928: The Introvert’s Powerful Approach to Networking with Matthew Pollard

Pete Mockaitis
Matthew, welcome.

Matthew Pollard
Mate, I’m ecstatic to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. I want to know, you’re the rapid growth guy, so why are we writing a book called The Introvert’s Edge to Networking?

Matthew Pollard
It’s funny. People would assume that rapid growth, sales success, networking success, is kind of an oxymoron with the concept of introversion. And while a lot of people think that, it’s totally not true. Let’s confront the stigma head on for a second. Most people think that introverts are terrible at small talk, yet David Letterman and Oprah Winfrey are introverts, so that makes no sense.

And then, “Oh, yeah, but we definitely can’t sell.” Well, Zig Ziglar, the most well-known sales trainer on the planet, who’s no longer with us, but him and his son, Tom Ziglar, are very introverted. And then you’ve got, “Oh, okay, if we can sell and we can do small talk, networking is the thing we definitely can’t do.” Well, that’s also not true. Ivan Misner, the founder of BNI, the world’s largest networking group, is an introvert as well.

So, really, I’m known as the rapid growth guy because I’ve been responsible for five multimillion-dollar success stories, and I help organizations, predominantly introverted small business-based, small business owners, obtain rapid growth in their business because I find them, they get stuck in this endless hamster wheel of struggling to find interested people, trying to set themselves apart, trying to make the sale, and always fighting on price, but also corporate executives. They have no idea how to sell their value.

And I find that the same methodology applies for people to create rapid growth in their careers as well. So, that’s how I’ve got the name but I spend my life trying to help introverts realize they’re not second-class citizens. Their path to success is just different to that of an extrovert.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. All right. Well, could you perhaps share a tale that lays it out in terms of what’s at stake for introverts, and whether they are networking well or not so well?

Matthew Pollard
Well, I think for a lot of people, there’s that old adage that, “If people don’t know your value, then it doesn’t matter how much you know. You’re never going to succeed in your career.” So, your network is directly related to your net worth. I think that’s changing a lot in the digital forum, but the truth is that I’m always pushing people to learn how to articulate their value in the networking room, whether they’re a career professional, whether they’re an executive, whether they’re just getting started in a career right through, and more especially for small business owners.

Because if you can’t articulate your value, and somebody’s politely listening to you in a room for two, two and a half minutes, you just got no chance online because people, then, give you fractions of a second. And I’ve seen people that we allow, or help get their messaging right in a networking room that have then gone on headhunted and get six figure increases in salary just because they’re getting their message correct. But without that in-the-room validation, it doesn’t work.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s double click on that for a moment. Six figure increases in salary, that’s lovely. So, if someone’s going from 125,000 to 225,000, for example, near doubling, all based upon effectively having a good two-minute exchange with somebody?

Matthew Pollard
This ideology actually started in the small business space. And what was funny is I actually had a lady that read my book, she reached out to me, and she was a small business owner at the time, and she said she was trying to get a corporate job. And I actually responded with, “You know, that’s not what I do.”

And she got upset with me, and she literally said, “Look, I know your ideology will work for corporations, and because there aren’t many authors in the introverted space, I just believe that you can help me.” And she said, “Really, I’m just trying to get one customer, one corporation to hire me.” I mean, “That’s kind of true but I can’t give you my online program. We have to work one-on-one. I’m willing to give it a shot if you’re up for it.”

And what was really interesting is we applied the methodology. And what I always focus on is you need to know the niche that you’re going after. And so, for her, what we’ve helped her realize was her real love was education technology. So, we got her to focus on education technology, we created a message for her, and she actually got a job that paid 180,000.

But the one specifically I was talking about was another gentleman that we worked with around the same time, and he actually was going to start his own business, and then he actually got hit by hurricane Katrina out in Texas. And I was like, “Mate, you’ve got scarcity in your life and uncertainty everywhere. You shouldn’t be starting your own business now.” He said, “But I want to start my own business. I don’t want to work.”

He was working for a large bank, and he said, “I’m traveling 250 days a year, and, on top of that, I’ve got to deal with all the stuff back home, and I feel like I’m always dealing with the same problem over and over, and I want to deal with lots of different types of clients.” And I said, “I don’t think you want to go and start your own business. I think that what you really want to do is work with an organization that has lots of business units. Then you can have the safety and security of an employment job but you can still work in lots of different business units and apply your ideology. But let’s understand what your ideology is.”

And what we realized is what he loved to do was create customer-centric moments that created organizational growth, so create that special contact moment that allowed that person that had that special contact to, then, share the praise with other people that created referrals and become more stickier customer and buy more stuff. So, I said, “What I believe you specialize in is creating these customer-centric moments which, then, creates a growth velocity for the organization that you work with, but you don’t need to work in your own business to do that. You can do that in a corporation. What we need to do is call you something like,” and I came up with the term the velocity architect.

