When someone tells you the next step in your career is “networking,” something in you tightens. It feels foreign. Transactional. A little inauthentic.

That discomfort is a sign you’ve been handed the wrong definition of networking, and it’s conflicting against your integrity. 

Here are five steps I suggest to my well-meaning introverted clients who want to grow their careers without being schmooze-y.

In the C-Suite, you can’t sit back and hope your direct reports have the courage to critique you to your face. You have to lead the narrative.

Don't wait for your team to tell you how you're doing. Tell your team where the organization is going, and invite them to build that future with you.

You want to expand your career, maybe even pivot into something different and bigger — but the thought of networking events, office politics, or chasing superficial connections makes your skin crawl.

This playbook is for you: the ambitious but introverted professional who has valuable knowledge to share, wants to keep growing, and refuses to play the schmoozy, transactional game.

Feeling like a "fraud" is super normal, even for me. The more I coach subject matter experts and executive women, the more I see that imposter syndrome is never an indicator of actual competency but a hypnotic spell induced by a society steeped in bias against women and minorities. We can break the spell of this terribly boring hypnosis by co-opting its language. So there, I'm a "fraud." 

A client recently came to a session with an anxiety level of ten out of ten. By the time she arrived at our coaching session, she had already spent an hour talking to a therapist about the accident. Yet, she still felt like she was, in her words, “surviving but not thriving.”

"Let’s address that anxiety," I said.