Meeting Strangers

There’s a reason why we call them “strangers” – not because they’re necessarily strange, but because of how it makes us feel when we meet them.

In today’s post, Pete gets down to what you can do to steer away from that feeling and increase your odds of creating a positive experience for everyone involved.

For more on networking, check out our GROW-it program here.

[Music] I was leading a session about networking this week and I brought up the idea of the best way to get away from that kind of awkward feeling that you often get from networking the best way to get out of your head and to get into a good mental space when you’re networking is to reach out to somebody else in the room and make eye contact with them and actively appreciate them and this one woman in the room asked a really good question about that she said well considering the state of things right now is that such a good idea and I totally understood where she was coming from I mean there are certainly gender issues that can come up and certain communication difficulties that happen most often between males and females when one person makes eye contact and actively appreciates someone else but my thoughts about how to manage difficulties like this and complexities like this is it’s a good idea to keep these things on a human level instead of a gender level if that makes sense what I mean by that that is you want to reach out and connect with someone and appreciate them for being there for being a professional for being someone that you can talk to for being someone who looks receptive to a conversation or for just being who they are it’s best to keep it on that level so appreciation can have different kinds of flavors you can appreciate someone on more of a an attractiveness level and less of a Humanity level if you focus on the humanity level if you focus on looking to connect with someone on a human person level then the flavor of your appreciation will be broadcast in a more specific way now not everyone is particularly emotionally sensitive and not everyone will pick up on oh they’re appreciating me because I’m a human being rather than they’re attracted to me and the frustrating thing is we can’t be responsible for how something that we send out gets picked up by someone else but we can manage it by having specific intentions when we reach out and connect with someone and by paying attention to how they respond to us so my recommendation when you’re networking Remains the Same I think the best way to avoid awkwardness and discomfort is to get out of your head stop thinking and worrying about yourself focus on someone else and actively appreciate them and as you have the conversation with the other person look to communicate your appreciation for them on a human level lead the conversation in such a way that they get this is what it is it’s a professional conversation it’s a human conversation it’s not anything that you might be worried that they could construe it as

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