Welcome back, lesson two is about exploring your personal and professional communities. As we learned in lesson one, how you grow in your current position or how you find a new opportunity in the 21st century workplace has shifted from more traditional methods. To be the most effective, you have to tap into your personal and professional communities. And tapping into those communities is sometimes as simple as asking for an introduction and expanding your weak ties, so they're there when you need them later. But let me give you a personal example. A few years ago I moved from Washington, D.C. to San Diego. I was moving from a place where I had spent eight years, where I had established and grown my career in policy and politics. It was a place where especially given the incestuousness of politics, you can't walk down the street and go out to brunch on Sunday without bumping into folks you knew. I was going to be leaving that place where I had a robust personal and professional community and lots of strong and weak ties, to a place where I knew literally three people. One was whom I was married to and who was completely in a different field. What was I going to do? How was I going to find a job, or even just find people who I was going to be able to connect with? How would I find my tribe again? We'll get into some do's and don'ts later in this course, but start thinking about what you would do in a similar situation. The previous lesson went into why growing your communities and network are important. In future lessons we'll go into how you can use your existing personal and professional communities to branch out, to find a few jobs, or grow in a new place. This lesson, lesson two, will be about establishing your baseline. What does your existing personal and professional network look like right now? You will dig into your own connections and create a profile of your personal and professional communities. You'll also analyze what it's strengths and weaknesses are, and where you should focus on growing to further your personal growth. To further whatever your personal version of career success is. This is an important step to take because you have to know where you are starting from to really be able to figure out where you're going and how to get there.