If you're anything like me, networking feels like a necessary evil at best, and an overwhelming nightmare more often than not. But it doesn't have to be that way. So today I thought I would share an extract from my new book time Wise, which is out in all places where you buy books. And this is a simple trick that I learned from Professor Marissa King that's helped me return to in person events with a newfound confidence, even when I don't know a single other person when I arrive.
My name is doctor amanthe Immer. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and this is how I work a show about how to help you do your best work. I avoid business events and conferences like the plague. In fact, the only time you'll see me at an event is if I happen to be speaking at it. I hate that feeling of walking into a large conference hall and seeing a sea of strangers.
Everyone seems to be having an amazing time and connecting with long lost friends, whereas I feel like a social pariah and I'm always at a loss as to how I will infiltrate the crowd and find even one person who might want to talk to me. Marissa King hates networking, yet somewhat ironically, has dedicated more than fifteen years to researching social networks. Marissa is a professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management and wrote the book
Social Chemistry, which explores the science behind our networks. Like me and possibly everyone else on the planet, Marissa really dislikes entering a room full of strangers and having to strike up a conversation with someone she doesn't know. But luckily some of her research can help us out. What we know from research is that people don't form walls or oceans. They actually tend to clump together in small groups, explains Marissa. So really it's not an ocean of people,
it's only little islands. Then the question is, now that I know they're islands and things feel a bit more manageable, what am I going to do next? What researchers have found is that people almost always interact in groups of two or diads. It's really the most fundamental unit of human interaction. We have two eyes, and we have two ears, and our hearing does something that's known as the cocktail
party effect, homes in on a single voice. For Marissa, this means that when she looks at the islands of people, she is looking for a group that has an odd number. It might be three, five, seven, it doesn't really matter. If there's an odd number of people, then there's someone who really isn't part of the conversation and they are
likely looking for a conversational partner. And so that's a very basic strategy that has become critical for me to start to navigate a lot of the social anxiety I feel in these types of situations, because it gives me direction, explains Marissa. Gone will be the days of standing around wasting time for and in You'll now easily be able to connect with new people while simultaneously helping that third
wheel who might be feeling left out. If you're keen for more tips like this one, I think you will love my new book time Wise. You can get it from all the usual places where you buy books. How I Work is produced by Inventing with production support from Dead Set Studios. And thank you to Martin Nimba, who does the audio mix for every episode and makes everything sound so much better than it would have otherwise. See you next time.