Episode 52: Connection Beats Networking with Annette Zapp, CSCS*D
Networking stinks like 3-day-old unrefrigerated fish. I said what I said.
Connecting is different. Connection is taking the time to get to know someone enough to put them in your solar system. Connecting is worrying more about what you can do for someone else than what they can do for you.
Connecting becomes important if you're a health and wellness professional attempting to break into the world of fire departments.
So what, now what?
Meet people and learn their stories. And then glue them together with other people! Forget about what they are going to do for YOU. What can you do for THEM?
Hear all about connecting on this episode, and if you're inclined, get on the waitlist for Building a Career in Fire: A Health and Wellness Professional's Roadmap.
Waitlist is here!
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Annette: [00:00:00] Hey podcast listeners. It's AZ. Welcome to episode number 52 of the Fire Rescue Wellness Podcast. I have some big announcements today. Let's get the first one out of the way. I am going to be temporarily-only temporarily-discontinuing the Friday episodes of the podcast.
Here is the reason why. I'm gonna be perfectly transparent and perfectly honest with you. I have a lot going on in the next couple of months. I have several big presentations. I have several out-of-town trips, much later in the summer, and not the least of which I have a major surgery scheduled early in June. And so I'm just not sure if I'm going to have the bandwidth to do two podcast episodes a week, and [00:01:00] so I will still do solo episodes, but I'm just going to sprinkle them in between the guest episodes on Tuesdays.
This will be the final Friday episode probably until end of summer, early fall. Thank you so much to all of you that have been listening to multiple episodes per week. I know that they aren't super long episodes, but I also know it's an investment of your time and I frankly appreciate the hell out of you. Again, my most sincere gratitude, that's announcement number one.
Announcement number two: I do not talk enough about my services. I think I mentioned that last week or the week before. I am hyped about this, you guys. I am offering for the fourth time my course…I changed the name of it a little bit.
It is now called Building Your Career In Fire: A Health and Wellness Professional’s [00:02:00] Roadmap. Here's the deal. There are so many great health and wellness professionals out there who really want to work in fire. They really want to serve those that serve, for lack of a better way to put it. But you guys, fire is a hard nut to crack.
Most of my audience is firefighters with a fair amount of these health and wellness professionals, but the firefighters, I'll tell you, if you are not a firefighter, you are an outsider. An outsider's automatically, and we're kind of suspicious of y'all. So sorry about that. But it is a reality. And so these individuals, these coaches, these scientists, these people that want to work and fire really badly, it takes them 3, 5, 8 [00:03:00]YEARS to create enough of a, a relationship to get an opportunity to work with the fire department. And frankly, we are losing our firefighters to cancer and suicide and cardiovascular disease, and we don't have eight years to mess around. We need to get these professionals into the fire departments yesterday.
And my course, although I will make no promises, I will not promise you that the process will be fast. But what I can promise you is that the process will be streamlined. I already stepped in all the mud puddles, and so you don't have to. I know the ins and outs, and I'm gonna tell you the ins and outs so you don't have to figure it out on your own and be floundering all by yourself.
In addition to the name changing a little bit, [00:04:00] the format is changing a little bit, and I'm excited about this because I think it's gonna make it more accessible. Previously it was six live calls. Now you got the recording if you couldn't make it live, you still got the recording. But there's nothing like being there live and getting your questions answered and, being part of the process.
But that's also a big commitment cuz the classes are 90 minutes to two hours each. And so making a big change this time and there will be three live calls and three pre-recorded calls. You're still gonna get all of the recordings in case you can't make it, but you only have to show up three times live instead of six times live.
I think that decreases the barrier to entry and I'm all about decreasing the barrier to entry. The important thing, my wait list always, always gets the best deal. No one else is [00:05:00] gonna get it for less of a cost than my wait list. The other thing that they get is some free coaching leading up to it. I've already been sending out emails given away information to the people that are on the wait list.
