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.

You have heard the advice a hundred times. Take a breath. Pause before you react. Then a real moment hits, your chest tightens, and you are just standing there wondering what you are supposed to do with that pause. Hiba Tanvir builds the part everyone skips.

This week I got to sit down with my friend Hiba Tanvir. We met at Sheryl Powers' author symposium last October, I was emceeing, and we have been trading messages on LinkedIn ever since. She is an emotional intelligence speaker and an award-winning author, and she is the creator of the Play and Pause methodology and the Zest framework. She is also the one who walks into a room full of executives with a tub of Play-Doh and watches the whole mood shift.

Key Takeaways

• All emotions are welcome, but they are not equal. Hiba splits them into high-value emotions like compassion, joy, peace, and collaboration, and low-value ones like anger, shame, and frustration. The mix you live in is what she calls your net emotional worth. Aim for emotionally wealthy, not emotionally poor.
• A pause only helps if you know what goes inside it. Build two or three small moves you can run in 90 seconds or less, and practice them before the hard moment shows up. Nobody runs their first fire drill during an actual fire.
• Play changes a room faster than any icebreaker. Hand people something low threat, Play-Doh, a pen to doodle, a walk outside, and the nervous system settles, the jaw unclenches, and real conversation starts on its own.
• Play stops being play the second it has an audience. If you are doing it for a photo, for likes, or for a finished thing to show off, you have traded the benefit for the performance.
• You do not need a checklist or a blocked calendar to start. Doodle on the next call. Take the call as a walk. Pick the kind of play that is actually you, and let it happen without scheduling it.

Listen If You...

• Keep hearing "just pause" and have no idea what to do in the actual moment
• Run meetings or trainings and want the room engaged instead of glazed over
• Think showing emotion at work makes you look weak and want a better frame for it

Connect with Hiba

Find Hiba at htcompassion.com.

Her latest book, Future Ready Performance Playbook, is on Amazon. It is about staying unapologetically human in the AI era, and it goes deep on the Play and Pause methodology from this conversation.

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.

I once watched a speaker work a room of about 400 people. She was the best speaker I saw that whole year.

A month later, I caught them again, in a much smaller room. Before they went on stage, I walked up and told them how good she was. Their first words back: "So did you buy the program?" Not thank you. Not even a nod. Just a receipt check.

That one sentence cost her over 20% of the room.

And this is just one example of not stopping and being intentional with your words.

I break down why that happens in this episode, and it comes down to three things: how you position yourself, the words you use, and the actions you actually take. Get any one of them wrong, and it doesn't matter how right you are.

Key Takeaways

• Why every single thing you say or do creates a feeling in the other person, whether you mean it to or not
• The line I use on myself before giving anyone hard feedback: "I get what you're going for, here's an idea that might help" instead of "that's stupid, do it this way"
• A former client that I couldn't back anymore, even though I agreed with everything they said
• Why chasing the algorithm with your words instead of the feeling behind them makes content fall flat
• The gap between what you claim about accountability and whether you actually follow through, and why that gap does more damage than staying quiet

Listen If You...

• Have ever said something true in a way that still hurt somebody
• Get views on your content but can feel it's not building real trust
• Talk a big game about your values and want a gut check on whether your actions back it up

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.