I have been a part of several professional communities throughout my career including Society of Women Engineers, Agile, etc. I have found enormous value and benefits from communities ranging from learning/growth to connections/opportunities. Truth is, I owe much of my career success to these communities.
After 2020, I have been considering joining new communities…partially for the social aspect and partially for expanding the value mentioned above. But I have to admit, I’ve struggled. And I knew logically what I was struggling with wasn’t unique to the new communities I was dipping a toe in:
- Every community has status, power, etc dynamics.
- Every community has stellar and not so stellar people.
- Every community has terminology and history.
- Every community has new and advanced content.
Yet, these were some of the complaints I was making to justify only keeping a toe in the community and not really investing. And this approach was not going to achieve any of my goals. So I had to figure out why I was having illogical reactions. With the help of coaching, I realized that every community I’ve been a part of up to this point, I joined as the newbie. I approached the communities with a “kid in the candy store” feeling of everything is amazing and wonderful. I couldn’t learn fast enough. This mental approach even left me surprised when I realized that I’m no longer seen as the newbie in the community. Yet, now, I’m considering communities where I am experienced. I’m not a newbie yet I am to the community. This has been creating challenges that I don’t know how to handle. For example, I am a new member of the National Speaker Association. I’ve been speaking for quite some time but with a “first timer” badge, I got mostly people approaching me to “help me speak for the first time”. When I responded that I’ve been doing this for quite some time, the conversations just ended. But I had no connection to the people that I could have a deeper conversation with – they don’t know me at all. In addition, I don’t have the bandwidth of a new person starting out needing to learn everything. I often can’t attend the community events (conflict with scheduled work), etc. And even if I could, many are targeted for the newbie speaker (which is very good thing – just not for me). So I’m left feeling a bit isolated when I do attend anything – even being the extrovert that I am.
So what am I going to do with this realization that I don’t know how to engage in a community as an experienced person? Not fully sure yet but I have some starting points:
- Acknowledge that this is different. This in itself is something to learn and experience.
- Stop comparing unfairly. The benefits I treasure didn’t happen overnight.
- Volunteer. If the programs are more for newbie, volunteer to help support those programs.
What step do you suggest?
