Welcome back to the Articharm podcast, a show designed to help you communicate with power and become unstoppable on your path from hidden genius to influential leader.

We know you have what it takes to reach your full potential in each and every week we share with you interviews and strategies to help you transform your life by helping you unlock your ex factor.

Whether you're in sales, leadership, medicine, building, client relationships or looking for love, we got what you need. You shouldn't have to settle for anything less than extraordinary.

I'm AJ and I'm Johnny.

Thank you everyone for tuning in. Let's kick off today's toolbox episode. We have our coach Michael joining us today and we're going to be doing a deep dive into networking.

We're going to show you how to take stock of the network you already have and get clear on what you have to offer.

Now we're going to talk about how to grow and strengthen your network strategically, whether in person or through online events.

And lastly, we're going to share with you our techniques that we've used to grow our own personal networks over the years with great success and we're super excited to share them with you.

Well, today we have Michael joining us for another toolbox episode. This one is actually focused on networking.

And I thought it'd be fun today to kick off the backstory of how networking actually led us to meet Michael and welcome him to our team here.

And I think for many of us when we think of networking, we think it's a little icky because we've had some poor experiences with people being very transactional.

But in today's story of how I actually came to meet Michael, it was the exact opposite.

And I think that's how effective networking works for most of us. It works through friendships and it's not about what can I get out of someone else.

So a little bit of backstory. I moved to LA almost 12 years ago now and when I first moved to LA, I of course wanted to grow my professional network.

So I was doing everything I could to go to networking events around Los Angeles. And I happened to go to this event and I was introduced to someone that I just had to meet who knew everyone in LA and that happened to be David.

And David became a great friend of mine. We spent some time throughout some networking events, smoking hookah, sharing stories of building businesses.

And I came to realize that David really is a super connector. He knows everyone. So as David got to know the art of charm and what we were doing and growing our business, he was constantly passing me little tips and tricks, some of which tremendously helped us grow our business.

And we were always looking to trade contact information with interesting people we were meeting through our networking efforts. And I knew that David was very open to meeting new people and he knew the same for me.

So one of David's friends, someone he had encountered back in Germany was moving to Los Angeles. And David reached out to me and said, Hey, I think you'd really get along with my friend till he's moving to LA.

He has a great business that's in the coaching space. I think you guys would have a lot in common. And he made the introduction.

So not knowing till at all, I went and grabbed lunch locally here in Los Angeles. And we had a great conversation around the backstory of both of us building coaching businesses, essentially coming out of college.

And till story was very similar to mine. We were trading notes around what our goals were for the future until was actually looking to transition out of coaching.

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