A Story About Doing It Without Becoming Someone Else
How do I network when I hate networking? You stop doing the thing you hate. What many people mean by networking — working a room, selling yourself, collecting contacts — isn’t the only way, and it isn’t even the way that works. There is another: you offer what you’ve learnt, you ask about what they’re facing, and you let the conversation be a conversation.
Let me tell you a story about a woman who was very good at her work and dreaded every networking room she had to walk into.
Ingrid is a character I created — her situation will be familiar to anyone who has waited outside an event, in the cold, deciding whether they could get away with not going in.
The Car Park
Ingrid was fifty-two, a structural engineer, and a partner in a practice that had put its name on buildings people trusted their lives to.
She could stand in a half-built stairwell and know, in her body, whether a detail was right. Her judgement was the reason clients called the practice. Three of her four projects that year had come through people who had worked with her before and would work with no one else.
And she was sitting in a car park, in the dark, not getting out of the car.
Inside the building was a construction industry evening — drinks, badges, a hundred people in a room with terrible acoustics. She had been to a version of it perhaps forty times in thirty years, and it had never once got easier.
The thing she hated was not the people. It was what the room seemed to require: brightness, availability, an eagerness to be liked. Working the room. Handing over cards to people who would never think of her again. Standing in a circle laughing at something that wasn’t funny, waiting for a gap to say something about herself that would sound, to her own ears, like boasting.
I’m not this person, she thought, in the car. I’ve never been this person.
She had told herself for thirty years that this was a character flaw — a professional deficiency she had somehow got away with.
She was wrong. And the person who showed her was inside that building, in the noisiest corner of the room.
The Man Who Didn’t Work the Room
Ingrid went in — she always did, in the end — and found her usual position: near the refreshments, facing outwards, holding a drink she wouldn’t finish.
She noticed him because, to her way of thinking, he was doing it wrong.
He was a quantity surveyor, older than her, and he wasn’t circulating. He had been standing with the same two people for twenty minutes. He wasn’t holding forth. He was mostly listening, with his head tilted, occasionally saying something short.
When one of the two moved away, Ingrid found herself near enough to hear him say, to the remaining one:
“That sounds like the thing I got badly wrong in 2011. Can I tell you what it cost me? It might save you six months.”
And then he told a story against himself — a costing error, the reason he’d made it, and what he now does instead — while the other man listened like a person being handed something valuable.
Because he was.
Nobody was being charmed. Nobody was working a room. Two professionals were talking about something difficult, and one of them was being useful.
Ingrid stood there with her warm drink and thought: I could do that.
She could not do the other thing. She had spent thirty years failing to do the other thing.
But that? That was just… work. That was what she did all day.
What Networking Actually Is
Here is the thing nobody says clearly enough.
The version of networking most professionals dread — the performance, the pitch, the relentless brightness — is not a superior form that some people are naturally gifted at. It’s a fairly poor way of building professional relationships. It produces business cards, which are not relationships. And it is exhausting for everyone, including the people who look as though they enjoy it.
What actually builds professional relationships is much closer to what you already do all day: you understand a problem, you offer something useful, and you’re interested in the answer.
The difference between showing off and offering is not confidence. It’s direction. Showing off points at you and asks to be admired. Offering points at them — at the thing they’re stuck in — and puts something of yours beside it, because it might help.
You can be a quiet, serious, private person and do that all night.
And there is a second freedom in it, which Ingrid found more slowly: you do not have to work the room. Three real conversations, in three hours, is a very good evening. It is a far better evening than thirty introductions nobody remembers. The people who look like they’re winning at networking are often just moving faster.
What Ingrid Had to Offer
Ingrid went home that night and did something that felt, at first, faintly ridiculous: she wrote down what thirty years had actually taught her.
Not her CV. What she knew.
A failure. Her first year as a project lead, she had been right about a structural risk and lost the argument anyway — because she had presented it as a certainty to a client who heard certainty as arrogance. The work went ahead her way, in the end, but only after a delay that cost real money and a relationship that never recovered. It taught her something she has practised for twenty-five years since: being right is the beginning of the job, not the end of it. She now shows people the reasoning, and lets them arrive.
A success. The hospital extension where the existing survey was wrong, and everyone had built their programme on it. She was the only one who went back to the building and checked the thing that everyone assumed had been checked. It cost three weeks and saved eight months. What it showed her about her own thinking: she doesn’t trust documents. She trusts buildings. Documents are what people believed about the building on the day they wrote them down.
