To close our International Women’s Day 2023 event on Monday, Kate Munday, Professional Storyteller & Coach at Out The Box Speakers and Creative Business Partner at Google, got our audience interacting during a lively session on ‘Owning your Career Capital’.
The session covered how to network effectively and how to quickly form genuine, long-lasting connections through the way you communicate. We share highlights from the session, covering Munday’s top five tips…
1. The Intention
Take the time to plan, set your intentions and be intentional before you head to a business event. It’s a business opportunity. Think about who you want to meet, why you want to meet them, what that means for you and what you can do for them.
2. Resonance
This is all about how we relate to one another. Try and do a bit of research about the people you are meeting before you meet them. Check them out on LinkedIn. What type of person are they? Think about the type of language you might need to use to communicate with them? What is it you can pick up on them? Find something in common with them because the quicker you can start to story tell, the more resonance you are going to have with somebody. When you tell facts and figures, that ignites two parts of someone’s brains, but when you tell stories, it ignites seven parts of their brain. It’s also useful to think about how you can help that individual. What colour can you bring to their life to make it better?
3. Build rapport
If we can have a good rapport with somebody, it makes it easier to have a conversation with them, it makes us more relaxed. So how do you build rapport? When we think about communication, it’s broken down into three key parts – 7% is the words we use, 38% is the tonality we use, and 55% is our physiology or body language. When it comes to physiology, there is a couple of things you can do to build rapport quickly. The first one is to match someone’s blink rate, and the second one is to mirror their posture – both will help to build rapport.
4. Effective Questions
People will forget what you say, but the way you make them feel is super important. With the questions you ask, it’s important to be both interested in the person, and interesting. A good way of doing that is asking someone’s opinion. But building on that, listen to what they have to say, and find things that they will find interesting. People are mostly interested in themselves, so another effective tool is to lead with their name when you are asking them a question.
5. The close
Finally, is the close. This is the biggest downfall or mistake people make. If you do not close, it’s just a nice conversation, but that’s not networking. Be conscious and remember that it’s a business meeting and that is why you are here. At Google, we always talk about the ABC – Always Be Closing. Be flexible with your communication and adapt to how that person likes to communicate. Ask what the best way is to communicate with them, and when you get in touch, think about what you can do to help them and give them a reason to remember you.