You're Not Bad at Networking, You're Bad at Arriving

You're in the car park eight minutes early, engine off, and you haven't moved yet.

You can see the door from here. You can see other people going through it the way people do. And you're still sitting with your hands in your lap, doing the only hard thing about the entire morning, which is getting out of the car.

Now hold onto that, and think about this.

Once somebody asks you what you do, you're fine.

You are.

You know you are.

You're interesting about your work, you ask good questions back, and people are glad they talked to you. On the way home you've often thought, that was fine, that was lovely, why do I make such a performance of it. And then next time comes round and you're in a car park again.

So here's the sentence you've been saying to yourself, and it's wrong.

"I'm not very good at this sort of thing."

You're good at this sort of thing. You're bad at one specific stretch of it, and it's roughly twenty minutes long.

That stretch starts as you park and ends the moment you're in a proper conversation with one person. Everything in it is unstructured, and that's the whole problem. The walk across the car park while somebody might be watching. The table with the badges, and whether yours is there, and what to do with your hands while they look. Coming through the door into a room where the shape has already formed, groups of three and four standing at the angles that groups stand at, all of them apparently mid-sentence. Getting a coffee you don't want, because a cup is a job and a job is a relief. Then scanning the room, where you look for a gap you could join without interrupting, and there's never a gap, because groups don't have gaps, they have backs. And the phone, which you take out with real purpose, as though something has just come in.

Then somebody says hello, and asks what you do, and the whole difficulty evaporates. Not eases. Evaporates.

That's the ugly truth of it. You've been thinking it's a verdict about your personality when what you've really got is a twenty minute logistics problem, and nobody has ever taught anybody how to arrive, because arriving isn't a skill anyone will admit to needing.

The wrong label matters more than it sounds, so let me be plain about why.

A problem about who you are has no edges and no solution. It applies everywhere, permanently, and there's nothing to be done about it except avoid the situations that reveal it. A problem about twenty minutes has a shape, a start, a finish and a door. You can work with that. The other just explains, for the rest of your life, why you don't go.

And watch how the wrong label expands once you accept it. You skip one thing, then a second, and somewhere in there it stops being about events at all and becomes a fact about you: not a joiner, not a mixer, not one for that sort of thing. Then that fact starts turning up in places that have nothing to do with work.

Because it isn't only rooms with name badges. It's the party where you know the host and nobody else, and the ten minutes before she spots you. It's the class where everybody else has already paired off. It's the video call you join a minute early, where two people are already laughing about something that started before you arrived. It's standing at the edge of the group at the school gate or outside the hall, holding your keys.

Same twenty minutes, every time. Different venue.

There's a version with your body in it too, and you'll know if this is yours. The arriving is harder when part of your attention is already working out where things are, how long you're committed for, and whether you can get back out. That's the same twenty minutes, carrying extra luggage.

If you want proof that people aren't what frightens you, here's a quick test.

Imagine you'd been asked to help. You're on the desk taking names, or handing out the programmes, or pouring the coffee. Would you go?

Almost everybody says yes straight away, and something in them relaxes as they say it. A job doesn't make you braver. A job removes the unstructured twenty minutes altogether. You've got a place to stand, a reason to be there, and a script for the first exchange with every single person who walks in. Take away the arriving and the fear goes with it, which tells you exactly where the fear was living.

So this week I'm not going to ask you to go to anything. That comes later, and there are better ways to do it than gritting your teeth.

This week, just correct the sentence.

When you catch yourself saying you're not good at this sort of thing, stop and say the accurate version instead, even if only in your own head. "I'm fine once I'm talking to somebody. I'm not good at the first twenty minutes."

Say it a few times and notice what changes, because something does. The first sentence is a life sentence. The second is a Tuesday morning with a fixable bit in the middle of it, and a fixable bit is a very different thing to hold.

Over the next few weeks we're going to take those twenty minutes apart properly, because every single piece of them can be arranged differently, and most of it isn't about courage at all.

If the getting out of the car is the hard part, I’ve made something for it. Twelve Minutes Before You Walk In is a free recording to listen to before you go in. It comes with the Sunday essays when you sign up.

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