Photo by Giulia Grani on Unsplash

Series: The Gap Self-Assessment Dimensions (2 of 7: Financial Runway)

There's a question in the self-assessment that makes people uncomfortable. Not because it's hard to understand. Because it's hard to answer honestly.

"You need to find work. How many people outside your current employer would take your call this week about an opportunity?"

Not accept a LinkedIn connection request. Not like a post. Take your call. This week. And have a genuine conversation about what's next for you.

When I answered that question honestly after my redundancy, the number was smaller than I wanted to admit. Not zero. But nowhere near what I would have told you six months earlier when the scaffolding of employment made everything feel connected and supported.

And I don't think my experience is unusual. I think most people carry a version of their network in their head that is significantly larger than the one that would actually show up when it mattered.

I need to be upfront about something. I'm not a natural networker. But if you've met me, you might not believe that.

I'm what I'd call an extroverted introvert. Once I'm in motion, I'm fine. More than fine. I love connecting with people. I can stand in front of two hundred people and deliver a keynote without breaking a sweat. I come alive in deep conversation, the kind where you skip the surface and get straight into what someone actually cares about, what they're building, what keeps them up at night, who they are beyond the professional version of themselves.

But getting into motion is the hard part. The activation energy required to go from my internal world to the external one is significant. Not because I don't want to connect. Because my default state, my happy place, is internal. Thinking. Processing. Deep in my own head.

Most people who know me don't believe this. They see the person on stage, the person who lights up in a one-on-one conversation, the person who can hold a room. And they assume that's who I am all the time. It isn't. That's who I am once I've overcome the barrier to entry. The barrier itself is real, and it's high.

Add ADHD to this and the complexity compounds. When I'm in a phase of hyperfocus, which is most of the time when I'm building something, I don't just go quiet socially. I disappear. Completely. Not because I don't value the people in my life, but because when I'm deep in something, everything else falls away. Time passes without me noticing. And then one day I surface and realise I haven't spoken to someone I care about in four months. Six months. Longer.

And then the guilt arrives. The longer the gap, the harder it becomes to reach out. Because now the conversation isn't just a catch-up. It's an explanation. "Sorry I disappeared." "I've been meaning to call." "I know it's been ages." The guilt compounds the gap, and the gap feeds the guilt, and before long the relationship has quietly atrophied. Not from conflict. Not from falling out. From absence.

And here's the layer underneath that: when people don't believe you're introverted, when they see the extroverted version and assume that's the whole picture, it creates a strange disconnect. You feel like you can't explain why you went quiet because the explanation doesn't match their mental model of you. So you say nothing. And the gap widens further.

Small talk is the other piece. I can talk for hours about someone's real interests, their actual passions, the things they care about beyond work. But the surface-level, working-the-room, how's-business, lovely-weather kind of networking? That's where my energy dies. Not because it's beneath me. Because it feels performative in a way that my brain can't sustain. I'd rather have one conversation that goes deep than ten that stay on the surface. But the world of professional networking rewards the ten, not the one.

I suspect I'm not the only person who operates this way. And I suspect the people who relate most to what I just described are exactly the people who need this article most.

Here's what I've learned about how we think about our networks versus how they actually function.

When you're employed, your network feels large. You're in meetings with people. You're on email threads. You have colleagues who know your work. You have contacts from previous roles who you could theoretically reach out to. Your LinkedIn says 500+ connections. The number feels reassuring.

But most of that network is contextual. It exists because of the shared context of employment. The moment that context disappears, you discover which relationships were genuine and which were structural. The colleague who you spoke with every day? You worked together. You didn't build a relationship. The difference becomes painfully clear about two weeks into the gap when the messages stop and the silence starts.

The network that actually holds weight in the gap is not the one that existed because of your employer. It's the one that exists because of you. People who know you, not your role. People who understand your value, not your job description. People who would pick up the phone not because you work at the same company but because they genuinely want to talk to you.

That network, for most people, is much smaller than the LinkedIn number suggests.

And here's where it gets deeper than practical networking advice.

For me, and I suspect for many people, the reluctance to activate a network isn't just introversion or ADHD or busyness. It's something underneath all of those. A set of beliefs about whether you've earned the right to ask.

The first one sounds like this: "They'll think I'm only reaching out because I need something." And the cruel thing is, in the gap, that's partially true. You are reaching out because you need something. Not necessarily a job. But connection. Direction. A conversation that reminds you that you exist professionally outside the walls of your former employer. And the belief that this makes the outreach transactional, that it somehow taints the relationship, keeps people silent when they most need to speak.

