Advanced Neworking: Establish Interconnections

Advanced Networking: Establish Interconnections 

Annabelle Reitman 
May 10, 2009 

Everyone knows it is very important to establish connections with people who will help you reach your life and career goals. However, what you really want to do is build interconnecting linkages and organize your contacts so you can quickly identify people who can provide the resources you need for success. You want to go beyond networking - to develop an interconnecting system of people with a mutual relationship of trust, respect, reliance, and a sense of importance to one another. * 

How do you create these meaningful and long lasting contacts? 

* What can you do to make your networking practices more productive and lasting? 

* How can you evaluate your efforts to establish mutually beneficial contacts? 

Making connections never should be happenstance. Valuable relationships, opportunities, information, and time are wasted or lost without targeted interconnecting linkages. Having the ability to pinpoint your efforts and stay on target is the key to successful networking. To do this, a plan of action needs to be carried out consciously and logically. 

In developing this plan you need a clear image of what you want to accomplish from meeting people. 

* What are your desired outcomes? 

* What do you need from others? 

* How can you connect with the appropriate individual(s) to accomplish your goals? 

Developing, managing, and expanding your interconnecting efforts begins with having an explicit life vision. An explicit life vision is a series of individual scenarios of the big picture of your ideal life style, including priorities, values, relationships, and goals. It is the unique combination of needs, wants, and desires that provides the motivation for making something happen. 

That is, you can be stimulated and inspired by a specific combination of what the outcomes of your actions are, why you want that outcome, and how you can best achieve that particular outcome. An explicit life vision enables you to go beyond networking by providing the focus for you to think about what you must have or must do to turn these still life pictures into reality. You need to identify who and what are essential to achieving your objectives. 

Key connections are targeted by noting suggestions and ideas of the type of contacts, assistance, information and materials required under each explicit life vision picture you created. Consider this phase your brainstorming time, list everything that comes to mind, even if items do not seem related. 

These notes are revised as you build a more accurate, detailed, and complete plan for making connections. 

The final set of your life vision pictures is the main source for: 

* Choosing interconnecting priorities * Identifying possible contacts 

* Deciding how to use your time to its best advantage to establish contacts 

* Initiating connecting activities And finally, take a long term-perspective to your interconnecting activities and stay in contact with the people in your Rolodex. Integrate networking into your life, you never know when the relationship you establish today will be just the connection you need tomorrow. 

Annabelle Reitman, Ed.D. 

Career Management&Job Search Consultant 

Email Address: anreitman@verizon.net