Business Networking and Sex - Ivan Misner [7]
So when a problem arises and gets in the way of good networking, good businesspeople look for solutions.
HARDWIRED FOR SURVIVAL
Perhaps, by some distant hardwiring for survival, our species defaulted to remembering the negative. A recent Association for Psychological Science study reports Boston College psychologist Elizabeth Kensinger’s study of the brain’s strong preference for negative memories, explaining that our memories retain the most negative, dramatic details of an event to “at some point save our lives by guiding our actions and allowing us to plan for similar future occurrences.”
If most networkers share this basically positive feeling about networking with the opposite sex, then why were there also so many negative comments in the final “tell us a networking story” part of our study? Bad news travels faster than good news because it is sensational. This is the same reason people slow down on the highway to stare at a grisly car accident, or tune into the news to sample the parade of violence and societal conflict that the less fortunate of our species has to offer.
Our deep-rooted survival skills may be storing negative information to save us from making those mistakes in our own lives. The residual purpose of collecting negative data may have run its course and left us with a strange, unanswered attention to the negative. The belief that the human appendix used to be for digesting bits of wood and now serves no purpose comes to mind. Who eats wood anymore, now that we are upright and frequent the salad bar at Whole Foods? Still, the appendix is there and can lead to problems.
Though very few women report having experienced their own problems, they have the perception that problems are common, through the grapevine effect. The same goes for men, each sex passing information speedily by way of the internet or gossip. They each enjoy networking with the other and rarely encounter problems, but hear second- and third-hand stories of worst-case scenarios.
Oh, how the stories circulate, from women who are overly sensitive to jokes and innocent comments to those who dress provocatively while complaining men are looking at their breasts and only work in female groups. And the numbers of men who are just trolling for dates under the guise of networking or making disrespectful, lewd remarks are endless. Or are they?
If this were actually a realistic representation of what’s going on, why are men and women in almost total agreement about their true feelings regarding networking with the opposite sex? We’ve got two ways of phrasing a question. One is “How do you feel about networking with the opposite sex?” and the other is “Will you tell me a story about networking?”
It’s possible that both feelings exist simultaneously for these survey participants, all of whom are dedicated networkers. Because everyone responding to this survey is already a dedicated professional, strongly committed to networking, they may just see these blips in professional behavior as challenges to be overcome. If one overall enjoys an experience and benefits from it, the fact that a small part of it is broken may just stimulate the desire to problem solve or repair the weakness, rather than changing one’s entire opinion of it.
These responses show some of the willingness to problem solve and work through gender glitches:
As a female in a highly male-dominated industry, I sometimes find that men do not trust my competency level. I often bring a man with me to nod to everything I say. This works very well.
I find that if you bring someone with you of the opposite sex, you can more effectively work with that sex when they might otherwise feel uncomfortable. The person you are trying to get to know will feel more at ease