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Reaching Out for Support: Finding a Professional N ...
Reaching Out for Support: Finding a Professional Network
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So good morning, everybody. I hope you're having a good day and were able to get here without any trouble. So yes, I'm talking this morning, I'm going to talk about really looking for a professional network and things that we need to think about and how we can go about really getting to that point. This is me you can read about, I am an assistant professor of nursing, I teach undergraduate nursing students and graduate nursing students and I also work clinically. But one of the things, I have been an acute care nurse practitioner for 35, 40, I don't know, a very long period of time. In fact, I was the first one in the state of Kentucky. So one of the things I've always had to do in my career is kind of find a network to be able to expand the role of advanced practice providers with any hospital or institution where I went. And I have no disclosures or no conflicts of interest with this talk. And these are just some of the objectives that we can look for specifically related to identifying a network. So this is a quote that I found. It's an African proverb, but I found it in a book by Del Toro McNeil, that shifting into a higher gear or better your best and live life to the fullest. And the proverb is, if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together. And that really is a testament to looking for a professional network that can help you to attain or achieve the goals that you have set for yourself in your career and throughout your professional growth. So one of the things that's really important, your connections are going to be key. And I look out at the room here and I see, you know, we're not very crowded, so it was very easy. How many of you actually knew another person in this room when you came in? Okay, all you guys over here who are on the committee don't count. So, you know, so you look over there and most of the time we come into a meeting and what do we do? We look for a seat. We preferably have a seat where there's something empty beside me so that I don't have to sit next to somebody else. And that's even before the advent of COVID and social distancing. And then what do we do? How many of you have been looking at your emails throughout the morning? Come on. There are way more hands that should be going up than that. But we look at our phones. So we aren't really present. We don't really, you know, how many of you have entered, I did see a couple people talking over there during one of the breaks, but how many of you have introduced yourself to someone sitting around you? You know, without putting yourself out there and really talking to somebody else, you're not going to be able to develop a network. So one of the things is really being able to get out of that personal zone, in that personal space, to be able to talk to other people and find out what do they know? Where are they in their career? What are they looking for that might be something that could be beneficial for my path and my network development as I go through? So we really have to think about that. And when we think about it now in a digital world and in the changing landscape, we can have a professional network that is worldwide. We're not limited to people who are within our institutions or within our cities or states because we can contact people very rapidly who are anywhere else in the world so that we can have a lot of different skill sets that are included in our network. We can have people who are at different levels of their career who can really help us to attain our goals. A couple of the questions that you need to ask yourself when you're trying to develop that professional network, one, where are you in your professional growth? Are you kind of starting out and you're really looking to develop much more in specific areas? So now I know I need to find people who are more seasoned in their career path that might be able to help me get to those goals. If I'm in the middle of my career, I might want to change focuses. I might want to move out of where I am comfortable or where I've been working. So now I want to find people to develop a network that might help me to change my path. So what do I want from that professional network? Do I want to be able to do more research? So my network is going to have to include people who are already doing research who might be able to help me identify good questions to ask or how to phrase those questions, how to really put a research project together, how to go forward, who do I need on my team, am I looking to publish more, you know, do I want to include in my professional network people who are already good at writing, who can help me to advance my writing skills to a level that is going to help me get me published more often. Do I want to present more? You know, what is it that you want to do with your career? So figuring that out is going to be important because it's going to help you to determine who are the people that need to be in my network, in the professional network that I am looking for. And when you're getting a network, you do want an entire span of people from novice to expert. You'd like people who maybe be at the same level as you so you can kind of bounce ideas off of each other and frustrations off of each other, but you also want people who have reached a certain level so that they can help you, they can teach you some of what they have learned, and they can help you advance in your career or in your professional growth that you're interested in. You also, you would love to get somebody who's already an expert that you can really learn from and you can get a lot of good information from that is going to help you to move along and to reach the goals that you have set for yourself. So looking at this meeting now, the meeting that we're attending, you know, first off, it's the first time we've been in person for three years, so there are different goals that some of us have. Just seeing another human being face-to-face is one of them, but, you know, what do you want to get out of this meeting? You know, if you're just looking to get CEs, then find the sessions that are most interesting to you and go to them and get your CEs and you're good. But if you really want to learn specific things or you really have ideas in mind that you want to attain, look at the sessions and how, what sessions are there that really could help you along that path to filling those goals? Because now you can look at not just who's attending those sessions, but who are the speakers and how can I go up and introduce myself to one of those speakers because they may have the information that can really help me out. And a lot of the speakers that you meet at the Congress will be very willing to provide you with an email address that will allow you to communicate with them. They may not be the perfect person to fill your network, but they may be able to introduce you to somebody else who can then fill that network for you. So look at the different sessions that there are out there. Just don't go to the things that sound most interesting. Find the things that are going to be helpful for you going forward. Look at the exhibits in the exhibit hall. What exhibits are going to be helpful for your plan for your future, for your path that you're looking to go down in your career? And again, be much more intentional about how you go through the exhibit hall to find and talk to people. There are many exhibits out there. We never hit every row probably. So you really want to figure out what's going to be best for you. And whether you use your little pocket pal and go through to figure out the sessions and the exhibits to go through, or you use the app on your phone, you know, figure it out and plan your days going forward because it's going to be very helpful for you to meet people that can really be helpful in developing your network. And you do need to move out of your comfort zone. So it's very easy for us to, if we know people at these meetings, to kind of stick with that group of friends that we all know and to just kind of stay with those people. And that can be helpful if they also know others that they can introduce you to that then might be able to help you reach your goals. But you really need to put yourself out there. You need to be able to go up to somebody else and introduce yourself and talk about what you're doing, where you are in your