Read Talk to Strangers: How Everyday, Random Encounters Can Expand Your Business, Career, Income, and Life for Free Online Page A

changes in skin tone and breathing patterns, as well as an entire range of information signals that are available only in face-to-face communication. You can more easily discern the impact that your communication is having when the other party’s eyes dart away based on something you just said. When someone takes a deep breath (which is noticeable on the phone but not as easily recognized when you’re in person), you gain insight into how that person is reacting. When someone shifts his or her body posture in response to something you say, you pick up valuable clues about the content of your conversation and the effect you are having.
     
    You assess much of this information about others—information that lets us know who they are, what they think, how they really feel—on an unconscious level. Our brains are able to ascertain large amounts of data on levels of which we are not even aware. But you have to be in the other person’s physical space to recognize it.
     
    Bottom line: when it comes to making valuable business connections and leveraging them into mutually profitable relationships, the money’s in the face-to-face meeting. With only few exceptions, if someone is going to hire you, he or she is going to want to meet you in person, even if you’ve previously met on a video chat. If an investor is going to plunk down hard-earned money into your company, he or she is going to want to get together with you in the flesh, probably a number of times. If someone is going to buy your product or service, he or she is going to want more than just having you as a name in his or her LinkedIn connections. All of these people are going to want to see you, feel you (well, sort of), and gain those subtle insights about you—clues that come through only in in-person, face-to-face interactions.
     
    Chapter at a Glance
     
     
 
Face-to-face interaction is the richest, most meaningful interaction two people can have.
     
     
Even videoconferencing doesn’t convey the fullness of one’s personality and character.
     
     
When we are in someone else’s physical presence, there is a chemistry that deepens connection.
     
     
Important business deals almost always require an in-person meeting.
     
     

Chapter 8
     
    Anonymity—A Random Connector’s Greatest Advantage
     
    Lest you think strangers are less willing to share information, think again. They’re very often more forthright, as counterintuitive as this may seem. Anonymity actually works to your advantage during a random encounter, because people are surprisingly more eager to share facts about themselves with someone they don’t know than with people they do. They simply assume they’ll never see or hear from you again, and until names are exchanged, you’re still a complete stranger. And that means you’re safe. They will therefore tell you things they would never tell someone who came to see them in their office and give you information they’d never give a colleague. But they’ll share it with you because, after all, it’s all under the veil of anonymity—and as far as they know, it will continue to be.
     
    In the first few moments of a random exchange, you don’t know the other person and he or she doesn’t know you. It’s safe. It’s comfortable. In these situations, you can find out a great deal about others—what they do for a living, what company they work for, even where they live, where they’re from, and where they’re going. You might even find out what’s important to them, whether they’re happy with their life circumstances, and what they do and don’t like about their work, home, company, and more.
     
    Under the shared veil of anonymity, you can offer up bits and pieces of your life, too, so all is fair. You’re not building a dossier; you’re merely exchanging information about yourself with each other without feeling threatened or invaded. The level of comfort and trust remains as you continue in conversation and lob back and