Speaking Your Mind

I visited a networking function a while back, and met a guy who like most of us was quick to ask what I do so he could get to talking about what he does and hand me his card. I actually thought that we may end up being good referral partners with each other since we were in a similar line of work, but sort of caught a sour note with him from interrupting me talking to someone else to make his presence known in the first place.

No biggie, I accepted his anxious introduction as just a misstep and disregarded any negative feelings, but overhead while I was talking to the original individual I was engaged with before his interruption, his conversation with a young lady in the area about how he does “this and that” so much better than other companies and so on. Since we were in similar businesses I almost took it as a poke to my company, but just sort of brushed it off. Besides, we had just met, could he really be trying to make himself look better to someone who didn’t even know me? I was sort of taken back by the comments.

Sometimes intuition is a good thing. Sometimes we can over react. I’m only human.

I returned to the office and carry on as usual. The guy I was originally talking to, along with the young lady both ended up following up with me. We had great follow-up time and I have referred both of them already for potential business and plan on keeping an ongoing relationship with them. However, I didn’t follow up with “mr. interruptus” and he didn’t follow up with me and it was back to business as usual.

Until I received an email blast about his company and his events and his business. And it wasn’t even addressed to me. It was a mass blast and I had become victim to the old “I-have-your-business-card-and-email-address-so-I-will-add-you-to-my-list” ploy. I was sort of cheesed off by it. It’s not like it was the first time it happened, but the guy had already rubbed me the wrong way, and I wasn’t going to be a victim of solicited spam!

I calmed down quickly and thought, hey, this is harmless. Just unsubscribe and keep it moving. Or, see if he may STILL be a good potential referral partner for you. You never know who knows who.

So I called the young lady from the networking event, because she had met him before then, and asked her about his character and integrity and told her I didn’t want to make any assumptions based on a few interactions. She said it was refreshing to hear someone say when they thought some networking etiquette was a little inappropriate and shared a few things with me about her observations that fell in line with mine.

I unsubscribed from the list.

Sometimes intuition is a good thing. Sometimes we can over react. I’m only human.

But this time, speaking my mind helped me realize that who you truly are in the world shows up, whether you like it or not. Doing good business is key!