Nourish Audio Course #1: Healthy Networking Practices for Filmmakers

I think the bulk of my perspective on networking comes from being on the production company side and having seen, I would say, probably thousands of emails from freelancers and directors over the seven years that I was there.

really started to percolate a lot of insights into what is the sticky networking, the good networking, and what is the networking that just flies through the cracks.

And then of course, after leaving Variable, I've been freelance now for, I think it's been almost seven years.

And so I've had to develop a lot of techniques on that side of the table as a freelancer without the foundation of the production company.

And so it's been nice to kind of have that experience being on both sides of the table.

So a lot of my insights throughout this course are coming from that perspective.

Yeah.

I'm excited to dive into

some of your own kind of personal thoughts as we share our insights, because I think among all my friends, I think you have some of the most robust, supportive network around you that I've seen.

You know, when I interact with friends you introduced me to or how you built your businesses, it's kind of amazing to see that ecosystem that Both for Variable and also for the Nourish community and personally, I think there's a lot of things we can offer folks here.

Before we go into, you know, kind of the juice of the course and our more tangible insights, we wanted to start by properly framing networking.

I think the word networking has some baggage to it.

You know, it's a little bit icky.

Sometimes you think of networking events or a lot of times feels like you're trying to like use people to get ahead in your career or it feels like people are using you and it's just kind of a lot of general meetings that might have no purpose.

But in the spirit of the nourish community ethos, we're going to try and talk about networking in terms of truly finding your tribe.

that you really jive with in terms of what a meaningful life means to you, cultivating sincerely genuine interest in others and having genuine, deep, vulnerable, meaningful connection.

I think that's the thing, like really robust networks happen when you connect with others on a very meaningful level.

And then just very naturally, because you had that meaningful connection, opportunities will arise as a result.

So, you know, we're not talking about networking as a means to get to somewhere else.

But I think trying to frame it in a way that networking can be joyfully finding friends.

Like, how do you actually find people you really jive with? And you share deeper conversations, experiences.

And as a result of that, you end up growing together and making work together and having a good time.

So that said, a couple of things we're going to cover in this course, how networking is no different than doing the inner work.

Why networking is, you know, very related to just knowing who you are as a human being and kind of working on things like patience, self-compassion, all these good things.

Then we're going to talk about the importance of being very explicit and why it's so important to be very overt about your values and positioning.