The second one is quieter but heavier: "Would they actually vouch for me?" Not just take my call. Actually put their own reputation on the line to recommend me, introduce me, open a door for me. When you're in the gap and your confidence is low, that question feels impossibly loaded. Because answering it requires you to believe that you've brought enough value to people over the years to warrant them investing their social capital in you.

And the third one is the most insidious: "I haven't maintained the relationship well enough to ask." The guilt of the disappeared introvert. The ADHD tax of lost time. You feel like you forfeited the right to reach out by not reaching out sooner. And so you don't. And the gap between you and your network widens at the exact moment you need it to close.

Here's what I discovered when I pushed through those beliefs: they were almost entirely wrong.

The people I was afraid to contact? Most of them were glad to hear from me. The ones I thought would judge the gap in communication? They had their own gaps. They understood. The ones I thought wouldn't vouch for me? Some of them had already been talking about me to people I didn't know, saying things about my value that I would never have said about myself.

The limiting beliefs about my network were louder than the reality. They almost always are.

There's a dimension to network strength that rarely gets discussed, and it connects directly to who you are professionally.

Different roles attract different personality types, and those personality types build fundamentally different kinds of networks.

If you've spent your career in sales, business development, or client-facing roles, there's a good chance your network is broad. Your job required you to build and maintain relationships. Your professional identity was built on being connected. Networking wasn't a side activity. It was the activity.

If you've spent your career in analytical, technical, or specialist roles, your network probably looks very different. Deeper in specific domains. Narrower across industries. Built around shared expertise rather than shared social energy. You know fewer people, but the people you know understand your work at a level that generalist networks never reach.

Neither is better. But they behave very differently in the gap.

The broad network has more doors to knock on but fewer people who understand the nuance of what you do. The deep network has fewer doors but each one opens to someone who genuinely gets your value.

The point is this: your network strength isn't just about size. It's about whether the network you have matches the kind of support you'd actually need. A thousand LinkedIn connections who vaguely remember your name is worth less than five people who could describe your value better than you can describe it yourself.

And those five people? They might already exist in your life. You might just not have spoken to them in six months because your ADHD brain got distracted, or your introversion made the outreach feel too hard, or your limiting beliefs told you they wouldn't remember or wouldn't care.

They remember. They care. You just have to reach out.

I'm not going to tell you to go to networking events. If that works for you, brilliant. It doesn't come naturally to me and I suspect it doesn't for a lot of the people reading this.

What I will say is that the strongest networks aren't built through events. They're built through conversations. One at a time. Without an agenda. Without a pitch. Without the pressure of needing something. The kind of conversation where you skip the small talk and go straight into what actually matters to the other person. That's where connection lives. That's where trust is built. And that's the kind of conversation that introverts, extroverted introverts, and anyone who'd rather go deep than go wide are actually brilliant at.

One genuine reconnection this week. Not a LinkedIn message that says "let's catch up sometime." An actual message. A voice note. A text that says "I was thinking about you and wanted to see how you're going." That's it. That's the starting point.

The network you need in the gap isn't built in the gap. It's maintained in the months and years before it. And maintaining it doesn't require you to be an extrovert or a social butterfly or someone who works a room. It requires you to be a person who occasionally, genuinely, reaches out to the people who matter.

Even when you've been absent. Even when the guilt says don't. Especially then.

In the identity article, I talked about discovering who you are beyond the job title. In the financial runway article, I talked about understanding what your money is actually buying you.

Network strength is where those two things meet the outside world.

Your identity tells you what value you carry. Your runway tells you how much time you have to deploy it. Your network is how that value reaches the people and opportunities that need it.

Without a network, identity and runway exist in a vacuum. You can know exactly who you are and have twelve months of savings and still be invisible to the world that needs what you bring.

The network is the bridge between who you are and where you're going. And like every other foundation in the gap, it's dramatically easier to build before you need to cross it.

And if you want to see where your network strength sits alongside the other six dimensions, take the self-assessment. Three minutes. Seven questions. An honest look at the foundations underneath your career.

Because the fault line doesn't care how many LinkedIn connections you have.

It cares how many of them would take your call.

If reaching out feels impossible right now, if the guilt of lost time and the fear of being judged are keeping you silent, hear this: the people who matter don't care about the gap in communication. They care about you.

One message. One conversation. Not a pitch. Not a request. Just a genuine "I wanted to reach out."

That's not networking. That's being human. And it's the single most powerful thing you can do in the gap.

Start today. One person.