Everyone needs to know how to talk to strangers! Anything we do for a living that involves relating with people we have never met before tasks us to establish a rapport, so we can have an understanding. So whether you are the young man seeking to speak to a lady who has caught your fancy; a shop keeper who is serving a customer he has never met before; a negotiator who needs to make a great front to get a deal sealed; a team leader whose presentation will either win the company the contract or make them lose it. It really doesn’t matter what you do, your ability to speak to strangers and have them relax and listen to you is of great value.
So what is the young man’s pick up line for the girl? How will he present himself when speaking? What aura will he convey? What parts of the pitch does the marketer have to memorise that will serve as strong points for his presentation and get the audience intrigued with his product? How does the negotiator get to the heart of the matter without the listeners feeling they are being rushed into a decsion? What can the team leader say that will really make the board members willing to give his company the contract without hesitation?
Many people have recounted the chances they took in chatting a person up with absolutely no motive in mind but just to be friendly and they ended up making an impression that led to life time relationship as spouse, business partner or even just friends.
There are no hard and fast rules. One major guideline is to try without being pretensious to impress your listener no matter how obscure or relevant your product might be. If you do not value what you are presenting and have no link to it whatsoever, the sensitive people will feel that bit about you and use it as a brickwall. So, you must be open minded and at the same time authoritative. Demonstrating a genuine interest or concern for the person you are talking to, whether he’s a prospective client, a new friend you are just meeting or a person of authority that could help you make your way. It really doesn’t matter. If your mind registers the signal: “I care about this person”. Your body will reciprocate with a warmth and aura easily felt by the person you are talking to.
Your initial meeting with a person leaves a lasting impression and so we are often challenged to make it as good as we can. The care and association with another person must be natural and easily expressed, not constrained hesitant and reserved. Even though people have different dispositions, one thing we all have in common is the need to be cherished, recognised and valued. Body language is a big give away. A person can say one thing and present another with how he carries himself. Shifting uncomfortably in a seat, flaunting a disturbed frown or raising your eyebrows in unexpected surprise to a notion, are all a giver away of our inner thoughts. Sensitive people can easily decipher constraints in our ability to network. So, show your clients that you are genuinely interested in them. Know them as much as you can so that you will understand what their fears, biases and preferences are. Everyone likes an interesting person, so be interesting, be practical and down to earth. Airs are dangerous. They could make your listener clam up like an oyster and you won’t have access to the pearl.
Today in business and relationships we are so clamped up with ourselves that we hardly have time to think about the other person. Could you be the one to break the pattern? At customer service points we are so detached by the fatigue of serving or speaking to so many different people that we fail to exude the warmth that is a welcome part of making a prospect feel at home. Could it be that we are pressed for time and therefore want to ensure that each person get’s to be served as quickly as possible that they barely feel the tone of our service.
Today in business and relationships we are so clamped up with ourselves that we hardly have time to think about the other person.
When we hesitate to talk to strangers we lose a lot of possibilities. Many people have recounted the chances they took in chatting a person up with absolutely no motive in mind but just to be friendly and they ended up making an impression that led to life time relationship as spouse, business partner or even just friends. The following story makes interesting reading; it goes to the heart of the saying: “Silence is also a lost opportunity.”
“About twenty minutes before this flight landed the person in the seat next to me braved the opening of a conversation. He asked me if I was headed home or away. He told me he was headed home after playing a music gig in another city. Turns out he was a studio session guitarist who has been surviving as a professional musician for fifty years. I told him I used to play, but now was just a devoted fan. He asked me which musicians I admired and suddenly we found overlap in artists whom he had backed. He had played behind Don Henley onstage. He had played on an album with Frank Sinatra. I told him I had just seen Jackson Browne and he said he always wanted to play with Jackson Browne, that was on his bucket list. He said the next time he played there he would try to invite me if he could get extra tickets. We exchanged cards. He asked me for nothing it was a great twenty minutes. I don’t know if I will ever see him again, but it made me think hard about that unwritten rule of bothering the strangers around you. How many amazing opportunities get away from us because we are too wrapped up in ourselves to reach out, or too exhausted from today’s turmoil to see tomorrow’s opportunity? We’ll stare into a tiny LED screen and page through infinite tidbits in a news feed, but we’ll hide from the tangible stranger who is less than a foot from our elbow. It’s a weird way to partake in humanity, and it’s probably costing us an unseen miracle or two over the course of a lifetime.” Don’t miss out on a chance meeting; you never know where it will take you.
*Ogundadegbe is a renowned management consultant. He trains managers and executives in the arts of Customer Service, Human Resources Management and Management strategy ([email protected]).
