Hey, guys. Welcome to the podcast. My guest today is Stefan Jerns, and he is the president of LNIC Systems and talks about what he calls the glorious unknown, which is how great conversations will lead to great relationships. And this is such a great conversation. You guys are gonna love this. Don't forget to connect with me on LinkedIn if you haven't already. Check us out on YouTube.
We put all our videos on there, and don't forget to check us out on MSL talk live, which is typically the 1st Tuesday of every month at 1:30 PM EST. Thanks a lot for joining us. Welcome to MSL talk with Tom Caravella, a podcast specifically designed for MSLs and all things field medical. Stefan, my man. Welcome to the podcast. How are you doing, brother? I'm good, man. Pleasure to be here. Thank you for letting me join you and your crew and your amazing audience you got, man. I love it, guys.
You are in for a treat. Stefan is a friend, a colleague, a mentor, an inspiration. He's just an all around amazing human being that, we are blessed to have him on this show. I invited him handpicked personally, to talk to us. But before I get into that, Stephane, why don't you do an intro, tell everybody who you are, where you're from, all that good stuff? Sure. Awesome. Again, thank you for for letting me join you today. Just as honored to be here with you, man. It's gonna be exciting.
Love diving into these topics we're gonna be talking about today. So I'm Stefan Yurons. I'm out of New Jersey. I run a manufacturing company that builds industrial equipment used for the metal pay making or let me step that back. Metal part making industry, sometimes I stumble over my own words. Basically, metal that's either molded or 3 d printed needs to go through a furnace. I make the furnace. That furnace makes parts hard and dense.
We have a service business that does all the process work too, so all the process engineering. We have an outfit in Germany that does service and spare parts, and then I have a little side therapeutic business hobby, which is behind me, the beautiful wooden flags and other wooden projects that I get involved in. So that's business number 4. It's more of a hobby kind of thing, but, one day that'll grow and do a bigger business too. But for now, I'm a manufacturing guy here in New Jersey.
Kinda going through a big operational change right now. We're moving our business from New Jersey down to North Carolina later this summer. And, yeah, it's family business. Been in and out of this place since I was 14. Learned a lot.
Took about 4 or 5 years, spending in the finance industry for a little bit, and really got to learn more about people and how money works and how insurance policies work and all the things that I've been able to bring back to this business and help this company really transform itself from, you know, 7, 8, 9,000,000 business to almost $20,000,000 last year.
Guys, you're probably all wondering, like, Tom, why did you invite a guy from the manufacturing industry to come on to a podcast for medical science liaison? And the answer is this guy is a monster communicator, people person, and personal growth expert. That's why. And you're gonna hear in the next 30 minutes or so, you're gonna by the time we're done, you're gonna be like, Tom, thank you for bringing Stefan to this show because he's amazing. So let's jump into it.
And we're we're going to talk about communication, but how to excel in conversations. And the place I'm gonna start is so, Stefan, you we were having a conversation, and you mentioned this term, the glorious unknown. I had no idea what you meant then. I still don't know what you mean. So I'm gonna start there. What do you mean by the glorious unknown? Awesome.
And that's you know, just to recap kind of back to what I said before, that's the other thing that I really love doing is I love getting together with people. I love having conversations with people. I love learning from what other people are, and I learned a lot of that when I worked in finance.
And, I mean, you have to hop into a meeting with somebody who you don't know, you might have had a phone conversation with, and you gotta spend a half hour, an hour, 2, 3 hours with them about super technical or super, let's say, important conversations about their money, about what they're trying to do with their lives. So what I got to was I I've developed this kind of little skill around being being comfortable with the uncomfortable. Right?
So the uncomfortable, the glorious unknown is what you had asked for. For me, that's that, like, it's it's right before you go into a new meeting with somebody you've never met before. It's right before you go into a networking event you've never met before. It's right before you get up off your chair and you go talk to the girl or the guy across the way at the bar, the restaurant, the party, wherever you are. The unknown is you don't know what the outcome of that is gonna be.
And that's nerve wracking. That's challenging. That's it's uncomfortable. Right? But the glorious part of it is some of the most amazing things have come from that little unknown pocket, which is the result of that conversation or what takes place through that. Right? So for me, I love getting involved with conversations in people that I've never met before. And the confidence, which I know we're gonna dig into this a little bit later, like, how do you do these conversations?
