You know that feeling of showing up somewhere and realizing - a little too late - that everyone else is already three steps ahead of you?
Maybe it's a new job where the whole team is firing off inside references you don't understand yet.
Maybe it's a dinner where two people are already deep in a conversation and you sit down and smile and nod and wait for a gap that never quite comes.
And instead of diving in, you shrink a little.
You find a spot on the edge.
You laugh at things like they are slightly funnier than they actually are.
You wait for someone to pull you in rather than pulling yourself in.
Most people think the solution is confidence.
Just be more outgoing. Just speak up.
But that's not actually the problem.
The problem is that most people walk into a new room and immediately try to impose their energy onto it - rather than doing the one thing that actually works first.
I have a friend who is, in my opinion, one of the best social communicators I've ever spent time with.
He walks into rooms where he has absolutely nothing in common with anyone.
Where the energy is completely different from his own.
And within about ten minutes, he's already leading the room.
He’s doing it by doing five very specific things - in a very specific order - that almost nobody thinks to do.
I broke the whole thing down in this week's video, using one of the most chaotic podcast rooms on the internet as the example.
If you've ever felt like you couldn't quite crack a room - like you were there but not quite in it - I think you'll find this one useful.