How to Talk to Anyone

How to Talk to Anyone

The conference room held thirty-seven people when Marcus walked in. He knew nobody. The event was a regional sales summit -- the kind where everyone already seemed to travel in packs, where the laughter in the corner had been building for twenty minutes before he arrived, where every chair near the food table came with a small invisible "reserved" sign nobody had posted but everyone could read. Marcus had driven two hours for this. He stood near the door for forty seconds, spotted a woman with a small enamel pin of a vintage typewriter on her lapel, walked over, and said: "That pin is amazing. Are you a writer?" They talked for eleven minutes. By the end of the day he had exchanged cards with six people and had lunch plans for the following week.

Marcus had not been lucky. He had been prepared.

Leil Lowndes spent decades studying that exact problem -- the gap between walking into a room and actually connecting with the people in it. Born in 1942 and raised in the American South, she survived what she describes as a nearly paralyzing shyness that lasted well into adulthood. She became a schoolteacher and was still socially insecure at the front of a classroom. So she left. She became a flight attendant to force herself into conversation with strangers at 35,000 feet. She became a cruise director to get comfortable addressing large audiences with no script. She hosted a New York radio talk show, interviewing politicians and celebrities, partly to prove to herself that she could talk to absolutely anyone. The shyness that had once owned her became her research laboratory.