I know a lot of what I'm bringing to the table in my conversation. But that glorious unknown, the truth of it is it's really it's a space. You have to switch switch your mindset to you know, fear is always gonna be there, but you can't let fear be the winner. You have to let the potential of what's gonna come out of that conversation be so much greater with so much more joy than what the fear is gonna stop you from actually getting involved in it. Right?
So, Tom, one of the things you got involved in recently wasn't was a a big private, educational group session, right, called Evolve that you got involved in. And I remember you and a bunch of the other people that we're friends with got involved in this, and I was so excited for you guys to go into this 2 or 3 day event without knowing what the outcome of this was gonna be because the conversations in that back and forth with people that you never know what the outcome is.
So don't I mean, obviously, if you're going in for a business deal, you wanna go in for an outcome. But if you if it's a conversation without a direct business dealing to it, there's so much that can come just from conversing with people. The brightest idea might come under, you know, out of that conversation.
You might, you know, meet your future wife, your future husband just because you went up and had a conversation where you don't know what the outcome is gonna be other than I just wanna say hi to this person. So the unknown is that, like, the the place where things get created, and if you know that creation can happen there, it becomes a glorious place. I love that. We're gonna expand upon that. But one of the things I wanna ask you is you're one of the most curious, inquisitive people I know.
So is that a big part of this? I'll tell you it's helpful. Caring about other people and having a curious mind is really, really important.
So, like, being in finance and having to be around people that were 21 to 91, you know, people that were major financial executives working in, like, mortgage backed securities making 1,000,000 of dollars a year to someone just coming out of college, having a new job, trying to start a cash reserve, to, like, an old war veteran and all these people of all these walks of lives.
I started to get very curious about what they do for their lives and what makes them tick and what got them to where they are because I was curious about learning, hey. You know, how did you do it? What were the things that got you to this place and so forth? So the curiosity of learning about people really drove me. And then there's this other little thing that kinda drives me.
I I have a lot of care for other humans and other people that are around me, and I have this level of care where, like, I really, really love, and this is like me filling my cup cup up by filling somebody else's cup up. I love to make people smile or have that, like, twinkle in their eye where they're like, oh, man. I didn't think of that. Right? Like, to give that moment to somebody fills my cup up to the top. And you're not gonna do it again and again and again. Guys, he is so good at that.
Stefan is such a cup filler. But here's let me get back a second, and I literally had to, like, ask a quick question because, like, it was so noisy here. But I wanna get back to the the glorious unknown piece for a second. Mhmm. Because my audience, the MSL community, you guys are constantly faced with this.
Because when you become an MSL, you're often either given a list of key opinion leaders to go talk to, or you're sent out to a conference, or you're in a situation where you just don't know the situation. You don't know the the the people that you're gonna be dealing with or what you're walking into. That's the glorious unknown.
And just learning from what Stefan is talking about, the reason he uses that word glorious is because there is something really positive that can come out of the other side as long as you take that leap and go into it with the right level of excitement, enthusiasm, curiosity. Be inquisitive. Ask the right questions. Have the right motives. Don't worry so much about the outcome. Worry about the execution more than anything else.
And you'll come out of it excited and motivated and inspired, and you'll have insights, and you could bring so much back to the table. So here's the question I have for you though, Stefan. You're really good at this. You're comfortable in conversations. What advice do you have for people that just it doesn't come natural? Great question. And that, you know, the first thing is reps. Right? It's the first time you go to the gym. You're feel awkward, you know, pushing weights around. Right?
Because you're like, I've never done this before. Is my form good? Is it not good? You go a few times. All of a sudden, you're really good. And then somebody comes up to you and they're like, hey. Can you help me with this? Because you formed, let's say, a skill by doing reps in the process. So you gotta get out there and do this stuff. Go to events, go to networking events, join groups and so forth that are there for your specific industry.
But even, like, to the point of just going out and having conversations with random people, you know, we both did a program called 75 hard, which is really good. And there's a caveat to the end of what's called the live hard program where you have to have a 32nd conversation with random people that you meet. That's a great exercise. I used to like, I have this friends of mine and, like, ex girlfriends of mine in the past that were all kind of annoyed by it.
