 All right, I'm really excited about today's toolbox episode because I know we talk a lot on the show about building and fostering great relationships in your life both personally and professionally. And we share a lot of advanced strategies when it comes to networking specifically what we want to share today is three scientific ways you can increase your success in networking and building relationships by increasing your like ability. And what we're going to share is what are those three components to your like ability how specifically you can leverage those three areas online and in person. And if you feel like you live in a city that maybe doesn't have a lot of opportunities to network and connect with people we're going to share specifically how we've had success taking these concepts online effectively creating an online network of high value people who help support us both personally and professionally. We're also going to share a couple pitfalls you might be falling into when it comes to like ability. Now, unfortunately, if we're struggling in the like ability area, the strategies you've heard in past episodes on the show are not likely to be very successful. Meaning if we don't have a great first impression and if people don't naturally like us to begin with it doesn't matter if you memorize a script it doesn't matter if you focus on high level strategies you're going to have a significant decline in the impact of what you're saying or doing if people just don't like you. So how do we become more likeable is the goal of today's episode and I want to start first with a common refrain or excuse that we hear from some of our clients in our coaching programs which is AJ, Johnny, Michael, you live in big cities, LA, Medellin, Vienna, where there's tons of opportunities to meet and connect with people. I moved away from a big city, maybe it was for work, maybe it was due to the pandemic, maybe it was to be closer to your parents. And unfortunately, I don't feel like I have those opportunities nearby. I don't feel like I have that social life that I want or those great opportunities to connect with people where I live and I don't live in a big city. And we don't want that excuse to keep you from building that high value network, from having that great active social life. So we're going to talk in these three components on how we can do it in person and also online so that we can become more likeable. This is a great topic to be discussing today as I was just on a call with one of our clients yesterday and he was talking about all of these things that he was going to do once he moved to here. He was talking about his new town and everything was on hold in his life because, well, I'm not there yet and when I get there, I'm going to get this started and that started and this is going to happen and I'll be dating and I'll be able to look for a new job and it's just funny to me because we live in this modernity with all of this technology at our fingertips. And certainly we rail against a lot of this technology and how it atrophies a lot of our social skills. But let's be real here. As a tool, this technology allows us to reach out and connect with people all over the world. And I'm excited to share some of the tactics and concepts that we have used to connect with people. Now, I travel a lot, AJ, I know that you travel a lot. Michael's been all over the world. And my favorite thing to do is to begin reaching out to people where I'm going to be visiting months before I even show up before I get there. And so I'm excited to talk about all of that stuff today. And something to keep in mind here as well is that even if you live in a big city like we do, there might be people that you want in your network that don't live in your city and then you still have to reach out to them to get that high value person into your network. And if you don't have the right tools, you just can't get them into your network. And let's be honest, we're all busy on top of it. I was talking with one of our team members, Doug, who has a wife and kids and he's got a side hustle. And he was saying that right now, he doesn't have a lot of opportunity to go out in person and meet new people, but he's on LinkedIn quite a bit and he sees all these really fascinating people in his feed. But he doesn't work in the same industry and he doesn't have common connections. So he was asking me how specifically he could be more effective in his cold outreach, meaning reaching out to complete strangers to increase his chances to create those connections online. And as we started talking about these three principles, it was really interesting how they work both in person and online so effectively to increase your likability and of course, increase the chances that people want to build and foster great relationships with you. So let's talk about this first factor in our likability or the first component that science shows makes us more likable naturally. And I know, Johnny, you talk a lot about this in our in person boot camps, this concept of propinquity. Yes, propinquity and familiarity work in the same, but there's a couple other components to propinquity that familiarity doesn't carry with it. But that's the easiest way to think about it. Familiarity, when you see people regularly, nature does its job and you become curious of those people. The other thing about propinquity is nearness in ideologies and interests and likes. So those commonalities, when you are going to regular events or you are operating in certain online communities, maybe an online arts community that specializes in specific art, well, your interests then are going to show because, well, why else are you participating or in that group? And if you are interested in those topics, those other people who are there, they're interested in those