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Is there anything more soul-sucking than a standard networking event?
Bad white wine, polite nods, and a room full of people squinting to read your title from afar to decide if you’re worth talking to before they even ask your name. It’s a marketplace of desperation. Everyone is running a mental algorithm: What can I extract from this person?
Nobody enjoys this. Because the moment you walk into a room with a script, a strategy, and a list of things you need from people, you become a transaction rather than a person.
We've built an entire industry around teaching people how to connect with other humans for work. Workshops, frameworks, courses, LinkedIn playbooks. And somehow, despite all of it, most people leave networking events with dozens of LinkedIn QR codes and zero real connections, wondering if they're just not very good at it.
But what if it's not your technique that needs changing?
We have been sold a lie that to succeed in business, we need to erect a shiny, bulletproof facade. We polish our CVs, rehearse elevator pitches, and perfect the art of "small talk" (a ritual specifically designed to signal politeness without revealing anything about who we actually are).
So most people operate on this sequence: credentials first, personality second.
You walk into a room and immediately try to prove you belong: “I’m a Senior VP at [company], I specialize in [jargon], and I went to [school].”
Intuitively, it makes sense. This is your armor, and it's hard to dismiss someone in a full metal suit out of hand.
But armor is also heavy. It holds you back. Once you set that bar, you have to spend the rest of the relationship performing up to it. You become stiff, uniform, forgettable. Terrified of making the wrong move or revealing your face - because it leaves you vulnerable to attacks. The suit takes over and the person beneath becomes irrelevant.
I've found that if you're trying to actually build up your network, it is much better to reverse the polarity:
Chaos first, credentials second.
It's always better to surprise someone by being more than they expected than to disappoint them by being than the persona you advertised.
Real connection - the kind that actually builds careers, opens doors, and creates opportunities that feel almost inexplicable - works on a completely different logic.
It's not transactional. It's not scripted. And it's definitely not short-term.
Think about the last time you were at a networking event. The rehearsed opener. The LinkedIn profile exchange. The "so what do you do?" that leads to a two-minute pitch nobody asked for. The slow drift toward the drinks table.
This is what we've been told networking looks like. And it's exhausting - not because socializing is hard, but because performing is.
If you’re neurodivergent, you know what masking is. This is a term used to describe how people with ADHD, autism, and similar traits learn to suppress their natural mannerisms and interests and adopt more "acceptable" ones in order to fit into neurotypical spaces.
The cost of masking is often invisible but real: the energy it burns is enormous. By the end of the day, you've got nothing left, because you spent it all pretending to be someone slightly more palatable, slightly more "normal", slightly less you.
Here's what nobody's saying out loud: masking is exactly what most professional environments ask of people.
The corporate world has accidentally pathologized authenticity. It asks you to trade your actual personality for a curated, CV-approved version of yourself.
But when you spend 40% of your brainpower monitoring your tone, posture, and vocabulary, you only have 60% left for actual brilliance. You are literally dumbing yourself down to look smart.
The most successful people I know refuse to mask. They create a judgment-free zone around themselves - they don't judge themselves for being "weird", so you feel safe being "weird" too.
And guess what? That’s where the deals happen.
That’s how you send one LinkedIn message and get a meeting with British Intelligence services (true story). Not because you sent a formal proposal, but because you bonded over the vibe of a particular city.
Because you asked them "what's your story?" instead of "what do you do?"
And because you actually wanted to know.
The reason most networking feels gross is that people treat relationships like game theory. They want to know the ROI of a coffee chat. They try to identify their strongest hand and in the process they become achievements shaking hands with achievements.
The irony is brutal: the more you optimize your network for utility, the less useful it becomes. Because utility runs out.
But real human regard - the kind that makes someone respond to your message at 1 AM, or go to bat for you before you've even asked - that's built on something else entirely. It's built on that person knowing you. The real you. The one who tells stories, has opinions, gets passionate about niche topics, and doesn't try to be impressive.
A network built on your CV will only last as long as your CV is impressive. A network built on who you are will last your entire life.
Rooting for the real you,
Hanna from Pulse
