Burlington Lunch & Learn with Tad Mayer of Career Negotiations

As part of our ongoing effort at building a sense of community among our members, we held another Lunch & Learn in Burlington this week. Hosted by Tad Mayer, President of Career Negotiations, the subject of this event was “How to Turn a Connection into a Champion”.

Whether or not we attend networking events or tradeshows on any sort of ongoing basis, we all need the help of others to grow our businesses and our careers. This is what made Tad’s topic so universal. Tad shared with the group several tips for how to motivate our business connections to want to help us by finding out what is valuable to them and using that knowledge to offer something truly meaningful to them first. As motivational speaker, Zig Ziglar famously said, “You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.”

With Tad’s guidance and worksheet, we broke off into groups and performed an exercise for finding ways to bring real value to a connection that would, in turn, inspire them to want to help us. Using our past interactions with our connection, as well as tools like Google and social media sites, we can learn about what their interests are, and with that knowledge, find common ground and a path to a valued partnership.

For our last exercise, we worked as a group through a challenge that one of us was having with engaging a business connection that had gone dormant for some time. Together we brainstormed for ways reinvigorate this connection. With so much combined experience in the room, we got a lot of insightful feedback for ways to approach this challenge.

To me, this is where the strength of a community is best exemplified. Our members hold many different positions in a variety of industries, and everyone brings a unique perspective and insight for how to address a challenge. We learn and we grow from these interactions and experiences and that’s one of the many bonuses of coworking at Office Evolution in Burlington.

Many thanks again to Tad Mayer of Career Negotiations and to all who took the time to participate in this week’s Lunch & Learn. We hope to see you next time!