topics. So we already have a commonality and that nearness in commonalities go a long way too. And what's great about propinquity and familiarity is that you can leverage it to your advantage. However, there is a window to leveraging it into your advantage, which I like to refer to as being the new guy and the advantage of being the new guy. Where as you continue to show up, you are the new person in the group and that might be an online presence or an in real life presence. There is going to be a period of your nearness makes people curious about who you are and what you're bringing to the table. And so being seen and being heard allows nature to do its job and we want to take advantage of that window of opportunity. This is why making sure that you are saying hello to people, introductions, handing out value is very important to that beginning period, that newness period. Because that's going to go a long way and people getting to know you and getting more comfortable with you. And the thing about propinquity and familiarity is that nature is going to do its job. But the thing that is most important there is that you don't put any hurdles in nature's way. Removing those hurdles will allow nature to do its job faster. And I know a lot of people out there are thinking, well, I'm busy. I have work. I don't want to be going to all these events. I don't have time to be doing all this. Well, it doesn't take very much for nature to do its job of you being the new guy and people being curious of what you're about. And to take advantage of that is going to take place very early in that period. Now, if we think back to our first crush or first interest, maybe it's grade school, maybe it was middle school, odds are it was someone you sat next to, someone you took class with, you saw over and over and over again. And that's nature doing its work, doing its job, as Johnny was saying. As we see faces that become familiar over time, we naturally gravitate, become more interested, like them more, become attracted to them because they're safe. They're part of our tribe. It's hardwired into our survival to be wary of new people. But if we see the same familiar faces over and over again, we naturally start to warm to them. So using propinquity is actually one of the easiest ways we can start to increase our likability online or in person. And the science is clear on this, right, Michael? Well, the science is really interesting around this, actually. Not just clear. I was very surprised when I read about this. There's something that's called the mere exposure effect, which is kind of the base version of propinquity. So Dr. Amy Gordon writes about this in psychology today in an article that's titled, The Role of Familiarity in Attraction. And she describes the mere exposure effect or how this has been tested in the lab. When you present participants with random stimuli, this can be a symbol, a shape, a picture, just something. The more people see this, the more they start liking it. And this happens both consciously and subconsciously. So this might even happen with a song that the first time you hear it, you don't really like it that much, but it plays over. It's the summer hit, it plays over, it plays over, it plays over. And that just lends itself to us suddenly liking it because we're exposed to it so much. Fashion trends, same thing. First time you see this weird pair of pants, you're like, what is that? Hundreds of times you see it. It's like, oh, I like that stuff. And if we take this mere exposure effect and we bring it to the human psyche, to human social interactions, now it's called the propinquity effect. And there's a very famous study, it's the dorm room study, where social psychologists found that the closer students live to each other in a dorm, the more likely they were to become friends. So in one study, 41% of people were friends with a person next door, while less than 25% had a friend who was just a few doors down. And when someone was living at the end of their hall, the likelihood that they were friends was only 10%. Now, one more thing, and then I'll leave the science lab for a bit. One important thing to tag on to what Johnny was saying earlier as well is that this familiarity or this propinquity, it doesn't beat negative experiences, just because you see your neighbor every single day of the week. If you don't like him, if that's a rude person, like propinquity doesn't save you. That's just going to backfire. And exactly what I was going to share, it's important to recognize that this is happening, but we can enhance or actually be detrimental to its effect. So we can enhance its effect by making eye contact. As Johnny said, acknowledging people, giving value, smiling, having great energy around the people that we're seeing in the elevator, in the hallway, our next door neighbor, our coworker, that's the cubicle across from us, or the barista we see every day. But if we're AirPods in looking at our phone, not acknowledging, not validating the people around us that we're seeing that we are building propinquity with, we're not going to have any of that likability effect that we just talked about. So it is important to recognize that this is a powerful driving force in nature that we can leverage to become more likable, but we have to be intentional with our actions and our nonverbal signals when we're in these situations with an opportunity to build familiarity. AJ, it brings up an interesting concept. So for our audience, I want you to think about the kind of world that you want to live in. And I was speaking to one of our clients about this and going out of our way for micro interactions to say hello, to make sure that people see us smiling, to be at a conscious level that we're present, and then making a connection with other people who are in that same