In a recent corporate workshop I led on cultivating high quality career connections, 59% of attendees cited time/competing priorities as one of the biggest challenges when building high quality career connections. 55% of attendees said lack of confidence/fear of rejection as a top challenge, and 45% said they didn’t know how to do it effectively.
As the new year kicks off with new goals, priorities, and hustle (ready or not), it is tough to find the time to stay grounded and steady when it comes to cultivating new career connections and nurturing existing career relationships that matter to us. Let’s face it, “life gets in the way”, and life has come with many extra large priorities and necessities over the past few years.
So, a lot of the lift when it comes to even organizing or thinking about where to begin to cultivate career connections, has been done for you in this Career Connections Calendar, a guide that serves as a complement to my career development bestselling book, KNOCK: How to Open Doors and Build Career Relationships that Matter. Organized by month and with common business and seasonal cycles in mind, you’ll find a theme for each month of the year accompanied by a resource or guiding questions to help you refocus. You can literally follow this guide every month to help the new seeds of career or professional relationships grow, or to give some extra love to the contacts, partners, clients in your professional network to make a greater impact this year.
Whether you are seeking to create new career or professional connections in your network for a job search, or you’re partnering internally at your company, or externally with clients and partners, on larger initiatives, connection and collaboration leads to progress. As you’ll read in KNOCK,
“KNOCK taps into our innate human need to genuinely connect with others (and even our bodies’ biological response when it happens or when it doesn’t) as we contribute to the workforce, reach for our career goals, and make a difference int he world–together.”
Download this Career Connections Calendar and share it with colleagues, employees, managers, mentors, clients, partners, and anyone looking to to make connecting in your career a little more effortless, with just as much impact.
