Meeting New People

There are times in life when you are about to meet someone new. You know the meeting is coming, you have been planning it for months. After all, it was a specially planned weekend trip to accomplish the meeting. For me, there are different approaches that I have to meeting new people. There is the personal side, the business side and the counselor side. And yes, they really are all different.

The Counselor side is truly my easiest. This is a role I slip into naturally. My first priority is always to put the other person at ease and to begin to establish rapport right away. If they are not comfortable, then we won't get to the heart of the matter and therapy will not take place. I love meeting new people in this setting. Usually we have set goals and issues in mind to talk about. It is purposeful conversation and searching for a topic is not a problem. The other thing that makes this extremely comfortable for me, is that self-disclosure on my part is limited. I am the one asking the questions. I am the one gathering the information and forming theories of what will work best for that client. It is all about them. If I am going to self-disclose, I will have already worked out in my head how that would be beneficial for the client.

The Business side of meeting new people is a little less comfortable, but I'm getting better and better. Give me a sales person and I can make idle chit chat with them for hours on end. The part that I am still working on is how to politely stop the conversation so that I can actually accomplish some work. Can't exactly be entering invoices and double checking that work if you have a sales person babbling on about springs and steel quality and blah, blah, blah. Of course, these are conversations that I do want to listen to, so that I know who has what in stock when it comes time to order. So I do listen, that is until they get to the let me tell you about what my kids did this past weekend... I guess I would include in this category Job Interviews, and co-worker conversations. No problems there either.

The personal meeting of new people. I am not very good at this at all. (I know in my head that I am better than I tend to feel like I am, but oh, the fits of uncomfortableness that I go through). I tend to be rather quiet and reserved on meeting new people. Once I begin to get to know someone, I open up a lot more (you know, that give and take of personal information). So, my usual M.O. when meeting new people and I have to watch this, is to slip into counselor mode, make it all about them. It puts the other person at ease fairly quickly and allows them a chance to talk about themselves. Problem--they want to know me too.

The meeting this Weekend? I met the family of a very dear friend. The stakes were high. After all, I wanted to make a good impression. Was I nervous? Ha! Of course, I was. I wasn't too worried about them liking me, most people like me without too much trouble. (I know, a little full of myself). My main worry was how to let them get to know me in such a short time when usually it can take several meetings before I am comfortable enough to start opening up. I think I did okay. After all, we were all determined to like each other, which is a very good place to start. I was able to be a little more talkative when I would have preferred to just sit back and listen. It was a good weekend. And even better it was a good meeting of new people.