conscious presence. Now, my question to you is, would you like to live in a world where no one says hello to each other, or would you like to live in a world where everyone says hello to each other? Well, that's a very easy answer for myself, because I've lived in places where everyone says hello, and I've lived in large cities where no one speaks to each other. And I can even hear in Medellin, one of the reasons that I love it. And even though I don't speak the language, Colombians are notably very friendly. And when you walk down the street and people say hola, Buenos dias, and it just warms my heart. It makes me feel welcome in a place where I'm a stranger in a strange land. But it makes my day. And one of the things that I do every day, in the mornings, I go to the gym, and there's a gym in the park. And it's a free gym. And I love working out outside every morning. And it's under the trees, and there's tons of beautiful birds here. And I see the same guys every morning. Now, we don't speak the same language. In fact, Medellin is a very international city. And there's quite a few people from all over the world in that gym. But pro-pinquity showing itself that we are there every day, every morning. And it's the same guys. But here's another thing. What does going to the gym at 6.30 in the morning in the park every day say about you and your worldview or maybe interest or passion for being for fitness? Well, all of those guys can share it. And because they are showing up at the same time every morning, there doesn't even need to be much said between us for us to feel comfortable and to feel at ease and have that commonality with each other. And it blows my mind how we interact at that gym. And I'm doing my best every day to learn the language and to push and force myself into these conversations. But that commonality and that propinquity allows for any faults in how little I speak the language, any mistakes that I make, where everyone just laughs, nods long, gives me a hand, helps me out, and vice versa. And it's wonderful. So one of the pitfalls we see is we don't recognize that this is happening and we live in our own little world, whether that's staring at our device, whether that's listening to our music, whether that's going to the gym and watching our workout intently on our phone. We don't acknowledge that this is happening. And without acknowledging that this is happening, we're not giving value and validating those around us. So they might actually not see any value in interacting with us. We might have a neutral terms of likeability and impression or we might even have a negative one of completely disinterested and not social. So just recognizing first off that this is happening around you. How do we enhance it? We add value to people, acknowledging them, validating them, having micro interactions. Another pitfall that we see is avoiding these opportunities entirely, whether that's not going to the barista, but instead ordering delivery, whether that's staying home if your work is now hybrid and there's opportunity to go into the office, but instead you just stay online and you stay on Zoom. When we avoid these opportunities, we're not increasing our likability and we're hurting our ability to grow our professional and personal network. And one of my coaching clients was sharing with me that he was starting a new role. And in his past role, it was a hybrid environment, but he found himself making a lot of excuses for not going into the office. So it was easier to go to the gym, he had more flexibility in his schedule to just stay home. He said he was more productive at home, but he actually got a performance review that was pretty neutral and he was pretty frustrated by that because he felt like he had done a lot of hard work. He felt like he had really made an impact on a key project, but he wasn't getting the great feedback. So in starting this new role, I encouraged him to spend one day a week in that hybrid work environment just going in with the intention of leveraging propinquity, building familiarity with other managing directors, even people he wasn't working with on projects and investing some time in getting to know them, acknowledging them, validating them, asking them how their weekend was. And this one day a week in a hybrid environment, going into work with that intention, fast forward six months later, next performance review. And he was highlighted for being a team player. He increased visibility. People found him to be very warm and a positive influence. And he got on projects that he never would have even heard about because managing directors saw him in that office environment and that propinquity was working for him, increasing his likability. Now we can translate this online too. So this is a trick that I was sharing with Doug around how to leverage this on LinkedIn. Well, number one, what's your headshot? Is your headshot smiling? Do you have warmth? Are you making eye contact with the camera? Or did you just grab any old photo of yourself and throw it on there quickly? Or even worse, you don't have a photo. Well, if you don't have a photo, it's going to be very hard to build propinquity. So we want to have a great headshot on our LinkedIn. Then all we want to do is we want to find those thought leaders, find people who are posting and creating content on LinkedIn that's interesting to us and spend a little bit of time every single day adding value, leaving a comment, leaving a like, using your face online and those micro interactions on the platform of LinkedIn starts to create propinquity. I have been creating on LinkedIn over the last six months, and I'm starting to see familiar faces and people liking my stuff. And in turn, I'm now being drawn to their stuff. Oh, let me click over. Let me see what they're writing about, what