career path, and kind of what is your idea for moving forward and what kind of things are you interested in so that you can get that information from somebody else. And then you can figure out if they might be helpful in a network that you develop. You also need to be in the moment. Going somewhere, you need to be present. You need to be engaged with the people who are there with you so that, again, you can have that communication back and forth that will allow you to understand if this person might be really helpful to develop my network and to help me move along in my career goals. And be intentional about that. So one of the things you can do is look at the different, not only the sessions, but the different receptions that are there and different activities that are going to be available for you during the Congress and go to one where you don't know a whole lot of people and introduce yourself and start talking to others so that you can hopefully then develop some of that network or find somebody who can help you or introduce you to others that can be part of your network. So one of the things that you can look at and to think about what do I need or what is going to best help me for my professional network? Think about if you had $100,000 that somebody just gave you a check for because you wanted to start a business. So think about who do you want to start that business with you? Are you going to do it all by yourself or do you want to get people around you that are going to help your business be successful? So are you going to get your five best friends together and say, okay, we're going to start this business? Most of us probably do not have our five best friends that are diverse enough in their knowledge set that are going to be able to propel a business forward. So we need to think about who would be most helpful for us to be successful and for this business to be successful going forward. I'm not going to ignore all of my friends, but for this business or for this network, I need the people that are going to propel me forward in my career and down the path that I want to go. One of the things that we look for, a network or another term for that can be a mastermind group which has been coined into Brown since the early 1900s, which they're also accountability partners. They're really there to help you and hold you accountable for reaching those goals that you have set and for moving forward so that you can attain those goals. They can help shorten your learning curve. We're good in hospitals at this. We get somebody from an outside small hospital. What's the first thing we do? We rescan everything. We redo all the labs because we don't really trust what came from somewhere else. But why do we need to reinvent the wheel every time? If I can work with somebody who already has that skill set, I can learn from them. I don't have to do it from the ground up and figure it out all on my own. I can really work much better with somebody else. You can leverage the talents that these other people have in this mastermind group. You can really bounce ideas off of them. You can give them, bring forward an idea you have and they may be able to tell you, well, that's really horrible. That's never going to work. Or they might be able to tweak it a little bit and say, you know, if you thought about this process or if you thought just this way, you would probably be much more successful in that plan that you had. But they also, you know, you have connection by association with these people. So you're not only connecting with them, you're going to be able to connect with people that they know. And it's going to expand that network to really allow you to pull in new information and to pull in new ideas and new expertise that can be helpful as you go forward. And some very big mastermind groups or famous mastermind groups that are out there to show you how they've moved forward, the Vagabonds is one. And you can certainly recognize some of the names of those people who were part of that mastermind, Ford and Firestone being two of them. And their whole goal with their mastermind group, this was in the early 1900s, was they were traveling the back roads of America, figuring out how automobile travel could be better. Well, there you go. You have Ford and you have Firestone right there figuring out how the car can be better, how the tires can be better, how can we get out there? How can we make the road system better? Another one was the Inklings, and obviously from some of the names on there that most of you might be familiar with. These were a group of writers that were able to throw ideas back and forth to each other. And two big things that came out of that mastermind group by particular authors was the Chronicles of Narnia and then the Lord of the Rings trilogy. So they were able to use each other for ideas and how does this sound? And how would I best, you know, tweak this little piece to figure out what might happen? Other people who've had very famous mastermind groups, for those of you from Chicago, there were a group of the Chicago Six, and they got together and basically within a few years they were all millionaires, but two of the most famous people from their little mastermind group were William Hertz and then Charles Wrigley. So if you know anything about Chicago, those names sound very familiar to people. And Walt Disney was one. All of you with kids, and you've all talked about kids, a lot of the animation that we have seen that we've all grown to love, and if you have kids you've probably listened to eight million times, you know, have come out of a mastermind group that Walt Disney was part of. So they're a group, a network that was able to utilize each other to help them advance the ideas that they had, but maybe they just couldn't figure out how to actualize them. So they're very, very helpful for holding us accountable, for helping us learn better, learn quicker, and to move forward so that we can attain the goals that we have. So really what do you want to do with this network that you have? You want to plan. You need to be able to plan what you're looking for, what you're interested in, what are your goals for your profession going forward, where do you want to end up? Because you have to have that to be able to figure out who is best going to serve your network. You need to be able to put yourself out there. Unless you are at the very height of a specific part of your career and you are the expert in your field, most of us are not going to be the person that people are looking for that are coming to get them to join their network. Most of us are going out there and having to find and develop our network. So you have to put yourself out there. You also want to surround yourself with good people who are going to be able to help you reach those goals that you have and really help you to plan going forward. But what you also have to do is even once you have that network in place, you need to reevaluate it. And you need to reevaluate it at various times to figure out, is this the same group of people or is this group of people really helping me now? Or have we moved in a different direction that I need to try to change my network around? Networks don't have to be permanent. They can be in fluctuations so that you make sure that the best people are there to be able to provide you with the goals or help you reach the goals that you've set. And with that, I'm going to reach my two minutes and be done. Thank you very much for your time.
Video Summary
In this video, the speaker discusses the importance of developing a professional network and offers tips on how to do so. She emphasizes the need to step out of one's comfort zone and engage with others in order to build connections. She also highlights the benefits of having a diverse network that includes individuals at different stages of their careers. The speaker suggests attending sessions and events where one can meet like-minded professionals and potentially find mentors or partners. She also emphasizes the importance of being intentional about the goals and needs one has for their network. Additionally, the speaker emphasizes the need to continuously evaluate and adjust one's network as goals and needs evolve. She concludes by encouraging viewers to actively seek out opportunities for networking and to be present and engaged in those interactions.
Keywords
professional network
developing connections
stepping out of comfort zone
diverse network
attending sessions and events
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