I’ve recently made my sweetie join the business-networking group, BNI  for our brand new business, Greenview Designs.  I have a day job and he’s semi-retired and this group has mandatory weekly meetings, so I don’t have the flexibility that he has. It is, however, against his nature. I’m the social one; the love-to-talk-to-everyone person and Steve is …well…not. He’s the doer. Need a bookcase, he’ll build it, need a video, he’ll film it. Who does my daughter call when she discovers her car is flooded? You guessed it, and he shows up and fixes it.

He’s at the networking social getting to know the group and I join him after work. He doesn’t even have his business cards with him, so I’m handing out mine. He’s way more interested in the game that’s on in the bar while I’m happily doing the meet and greet and enjoying the conversations I’m having with everyone.
When we get home that evening, I immediately email a few people in relation to the conversations I just had. (This has more to do with the fact that I won’t remember the conversations if I don’t respond immediately, than me being that on top of it.)
It is as soon as I send the last email that I think about how diverse these conversations were. I laugh at myself thinking I was probably the only one at that meet and greet that could have had these separate conversations in one evening.
1. There was the techie guy with his web business. He was full of the latest lingo and anachronisms. I’m a marketer so I at least know what SEO and ROI means. We talk for a long time about business. I talk about the book “Tribal Leadership” how this book impacted me as a leader. I send him the TED talk link  and the free download and I just blogged about it, so I sent him that link too. 
2. The next was a friend who I enjoyed catching up with, our kids even went to Bonnaroo together. She has a side business teaching what I call gentle yoga. It’s for people who have some type of physical issue like MS (multiple sclerosis). I immediately thought of a blogger friend who I know from my Generation Fabulous blogging group, I know she’s a health advocate for MS as well as a woman who is living with it. I think that these two great women should at least know each other and may be able to share resources even though they live at different ends of the country. So I send them an email introduction to each other.
3. I even got into a conversation about auras. I realize that this is not normal business conversation, but this is really the types of conversations I get into all the time. I’m open to many possibilities. I’ve never seen an aura, but I have people near and dear to me who have. So I believe the validity of this energy that we all have. I also know for many this is a little “WOO WOO” out there. I discover my new BFF reads auras. Just days before I had a conversation with a woman who wanted her aura read while she meditated. So naturally I introduced them via email.
We are a sum of our life’s experiences. I can go from tribes to Bonnaroo to auras without skipping a beat. This is what networking means to me, simply sharing my life experiences and trying to connect people who should know each other. The term networking seems so formal and not me, I like to think of myself as connector of colorful friends.
 I wonder what color my aura is right now.
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