What Are You Scared Of? Connect.

How do you connect with your community?

Do you get out there and put a face to a name and go beyond the business card relationship? Or, do you sit at home all comfortable in your snuggie tweeting away and connecting on LinkedIn knowing that you’ll probably never meet the person who you’ve just connected with?

Do you get out there and build real relationships. Do you test yourself?

What I’m getting at is that I’m still abuzz (Google says it’s a real word) from attending the Tru London Conference.

Why should you care? Because I got to connect with China Miner Gorman and Sarah White (albeit briefly as she was flying home) who are two active members of your community and I also got the chance (in my opinion) to connect with (yes, I know I’m using a lot of brackets) Laurie Ruettimann.

Laurie was an amazing person to have a conversation with and also managed to calm me down as I nearly let the flu get the better of the track I was leading. We had the chance to have a nice conversation over lunch and talk about her career, my career and the crazy world of conferences. I think she was in the middle of a blog post so I apologize to all her loyal readers if your cynical hit was delayed. But what many people can forget, and what I loved most about meeting Laurie, is that away from all the blogs, cats and tweets she’s a real person.

I think that is an important take away in so many different facets of life.

When you’re dealing with “that” candidate, when you have a troublesome employee in for another performance meeting or when you’re pitching to your CEO – don’t forget they are just people.

So, my challenge for all of us uber-connected HR folk is to find somebody in your network and get to know them away from all the hustle and bustle of the online world. Discover what they’re really like away from the short bios and snippets of wisdom.

If you’re up for the challenge, feel free to come and connect with me in Australia. The floods have gone and my house is fine. After all, I never would have met China, Sarah, Laurie and all of the other the people I met if I didn’t get of my butt onto a plane for 24 hours.  You’ve really got no excuse.

Considering I met all these great Women of HR in London, I thought I should finish off with this quote from Notting Hill, “After all, I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her.”

Let us know about your meetups in the comments! Good Luck!

Photo credit Google Images