How to Follow Up from a Coffee Chat, $50,000 Scholarship and more!

Hey there,

This week I am trying a new format with the newsletter. More value, shorter email and if you want to read the full deep dive you can read it on a separate page. This is me sharing stuff I wish someone shared with me when I was starting my journey.

read time: 4 mins

What to Expect This Week:

• Opportunities: $50,000 Scholarship, UN Fellowship and more

• Deep Dive: 5 steps to Follow Up from a Coffee Chat

• Life Updates: First Meet Up, New Client and Speaking

• Community: How Eliska became a World Bank Ambassador

Opportunities This Week

In addition to these, here’s the full list of 25+ Youth Leadership Opportunities.

How to Follow Up from an Initial Coffee Chat

When I think about lessons I wish I knew earlier, the first thing that comes to my mind is relationship management.

Looking back, I have had chats with so many cool people - from CEO’s, to MP’s to Celebrities, Sports Legends and even a Billionaire … but none of those mean anything now.

Why? I never followed up with any of them.

I used to think networking was all about having chats with as many established people as possible.

Only to realise I was ‘playing the game’ wrong the entire time.

This week I break down the 5 steps I use to now follow up with people I meet. I share real life examples of how some of these steps have led to opportunities like jobs, media interviews, partnerships and more.

I also shared a relationship management tracker template I have been using over the last couple of years 👇🏽

Our community grew to over 100k in such a short amount of time. This is something I am so grateful for. But what I realize is that I don’t have a lot of data to understand the community and make decisions. Every week, I will be having a poll to get a better understanding of our community. It would mean the world to me if you engaged with these.

Life Updates

I am introducing this section to share with you some updates as we continue to build this community together. Here’s some things that have happened recently:

• We hosted our first community meet up in Toronto. 75 people showed up and we had an evening full of deep conversations, good vibes and a fun $500 pitch competition. You can watch the highlights from our meetup here. We hope to do these in every city our community is present in - let me know if you want to collaborate on the next one!

• We launched the consulting side of our business a couple weeks ago where we work with various brands and organisations on how to meaningfully engage young people. As part of this, we signed our first client for our newsletter agency. Read how we did that here

• I’ve been doing alot of public speaking lately. From speaking to 250 high school students to the largest education conference, I feel so lucky to share the story of our work.

From The Community: Eliška Pechlátová

A couple weeks ago, I met Eliška as part of the 15-min chats I offer to the community. Eliška is from Czech Republic and is really passionate about Agri Voltaics and Climate.

After our chat, I shared with her one of the opportunities through the newsletter and I just heard back from her last week:

This is honestly crazy right 🤯 

I feel so lucky that we’re building a community that’s having real impact on real people and the power we have to support each other virtually.

⭕️ I would love to feature more stories like these from our community. If any of the opportunities or newsletters have had an impact on you, please send me a note. These are the stories that push me to wake up everyday. I make sure I reply to every single email.

My friend, before I go - I wanted to come clean to you. I haven’t been consistent in sending a newsletter each week as promised. Tbh, I will be done with school very soon and I have been prioritising $$ over the content. I’ve been spending most of my time on the back end building the consulting side of the business so I can be in a position to provide as much value to you guys for free for as long as I can.

But I hope to get things rolling and start being more consistent with the newsletter. This community we are building inspires me to keep pushing and I hope you can hold me accountable to it.

I just want to thank you My friend for supporting me through this process.

I’m looking forward to everything we will build together :)

Hope you have an amazing rest of your week, my friend!

With love,

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Let’s connect on Linkedin and Instagram

One of the goals of Leaders of Today is to ensure we democratise access to opportunities. But in order for us to do this, we all have to come together ⭕️ Keeping this in mind, I would love for you to forward this with your network. Whether it’s your friends, classmates or colleagues. And to reward you, I will take out 15 mins of my time to have a 1-1 meeting with you for every 5 people that you refer.