Based on my observations over nearly 30 years of attending networking events, the predominant mental metaphor which drive people to these events is a hunting mentality. Mental metaphors help us understand what we should be doing in various situations.
This metaphor has been hardwired into the oldest part of our brains. It's firmly attached in there by a thread of emotion that tells us, if you don't find food for today we will have to go hungry. It calls up the image of some fur-wearing, slack-jawed, dull-eyed, mangy hair looking humanoid, not unlike the cave men in the Geico commercials, launching a spear against a woolly mastodon more than 10 times his size.
Take an attendee at one of these meetings. Call him Peter. Peter is probably send there, if Peter works for a company, buy a hunter-oriented boss, call him Stanley, who has the same mental metaphor that defines what Peter should be doing as Peter does. Peter wants to find that customer in the room who will buy his widgets so he can eat. Peter could just as easily be Petra.
Peter arrives at the venue, parks, straightens his tie and smooths his suit, signs in and puts his name tag on. It could be one of those adhesive things that always come off after 30 minutes of handshaking or a pin-on that stays but puts a tiny hole in your suit coat, mounts his spear, or his cards, and girds for battle.
Peter sights a target, greets this person with a firm handshake, a smile, and good eye contact, just like he's supposed to, tells them what he does and how his product can help theirs, listens to his target's spiel, exchanges his card for the target's, and ends the conversation with something lame like "Well, if you ever need widgets, give me a call," and goes on to the next.
As the event closes, he reconciles himself to the fact that no one fell all over themselves to get his product and tries to figure out what he's going to tell Stanley in the morning when Stanley asks him, "Well, Peter, how did it go? Any sales? Any leads at least. You know that event cost us $200 and it would be nice to show management that we got something out of it."
Or, if Peter is self-employed, he's going through the same self-talk with the maniac he works for--himself.
What a nightmare. It doesn't have to be this way.
I'm trying to improve people's connecting. Is this helpful?
Connecting is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. It informs my entrepreneurial strategy. For my ideas on entrepreneurship go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com.
It makes Your Stop for Real Estate , my real estate referral business, go. See www.yourstopforrealestate.blogspot.com.
It powers my approach to writing. See www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com where you can read my mystery for free, download it for free or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it.
It fuels my publishing enterprise, By and for Writersgo. See www.byandforwriters.blogspot.com where you can get a poem or a short story published.For other ideas on entrepreneurship, go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com.
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