Leading With Authenticity - Meaningful Connections

Good morning, Cadre family. Happy Monday. Hope you are all having a great day. Beautiful start to your day. It is sunny and chilly here in Minneapolis. Good morning, Jules. How's the snowstorm? The sun is shining bright today. Always a good sign. So as you're popping into our livestream today, I will invite you to do what I invite you to do each time you jump into one of my calls. Got my trusted advisor here ready to say hello and good morning. Ah, inches. Not bad, not bad. So this morning, as you're calling in or whether you're listening in on replay, I'm going to invite you to take a breath.

Long, slow inhale. Why do I ask everybody to breathe? Honestly, there, the list is long and I'm gonna do some live videos on breath to help us break it down and learn more. But basically what it does is it can reset our systems when we take intentional breath. Also known as prana in the yogi world and in different spaces, it's a breath of life. But what it allows us to do when we actively control our breath is to help reset our systems. So if we can take time to take a few breaths, then it allows us to get present, allows us to reach, reshape our focus, redirect our focus.

Speak Wonder. Yes. Vitamin D. It's a vitamin D morning in my favorite corner of where we live with all the plants and with Major here hanging out with us. So today I titled it networking and I wanted to change it to say meaningful connections, but I left it to networking, partially because I want to understand or get your perspective. When you hear the word networking, what does that word make you feel? Not how do you interpret it, but what does it make you feel? When I say the word networking, how do you feel?

Type it in the chat. If you're popping in on replay, please do the same. I'll come back and listen. I love Speak Wonder that you have your morning coffee and that you're writing. So when you think about networking, has it, like, what does it make you feel? List out some words. Now, for me, personally, anxiety. For me personally, when I hear the word networking. Yes, Speak Wonder. It feels business. Like, I get this little, like, pit in my stomach feeling kind of like now I'm a very social person and what's really funny about that is I used to host networking events for women for almost eight years.

And it's funny because you would need to title things certain ways. Speak, render, crowds. Yeah, you need to title things certain ways to get people to come. Right. Game face on. Yeah. So it's funny because I named us Network Buzz and I had a name for us. I created a logo. It literally was a hobby of mine. But I can't start anything unless I name it and create a visual for it. I don't know why. It's just the way that I work. And what I wanted to do was break the stigma around networking and make it be something people could look forward to.

And so every time I would start my events and I would use the language meaningful connections. And it's funny because my very first one, I was so green, I didn't know what I was doing. I was part of a women's leadership group, and I knew that I wanted to bring women together specifically to create connections, because what I was seeing at the company that I was working with and I worked at in finance at the time, and I was at at a company called Best Buy. And I was really grateful and honored to be part of this women's leadership group.

And what I found was we had females, had at least females in this group. One, had a really hard time talking about themselves, especially in a business setting. And two, most of their connections were other people that worked at Best Buy. Now, I had only been there for a couple of years, and I had already had another two other jobs at this time. And my brain couldn't comprehend that they didn't know people that didn't work at Best Buy. Now, they knew neighbors, right? People in their neighborhood, But a lot of these people had worked at best buy for 10, 15, 20 years.

And I feel like there's a point in that number of years that you work at a company where you start to acquire more and more friends that are only in the spaces that you work, right? We spend so much time there. We spend 40 plus hours a week with the individuals that we work with. And we might move jobs inside those companies, but realistically, that becomes our friend group, our work group, all of the things, right? And so I wanted to create events where people could connect and create meaningful connections outside of Best Buy.

So I pulled in people that I knew from tennis and from volleyball, from previous jobs, from side hustles that I do because I've been a serial entrepreneur for a really long time. And I created this networking group and it grew like my largest event. I had 100 people attend. I would do it at a local restaurant. I would buy $5 gift cards for everybod and they would give me the space. So it was great. I charged like $15 for the event. So it was really, really fun because it created the opportunity for women to come together to talk about more than just what they do.

So I had guest speakers. I would do some type of activity that would force people to talk not just about their day jobs, but to really allow people to get to know who was the person behind the job title. Speak wonder. Exactly. That's why post retirement you lost a whole family. That's why retirement is so hard. People start to lose the family that they identified with for so many years. A part of themselves that was so important for so many years. And it's one of the things that I tried to protect my parents against so much because when my mom retired isn't nurse.

It was like she lost a part of her identity. My dad found a part time job working at the casino because he wanted to connect with people, because he missed connecting with people. So, you know, it becomes a really big part of who we are. So when I title this networking, what I want to say and want to change the story of is how might we create meaningful connections and allow that to go beyond the typical networking we might do? And when I say the phrase meaningful connections, how does that feel in your body?

