It’s funny sometimes how we are able to grow and change in such a short amount of time. About eight months ago I went to meet someone at Alterra Coffee on the lake (when we say “the lake” in Milwaukee, we mean Lake Michigan). I was really nervous because I had never done anything like it before. I was headed over to meet Ryan Graves, the very first face-to-face contact I made as a result of working on ItStartsWith.Us. Before I went to meet him, I looked at all his sites, read a bunch of his writing, watched a couple of videos he had made, and studied an interview someone had done of him. And then when I found him in the coffee shop, all that pretty much went out the window, and we just sat down and talked about stuff. Nothing I had to prepare for at all. Both of us had (and have) big ideas about life, and it was exciting just to hear about what he had done, tell him what I was doing, and see where our interests overlapped. Turns out they didn’t overlap too much, but that’s okay. He kept doing his thing, I kept doing mine, and we kept in touch here and there as we went along. I’m happy to report that he’s turning the corner on an exciting new time in his life, working with a cool new company. And I’m doing pretty much the same in starting mine. Awesome.
Contrast this with my meeting last week. Also at Alterra Coffee on the lake (we still mean Lake Michigan), but this time I wasn’t nervous at all. I have eight months of meeting new people under my belt, and even though I’m a big introvert, I’ve really gotten used to doing it. In fact, I’m now so used to doing it that as I parked the car and walked into the building, I found myself double-checking to make sure I even remembered the name of the person I was meeting, much less her life story. Oh, and by the way, Caroline was the one who asked me to meet there after work that day, and I found out that she was really nervous, because she’d never done anything like that before. Ah, see how we’ve come full circle? It was good to be on the other side this time. Except circles don’t really have sides. Whatever.
I’ll tell you something I’ve learned in eight months of talking to people. The most fun I have in a conversation is when I ask people, “What do you get excited about? What do you love doing?” Because telling your story (in my case the story of ISWU) is fine and dandy, but it does tend to get a bit old, at least to yourself. After all, you’ve heard all your stories before. But when you ask people to tell you what they’re interested in, you learn something new every time. And there’s something very cool about that. I get to hear about exciting new places and activities from people who actually live them, and not just from a book or TV or the web. In Caroline’s case, I got to hear about her three-year stint in Africa, living in a village and working on microfinance initiatives. Watching her eyes light up as she told me stories about the people she got to interact with there was the highlight of my evening. And you know what’s awesome? You can have conversations like that with just about anyone. Most people have something that they love, something that gets them energized when they talk about it. So go ahead, ask somebody and see what happens. And even if you’re not really interested in the topic they bring up, you can switch your focus from the actual story to their eyes, their facial expressions, and the tone of their voice. Pretty cool stuff.
Eight months down the road, I wonder what the next meeting at Alterra will bring.
Do you have a favorite question to ask or something you like to do when talking to a new person for the first time? I’d love to hear it.
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