Business camp was on last weekend, and I wasn't excited about it - no offense Evert - but after so many business networking events this year, I thought I couldn't face another one.

But we popped in. And it was great! I had a cool time, met lots of great people, new faces and old faces, and had some great conversations.

So why? What made it a great event?

Or what made me think it wouldn't be?

Meeting new people is tough. I hate the fact that business networking is motivated by potential sales, such that I feel constrained to talk about "my business" and ask the dreaded "so what do you do?" question. It can be a chore to keep churning out the same "we want to get people together, so they can blah blah blah..."

A friend of mine had a scar from childhood on her face that drew people's attention. After years and years of getting the same "what happened to you?!" question, and getting bored with the stock response, she began to fabricate stories - of violent knifing rapists, near death car crashes, war wounds and the like; and sometimes it feels like I need to spice things up - tell people I'm a cat killer, a porn star, or a disposable cup manufacturer.

But I realise there's something deeper than simple repetition of a company mission that can turn people off meeting new people. It's that oftentimes uncomfortable reminder of your current life situation, how things are going NOW, which can lead to mind-muffling confusion if it just so happens that your clarity of purpose in your life is taking an extended vacation.

Lying is not something I am very good at, and so at the last networking event, it was the 15th new person who was the lucky recipient of a whole heap of distilled meetforeal explanation induced rage, the "I don't know where we are going, and I am sick of pretending!" rant.

Sidestepping "So how are things going?" from friends and family is a hell of a lot easier than explaining from scratch why you are here and how you got here.

So many of us exist suspended in uncomfortable life situations, the equivalent of sitting hunched over in a badly designed computer chair for the large majority of your days and only when a persistent pain niggles in between your vertebral column and starts to affect the rest of your life does it provoke you to intervene. But perhaps then it's too late.

I remember that this was one of the reasons we started meetforeal- we reckoned that if you are confronted with the equivalent of "what do you do?" in a real life context, on a regular basis, you become aware of any niggling unhappiness in your life, and in order to avoid having to keep talking about it, you are motivated to go and do something about it.

So for me, meeting new people is like a way to test how I am right now - a specially designed happiness monitoring system that reminds me of my current status, and alerts me when I need to change course.



This time business camp was so much fun not because the content was any cooler, or the people who attended were any more tuned in - although they were lovely - it was fun because each time I explained what we are doing at meetforeal, I got excited, and I felt my enthusiasm grow with each repetition... and so now I know we're on the right track, for now at least.