These days, I talk to strangers four times a week for an audience of millions. But you couldn't have predicted that when I was growing up.
As a child, I had crippling social anxiety that made me feel uncomfortable around others. This caused me to skip school. I'd love to say I'm the cool guy from school truant, driving Ferraris, going to museums and ending up on a float, singing in a parade (Bueller, Bueller… ), but I was the uncool. I was the guy whose parents found him playing video games in his underwear when they got home.
Related: 5 Simple Habits to Manage Your Anxiety Somehow I managed to graduate from high school and get into the University of Michigan. Four years later, as I watched my friends get cool jobs, I was mostly directionless, even with a degree in hand. After a few timid attempts to find something to do, I decided to go to law school, because everyone told me that I could definitely get a job afterward, and that would give me another three years to figure things out.
Before I knew it, I found myself in one of the best law firms on Wall Street. Surrounded by all this brains and restlessness, I suffered from a new type of anxiety:impostor syndrome. Obviously I had fallen through the cracks and they didn't realize I wasn't supposed to be there. I knew I wasn't going to get better at lawyering and my competitive advantages of hustling and street smarts had evaporated. Everyone in my company was smart and willing to work just as hard.
Dave
There was one exception to this seemingly endless barrage of memos and conference calls:Dave. Dave was a very tanned lawyer from Brooklyn, who was rarely, if ever, in the office. He had hired me and was even responsible for guiding me, but I never saw him. Curious about him and eager to find anything to help me advance in my career, I contacted the human resources department and mentioned that I had not yet seen Dave. He was predictably delighted to have to come in and give one of his two required box-ticking mentorship sessions over the summer, and soon I found myself across the table having coffee for he was banging on one of those old BlackBerrys.
"So," I blurted nervously, "why aren't you ever in the office?"
He stopped typing and leaned over the table:"Who says I'm not in the office?"
I tried to back off as gently as possible, just saying something to the effect of "some people", I noticed he was rarely around and asked if there was a secret to his work.
"Yeah, the secret is that I bring the deals that allow this business to continue." For the rest of our time together, he talked to me about taking meetings in the Hamptons or going on charity cruises or golfing in Florida. All of these were simply opportunities to engage with people who might become customers. Dave brought something to the table that no one else had. He piled on social skills on top of his abilities as a lawyer, and as a result, he got paid to network and build relationships. Instead, I was paid to check for stray commas in 1,800-page documents.
Related: 8 Proven Networking Strategies of Successful Entrepreneurs
“Always give” puts you in the perfect position to “leave everything better than you found it”.
While I had been fascinated by social dynamics before, this encounter with Dave was a real turning point for me, and I began to dive deeper into what was then a nascent field. I started designing my life not to emulate Dave's, but to take advantage of the same matrix as Dave. I started to see a world full of people and saw the power of a personal network and how much intentionality it takes to build it.
JENNIFER JANOSZEWSKI
As I always say
At that time, I co-founded a training company to help people better understand social dynamics. Our work has helped people overcome self-esteem issues, create greater career and business success, improve family ties, and even have better luck with the dating scene. We called the company and the podcast we produce, The Art of Charming.
Over time, I reduced the complexity that threatened our students and listeners to two simple sayings. The first was a variation of a phrase made famous by Alec Baldwin in the movie Glengarry Glen Ross . While Baldwin memorized luckless real estate brokers for “Always Close,” I opted for “Always Give.”
As my network was built, I ruled out deals. I wasn't interested in networking in the humorous way that some of us know. I wanted to build relationships with good people. These relationships could lead to opportunity, prosperity, or flexibility, but that was not the point. I led with value. I'm always trying to figure out how I could help others without expecting anything in return.
Related: Jordan Harbinger on how opportunity lies on the horizon
It ties into the second sentence, which is The Art of Charm's tagline as a company:"Leave everything better than you got it. find. It was most definitely not inspired by Alec Baldwin, but was more of a way to express the heart of what the study of social dynamics and personal development meant to us. The field was so understudied, with so many unwritten rules, and it was easy to fall into meaningless tropes like “put yourself out” or “just be yourself.” It literally meant nothing to me and my co-founders.
We wanted something meaningful and concrete, without any ambiguity. That meant we weren't playing for the next term. We were playing for the next quarter century. If I looked at every interaction from the perspective of how I could give and always had to leave something better than what I found, that meant I was not focusing on myself, but on others. The byproduct of this generosity was that, over time, great opportunities presented themselves to us.
That's lovely
During a conversation last spring, a colleague told me that he had discovered a great job candidate simply from a chance conversation at a happy hour. I took this example to point out that when you look at the best networkers, their opportunities seem random and the outcome of luck. But it's not that. If you're open and friendly, if you take the time to follow up, if you don't keep score, no surprises, good things come your way. In this context, being lucky in networking is not a coincidence; rather, it's a skill set that you can learn, develop, and teach others.
Networking gets a bad rap because of those highly motivated starters who are always throwing business cards at you during random mixes. But networking is not something you do – it is a permanent state of mind. If I can avoid thinking of networking as something I turn on and off, and instead think of it as a positive way of being, I can reinforce my notion of constantly giving.
I haven't always been at my current level of networking. I saw the quality of the guests we have on The Art of Charm the podcasts are going up as I've grown and improved into the kind of guy that interesting people and experts want to talk to. Through practice, I now have the required skills and conversational chops to engage them in a way that delivers real value to our listeners, not just subject them to the same boring stock market questions they might get on many other podcasts. I practice what I preach because I don't really have a choice:it's my business and my life.
Interviewing these top artists week after week on The Art of Charm is rewarding because seeing the generous and selfless habits of my guests, I remember our simple path is correct.
Related: How to build good relationships
This article originally appeared in the February 2018 issue of SUCCESS magazine.
