Networking Too Often Can Cause Brain Damage

The symptoms of networking brain damage include, stress, confusion, discomfort, overwhelm, over commitment, lack of planning, loss of sleep, disgruntle family members, anxiety, body aches and pains, headaches, tardiness, loss of memory, speech impairment and temporary loss of intelligence.

If you look hard enough, you can find somewhere to go networking every day of the week, several times a day. Once you plug in to all the groups and organizations that exist, you start receiving invitations to everything from everyone. When I started my business years ago, I attended everything until I realized that no one was working in my business or generating revenue!

Networking Myth: People believe that if they work really hard and attend more events, shake more hands, collect more cards, tell more people their marketing message; they'll get more results and bigger payoffs.

If you're already a social butterfly and love being around other people, you have probably experienced a little brain damage already. I can speak from experience when I tell you it's not good for your health to participate in every activity you find. It will eventually prevent you from really succeeding in your career or business.

Once, there was a big networking event I was hosting with a HUGE speaker and my goal was to have at least 100 people in attendance. I thought if I went everywhere there were people, I could announce my event and get more registrations. The problem was keeping up with meeting so many people all at once, following up and responding to incoming requests to meet for coffee or lunch; I didn't get anything done that was really important. Not to mention the cost involved to attend all these meetings added up very quickly.

The point I'm trying to make is you can spend too much of your time networking and not enough time producing results. Your calendar could be filled with places to go, people to see and things to do but if you're not managing your time effectively with turning some of those connections you've made into transactions, you're just socializing. Don't get me wrong, it can be lots of fun to see all your friends and to learn different things from the speakers but it's not helping you build your business.

You need to plan ahead when you implement a networking strategy. Decide whether you want to go networking several times a week or what you think you and your budget can handle. I would suggest no less than once a week but no more than three times a week.

Don't go to the extreme either and stop networking altogether! You need to stay visible and remain on the radar screen. If you drop out of sight, you'll drop out of mind too.

Make sure to include time after you attend any function to immediately follow up. If you take too long you might become a distant memory and you'll have to reconnect all over again.

If you're suffering from networking brain damage and find you're networking too often, analyze where your last 10-20 clients have come from. If you find a good percentage is coming from one or two networking functions, then eliminate or cut back on all the other groups for a while and focus in on the ones that are producing results. Before you know it, your brain will repair itself and you'll appear to be the smartest person in your business!

Darlene Willman, aka The Sassy Networker, is a keynote speaker author and coach, specializing in small business networking and referrals. She provides resources, connections and support to entrepreneurs, small business owners and other professionals that have a strong desire to promote their companies through relationship marketing. She will show you how to build an incredible network of people who refer business to each other plus so much more. You can start receiving her eZine, The Networking Focus by visiting www.SassyNetworker.com