they're sharing. So this concept of propinquity is not just in person. We can leverage it online. And also just thinking about my own bad behavior around this, and I promise I'm trying to get better with this in 2024, how often do we reach for social media just to alleviate some boredom? I'm waiting for my water to boil. I'm waiting for this computer to boot up. Let me check social media. Why not turn that doom scrolling into something that's actually useful and use that minute or two or five to show propinquity with people, to show up, to show up in their stream, to leave a comment, to leave a like, to leave a question, to leave a follow-up, and in that ways, expand that network instead of just killing time on the freaking apps. There's another piece to this that I want to bring up that it's important. For a lot of us, we're always looking for the instant feedback loop. And when the instant feedback doesn't come our way, it's easy to get into our heads and start ruminating and asking ourselves, why am I not getting the feedback or the likes or the responding that I need to know that my efforts are going into a good place. We hear it all the time. People get so frustrated, they want the big outcome. And what I want to do is present a little bit about how groups work. And this is online and in person, where there is a certain group dynamics that you have to have an understanding of, so you're not looking for the wrong things. So in any group, let's say 100 people, you might find a small percentage, 5%, who are doers. Those people are going to be the ones who are being active, who are reaching out, who are creating, who find their purpose and mission more worthy than anything else. They're going to take action. Then there's going to be another small portion and we'll say like together from five and then another 15% are going to be those people who are participating, who are the helpers, who are the encouragers, they're the supporters. They see work being done. They are going to show up to be there to cheer it on or they're going to ask what can they do to help and how can I participate. Then we're going to have 80% of spectators who are in the stands. They are there to be entertained. You can look at them as critics because aren't we all critics every time we go to a movie? Don't we cheer or cheer that movie? Don't we have complaints or things that we liked about it? Do you think the directors who put these movies together really care what you have to say about it? Those people, and Michael just mentioned how many of us go on to social media just to kill time. We're not invested in the work that is being done in any of these online or in real life communities. We are going to be entertained. We're going to have a chance of being enlightened or see something cool. It's about engaging with the people who are already doing the engaging and not worrying about the rest of those people. Everyone warms up at a slightly different time. We're going to let nature do its work. For a lot of people, they want to see how everyone else responds to you, how everyone else acts with you, and this is going to bring going to our next piece of how those people that they know interact with you so they know, hey, it's safe for me now to interact with that person. You cannot worry about what the people in the stands are saying or thinking. If you allow their thoughts to get into your mind, it's going to affect your production and ability to connect with those who are reaching out to you. Let's talk about that second factor in increasing our likability. That's we naturally like people that our friends like, that our network likes. It's called social proof in online marketing. When we see that other people like something, especially people that we know, like, and trust already, we naturally feel comfortable liking it as well. You could imagine you're throwing a house party and you invite a friend and they bring one of their friends. How are you going to react to that person? What the hell are you doing here? Why are you in my house? No, you're going to be excited that your friend actually brought someone in their network. You're going to be warm to that person. You're going to most likely find them to be likable simply because your friend likes them. Your reputation makes you likable. When people like you, more people naturally like you. That creates referrals, introductions, vouching for you. Lots of ways that your network and being likable in your network has an impact on more people liking you and naturally growing your network. So there are a couple of psychological principles that are behind this. Actually, there's plenty of them. Here are three that I think are most salient for the way that we talk about propinquity. One is simply the similarity attraction hypothesis and that is I like my friend because we have certain things in common. That's why we became friends. By extension, the friends of my friend are also in that same area. They probably have a very high likelihood of being similar to me as well. This is simply social preselection. Friends of my friends, very likely they're similar to me as well. Another one, and here we're going back a couple of hundreds of thousands of years. This is an evolutionary pressure to create group cohesion. When you have two groups of homo sapiens that are hunting mammoths, you want to be in the group that sticks together and that maybe even when they're someone who's just 90% compatible with you, just 80%, you still want to be friends with them because it helps you hunt that mammoth. So groups are just a lot stronger and had a higher chance of survival when everyone made an effort to get along with everyone else. Hence, the friends of my friends are people I should appreciate in my life. And then lastly, heuristic processing, which is a fancy way of