So call to action. If you're even thinking about taking the course, if you even think, huh, that sounds interesting. If you are a physical therapist, an athletic trainer, a dietician, a strength coach, a mental health professional, heck, even a chiropractor, if you are thinking about attempting to work with fire, Or let's be honest, even with law enforcement officers, my course is the way to go, and the wait list is where you wanna be.
I will put the link in the bio, but if you wanna cruise over right now while you're listening, just go to my website and [00:06:00] then look for services. And then you're gonna see for departments and for Health and Wellness professionals. Click on Health and Wellness Professionals and that brings you to the landing page (Thank you, Lex), where you get on the wait list. And you know what? If you decide you don't wanna take the course, no big deal. I scrub the wait list at the end and we start over next time. So there's really no shortcoming. There's really no reason not to get on the wait list if you are even like 1% interested.
Building a Career in Fire: a Health and Wellness Professionals Roadmap class starts May 22nd. The wait list registration starts May 10th.
I thought about it today and I thought, how can I both speak to my firefighters and to the health and wellness professionals that [00:07:00] want to work with them? And I figured it out. Pretty excited about this. Today, the topic is networking versus connecting. If you've been in my stratosphere for any amount of time, you've probably heard me say, “I hate the word networking”, because networking to me implies I have an agenda. I am going to go meet people with the sole purpose of trying to figure out what they can do for me.
I am going to give business cards to people with the hope that someday they will think of an opportunity and dig through their file and think of me and give me an opportunity. And it doesn't [00:08:00] really work like that. It doesn't really work like that unless you take this networking to the next level of connecting.
I already said I don't like the word networking, and I think this is the reason why. Again, when I was in my decade of darkness, state of despair, whatever you wanna call it. And going to conferences, just the word networking made me wanna poop my pants. And so there's that connotation that it has for me, that feeling of nerves and anxiety, which isn't great.
But I also saw this firsthand when I was at a conference in DC uh, 2019, I wanna say it was, And all of the bars in the area of the conference hotel, they're full of people from Capitol Hill. And [00:09:00] so anytime you walk in, everyone's networking and it, and it goes like this. You walk in and you try to be polite and you try to introduce yourself.
Say you're standing around a high top table having a drink and you try to introduce yourself. The next thing that happens is everyone whips out their little pouch of business cards and starts throwing them like a deck of cards at each other. So each person has their stack of cards and they're dealing them like a Las Vegas card dealer.
And you, you know, you get this pile of cards and you honestly don't even know which one came from which person. And then I was just thinking, what in the hell am I gonna do with this? I didn't really even meet this person. So what am I, what, how do I even classify this in my brain Rolodex? Okay, this is Kyle.
And he threw a card at me at a bar [00:10:00] on Capitol Hill or whatever the term for it is. Like, it just, there was no, it didn't make sense to me. And so I got to thinking, we're going about this backwards. We are throwing cards at people in an impersonal fashion, hoping that someday they're gonna do something for us.
But really if we attack it from the other side, and when we meet people and we create an actual connection with them and we get to know them and we worry not so much about what they're gonna do for us, but what we can do for them, it comes back. It comes back a hundred-fold.
So if, for example, At that bar in DC if I had truly had [00:11:00] a heart to heart conversation with someone and really gotten to know them, there's the potential that an opportunity could have come along between then and now where I truly would have thought of that person, and I would have reached out and I would have connected them with someone else.
But because I didn't even really meet any of those people, there is an exactly 0% chance that I'm gonna let them orbit my solar system. I don't know them enough to trust them enough to introduce them to my people. So that's why I feel the process of connection is so very important and, we have to be honest: Throwing business cards at each other doesn't take any time. It doesn't take any bandwidth. There's, it's so surface, there's nothing to it. [00:12:00]
But truly connecting with someone, listening when they talk, remembering where they went to school, remembering that they have a dog. Oh, I love dogs. Remembering that they have a pet turtle or kids or whatever, remembering that they have a background in marketing, even though right now they work at a gym and then thinking, you know what?
