11/09/2026
I’m s**t at networking and I always have been.
The “hi, so what do you do” bit makes me feel sick to my stomach. Folk are usually surprised by that because I stand up and deliver workshops all week, and in rooms like this one I’m fine. But walking into a hall full of strangers and starting a conversation from nothing? I would rather do almost anything else.
I was at Ideas Fest down in England this week and I was dreading exactly that bit. So instead of trying to get better at it, I tried something else.
I wore a jacket I’d made with DELUSIONAL AS F*CK painted on the back, and a pair of Dr Martens I’d covered in glitter and paint, and I decided I wasn’t going to introduce myself to a single person.
I didn’t have to. People stopped ME. About the jacket, or the boots, or both. And because they’d started it, the horrible bit never happened, the conversation was already warm.
And I did the same back. Stopped folk whose boots I loved. Folk who were visibly having the best time. Told them so.
The bit I keep thinking about is this: it didn’t get me MORE conversations, it got me the RIGHT ones. The people who came over were my people. The ones who weren’t stayed well away, which suited us both fine 😄
I know a lot of us in here find that side of business hard, and I think we’re often told the answer is to practise until we’re less rubbish at it. Maybe. But there’s another option, which is to stop trying to be good at the bit you hate and find a way round it that’s actually YOU.
Mine was a daft jacket.
What’s yours? Genuinely curious, because I suspect there’s some brilliant workarounds! 💛