And I said, “Call yourself the velocity architect, don’t call yourself a marketer, because when you say you’re a marketer, they put you in a box with everybody else. And while that may be what you need to do to get your first job, the people that go from middle to top-level management, they need to separate themselves. They’ve got to have something unique.”

So, we called him the velocity architect. We created the three major problems that most organizations have where they struggle to create customer velocity because they don’t create these customer-centric moments. And following up, he went from an interview with an energy company that had multiple business units, and it was a six-figure job but it was low six figures. I think it was about a $150,000-$190,000 job. And when he went for the interview, he introduced himself as the velocity architect, he talked about these customer-centric engagements, and he learned how to tell stories.

Because a lot of people try to educate on their value, and stories work far better. But once he did that, the person that he was doing the interview with said, “Look, you’re overqualified for this job but my CEO needs to meet you.” And they actually created a job for him that actually paid. It was over 100,000, it was in the 200s, more than the job he was applying for.

Because what you’ve got to understand in today’s world, people are looking, and I’m not talking about low-level jobs. I’m talking about medium to high-level jobs. They are looking for people that have ideologies that give their organizations value, and they’ll create jobs for you. They’ll headhunt people that have unique points of view. And in today’s digital world, if you can learn how to articulate that clearly and concisely in a networking room, you can leverage that online, you’ll find yourself getting headhunted. You’ll be able to leverage that message online and have people all over the world trying to recruit you.

Pete Mockaitis
Matthew, this is an intriguing thesis. You’ve got some juicy case studies and examples. Do you have any other compelling evidence that suggests that, in fact, this unique point of view that you have about unique points of view is dead-on true?

Matthew Pollard
The truth is that when you’re looking to go to a networking room, and, if you’re a small business owner listening to this, you should never be going to a networking room to try and find clients. I know you think that that’s what you need but, for me, finding another client is the wrong direction to go.

My belief is that finding, what I would call, momentum partners and champion relationships are where the power is and for career people listening that have got jobs, this is just as powerful for you because if you go to a networking room, and you’re looking for that next person that’s going to hire you, well, if you’re not looking for a job right now, it’s going to convince you that don’t need to be networking.

But then, on top of that, the biggest relationships that I have found useful in everything that you do, firstly, momentum partners, people that believe in what you do, and are willing to talk to other people about it, and you believe in what they do. And because of that, this ideology works much more effectively because if I said, “Oh, you’re looking for a marketing person, or a senior marketing-level position, you need to talk to this person.” It’s like, “Oh, I’ve already got a few people. I’ll get them to submit their resume,” as opposed to, “Oh, my gosh, you need to speak to the velocity architect.”

All of a sudden, this person is different and unique. They stand out. You’re at least willing to entertain having a dialogue with them. And then the next thing is this concept that I came up with which was a champion relationship, which is somebody that is far more advanced than you, that’s willing to share your praises and willing to endorse your work and give it credibility. Because if you’re the velocity architect, and you’ve got other people talking about what you do and why it’s amazing that are highly credible, and you network to find those people, then those people will allow you to constantly land work and create greater and greater success.

But what I really want to do is take a step back for a second and imagine that I’m a brand-new person. I’ve never had a job before. And I’m moving into just a customer service role. I’m just looking for a customer service role. If I applied for every customer service role under the sun, then I’ve got to have the best resume, I’ve got to interview really well, I’ve got to cite all the right things. I’m relying on a lot of luck to get that job, and, especially if I’m introverted.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I believe that introverts actually make the best salespeople, the best networkers, the best public speakers, the best leaders, but if I didn’t believe that, and I didn’t plan and prepare, which introverts are great at, but most often they prepare and plan in the wrong way, I might go and bumble my way through that interview, and hope that they can see the real value in me to hire me.

But if I, instead, said, “You know what, what I’m going to do instead is I’m going to focus on my passion. Maybe I’m really passionate about manufacturing organizations, and changing customer service in a manufacturing business. Well, then maybe I’ll only go for manufacturing-based interviews. And because of that, I can talk about my passion for the manufacturing space. I can talk about the mission that I’m on to transform the space. I can do more research to understand it more, and it makes me more relevant and more employable to that organization.”

And that is why it allows you to create far more success. This isn’t new stuff. If you say, “I’m a person that’s trying to get a client, and I’m a small business owner.” Well, if you niche down, you’re, of course, going to be seen as far more likely the only logical choice. And if you’ve got a message that resonates to that marketplace, of course, they’re going to be willing to pay you as a premium. Well, why is that different for a corporate job?

