Starting Conversations

Today is my 22nd birthday and it’s safe to say that 21 was my best year yet.

I started a lot of things when I was 21, a big one being my career in Digital Marketing.

Since lockdown started, I’ve made some small (but significant) steps towards developing my career – the most important of these being networking. As I am currently the only person in my company who handles digital marketing, I haven’t had many (*any) contacts in the industry. Although this hasn’t necessarily hindered me thus far, I have often found myself having questions that I cannot find the answers to. Therefore, I’m making a conscious effort to try to make some new contacts – not just random connections on Linkedin, but genuine people who I feel like I could talk with openly.

I think that a lot of people find the idea of networking to be rather intimidating (myself included); Is there an expectation that I have to live up to? What if I don’t know what anyone is talking about? What if no-one wants to speak to me at all? When I have doubts like these, I like to remind myself of this quote:

If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room

Marissa Meyer

One positive change that the pandemic has influenced is an increase in people looking to communicate properly online. I’ve noticed that people are generally more open to starting conversations and building genuine connections.

As I’m still a student (for one more week), I’m taking advantage of all of the fabulous resources that UEA Career Central offers, and decided to sign up to their mentoring scheme. It was initially advertised as a good pathway for anyone who doesn’t necessarily know what they want to do or how to get there. Consequently, I wasn’t quite sure how it would help me since I already have a very clear picture of what I want to achieve and have started taking the necessary steps, but I thought a chat with an expert couldn’t hurt.

I was matched with the founder of a Digital Marketing Agency who had attended UEA prior to starting his own business. We scheduled a call for us to get to know eachother, discuss my plans, and for me to ask any questions that I might have about starting out in the industry.

The conversation was incredibly insightful. I learnt more about the importance of building a personal brand in 40 minutes than I had in the 2 years of work experience leading up to it. Now I have a contact that I would feel confident calling if I needed some advice; I was lucky that he was a lovely person and very easy to talk to.

The whole experience proved to me that I shouldn’t ever be nervous about talking to people because, at the end of the day, people are just people.

I think I speak for a lot of recent graduates when I say that successful people can sometimes appear to be unapproachable. It’s easy to fall into a hole of thinking that they would judge or laugh if you were to send them a message, but 9 times out of 10 that isn’t the case at all. Decent people (who have the time and resources) will be open to chatting to you if you are willing to put the effort into listening and learning. After all, what good is knowledge if you can’t use and share it.

Overall, I’m going into my 22nd year feeling empowered and confident that, although I will never stop learning, I’m thoroughly enjoying the journey. So, a bit of a ramble today, but I think you can let me off considering it’s my birthday. I’m not going to sit here and carefully edit my thoughts when there’s cake to be eaten!

Consider starting a conversation with someone new this week (and stay safe!).