Gamifying your networking experience

As I’m sat here, looking at the schedule of the next conference I’m going to, I check who the speakers are and who else is turning up. As with any conference, it’s an opportunity to learn from specialists and to meet new people, in other words, it’s time to network.

Personally, I’m not great at networking, I’ve gotten better over the years, but it is not something that comes easily to me. And I’m sure that’s true for many others, the prospect of approaching strangers, either alone or in a group can increase the anxiety in most individuals, and then there’s the ‘small talk’. Naturally, the point of networking is to learn about each other. But often your nerves take over and you’ll probably either only talk about them, never giving a glimpse of what you can offer. Or you only talk about yourself and they get bored with you.

So, how do we go about changing that? One of the benefits of gamification that is not highlighted often enough is the fact that it permits the ability to change a mindset and a point of view of something. In essence, it takes something that is familiar and allows you to see it in a new light. Which is great for those of us that get nervous with certain things, it gives us the option to essentially ‘re-skin’ the experience into something we are less nervous about. So, let’s see how we could go about gamifying our own networking…