Now that you've created a list of about 50 personal and professional contacts, here's a downloadable database for you to add to your contacts to. The database can help you layout how people can help you in your journey towards career success. You'll want to update it in the future as you add and reprioritize names as your world and your communities change. After you insert the names, you'll see there are categories within the database that can help you identify areas of possible support roles. These categories, and even the names of people will change as you chart your future work, opportunities and grow in your career. Here's some of the categories you might want to start using as you categorize your personal and professional community members. And you can make up your own. We've just started with the obvious ones related to some of the concepts we've already talked about. So we put down strong ties and weak ties, we put down mentors. We've also included some that we haven't discussed and you can change the names of these or add your own categories. But we've added in categories like, Location Specific Contacts and Industry Specific Contacts and Explorers. Those people that help you think outside of your usual way of seeing the world. They help you unstick yourself when you're stuck. They listen, come up with quirky ideas and help you keep on moving forward. Who in your list of contacts fills this role for you? Are there other categories that you would find helpful? As I mentioned at the top of this lesson, a few years ago I moved to San Diego and I knew, no joke, three people. I was lucky though, because I was coming from a place where I had a lot of connections both strong ties and weak ties. I realized that I had a huge gap in my network, since I didn't have any location-specific contacts. So I set out to fill that gap. Literally, every time the word San Diego was mentioned, I would make the ask of whomever I was with, for them to connect me with whomever they knew in San Diego, personal or professional. Every interaction where someone mentioned that I was transitioning from my job, I followed with a plea. I would end emails with an ask. And this was a genuine ask. Saying that I was moving across the country and that I didn't know anyone. So I'd love to meet and talk with anyone they knew in the area and who they could connect me to. People were more than happy to open their Rolodexes, or really, their Google contact list. They would drop a quick e-mail introducing me to their friend, or their former colleague, or whatever, and cc me. And then once I got to San Diego, I followed up on those e-mails. I had a bunch of coffees. And at each coffee, I'd ask them who they thought I should sit down with. Who else should I meet? What exciting opportunities were there that I should look at? And now when folks come to me with the same ask, I can help them out. Last month, a 2017 college grad, so a recent college grad, came to me asking for DC contacts. She was moving out there this summer, but was going to be going for a long weekend, this was last month, and was interested in pursuing a job at an environmental think tank and she wanted to network. So I connected her with a great friend of mine in DC who works in that space. In a later lesson we'll get into the details of how best to make these types of asks and how best to leverage other people's relationships like she did for me. But just know that I was happy to help and really most people are.