saying this is just a mental shortcut in terms of decision making, thinking about things, pros and cons and judgments. It's like, no, let me use a shortcut here. This is AJ's friend. He's probably a cool dude. I'll make an effort to be nice and meet that person as well. Yeah. When we know, like, and trust someone, we care a lot about their opinion and naturally, who they know, like, and trust becomes more interesting to us and more likable. So we can leverage this to our advantage by creating the great reputation amongst our social circle, whether it's big or small, online or in person, reputation management and your ability to be high value, giving value to others is going to be returned in that you're going to have opportunities, referrals and references from people in your network who want to share, who want to add to your life. Now, one of the pitfalls here, of course, is that we don't give people enough opportunity to grow and expand our network. And this is one of our key concepts in our social sales funnel that we teach our clients, which is the power of the invite by inviting people into your life and giving them a plus one, giving them an opportunity to bring someone that they know, like, and trust to your event, whether you're hosting it at your place as I shared earlier, or you're just hosting it out and about, maybe it's a dinner, maybe it's a meetup by encouraging the people in your network to bring people that they know, like, and trust into your network. You not only increase your opportunity to grow your network, but you're increasing your likability from these people who are connected to you. So when they introduce you to someone, that person's naturally going to like you because you're friends of their friend. So it works both ways. We increase our likability and we increase our network. It's incredibly important that if you ask for a referral or an introduction or ask a friend to a vouch for you, that you show up with your best foot forward because they are sticking their neck out for you. They are vouching for you. It's going to be incredibly difficult to get that referral again if your friend introduces you and you sit there with a bump on a log and you immediately, maybe you say hi and go right back to your phone. This is goes exactly what AJ mentioned earlier, which is that bad first impression. It takes a lot to get over. I believe in one of the other episodes, we looked into the science of that and it was, we need at least six to 10 interactions just to compensate for a bad first impression. And if you're somebody who's busy and you don't have enough time, has that something that you want to be worried about? So if you get a referral, an introduction, someone vouches for you, positive mental attitude, a positive outward attitude and you show that value and then vice versa that if you're bringing a friend somewhere that you're introducing that friend and that friend feels comfortable because here's the thing about it. Let's say that you're hanging out with somebody that you don't want to introduce to other people that you know. Why are you hanging out with that person? If you're worried about the way somebody is going to act in introducing or vouching for somebody, perhaps you need to take a look at who you're hanging out with. Perhaps you grew out of old friends and it's time to create a new wolf pack of people that you are excited about giving a referral and introduction or vouching for. And here's the thing. You don't need to be best friends with this person. You don't need to be tight confidants in order for them to impact your reputation, share you, introduce you, refer you and use you as a resource. What we're saying is even our acquaintances, there is a network effect too. So if that acquaintance likes you enough to invite you somewhere, introduce you to someone, that carries a lot of weight and increases your likability. So we in turn should be doing the same thing in our life. We should be looking to add value by connecting people, making introductions, bringing people together who are from different social circles. And one of my favorite things to do when hosting an event and getting people together is to think about all the different contexts of relationships that I have. My work relationships, my gym relationships, my golf relationships, my business relationships and say, hey, can I bring a few people from each of these contexts in my life together? Can I share my world with more of these people? Odds are as we shared, friends of friends are naturally going to like each other. And in turn, I'm going to be invited to more contexts than just what I met that person in. So it is an advanced strategy, but we're using the science of likability, understanding that we know, like and trust people who we know, like and trust already. And naturally we become more interested and like people that are friends like. And also something that you're doing as you're bringing friends or acquaintances from different areas of your life to those social events is you're displaying a lot more personal traits, not just your business traits, right? But your sports, your gym, your friendship traits, all of them are now on display. And something that's really important when it comes to a propinquity or attraction is something that Launay and Dunbar found in 2015 in their study that's titled playing with strangers, which shared traits attract as most to new people. And the keyword here is homophily. We want to be as similar to those that we're talking about. And the proxy we use for that is how many traits do we have in common? And it turns out that the greater number of shared traits and remember in order to have shared traits, you need to display those traits, otherwise people can't reach them. The greater number of shared traits led to an increase in how