The Slow Build: Creating a Network You Can Trust

 With a clearer understanding of the gaps in your skills, you start taking a closer look at the people you've met in your weekly networking group over the past few months. You’ve built a sense of who you connect with, who’s approachable, and who you could genuinely see yourself working with. You dive a little deeper—checking LinkedIn profiles, browsing portfolios, and trying to get a feel for who might be a good fit for future projects.

You reach out to a developer who seems promising. You explain your situation honestly: your strengths, the areas where you could use support, and the types of projects you might bring them into. They’re open but cautious. No promises yet—just the beginning of a possible collaborative relationship.

While that’s unfolding, an email pops up in your inbox. A short freelance request from a UX designer in one of your online communities. It’s a small ed-tech project, right in your wheelhouse, and the chance to collaborate is exciting. The first week goes smoothly, and you start to think this might be someone you could partner with again.

But then things shift—quickly and noticeably. The hierarchy changes. Instead of collaborating, you’re handed all the tasks the other designer doesn’t want to tackle. Your ideas are dismissed before they’re even considered. Screens you design are revised without discussion. The professional tone you expected fades, replaced by a standoffish, dismissive attitude that catches you off guard.

You didn’t expect to be treated as an equal partner, but you did expect a dialogue—a space to contribute, ask questions, and learn. Instead, you feel reduced to a pixel-pusher. The project itself aligns with your skills, but the working relationship is nothing like what you hoped for. What started as an exciting opportunity now feels draining, frustrating, and far from the collaboration you signed up for.

Around the same time, you unexpectedly reconnect with someone who first introduced you to UX design—a senior designer whose early guidance helped spark your interest in the field. You bump into them at a coffee shop, and after the initial surprise, you both sit down and catch up. They’re still the same genuine, grounded person you remembered. They were never your direct mentor and never graded your work, but they opened the door that helped you understand the industry and what it could be.

As the conversation unfolds, you gather the courage to ask if they might be open to acting as a mentor or consultant occasionally—someone you could reach out to when you hit strategic or challenging moments in your freelance projects. They pause, think it through, and say they’d be happy to support you. But they’re busy. If this is something they agree to, it needs to be structured, planned in advance, and billed at their professional rate of $200 an hour.

It’s a wake-up call. Their expertise would be invaluable, and you know every session would be worth it. But it also means they can’t be your go-to for everything. You’ll have to be intentional—using your time with them wisely, saving it for high-impact guidance rather than casual conversation.

These experiences show you that building a network isn’t a rush. It takes time, trial, and a few uncomfortable moments to figure out what kind of collaborators you want around you.

You may not have your full circle yet, but you’re gathering the right people one connection at a time—people who bring out your strengths, treat the work with care, and make the process feel like something you want to return to. And that feels like the beginning of the right kind of network.

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