Your Happiness Factor

Networking can be very good for your health! Networking is good for you. So we are told all the time! You know already that you should network if you are looking for work and, oh yes, of course you must network if you are starting up a new business. But for some of us, the prospect of networking can be quite daunting. Now why should that be so? Let us think a little about networking and what it is really about.  Networking is about finding and building new relationships. It is about meeting new people and finding an opportunity to make an exchange, be it simply an exchange of friendship.  We go somewhere to meet someone new. We exchange information and then test out whether they are interesting to us and in return we hope to be interesting to them.  Most of us do it all the time in our private lives. But when it comes to networking for work, many of us feel much more diffident because we are not just looking for friendship.  We are hoping this new contact

I love social media –  Twitter (you can follow me as @WWisewolf),   Linkedin , Facebook  etc.  Those I’ve tried, I love, most of the time! Of course, I’m aware of the dangers and, yes, I have come unstuck before.  There are a number of us using Twitter who were taken in by a fraudster claiming to do good works.  I learned the hard way not to take people at gravatar value. I know about the dangers of meeting up but by following the rules about first meetings in public, etc, I’ve met some smashing people and made some real friends. But today I had my first really negative experience.  I realised the power of the medium and felt quite intimidated by it. I received a series of what I considered to be fairly “spammy” messages from one particular network (not one of those named above).  I tried to unsubscribe from these particular messages but it wasn’t easy and for some reason it didn’t work.  In all honesty I don’t think the originator of the messages intended them to be anyth