Talk to strangers.

What’s a single piece of advice you remember hearing from your parents or teachers over and over again when you were young?

I bet, amongst all the answers, that one of the most common pieces of advice is:

Don’t talk to…

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STRANGERS!

No matter where I’m speaking, even if I am being translated into a different language, every audience in every country knows the answer to that one and shouts it out to me!

And then we start our own business, or are representing someone else’s, and have to go networking! And walk into a room full of strangers, with the echo of fifteen years of repeated advice from our parents.

We know it is important if not vital to our business, we can see other people doing it successfully (rather like the one kid at school who would just walk up to girls and start talking to them, full of confidence, I used to envy him so much), and yet it is that one thing we find so uncomfortable.

To make it worse, a lot of the advice out there seems very contrived, about asking special ‘networking’ questions, or having a clever handshake designed to build rapport. And if you’re at all nervous about engaging with people you…