From the Sound Up ✈️ Lesson 11: How do you make friends as an adult?

Sound Design Live - Career building interviews on live sound, theatre, AV, recording, and sound system tuning

Welcome to Lesson 11! If you missed the previous lessons, please go back to that email or head over to the course page. http://sounddesignlive.com/from-the-sound-up/ Notes - When you're young, making friends is easy, more natural. But when you are an adult, it's harder. - Here's why this is important: every time I have moved I have been focused on finding work and a place to live. Because I feel like if I can get that taken care of, I'll be set. But the thing that always creeps up on me, which I always forget about, is my network, because at home, it's something I always took for granted. So then what happens 3 or 4 months down the road is I end up getting depressed. And this is a killer. It will stop all work. - So here's my new plan for my move to Minneapolis: Instead of focusing on work and housing, I'm going to flip the script and focus on making friends. Crazy, right? Because here's the thing, if I have a supportive network of people that care for me, I can weather any storm. If my business tanks or I can't find an apartment, I might feel bad for a bit, but through the support of my network, I'll dust myself off and get back up again. - So my agenda for building relationships in Minneapolis is not to have an agenda. Now, I am going to try to intentionally meet the right people, but after I meet them, there's no plan, except to be as curious about them as possible and listen to what they have to say. - I'll tell them what I'm about, which is going to be super clear and easy because of all of the work at did at the beginning of this course. Then I'll just let the the relationship develop naturally and see how we can support each other. - So what I'm going to do, to get that started, is contact everyone on my list, tell them that I'm moving, and ask them if they can connect me to one new person in my new city. If they work in pro audio, or the performing arts, or event production, great, but at this point, I'm just looking for friends. Homework 1. Contact the first 10 people on your list. Ask them for a contact in your new city. Maybe explain to them how to search LinkedIn or FB to make it easier on them. Hopefully, these are people that you've been in contact with regularly already, but if they're not, you might need to reconnect first before making that request. 2. What is the best way to build relationships with colleagues and ask for their help? Congratulations on completing lesson 11! -Nathan