeks later when an old friend called me. I had not talked to him for some time. It turned out that he was the friend she had talked to me about! They knew each other, I knew both of them, but we did not know the common connections. It is a small world!

I have the impression that the world is just getting smaller and smaller. More people travel than ever before, and travel farther away from home. The same is applicable in work life: we cooperate and compete with companies not only locally, but world-wide. This is obvious in my IT business where we today encounter strong competition from consultant companies in India, China...

In this process of globalization it is getting increasingly important with personal contacts. In order to succeed in a foreign country you need to have local contacts that can pave the way for you. Without local contacts you have a much less probability to succeed. So an international network is becoming more and more important. It is also very exciting to learn to know people in other countries and to understand their culture and living conditions.

So how do you go about to build this international network? There are several ways, one of which is the Internet. There are several sites that provide international contact foras for you.

But the best way is no doubt to mingle as much as possible. The more people you meet and talk to, the more likely you are to get contacts all over the world! As usual you need to give in order to get, i.e. you must share your own contacts to get contacts from others!

Practice to mingle, it is an art! The better you become in the golden art of human communication, the more contacts and references you will get from each mingle session. And, of course, to a skilled communicator every single minute of your life is an opportunity to mingle and create new contacts in your network!

Good Luck, now go out and build your network big and strong!