people were rated in regards to their likability. And also in higher ratings of this is a fancy one, inclusion of others in self scale. We talked about this a couple of episodes back. This is basically if I include you in myself, I use we instead of I instead of saying, I want to go see that movie. I'm going to say, hey, we should go see that movie. And the higher I as the air quotes stranger can see that I'm sharing all these traits with you, the higher my likability is going to go and the higher this inclusion of others and self is going to go. So let's take this online. Again, going back to LinkedIn, but pick your favorite platform. Maybe it's Twitter. Go through your mutual connections, go through your close friends online. And are you adding value? Are you commenting? Are you celebrating? Are you elevating? Are you tagging? Are you interacting with them in this online community that you're a part of when you actually engage? Not as Johnny was saying earlier, just consume passively, but when you actually engage with content that's being posted and shared by your friends, you are increasing your likability amongst their network. And if you want to get really strategic with it, if you identify someone that you really want to have a connection with, but it's completely cold, you've never met them and you go to your mutual connections on LinkedIn, you can start to prime the pump by interacting with that person's mutual connections content so that your face is showing up in their feed. Your comments are showing up when that person's mutual connections, comments and shares are in the feed. So you're creating propinquity, you're leveraging online in the algorithms to showcase your reputation as being a friend of their friend that naturally increases your likability and it's going to make all of your cold outreach warm outreach and warm outreach is much more impactful in building online relationships just as it is in real life relationships. Now, Michael, you talked about the third factor a little bit in some of that science and I want to really highlight this because this is so important. We naturally like people who like the same things as us. We love shared interests. When you love golf, I love golf, we get along great. So recognizing that number one, if we have shared interests, we need to highlight that, we need to celebrate that, we need to bring that into focus because that naturally increases our likability and you're smiling, Johnny. Yeah, the reason is I think everyone has a tendency a lot of times to look at themselves in our own little box. For instance, for myself, I know that my music isn't everyone's cup of tea. In fact, it's quite fringy. I know the literature that I read is not everyone's cup of tea and it is quite esoteric. I know that a lot of my other interests may be a bit extreme or odd or on the fringes of a lot of stuff because that interests me. I like to do deep dives and look at things in a very deep level and I certainly know that if I'm out at a social event and I start talking about the latest books I read or some of the music that I've just listened to, it might be difficult to connect with a lot of people, especially if it's not some online community that specializes in this type of art. What I can do in those moments is look at the music or the literature that are the bridges to what I like and find those people who understand those bridges or who are going to find those bridges so that I'm able to connect with those people. Now, I know that not everyone is going to know of a tiny little band from Italy in a small town that maybe has a thousand listeners on Spotify, but I certainly know the bridge that I took to find that band and that bridge is going to be where a lot of people are able to understand and so we can use those bridges and well pun intended to bridge the gap. And sometimes that lineage might just be philosophy. It might not be exactly the type of philosophy that you love reading, but just recognizing that sharing that interest in reading philosophy for fun is an opportunity to showcase shared interest and of course increase your likability. Now, one of the things that we see with a lot of our clients is they have interests, but they don't often feel comfortable sharing those interests in a more public setting. Now, when we withhold sharing our interests, we don't showcase our dynamism. We have a negative impact on our likability because people struggle to find those common interests and commonalities and odds are we actually become quite boring and off-putting in conversation. So as out there or as fringe as those interests are tracing the lineage of how you got into that fringe idea or concept or interest is going to bring people into your world. It's going to showcase your interests and highlight your own journey and of course make you more dynamic. Now, we can do this online or in person, but I highly recommend if you're listening to the show really think about what are those four or five interests that you have that maybe are the rabbit holes that you can go on blocking everything else out in the world and researching or maybe it's the things that you absolutely, the second get off work you launch yourself into doing and think, am I bringing this to the surface? Am I showcasing this in real life? Am I talking about this with people I know like and trust? And am I showcasing this online? So along with discovering or sharing the journey that took you to find some of the fringe topics that you're interested in or some of the passions that you have and those paths are going to be where a lot more people are going to be able to connect with you. The other thing is no matter what they share in those moments, show an appreciation for those interests. It doesn't mean that you need to dive into that stuff when you get home to