I'd be like, I would just talk to random people. I would go up to people and be like, hey. What's going on? How's your day kinda thing? Or, like, we're walking through the supermarket. I'm talking to the gas register person, and I'm like, I'm sitting around for an extra 30, 40 seconds just chatting with them because it's that repetition of just talking to people that is your reps. Right? And so you said something earlier that I think is really, really good.
Going into events, going into networking situations and so forth, the idea of going there is only to meet people. Right? If you go in there with, I gotta have the right question, or, I gotta make sure I have this outcome, Yes. Have some desires for where you want it to go, but the main objective of meeting new people should be, I just wanna make a friend or a business colleague or something. And here's the thing.
If you go to these networking events and you have all these big goals of trying to meet these people, get these things accomplished, and so forth, if you don't achieve them, you've just made yourself sad and kinda depressed about you didn't achieve your goal. If going into it is, I just wanna meet these people so we know each other, the conversation should start out, hey. My name is Stefan. I'm in manufacturing. I build equipment. I serve all these markets. Tom, what do you do?
You give me your explanation. You give me this little rundown of what you do. If the conversation ends right there, mission accomplished. You just made a connection that you might not need that person for 6 months or even a year, but now you have someone in your Rolodex that you can refer to when something comes up down the road, and that's how you build that relationship.
But if in that conversation, you now have gotten to the point where the conversation goes further and you start asking questions about each other and you forge a better relationship, that can now become something that's valuable to you. But you had asked something before about reps. The other thing that's really, really critical is this.
If you know where you're going, if you know some of the people that are there, if you know the person that you're interviewing with or even a business meeting of the person you're trying to meet, man, guys, there's social media out there. There's LinkedIn. There's Facebook. There's Instagram. There's Google itself. Just Google the person's name. Find out 1 or 2 things about that person that either you share an interest in because now you have an icebreaker. Oh, hey, man.
I saw you play lacrosse back in college. That was a favorite sport of mine when I was growing up. What'd you play? Instantaneous, you're making a connection with somebody that has zero to do with what your ultimate outcome is. But to get to the outcome of I have to have a better business dealing with this person, I would love this person to become a client, what you're doing is you're building a relationship. People work together with people that they like because they have connections.
I love that, man. There's so much to unpack there. So I'm just gonna add and not not repeat, add, and kind of repeat, but like, the I love the fact that you're touching on all of the critical elements that are gonna help people jump out of their comfort zone. So when you say reps, that means, guys, get comfortable with rejection.
Get comfortable with no. You have to get comfortable with no, and be ready for no. If you can't handle no and if you can't handle rejection, it's going to be a big bottleneck for you in putting yourself out there. So you have to really start to play this maybe a little, like, gamification and start to just see, well, how many knows can I get? Or let me let me practice and realize that I should expect a certain number of nose. The other thing too is that preparation peach piece the peach.
Preparation peach. The preparation piece does so much to help you to find a lever level of comfort and confidence because you're not flat footed. Maybe you practice your elevator pitch. Maybe you do that research and understand who the audience is. That's gonna put you in a in a totally different position that if you're if you don't practice at all. And you can rehearse it. Don't think that you can't rehearse this stuff. So I love all that. And I use the word confidence.
You know, that's that's another piece that people come to me all the time. They're like, hey, Tom. You know what? This all sounds great, but I just I struggle with confidence. So and, Stephan, you don't. You're the one of the most confidence dude confident dudes I ever met my entire life. So any other hacks that you might be able to share with people to help them develop confidence? Yeah. So that I definitely wanna talk on that, but I wanna say one thing to what you said earlier.
The idea of getting comfortable with no, most people fear is the no. So here's my objective when I try to go into these conversations nowadays. Again, it's come through experience and time of having these meetings. But if you're going in fearing the no, your emotions are gonna get all over the place. They're gonna be jumping around and all that stuff.
And I'm not trying to counteract what you're saying, Tom, but I what I think the important thing to do is go into the conversation of all I wanna do is meet this person. Who cares whether it's yes or no? If your objective is I just wanna meet this person and I wanna know who they are and what they do, whatever happens afterwards, if you make the objective meeting them, you've accomplished your objective, you've gotten a w. You've gotten a win.
You've built confidence, which leads me into how do I build confidence. I've had a bunch of friends in my life over the last 5, 6 years who've come up to me, and, like, one friend specifically said to me after I saw him, you know, on a on a trip I went on, he's, like, called me shortly after the trip was over. He's, like, dude, just gotta ask you a question. Why are you happy all the time? And I'm, like, bro, I'm not happy all the time. Like, nobody's happy all that much. He was, yeah.
