To inquire about having Susan RoAne visit your reading group or book club via phone or Skype, contact her at Susan@SusanRoAne.com.
The following questions are offered to stimulate a discussion about how and why it’s important to be able to work a room and how the participants will endeavor to implement strategies from this book.
These questions/observations can be posed by the group leader to a full group or small group to enhance participation.
1. What do you do as a host for an event or party?
2. Take two minutes to draft a seven-to nine-second self-introduction. Go around the room and have each person introduce him or herself to the group.
3. How do you prepare yourself for events?
4. What would be the top three specific benefits to you if you could work rooms easily? Rank them.
5. What is your biggest deterrent? How do you deal with that?
6. What three suggestions/strategies do you plan to adopt? Why?
7. Identify a magnificent mingler whom you know. What do they do? What could you “borrow”?
8. What’s the most successful way you’ve started a conversation?
9. What graceful exit have you experienced?
10. If you consider yourself part of the 93 percent who self-identify as shy, how have you adjusted in social business situations?
11. What online social media sites have you joined? Your favorite? Why?
12. How have they contributed to you? Your career?
13. Any tips you would share with the group for remembering names? Any awkward situations when you forgot a name? How did you recover?
14. How do you handle your cell phone at events/gatherings?
15. Have you encountered a “sleaze”? What did they do to be one?
16. What’s the most beneficial, positive outcome you’ve had from attending a business event?
17. How does an event with a greeting committee differ from others? (Would you sign up to be one?)
18. How do you choose which business events to attend?
19. How do you prepare for small talk? How do you move it to business conversation?
20. How will you follow up events once you have collected business cards?
21. Do you consider yourself shy? An introvert? What do you do to manage social settings?
22. What’s your biggest pet peeve about going to events?
23. Any relationships—business or personal—that started by meeting a stranger at an event?
24. What is the one thing you will no longer do as a result of reading this book?
25. What is your top tip takeaway from How to Work a Room?