Connector Field Notes #18

Full circle celebration

I went to a wedding recently- a friend I met in the halls of WeWork in 2018. We first spoke because I heard someone speaking Spanish and turned around to talk to her. We quickly discovered we grew up in the same city and went to the same high school, but enough years apart that we never met.

In a delightful surprise, my high school friend was also at this wedding. Years ago, she had reached out because a friend of hers was moving to Boston and was hoping to speak with someone in Boston who shared her academic specialty. Enter: my friend from WeWork.

I had connected the two of them, and they became great friends. By chance, my high school friend was visiting her friend who moved to Boston this weekend. When my friend from WeWork found this out, she immediately invited her to join in the celebrations.

Having this many characters in a connection story is magical. (And slightly more challenging to eloquently anonymize.)

A helpful reframe

The most helpful thing I’ve ever learned about connections and conversation with executives came from two of my early jobs out of college: an entry level software sales role and a cross functional adventure on a scrappy early stage startup team.

It would have been easy to feel intimidated in some of those rooms. I even took my graduation year off my LinkedIn profile so that prospects and clients wouldn’t immediately know I was just a year or two out of school.

This was the secret: reminding myself that everybody puts their pants on one leg at a time. Even the CIO I was cold calling, or the CRO who was coming in for a meeting, or the VP of Sales who had just signed a contract with us.

Behind titles and tenure, everyone puts their pants on one leg at a time. I don’t remember exactly which manager first said this to me, but it stuck. Everyone is still just a person looking to connect with another person.