But you got this just way about you. Like, you're comfortable. You're confident. You've built this happiness around you. And I told him, I was, like, there's something that I do that I've learned, you know, not just for hearing from what Andy talks about on the real AF about the the power list, but things I also did in my previous life. But the idea of giving yourself a win is a huge, confidence booster. Right?
For anybody that's listening to this, that's played a sport in your lifetime, you've probably won a game. And you felt really, really good after winning that game. And when you lost the game, you didn't feel really, really good. And if you did it a couple of times together, a win after win after win and you can stack a win feeling, it's really damn good. It feels amazing. So with this friend of mine, what I did is I helped him and I said, listen. Here's the deal.
For the next 2 weeks, I'm gonna be on I'm gonna be on this process with you back and forth. I wanna know 3 things a day you wanna do. And I can do Andy's 5 powerless items, so I just wanted this guy to get this process started. So every single day, I held him accountable to some things that he wanted to do. He wanted to get be in better shape. I was like, cool. Awesome. What do you wanna do today? I wanna lose £10.
You can't do that in a day unless you're running in a, you know, plastic bag, 17 sweatsuits on, and you're just running around all day. You may hit the number. But I was like, what's the specific task? He goes, I wanna ride a bike for 20 minutes. Cool. What's the other 2? Gave me his list. I did this with him every single day. I checked with him at the end of the day, and I told him in 2 weeks, you're gonna feel way different about yourself.
At the end of week 1, he told me that he felt way more comfortable and confident in who he was. He got a promotion at work because his attitude started to shift, and it was kind of coming, but the boss was like, I gotta give this guy this promotion. He said his relationship with his wife started getting better, and all these little things started snowballing on top of them because he started to believe who he was.
And belief in who you are and confidence who you are comes from holding a promise to yourself. We, as humans, are so easy to break the promises we make ourselves, but we always help other people because we feel good about helping other people. You're a person too. Feel good about helping you.
And that's the shift I've made in my own personal life that's given me a complete rocketship, you know, propulsion of how I am able to manage myself through conversations with new people or meetings and events that I'm in and just general life. Dude, that's so awesome. I mean, it's I see it in you. I live a very habit driven, consistent life where I hold myself accountable. I have very clear goals that I've set for myself. I'm very intentional.
Everybody that listens to this podcast knows that I'm super, super intentional. It comes down to that. You have to find like, Stefan says, to find confidence, you have to understand what is it that you want in your life and start to keep those promises that you make to yourself. But spend time with yourself and understand. Set clear goals and say, well, yeah, I wanna lose £10. Okay. Well, how am I gonna get there?
Well, you know, you have to set small daily goals for yourself in order to get to the main goal. You already covered that. I'm not gonna talk about that. But by doing that and stacking those wins each day by just doing small things each day, that is what ultimately is going to wind up giving you that daily boost of dopamine, that daily boost of confidence, that daily boost of excitement that's gonna say, okay. Wanna do this again tomorrow. Wanna do this again the next day.
So every day when you get up, you have something that you're that you're striving for, and that helps you gain that level of confidence. And it's the same thing when you're going out into a networking meeting or or going to visit a key opinion leader. You you have to be intentional about what it is that you want to accomplish, how you're gonna go about it, and just focus on the execution of that and not focusing on the outcome.
Because if you focus on the outcome, you focus on that £10, that's gonna distract you. It's gonna intimidate you. It's gonna take you off your game. So let's talk we're gonna shift oh, yeah. Let me add one thing to that. So Go for it. Just to piggyback on what you just said there. Thinking about the audience that you have, they're in, you know, mostly medical sales. Right? So they're either selling some kind of product or this, that, and the other. Not sales.
Okay. So these are medical science liaisons, and their responsibility is to educate, not promote. It's nonpromotional, but they need to educate and provide scientific information to health care professionals in a non promotional way. So it's really difficult because their main goal is to provide value and even talk from year to peer. It's even better. I love this topic. We sell equipment. Right? But my my furnace does one thing.
What I do in a 1 hour furnace discussion is 5 minutes furnace, 55 minutes of how do you understand the process? Do you understand all the little things you need to do across the process to become accomplished you know, become successful? And, yeah, okay. My furnace is it'll it'll help you in the process, but you need to know all this stuff.
