My favorite definition of an extrovert is “a person for whom heaven is a roomful of strangers.” For an extrovert, such a room is an opportunity to meet and engage with new people, learn interesting things, share observations or humor, and potentially make useful connections. We look forward to and draw energy from these occasions. For us extroverts, the pandemic has been a frustrating and lonely time.

Fortunately for us, the world is beginning to open up. I’m going out to meet today with a group of high-powered women. We’ll listen to an expert speaker, eat lunch together, and enjoy each other’s company. I will most likely sit at a table where I know no one. I can’t wait!

Of course, I’m well aware that not everyone shares my enthusiasm. I have plenty of friends, colleagues, and clients for whom networking is a nightmare. But love it or hate it, for the last two-plus years all of us have had to learn how to work virtually and how to network virtually. We’re still doing plenty of it. Here are some of the lessons I have gleaned from the wonderful world of virtual networking:

I spent my first career trying to help people who most certainly did not love their jobs. As a psychologist, there was only so much I could do. Sure, I could give people techniques to cope, but I couldn’t change the fundamentals of how they spent their workdays.

When I became a leadership consultant and performance coach in 2003, my vision was simple. I wanted to work on the root of so many problems, helping leaders and organization create environments that enabled people to bring their best to work. When I wrote my book, Curating Your Life, in 2019, my goal was to help leaders maximize productivity and joy, both for themselves and for their employees. Learning to love your work — that’s what my work has been about.

So I was fascinated to hear a recent talk by Marcus Buckingham, a giant in the field of leadership excellence. His latest project is Love + Work, a book about how people can thrive at work and find their excellence. Right up my alley!

How do you get to be a CEO? Recent research from the search firm Spencer Stuart identified the four most common “last-mile” experiences of first-time CEOs in S&P 500 companies: COO, divisional CEO, CFO, and “leapfrog” leaders promoted from lower in the organizations. 

Perhaps not so surprising, the path to CEO is littered with “C”s. 

The data gets more interesting, however, when you look at performance. Those unexpected “leapfrog” leaders, who enter the job from outside the C-Suite, were the most likely to outperform their peers. 

By now, most of us have already begun to slip away from those worthwhile New Year’s resolutions we made a couple of weeks ago. Many people I know don’t even bother to make resolutions because they don’t believe they’ll follow through. And yet, as my colleague Constance Dierickx points out, people do make significant changes all the time. 

Does being rich make you happier? The answer seems obvious — of course it does! Anyone who has ever been poor knows that poverty is miserable. Financial comfort is much more fun. So surely, true wealth must be even better?