How To Network For The Socially Awkward
Or, Ten Things You Can Do That Won't Make You Feel Gross or Dumb
Back when I was just a baby film student and I heard for the first time that the only way to make it in this business was to ‘network,’ something inside of me died.
Like, my chest tightened, my stomach dropped, my legs wobbled.
In my mind, echoing over and over, were only the words:
“But I can’t do that.”
You might as well have told me that I would have to do the Running Man. Impossible.
I had struggled with social anxiety and chronic shyness most of my life and therefore networking, as I understood it, was meant for those Life of the Party types. Not me.
See, the only definition that I had for networking at this point involved being, well, kind of an obnoxious douche. It required you to be inauthentic, scheming, pushy and self-aggrandizing. It meant going up to powerful strangers in a room full of other powerful strangers and telling them how awesome you were. It meant not caring if those powerful strangers thought you were an idiot.
In practice, it meant shoving your script into a producer’s hand when you crossed paths at a coffee shop. It meant having an agenda at all times and always putting it before anything else.
Um, yeah. No. I couldn’t do that. I didn’t WANT to do that.
So, baby film student me didn’t. And felt dumb about it. I remember feeling like me not doing all of those things meant I didn’t ‘want it’ bad enough. That I wasn’t willing to do what it took to make a movie. Occasionally, I’d drag myself to a mixer or a party and try to force myself to ‘network’ but often I’d get there, get a drink, drink it in five minutes, and leave.
In the past few years when I’ve had the opportunity to speak to other baby film students, one of the biggest questions I am asked over and over again, especially after I disclose I have social anxiety, is, “How do you network?”
So, I figured I’d go ahead and write about how I came to define it for myself and the specific things you can do to ‘network’ that won’t make you feel gross or dumb.