So the people in your field that you're helping tremendously, the more they can understand what it is they're talking about, do the, I mean, do the research at the end of the day. That knowing the topic of what you're talking about gives you a boost of confidence no matter who you go talk to. So understanding your your your information, understanding your industry, understanding the topic of the discussion is by itself the ability to be that much more comfortable and confident in a conversation.
And what you gotta reward yourself is is this. By doing that research, by having all this information, you gotta know going in there, you have the information that the person you're talking to doesn't. So you have a you have something they don't. Use that as a boost of your own confidence to know, hey. I'm walking in. I got something they don't know or don't have. It's my job to make sure they understand it.
And then find a way to do it in the most simple terms and tell a story around it so people can grasp it. Dude, that is so powerful. Guys, he obviously, Stephane has no idea what an MSL is or does. He just created a such an amazing parallel to how important it is. It doesn't matter if you're an MSL or if you're selling manufacturing equipment. The whole key is when you become an expert in your field, people are going to wanna hear from you. They're going to want to talk to you.
They're going to want you to help them solve their problems. That's what it's all about. So that is so spot on. Guys, I told you, this freaking guy is a genius. Told you. Told you. So, Stevan, I as being in the recruiting space, I always like to go back to this place of thinking about the job seeker, thinking about people that may be preparing for an interview. And I know that you, as a president of a growing company, are always interviewing people.
So what interview advice what types of things do you look for when you're interviewing candidates, and what can you share with the audience today? I mean, it goes kinda back the beginning of the conversation as you're going in for an interview. Obviously, the objective is to get a job. Right? But don't go into the interview with the objective of getting a job. The objective should be I wanna make I wanna forge a relationship with this person who's interviewing me.
Mhmm. If that's your objective, then you're putting less attention to the specifics of the seat in the office that you're gonna sit in, which is important. You need to always kinda have a vision for that. Mhmm. But if you're sitting across the table from the person and you're having a conversation, the way they walk out of that interview is be like, man, this person just they kind of understood really what we do. They understand people. They've made connections with me as a human.
I've interviewed tons of people. There's a we have a new woman on our team, not new. She's newer, let's say, in terms of the overall scheme. She's been with us for a couple of years. She's our finance and HR woman. She came in for an interview. I interviewed 10 people across the line for this. We spent 3 hours talking, of which maybe 30 minutes was work related. We spent the whole time just talking about life, making a connection with each other, understanding each other.
We both kinda did a little research on each other before we came in, so we had some talking points. Right? So that's huge. If you know before you go into the interview, ask who's doing the interview so you can do some research on them. Again, make that little connection, 1 or 2 things. Right? Google's a phenomenal tool. You can find a lot out about people these days. Whether it's good or bad, it's, you know, it's up for objective.
But so this woman came in, and, literally, I walked out of that meeting. I'm like, this is gonna be our next finance and HR woman. She walked out of the meeting, called her son on the way home, and she goes, I just found my new home. And it wasn't even offered at that point. She's like, well, we just made that connection.
So in interviews, the thing that's most important is find a way to connect with the person across from the table, tell a story, Have that relationship being built between each other. Yeah. The work's important. They're gonna ask you questions about work. They're gonna ask you specific tasks and so forth you've done.
Try to find a way to tell a story around how what you've done was helpful for the people that you helped and how you've bridged you've built a bridge between, you know, if it's in your specific industry, the people that are needing the information and you having the information, how did you build a bridge to them? Paint the picture of that stuff. That's gonna give these people the ability to say, wow. These people are good at communicating.
These people are good at educating a customer at the end of the day. And, hey, try to find a way to do the same thing for the person on the other side of the interview table. Right? And don't be afraid to interview the people too. Right? So you're sitting in the seat to be interviewed. You gotta interview the company too. That's really important. Ask the company. What are the values you guys hold? What's your mission? What are you guys trying to do and accomplish?
Because if those two things don't align, that sucks. I tell people at the end of the day, if any interview that comes through, I tell every guy or gal that's sitting in our seat, I say, this is really important for us to make sure we get to know you. You have to get to know us, though. So what questions do you have? But what it leaves, I always say this is especially if they if I know they have a family. I say, listen. This is an important decision. This is gonna be a new career for you.