A passion. Her father had been a fitter in a shipyard, and had come home one evening in 1979 and sat down without taking his coat off, because a walkway had failed and a man he knew had been badly hurt. It had been signed off. It had been on a drawing. Ingrid was six. She does this work because a drawing is a promise, and she has never once been able to treat it as paperwork.
Three stories. Not one of them a boast. Every one of them the truth about how she works.
Three Hours, Three Conversations
The next event, she made herself a rule that would have horrified her old self by how little it asked: talk properly to three people. Then go home.
The first was a woman running a project that Ingrid could hear was in trouble — a programme built on a survey nobody had re-checked.
Ingrid didn’t pitch. She said: “Can I tell you about the worst three weeks I ever spent, and why I’d spend them again?” And she told the hospital story — the survey, the walk round the building, the three weeks, the eight months.
The woman said: “Ours was done in 2019.”
“By whom?”
A pause. “I actually don’t know.”
“Would you want to?”
They talked for an hour.
The second conversation was with a new engineer who was, Ingrid recognised instantly, in the exact position she’d been in at twenty-eight: right, and losing the argument. She told him the story of her first year, and what it had cost her, and what she does now. He said: “Being right is the beginning. I’m going to write that down.”
The third was a woman she simply liked — a relaxed, unhurried conversation about work, and life.
She was home by half past nine.
Six weeks later, the woman with the 2019 survey rang her. The survey had been wrong. It became the practice’s biggest piece of work that year.
That was the one Ingrid could have predicted.
The others, she could not.
Months later, at another evening she almost didn’t attend, she found herself standing beside Jack — the new engineer. He told her he’d used what she’d said, in a meeting, about being right being the beginning. It had changed how the meeting went. He wanted her to know.
And the woman she had simply liked — the relaxed conversation, about work and life — rang eighteen months later to introduce her to someone else entirely.
Ingrid did not, at any point, work the room. She never has.
She has simply stopped believing that she needs to.
How to Network When You Hate Networking: What Ingrid’s Story Shows
Give up the performance. It isn’t the price of entry. The bright, hungry version of networking is not a better version that you’re failing at. It’s a weaker version that happens to be louder.
Offer, don’t perform. Showing off points at you. Offering points at the problem they’re standing in — and puts something of yours beside it, in case it helps. Nobody has ever resented being handed something useful.
The story you lead with is the one the moment calls for. Someone stuck in a problem you once got wrong? Your failure — and it’s the least boastful thing you can say, which is why it costs quiet people nothing to tell. Someone sceptical about whether an approach can work? Your success. Someone weighing whether you actually mean any of it? Your passion. Ingrid led with failure that night because that was the room she was in. The point is not that failure comes first. The point is that you have all three, and you listen for which one is needed.
Be interested. It’s not a tactic — it’s the point. Ask about the thing they’re stuck in. Ask a second question about the answer. Being genuinely interested is indistinguishable from being genuinely interesting, and it is enormously easier for a private person to do.
Three conversations is a full evening. Then go home. Thirty introductions are worth nothing. Three real conversations are worth years.
You Already Have What the Room Needs
Thirty years held every story Ingrid needed, and not one of them required her to become someone else. The failure that taught her how to be right usefully. The success that showed her what she actually trusts. The reason she has never been able to treat a drawing as paperwork.
Yours are there in the same way. They are not a performance. They are just what you know, offered to someone who could use it.
Continue the Work
And if you want to go deeper — finding your three stories and the insight beneath each one; building them for the spoken moment, in your own voice; connecting them into one complete picture of how you think, what you’ve learnt and what drives your work; and knowing how to enter any conversation and offer the right one — that is what my second Professional Self-Coaching resource is for. The thinking, the sequence, the questions and the frameworks a coach would bring to hours of one-to-one work, placed in your hands, to work through in your own space and time.
Get the Client — Professional Self-Coaching for Networking and Building Professional Relationships Tell the Three Stories That Reveal How You Think, What You’ve Learnt and What Drives Your Work — and Why That Makes People Want to Work With You
Work With Me: Commissioned learning resources, speaking engagements, and organisational partnerships.
Support This Work: Your support makes a difference and helps me to continue creating resources that are accessible to everyone. Thank you. Carmel
Listen to the audio version here:
Share These Learning Resources
These resources are designed as short, effective learning experiences—for individuals managing their own development and companies supporting their people’s growth.
If you think this learning resource story would be helpful to others, share it forward.
Discover more from schoolofworklife.com
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.