That person has a background in marketing, and even though they work at a gym, I think this opportunity that I have or that I've heard about, could be perfect for that person. And you know them and you trust them enough to bring them into the fold and connect them to other people you know and trust. So you have to know that there's going to be a relationship here.
There's going to be a lesson here, and [00:13:00] so here's the lesson. Let's move back to those health and wellness professionals, the ones that are trying to get a job or a contract with the fire department. I think that we're going about it wrong because we are trying to find a department to fit what we're selling, or worse yet, we're just trying to, to jam the department that's in front of us into the model that we already have.
We haven't taken the time to get to know the department to form a connection. There's that word again, connection, and then perform a needs analysis to figure out what they really need. Many times we just assume. We put them into a cookie cutter. We just assume [00:14:00] that we know what they need and we want to sell them something.
I got this on Instagram stories this weekend. “I've been trying to sell my services to a fire department for a really long time, and they're not paying attention.” Of course, they're not paying attention. No one wants to be sold something. It's creepy. It feels gross when you walk into a store and the salesperson, Victoria's Secret is a perfect example.
You get precisely two milliseconds to browse, and then they're all over you. “How are you today? What are you looking for? Do you need a bag? Do you wanna try on this perfume?” Like Lady, leave me alone. Give me five seconds. I wanna buy something, but I don't want you to sell it to me. I wanna buy something, but I don't want you to [00:15:00] sell it to me.
Fire departments are the same way. They're all looking for a solution to their problems. And we have to, we have to be honest. Those problems aren't necessarily on the forefront of their mind every single day. Those problems come to light when, say someone experiences a catastrophic back injury or someone falls or something like that.
Then it comes back into light like, oh my gosh, we need to be working on injury mitigation strategies. We need to be working on our fitness. We need to be working on our mental health. And then, it comes to light and then of course it gets overshadowed by something else. And so the fire department has issues that they need solutions for, but just like, I don't wanna be sold stuff at [00:16:00] Victoria's Secret, they don't wanna be sold stuff either.
They don't wanna be sold stuff either. Let's use another example. I'm just not into sales. I, I can't, I just can't with sales, and I can see it coming 10 miles away. Someone reaches out via LinkedIn. Words, words, words, words. I'd love to connect and it's… I can predict it. As soon as I hit accept the connection with them, they're in my direct messages trying to sell me something.
And in my head, I'm thinking, at least take me out for dinner before you try to take me to bed. You know, take five days, 10 days, 30 days, to groom a relationship, a connection before you even bring up what you're selling. The people try to sell me stuff that.. [00:17:00] someone once tried to sell me services for the exact same thing that I do because they didn't bother to even get to know me well enough to know what I did.
So if they would've perhaps taken a few minutes even to look at my profile, they could have figured it out. And so selling things feels icky. It feels icky to the person that's being sold to. And it also feels icky to me. I don't know if it feels icky to those people on Instagram and LinkedIn who just, you know, friend you connect with you, quote unquote, and then immediately try to sell you something. I don't know if that feels icky to them, but it feels icky to me and it actually, I do one button after that, which is block or delete or whatever it is. [00:18:00]
It's the same thing with fire departments. Again, they know they have problems. They know they need solutions. They just don't want someone trying to sell them something, especially if that someone hasn't taken the time to learn about them.
I say it all the time, dealing with the fire department is very much like dating. Be on your best behavior. Don't be creepy. Don't rush the tempo and like be a good person. Take the time to build the relationship. Take the time to build the connection.
So this lesson applies to whether, people are at F D I C this weekend, whether you are starting a new college class, whether you're going to the National Fire Academy, all of this applies. Stop meeting people [00:19:00] with the intention of networking and hoping they do something for you in the future. Connect with them and think more about what you can do for them, and I promise you it will come back a hundred-fold.
Last call to action. Get on the wait list for my course. It starts May 22nd. Registration for the wait list is May 10th. This is AZ and I am once again with my last Friday episode for a little while officially out.