What does that make you think or think differently? Feel free to type in the chat. Meaningful connections. What does that mean to you? What does that feel like to you? So for me, what that means is I might take notes on some people. I might intentionally capture their birthdays. So at the very least one time a year I am sending them a note to tell them I'm thinking about them. Jules. Hope and happiness. That's a reaction to meaningful connections. Speak wonders Reaction to meaningful connections.

I wish companies would bring in events to help employees prepare mentally for retirement. That is a brilliant idea. Might you have discovered a new opportunity? But yes. How might we stop with that day to day login, check the email, DM answers, show up to meetings. How might we start to build opportunities for meaningful connections? Meaningful connections equals more organic and warmer. Yeah, it goes beyond that layer that says here's my business card. So, fun fact. I attended a networking event, the first one in many, many years because after I stopped leading them, I kind of, I got spoiled with how people showed up at the events that I led.

And two, I got tired of being at all these events, so I just took a pause. I needed a timeout. But what I did instead is I leaned into my other jobs that I do, other passions that I do. I leaned into the spin studio that I talk about often and I leaned into my sound bath experiences and I use those as my opportunities to create purposeful connections. Because there were. There was a community of people coming together for a specific reason. And for me, it's about that purpose. It's about that reason.

So it was really easy for me to dive in to create experiences for people, but then allow people opportunities to meet through spin classes. So building community in just a different way, Making meaningful connections through the fact that all of us show up daily to move our bodies, or a few times a week, or even once a week or once a month to move our bodies. So I created connections and community there. So I went to a networking event, and I got invited to it by this very beautiful person who had come to one of my sound baths, and she excitedly told her team that I had said, yeah, she brought her team to my sound bath.

And she said. She said she'd come to our event. And I was like, oh, shoot, now I really have to go. So I did. Hi, Luke. Happy Monday. We're talking about meaningful connections. So I went to this event, and I was like, I don't know if I can do this. There's a bingo card. I'm supposed to meet all these people and fill out answers to this bingo card. And I literally was cringing inside. And it was just because to me, it stripped away the meaningful connections. And so we did a line of speed networking for 20 minutes, and I was like, oh, I'm dying inside, but I've got this.

I said that I would be here. I will be here. So every person I talk to, I asked them to go first. I kind of, like, interjected myself. And I was like, tell me what you love about what you do. And that was my question on repeat. And it jarred people a little bit. But what it invited in was a different conversation than, I'm just gonna talk about my business. And I got to hear more about their story. And then I shared. They're like, well, what do you do? And I was like, well, I wear a lot of hats.

But because I got to hear about what they loved about what they do, I knew which story to talk about. I knew if I could talk about Cadre, I knew if I could talk about my consulting, my coaching, my sound bass, or my spin. That's five things that I do that I'm really passionate about. But when I heard about what was meaningful to them, I knew which job I should talk about for them. And a few of them got the whole download because they were really curious. So when we are thinking about being out and about, or we're thinking about connecting in our day jobs.

How might we instead flip the story from just networking, taking away a bunch of business cards? And what might we do differently to meet people where they're at? Meet people where we're at to have a real discovery and create a real connection. And not everybody that you connect with is going to stay in that pocket with you. Some people might float away, some people you might pay forward to others. But when we allow ourselves the opportunity, even in a short period of time to create a meaningful connection, new ideas happen, new inspirations happen.

And this might be somebody that you connect with in your quarterly connections. Now I'm going to add meaningful connections as my next Monday conversation and we're going to discuss what we can do with those meaningful connections, how we actively engage with those meaningful connections. So now I'm going to make you stay tuned for more. But I want you between now and next week to think about it. If you're changing the story from networking to creating meaningful connections, you might engage with less people, but they might become deeper conversations.

So let's practice between this Monday and next Monday, let's practice changing the story. Who might you have a meaningful connection with in the next seven days? My challenge to you is find three people to do that with and speak Wonder. I see you out here. I see you coming up with ideas, the harbor pilots for your retirement. How might I support you? Let me know. I'm full of ideas and I would love to be one of your meaningful connections. So with that, I hope you have the most beautiful Monday. I want you to remember that you always have a family right here on Cadre.

We love you, we're proud of you for showing up as often as you can and we want to be a part of your meaningful connection family. So check out the other members that are out here popping in today. Or maybe you don't have time today. Look ahead at the schedule and check out some of the beautiful faces. If there's one out there you haven't ever listened to. My invitation to you is go out there and check out somebody new. There's a few I haven't been out to here, so I'm going to do the same. Maybe I'll see you there.

Have the best Monday, enjoy the vitamin D and we'll see you soon.