If you are in a networking group, is your networking meeting on your calendar? If so, for how many weeks/months in advance? A month? Two months? Or is it marked for the rest of the calendar year and beyond?
What can often happen when people join a networking group is that a certain complacency can set in. The meeting becomes part of your routine. While in some ways routine is good, in networking not so much. Particularly, if you are in a monthly group.
As a member of a group that meets monthly, that meeting should be more like an event. Most people don’t want to miss events. That’s why they mark events on their calendars, so they won’t miss them and won’t schedule anything at that particular time.
While it may seem like a small thing, marking your calendar with your networking meetings for several months in advance symbolically represents a commitment to that group. A commitment you’ve reinforced by putting it to paper or, in most cases, a calendar item on your handheld or computer.
Does that mean you make every meeting? Not necessarily. Life events still happen. Yet it’s probably safe to say the networker who books their networking meetings and events in their calendar well in adavnce will make it there more times than one who doesn’t. And in networking, being their is more than half the battle.