Your PERSONAL COMMUNITY

We all have them. Personal Communities. Actually we have quite a lot of them and we keep them in buckets. Sometimes they appear in two buckets or more... what am I talking about? ... Networks

Have a think about the networks you belong too? ... You might immediately think of a Networking Group that you attend as your main network but you will have a lot of networks... look below...

Family, Close friends, work colleagues (ex work colleagues, ex ex work colleagues), community groups, faith groups, school friends, local mums, school gate connections, people in your neighbourhood, pub / drinking friends, sports team mates, facebook friends (groups), twitter connections, linkedin connections (groups)

That is just a few... we are all part of many 'personal communities'...

Remember... every friend we have was a stranger once... the difference between a stranger and a friend is 'Hello'.

How many people do you actually know?

We are so desperate to meet new people we very often dismiss the people that we actually already know. In amongst this huge 'Personal Community' our network are often connections to people who could help us.

If we imagined we knew just only 100 people or so (that's conservative by the way) and each of those connections knew 100... that's already 10,000 people (at just one level deep). That's where the idea we are only 5 connections away from every person on the planet came from.

We can solve almost every problem we're ever likely to encounter with a network like this.

Maybe we just need to get better at accessing those we know already

The first challenge then is not necessarily to head off to meet lots of new strangers but maybe to enquire of our existing personal communities if there are those that could help us?

In today's world we have to tools to find them too. We just need to be able to use the technology. [... quick answers or hands-on-help might be a useful place to start!