Take the time to think about it. Go home. Talk to your spouse. If they have questions specifically and they wanna call us or come and meet with us too, I honor them to come in. Because for me, it's important for people to have connection at home. Now not everybody wants to have that at home. Right? That doesn't work all the time.
But there's been some times that people have come back in and their spouse came in to meet us too because I wanna get to know the people that they're gonna have at home. And what kind of support and help do they have at home too? And what's that unit look like? That's just me caring more. So that's critical. That's amazing. And and I think that's rare. I I do.
I think that that's something that I wish people did more of, but I don't think and especially nowadays, I think, everybody there's so many people that are virtual, and maybe you can set up Zooms with with family members and stuff like that. You could certainly do that. But I have to tell you, I think that that's, first of all, tremendous advice.
And it's advice that I don't normally we don't I don't normally really it's been said in different ways, but the way you put it, which is to focus on the relationship in front of you first. Right. And don't worry about, am I gonna get the job so much? Let me tackle what's in front of me, which is my ability to make this connection, make an impact, and develop this relationship, and then everything else is gonna come together.
I think it's one of the most powerful things anybody's ever said on the show. Especially if they're you're applying for a job that might have 30 or 40 interviews that that person's seeing. Mhmm. You want them to remember you, not remember you in relation to the job. They obviously know it's for the job, but remember you. Right. How did you make that person feel? People always remember how you make them feel, not what you told them. Right.
Yeah. And it and this, guys, this works not just in interviews. Obviously, we're talking about when you're going into your KLO, is it? And you need to present a dataset or whatever it might be. Again, if you take this approach and make that connection and and develop a relationship, develop a colleague, develop an ally, it's a whole different ballgame. You're still gonna hopefully you still will accomplish your goal by providing the value, but you're also creating that relationship.
So I know that this is easier said than done. It it this isn't just a magical kind of thing. It takes a lot of work. It does take a lot of effort. It takes a lot of as Stephan said, preparation, planning, practice, rehearsing. There's a lot that goes into it. So but I love this concept. I'm so grateful, Stefan, that you came and and, you know, you poured it. I I I knew that this was gonna be good. Let me ask you, though.
You you you brought up a good and I don't wanna forget this, but you brought up a very important word, questions. So you you made it a point to say interview the other person. Well, I think that that goes into a lot of different walks of life. It's not just you being inquisitive, curious, and asking the right questions when you're on an interview. But I think you have to always be armed to ask others the right questions. So how do you handle that? Do you prepare for that in advance?
What types of questions do you typically go into conversations with in order to help build that relationship? That's a great one. So, I mean, for from a preparation and and, like, research point of view, you only need 10 minutes. Like, you can do it on the train ride into the place you're doing. Grab your phone, Google the name. You'll get to know something about that person. Right?
But what I would do is don't think about this most amazing question that, like, you know, it's the most earth shattering question. Try to think about a question that you specifically can talk about. Right? So for me, I love adventure. I love hiking. I love snowboarding. I love sports and lacrosse. I love motivational quotes and motivational things. I love, leadership discussion. I love talking about leadership. It's one of my favorite topics.
So when I ask questions, I try to ask questions that I would be able to answer if it was pushed to me. Right? Because, and here's the hack, if you ask somebody a question about something that you specifically are comfortable enough to talk about, now as they lobby back to you and say, hey, what do you think about it? Now you have something you can talk about because it's your thing. Right? Why ask this question? It's like, I love scuba diving. I've never personally actually gone scuba diving.
What the hell am I gonna ask that question for? It's like, hey. Do you like scuba diving? Why would I do that? Right? I would talk about something that I can talk about. So, you know, this whole thing about the unknown, this whole thing about relationships, this whole thing about everything is, yeah, it's important to make sure that you research somebody.
Like, if they did something amazing in their life or their career that you're more inquisitive and want to learn about, like they started this massive foundation that made a huge change in people's lives, whoo, you can ask questions about that even if you don't know what it's about, but you got 4 or 5 questions. How did you start it? What was the driving force behind you wanting to do this? What impact did you wanna make on the world? Right?
And actually get to know the person because now you're gonna understand the the the reasons behind that human, what drives them. So now you kind of understand them more. So anytime you have to follow-up with that person in any further interaction, you know what drives them a little bit. Right? So that becomes like a little bit of a cheat and a hack that you can keep. And it's kinda just like a a list of information you keep about people, either in your head or on your phone or however you do it.
