We are not courageous when we reach out to people. // Let me give you an example of that. // A few years ago, I had a very eventful year. / That year, I managed to lose a job, / I managed to get a dream job overseas and accept it, / I had a baby the next month, / I got very sick, / I was unable to take the dream job. // And so in a few weeks, / what ended up happening was, / I lost my identity as a faculty member, / and I got a very stressful new identity as a mother. // What I also got was tons of advice from people. / And the advice I despised more than any other advice was, / "You've got to go network with everybody." // When your psychological world is breaking down, / the hardest thing to do is to try and reach out / and build up your social world. // And so we studied exactly this idea on a much larger scale. // What we did was we looked at high and low socioeconomic status people, / and we looked at them in two situations. // We looked at them first in a baseline condition, / when they were quite comfortable. // And what we found was that our lower socioeconomic status people, / when they were comfortable, / were actually reaching out to more people. // They thought of more people. / They were also less constrained in how they were networking. / They were thinking of more diverse people than the higher-status people. // Then we asked them to think about maybe losing a job. / We threatened them. // And once they thought about that, / the networks they generated completely differed. // The lower socioeconomic status people reached inwards. / They thought of fewer people. / They thought of less-diverse people. // The higher socioeconomic status people thought of more people, / they thought of a broader network, / they were positioning themselves to bounce back from that setback. // Let's consider what this actually means. // Imagine that you were being spontaneously unfriended by everyone in your network / other than your mom, / your dad / and your dog. // This is essentially what we are doing at these moments / when we need our networks the most. // Imagine -- this is what we're doing. // We're doing it to ourselves. // We are mentally compressing our networks / when we are being harassed, / when we are being bullied, / when we are threatened about losing a job, / when we feel down and weak. // We are closing ourselves off, / isolating ourselves, / creating a blind spot / where we actually don't see our resources. // We don't see our allies, / we don't see our opportunities. // How can we overcome this? // Two simple strategies. // One strategy is simply to look at your list of Facebook friends / and LinkedIn friends / just so you remind yourself of people who are there / beyond those that automatically come to mind. // And in our own research, / one of the things we did was, / we considered Claude Steele's research on self-affirmation: / simply thinking about your own values, / networking from a place of strength. // What Leigh Thompson, / Hoon-Seok Choi / and I were able to do is, / we found that people who had affirmed themselves first / were able to take advice from people / who would otherwise be threatening to them.