What to do if you hate business networking

....and don't want to get better at it.

You know the feeling before you've even joined the call.

Something tightens. You find a reason to check your emails one more time. And afterwards, however well it went, you need a lie down and the rest of the afternoon to yourself, and you can't entirely explain why an hour of perfectly pleasant conversation has left you feeling like you've run somewhere.

Most advice for founders who feel this way about networking assumes you'd like to get better at it. Prepare three questions in advance, set yourself a target of five conversations, find the other person standing alone, follow up within forty-eight hours.

All sensible enough. And all of it resting on an assumption that's worth turning over, which is that the room is fine and you're the part that needs adjusting.

I'm not sure that's right.

If you're introverted, or highly sensitive, or simply someone who notices what's moving underneath a conversation, I think your discomfort might be information rather than something lacking in you.

Maybe the reason you hate business networking is absolutely, totally logical.

What your nervous system is picking up

Something happens in a conventional networking room that nobody quite names.

Almost everyone has arrived with an agenda. Not unkindly, and often not even consciously, because the format asks it of them - limited time, a room of strangers, an unspoken expectation that you'll leave with something.

So people move through it conducting a sort of rapid assessment. What do you do, who do you serve, is there anything here for me.

And you can feel it.

You can sense when the person in front of you is still deciding whether you're worth the next ten minutes.

You can feel the moment the assessment concludes and the attention slides away, the polite smile holding while their eyes travel somewhere past your shoulder.

For a sensitive nervous system, that's demanding work. You're doing two jobs at once - holding your own presentation together while continuously reading everyone else's, tracking the room, adjusting, noticing.

An hour of that costs something. And it has very little to do with confidence.

When I first started going to networking events, I joined a group that ran a workshop you had to attend on how to network.

And it was, quite openly, training in how to get results - success was a referral, a booking, a meeting secured, and if you came away without one, the session hadn't really worked.

I remember sitting there thinking: so this isn't about meeting people at all.

I'd purposefully joined a women-led networking group, hoping it would feel different, but the underlying shape was the same. The same pace, the same emphasis on outcome, the same faint sense that you were there to extract something.

Still quite masculine in structure, whoever happened to be in the room.

What happens when nothing is being sold

The first thing I noticed, when we started running gatherings in Kindred Founders, was that people exhale.

You can hear it. Somewhere in the first ten minutes the shoulders come down and the voices change, and it isn't because anyone has been given permission. It's because nothing is being asked of them.

There's no pitch, nothing to angle for, nobody assessing anybody, and what's left once you take all of that out is just people. Founders arriving as themselves rather than as a positioning statement, talking about what's actually on their mind this week rather than the version that makes them sound like they've got it handled.

And this is where community starts doing something a networking room can't, because it's the difference between meeting someone once and being known over time.

Think of the Monday morning when you wake up flat. Really flat. Where you can't locate your energy and can't imagine where you'd begin.

What do you do with that?

You can't say it publicly, because someone considering working with you will read it and file you under inconsistent. You may not want to say it to friends outside of business, who'll worry, or gently wonder whether you've thought about getting a job. So most of us say nothing, and carry it alone, and add a thin little layer of shame about carrying it alone.

Having somewhere to say today feels rubbish, is anyone else feeling this way - and have four women say yes, me too, hold on - is worth rather more than a folder full of business cards.

And the same is true in the other direction.

When you finally do the thing that's been sitting at the edge of your comfort zone for two years, you want people who understand exactly what it cost you. Not polite congratulations. Actual delight, from women who know precisely how long that thing has been on your list, because you've mentioned it four times.

Networking, or net weaving

I've come to think that what a lot of us do isn't networking at all.

We tend to be rather good at the thing traditional networking has no use for. Sensing the room, reading what's underneath the words, noticing who's gone quiet. Holding several threads at once, remembering that someone mentioned a hard month six weeks ago and asking after it. Introducing two people who don't yet know they need each other, with no expectation whatsoever of anything coming back.

That isn't networking. It's closer to weaving.

Building a fabric rather than working a room, where the value gathers slowly and turns up later in ways you couldn't possibly have engineered.

Conventional formats give that capacity nowhere to go. They're built for speed and transaction, which means the things many of us are strongest in become irrelevant, or occasionally a bit of a liability. So we come home feeling we performed badly, when what actually happened is that we were playing a game that discounts most of what we're good at.

And I suspect this is where things are heading anyway. Marketing has been growing more relational for years now, and I can't see that reversing.

Trust builds through small, real experiences of a person, repeated over time, rather than through one well-made impression. If that's true of how people come to work with us, it's almost certainly true of how we find each other.

Don't want to hate business networking? What to look for instead

If you've read this far nodding, the question probably isn't how to endure networking better, it's where else you might go.

A few things worth noticing.

• Whether there's any selling in the format at all, stated or implied.

• Whether people come back, or whether it's a fresh room of strangers each time - because depth needs repetition, and you can't be known by people you meet once.

• Whether the pace leaves room to say something unfinished.

• Whether the space encourages you to become more like yourself, or quietly more like everyone else in it.

• And whether ambition is welcome there in a form that's sustainable for you, rather than the striving-for-its-own-sake version that most business spaces still run on.

That last one matters more than it might sound.

Plenty of gentle spaces quietly ask you to want less, and that's its own kind of shrinking. The ones worth finding don't. They just refuse the idea that wanting a great deal has to cost you yourself.

Maybe the goal was never to get better at working the room.

Maybe it's to find rooms that don't need working.

Lucy

---

The gatherings I've described here happen inside Kindred Founders, an online business village for self-led women building differently. Co-working on Mondays, a writing nook on Fridays, business and Human Design circles each month, eight seasonal gatherings a year with the turning of the wheel and much more. It's £16 a month, and there's a free week if you'd like to see how it feels from the inside.

The seasonal gatherings are open to visitors too, if you'd rather start there.

Or if a room still feels like a lot, book a virtual cuppa with me  and we'll just talk. No pitch, no agenda