You have been told to network more. Put yourself out there. Talk to strangers. Nobody ever hands you the actual steps. So you white-knuckle through the event, leave early, and tell yourself you are just not a people person. Bill Lennan builds the steps.

Bill and I got connected recently and clicked on the first call, the kind where you both go, okay, we need to talk more. He was raised on islands, and he has spent his career building products and teams across mobile, recruiting, e-commerce, and now education. These days he specializes in building high-functioning teams. He also used to have real social anxiety, so he built a system to get out of it, and he has taught it to more than a hundred people since.

Key Takeaways

• Social anxiety was the thing about to stall Bill's career the day he got his first team to run. He treated it like any other problem and built a fix. The doors that opened after were not small. Networking inside the company, public speaking, even dating all got easier.
• The 2 minute recipe: Bill's on-ramp for social anxiety is a short physical routine he runs before he walks into a room, built to drop your heart rate and make the first exchange easy. He walks through the exact steps on the show.
• Communication is a stack of skills, like math. You do not start at calculus. Start conversations a few thousand times until they come across as easy and natural instead of needy. Needy is hard to date with and hard to sell with.
• Lead with curiosity, not your pitch. Bill keeps a small set of reusable questions he uses on strangers, on his own team, and on executives alike. They are simple, and he lays them out in the episode. If you are patient, people tell you their problem.
• If you run a team, your job changed. Bill learned early that leading people is a different job than doing the work yourself, and that the real work is clearing what slows everyone else down. He tells the story of the day that clicked for him.

Listen If You...

• Keep getting told to network and have no idea what to actually say to a stranger
• Call yourself an introvert and use it as the reason you stay quiet at events
• Just moved from doing the work to leading the people who do it, and it is not clicking

Connect with Bill

Find Bill at 40pb.com. His book, Talking with Strangers, is on Amazon.

Tired of prospects ghosting you after your first conversation? Grab my FREE 5-day email course at https://thefollowupfix.net/ and learn the five relationship-killing mistakes that are costing you sales (and how to fix them without being pushy).

About the Show

#MeetCoolPeople is where founders, creators, and entrepreneurs share real stories about building businesses that matter. Hosted by Ely Delaney, each episode goes past surface-level advice to uncover the mindset shifts, failures, and frameworks that separate people who talk about success from people who actually build it.