learn about it. It doesn't mean that you have to say, I like it too. It just shows that you appreciate their passions and what they're interested in. And this goes a long way, especially if you've been vouched for or have a referral and you're connecting with somebody because the reality is we don't know that person's story and we've probably compartmentalized them into our minds. In order to connect with them, that's what our brains do. We subscribe stories to people in order to have a sense of who they are. But we want to be open to hearing what their story is and show appreciation for that story. And also don't think that you need to get this absolutely perfect before you are allowed to go to social events, write a comment or reach out to someone. I think that oftentimes the clients that we work with, they have this perfectionistic approach to things like either I'm going to do this 150% or I'm not going to touch my keyboard. And I think what we've highlighted here today is that propinquity does a big job for you. When I'm talking with Johnny, it's not necessary that we agree on which one of Nietzsche's books is the best. The fact that we spend a lot of time with each other, that we have the same friends, that we go to the same events, not in my case, but that we hang out in the same park gym in Medellin. That does a lot of the heavy lifting. So please don't think you need to get everything absolutely perfectly right. And with that, express curiosity in other people's interests. I often find in a lot of these situations where we're meeting friends of friends or we're at a social gathering or maybe we ventured out to a meetup group where we tend to fall back into the context that we really spend a lot of time in or that we know a lot about. And for many of us, that's work. So if you're asking people what they do for work, odds are it's probably not an interest of theirs. Very few people are actually working in an area that they're completely fascinated by and interested by. So instead, frame your curiosity and your questions on what you do for fun last weekend or, hey, what did you do on that trip to Italy? So that you're being curious about other people's interests and surfacing those interests to find commonalities and conversation. So even if you might not feel that you're super interesting, or as Johnny said, your interests overlap, the act of you being curious to learn other people's interests and learn their journey and their lineage to find those things that they're into also go a long way to creating that space for you to be more likable because you're taking interest in others. So what we found in sharing these three factors is when we increase our likability, when we use propinquity, when we build our reputation online and in person, and when we surface our shared interests with others, naturally, they're more interested in us. It increases our likability and all the great strategies we've shared with you. This works the same way online. And one of the challenges that I had in the very beginning of starting to create posts on LinkedIn was showcasing a bit of my personality and what I'm into. And a lot of my friends who are pretty active on LinkedIn really said, hey, it's important that you showcase personality online. It's important that you showcase those interests online. Is it the fact that you drink pour over coffee every morning? Is it the fact that you love zone two training for your running? When you actually bring that personality to what you're posting online, whether it's LinkedIn or Twitter or any of your favorite platforms or sub-communities and cultures you're a part of, when you showcase that side of yourself online, you wave a flag of interest that draws other people who are sharing those same interests over to you. So we can leverage our shared interests in person or online to increase our likability. One of my favorite things, and this is, we have the beauty of being able to do this today. And this goes to what we were talking about earlier, where people tend to put things on hold because they're going to wait till certain other aspects are just right in order to engage. All those are excuses for some fear that is going on here and now that is keeping you from doing that. Or a belief that is keeping you from doing that. And as I mentioned earlier about our client who had all of these grand plans that he was going to get to when he moved. Well, as I mentioned, you can begin doing the networking that you're going to do when you get there now. And it is something that I have done over the years with all of the traveling. And I love solidifying these unique connections that I've made online in real life. And it always makes for wonderful conversation. I've had people pick me up at a bus station that I did not know who I met online. I've had people take me to concerts in different cities who grabbed me at the hotel who I had met online. You never know where those adventures may lay. But certainly nothing is going to happen if you wait. And each one of these are opportunities to grow your connections. So not only do we talk about how to increase your likability, but in turn, if you're starting over in a new town, you move to a new place, you're looking to grow your social circle, maybe you lost friends over the year and you found yourself really focused on work or family and now you want to grow your social and professional connections. Use propinquity. That's an opportunity for you to build connections. Use friends of friends and introductions as a way to build connections and use interests online and in person as a way to build and foster connections. And then all the strategies we've shared with you over the years on these toolbox episodes will be much more effective and work out in your favor because you have a lot of likability going in.