But ask questions about stuff that you specifically can talk about because that's not gonna make you feel as uncomfortable. Dude, that's such a good hack because 90% of the people would answer that question. Well, look at a picture their pictures on the wall and find out what their hobbies are. And that's all good. I don't wanna take away from that and say that that's not a good thing to do.
You should absolutely learn about the person on the other side of the of the table and be able to talk about what's important to them. Absolutely. But if you can find something you have in common that you can speak about, let's just say somehow, some way, you find out that that person loves Yellowstone or Ted Lasso or whatever other program on. And you're like, oh my god. I heard you mentioned that, you know, you're a big Ted Lasso fan. I'm obsessed. Love Ted Lasso.
You know, who's your favorite character on the show? Right? Or, oh my god. You know, doesn't Beth Dutton get you, you know, drive you crazy? Like, be able to have that conversation, create that connection because people do light up when you talk about things that they have interest in. But they also like novelty too.
So when you mention, you know, talking about something that you're an expert in, that novelty is also something that that'll give somebody a shot of dopamine and and and, you know, I hate to keep going back to that, but it is true. You wanna have an impact in the conversation. So here's the other little Last thoughts. What do you got? Let me add one thing to that last little piece. So here's the other reality. Especially if they've never met you, they're probably uncomfortable too.
Yeah. They might have a little bit of fear going on in their own body. And that's the natural thing most people have. It's like they feel the most fear or of the unknown, and they're like, oh, well, this other person, they're an expert. They know everything. They're they're super, super great. Everything they do, they're never gonna be uncomfortable. It's like, yeah, they are. Everybody's a little uncomfortable before they go into a place they don't know things about. It's just human nature.
So the idea of talking about things and ask questions about what you know, what you're doing is you're actually teeing up things. You're giving a gift to the other person on the other side of the table to ask questions about you because you're offering them information about you by talking about things you like to do. And that's that reverse information back and forth. So it's it's little subtle things, but, again, if you're comfortable about talking about wakeboarding, then be like, hey, man.
You ever, you know, you ever get down to a beach or find out if they have a beach house and then you can work your way in a wakeboard? Don't be like, hey. You like to wakeboard? Yeah. Just throw something random out there. Yeah. Novelty is not good when it's totally random. It it's it has to have like, there has to be something behind it. But Yeah. Dude, this was awesome, man. You're the best. Any final thoughts, final words, advice? Man, I mean, I Yeah. That's that's a loaded question for you.
This has been truly fun, man. I really appreciate it. There's one I'd like to tell everybody about a book that I read recently. I'm actually still in the process of finishing. But I've I've reinforced a lot of what I've shared here by reading that book. The book is called Captivate, and it's written by a woman by the name of Vanessa Van Edwards. And her whole business model is the science of people. And there is an incredible level of value in that book, how to work a room.
Where do you position yourself in a room when you're doing a networking event? All kinds of icebreaker questions and things like that. It's a phenomenal, phenomenal book if you're trying to learn about people and how to be good at the conversation side of it, whether it's in an interview, in a networking event, in a group event. I highly recommend everybody goes and grabs that book. I'm not making any money on it. I just really believe in Dude, I can't believe believe it.
I seriously can't believe you just said that. Literally, one of my favorite books that I've read in the last 5 years. Oh, you did? I literally listened. I listened to it twice. Awesome. Took notes. I actually I have actually trained MSL teams on the concepts in that book. You'll hear me talk about it. Anyone that knows me. So that's so crazy how how we're on the same page.
But, guys, as far as an MSL book that has to do with building relationships and developing the muscle of influence and how to really get people to like you. Vanessa Van Edwards is absolutely masterful. It's one of the best, honestly, one of the best books I ever read. Yeah. Although I listened to it. Really, really good stuff. Greece and it's research based stuff. So all you MSLs will love that. So, Stephane, you are the man. Thank you, brother. I appreciate you being here. Love you.
And, and we gotta do this again sometime. Absolutely. Thank you, brother. Appreciate it. Yeah, man. Alright, guys. Thanks for listening. We'll see you soon. Thank you so much for listening to the show. And if you enjoyed it, please subscribe so that you don't miss an episode in the future and feel free to leave a rating or a review or a comment. Thanks again, and we look forward to seeing you soon.