The Energy You Bring Into The Room

There is a moment, the briefest moment, when someone walks into a room and you feel them before you have even properly looked. Before you have registered their outfit, their face, their handshake. You feel their energy. Their atmosphere. The weather they carry with them.

It is the same in reverse. The person you greet feels you long before they have consciously decided anything about you. Your warmth, your nerves, your openness, your guardedness. It lands before a single word is exchanged.

Maya Angelou said it best.

People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.

And how we make people feel is not really about what we say or what we do. It is about the energy we are transmitting, moment by moment, into the room.

What we are actually talking about

We call it many things. Charisma. Presence. Vibration. Attitude. Aura. Bearing. The thing that some people seem to have without trying, and that others mistakenly believe can be faked with the right outfit and the right opening line.

It cannot. Energy is honest. It tells the truth about where we are inside ourselves. It reveals whether we are anxious or grounded, whether we are open or armoured, whether we have come to give or come to take. We feel it in others because we are reading them at a level far below words. And they are reading us in exactly the same way.

This is the great unspoken language of networking. We talk endlessly about elevator pitches and follow-up emails and how to work a room. We talk far less about the single most powerful thing we are doing in any business interaction, which is being who we are, energetically, in front of another human being.

Reading the room

One of the most invaluable things I do when I am hosting an event is hold the energy in the room. I am reading the room. I am noticing who has arrived feeling unsure, who is here for the first time and trying not to show it, who is carrying a heavy week behind their smile. I am sensing where the energy is high and where it needs a lift. And I am adjusting myself accordingly, because the energy a host holds gives everyone else permission to settle.

You do not need to be the host to do this. You can do it as a guest. You can walk into any networking event, any meeting, any conversation, and decide that part of what you are bringing is your attention to the energy of the room. The woman in the corner who hasn’t spoken to anyone. The conversation that has gone a little flat. The new face at the door. When you choose to read the room, you stop being a person who is waiting for something to happen and you become a person who is shaping what happens.

This is leadership. Quiet, generous, often invisible leadership. And it is felt by everyone in the room, even when they cannot name what they are feeling.

What you put out is what you get back

There is no escaping this. It is one of the oldest principles in human relationship and one of the truest. The energy you put out is the energy you get back.

Walk into a room expecting to be ignored and you will be. Walk in expecting people to be cold and they will oblige. Walk in defended and people will not quite know what to do with you. But arrive curious, warm, interested in others before you are interested in being interesting, and the room will rise to meet you.

This is not a trick. You cannot put on warmth like a coat. People feel the difference between performed energy and genuine energy in seconds. Which is why the real work of networking is not external. It is internal. It is the work of arriving at yourself before you arrive at the door.

For me that has meant twenty five years of meditation. For others it might be a walk, a breath, a moment in the car before the event, a deliberate pause to ask, what am I bringing in here with me, and is it what I want to leave behind?

The wider weather

The world feels a little discombobulating just now. None of us are immune to it. The news, the noise, the speed of everything. It is easy to feel that the answer to any of it lies somewhere far away from us, in the hands of people we will never meet.

But the energy we transmit is not a small thing. It is the only thing we actually have authority over. And it ripples further than we know. The way you spoke to your partner this morning has already changed something in their day. The way you greet the person at the coffee shop will change something in theirs. The way you walk into your next networking event will change something in the room and in every woman who is in it.

This is where it starts. Not in the headlines. In our homes. With our families. Then in our streets. Then in our towns. Then in our counties, our country, our world. We have to begin somewhere, and the only somewhere we have any real authority over is right here, in the energy we are choosing to be.

The invitation

So before your next event, before your next meeting, before your next conversation, pause. Ask yourself what energy you are about to walk in with. Ask yourself what energy this room needs. And remember that you are never just attending a networking event. You are co-creating it. You are part of the weather.

The business you are looking for, the connection you are hoping to make, the door you are hoping will open. All of it follows the energy you bring. Make sure it is energy worth following.