Showing Up Is the Networking

Showing up, month after month, for years, is the networking that actually works here. What doesn't work is showing up once, saying "hallo" and a couple of other words in Dutch, being perfectly polite, and expecting the room to hand you a red carpet for it. Nobody owes you instant belonging for a single well-intentioned gesture, however sincere.

Here's what three years of a monthly conversation table in Leuven actually taught me about the difference.

Why I actually went

I didn't join to find clients. I want to be upfront about that, because it would make a tidier story if I had. Most of the regulars were already taking language classes elsewhere, so the table was never a great lead source even if I'd wanted it to be. I went because I wanted to know Flemish people better, and I hadn't found another way in.

The timing matters here. I'd quit my job in 2021, in the middle of the lockdowns. By 2022 I'd launched officially as self-employed. My actual contacts with Belgians, real ones, not colleagues, not acquaintances from the international bubble, were still thin. The conversation table was one of the only recurring things I had.

The first year looked nothing like the third

The first sessions were not unfriendly. Just serious. New face, no context, no shared history, so the room did what any room does with a stranger: it kept its distance. People were polite. Nobody was cold. But there was a wariness in it that I felt every single month, and it was, for a long stretch, genuinely stressful.

What I didn't expect was how the shift would show up. Not as a single conversation where things suddenly changed. As a series of small, almost administrative-looking adjustments. Someone stayed at the coffee break instead of drifting back to their usual group. Someone followed me out when the break ended instead of letting the conversation stop there. Someone asked for my number in case they wanted to work with me. The warmth arrived in logistics before it arrived in words.

Once people realized I was actually learning Dutch and that I was curious about their culture past the polite minimum, things moved faster. One regular eventually became a language student of mine. That's not a coincidence. That's what three years of the same monthly room does.

A book at the train station

At some point, one of the regulars couldn't make a session. Instead of just letting it pass, he messaged me: he had something for me, could we meet near the Leuven train station around noon instead. I said yes and went.

He handed me a book. A comedic guide to Belgium, written by two Belgian comedians, the kind of book that pokes fun at the country from the inside. "This is for you. Enjoy," he said, and that was it.

I didn't see it coming.

The project I almost said no to

Later, someone else joined the table: a former university professor, retired, serious in a way that read as cold the first time we spoke. After one session he asked if I had time for a coffee. I said yes.

Over coffee, not particularly warm at first, he explained a project he'd been building for years: a large Italian-Dutch thematic vocabulary resource, the kind of thing that takes real linguistic training and real patience to build properly. 

He needed someone who could judge whether the Dutch side of it actually held up, someone whose Dutch was solid enough to catch what was right and what wasn't. He knew other Italians. None of them had the Dutch for it.

I could have said no. I remember the exact shape of the excuse available to me: some version of the idea that Dutch wasn't worth the effort, that it was the ugly cousin of French, not a language you invest real years in. I'd heard that opinion often enough, from other internationals, to have half-absorbed it without noticing.

I said yes instead. 

What started as checking his translations turned into actual conversations in Dutch too, then into him complimenting my Dutch. I'm credited on the project to this day.

What showing up actually bought me

None of this came from a single well-executed gesture. It came from choosing the same room, every month, for three years, and from refusing two very available excuses: that Flemish people wouldn't warm up to me, and that Dutch wasn't worth learning properly.

If I'd believed either of those things, I'd have missed a book handed over at a train station, and a project that's still going. Showing up, repeatedly, is the networking. What isn't networking, no matter how much it feels like effort in the moment, is one polite hallo and the quiet expectation that it should count for something immediately. 

Trust here isn't built in a single transactional conversation - and I find it totally normal.