It’s not different. The truth is if they’d never heard of you, then separating yourself from the pack is the only thing that’s going to make sure you’re in the top three candidates to get that second interview. And that is why I recommend that you do this because what you want to do is you want to shine on your differences, and you want to be able to talk about your unique passion, your unique mission.

Oh, by the way, if you are going for an interview, the other thing you really want to understand is that in an interview, you think it’s all about you. It’s not. The biggest mistake you can do when you go into an interview is make it all about you. And, by the way, introverts hate talking about themselves, which is why interviews goes so poorly because they go into an interview and they think they’ve got to brag on themselves and talk about their credibility, yet, the truth is, the best way to be successful in a networking room, and in an interview, is to understand the organization that you’re working for and the objectives that they have, and then make your experience relevant to them, and talk about your care for helping organizations like them.

And, again, to do that, you have to think about your differences, your unique value, the specific marketplace that you love helping, like manufacturing, or the specific outcome that you love helping people get, like customer-centric velocity, and then make that relevant to the organizations you’re going for interviews with. But truthfully, it doesn’t just work for going for interviews. Getting promotions within current organizations has also worked tremendously well for us as well because you can share your difference and get stakeholder support within the organization for new initiatives or to create jobs within an organization you already work with. And we’ve seen that happen time and time again.

Pete Mockaitis
Matthew, that’s beautiful. There’s a whole lot here. Boy, let’s chat about coming up with your unique point of view. And you said one way is that you kind of find the intersection. We’ve got an issue that you’re into, and an industry that you’re serving. So, not just customer service for anybody but customer service for manufacturing companies or whomever.

So, can you give us some examples of additional articulations of unique point of view? So, we got the velocity architect as one example. And how we come to land upon what that articulation is.

Matthew Pollard
Absolutely. So, I would say that you need to focus on what you’re absolutely passionate about. And there’s a quote by Jim Carrey that I think is great for those people that are worried that it’s not going to work. And he said, “I learned a great deal from my father but nothing more valuable than you can fail at what you don’t want, so why not take a chance at what you love?”

And so, I’m going to suggest to everybody when they’re looking at this articulation, to really think about what they’re passionate about, what they really care about. So, for somebody that really cares about manufacturing, go into the manufacturing space and build your messaging around that. If you’re really passionate about technology then build it around something specific that you do in the technology space. I’ll give you an example on that.

So, let’s imagine you’re a managed service provider, you work in an organization that you just love technology and you help people fix all their computers and systems, and you’re looking for a high-level CFO job, sorry, a CTO job. Well, maybe that what you really are passionate about doing is helping those companies obtain hyper growth. So, maybe you want to go and get a job at like an accounting organization that has a growth-through-acquisition mindset, or a lot of accounting firms grow by buying other accounting firms and taking on their books of business, or a manufacturing business will say, “Okay, we’ve got all these products. Let’s go and buy other manufacturing firms so that we can take on all their products but also cross-sell all the products that we have.”

So, growth through acquisition is really, really prevalent in those industries. So, if I was a CFO, and I was looking at those kinds of industries, and I love working with hyper growth companies, what I would say is the biggest problem that they have, though, and this happens a lot with organizations like that, is they buy a book of business, but then they’ve got to mix the technology. And what you’ll find is there’s licensing issues. The organization is building this fortress to make sure no one can hack in. And now they’ve got to build this hyper freeway to have all the data transferring between all these different offices, and it creates all these issues and conflicts.

Well, if I was going to sell to myself as an employee, I might position myself as the acquisition lifeguard because I know they want to grow through acquisition, and I know the technology is one of the biggest hassles that causes the organizations to almost drown in the minutiae of doing this that causes CEOs to lose their support. So, I might call myself the acquisition lifeguard in order to do that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. So, you’ve got that clarity such that you become the only logical choice for a select few. And then it’s sort of like you have a moniker or a role or a title that goes there. Any tips on fine tuning that articulation? I think it’s so funny, I remember one time I was talking to someone, and he tried this. He said, “You know what, we’re a financial quarterback. You come to us and we’re going to find the best fixed income guy, the best stock picker, the best whatever.”

And it was so funny because I watch so little sports, I didn’t even understand the metaphor until much later, it’s like, “Oh, as a quarterback, your role is to throw the football or to pass a portion of my portfolio onto a specialist in different respects, much like a quarterback might throw to different players on the field.” I felt kind of like an idiot.

So, I guess, in a way, there’s a risk there that if you use a word that your target audience doesn’t have as much familiarity with, watch out for that. Any other pro tips on refining your moniker?

Matthew Pollard
So, there’s a couple of answers to that. So, firstly, you’re talking to an Australian with NFL terms so I have no idea what you’re talking about.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, there you go. Yeah.

Matthew Pollard
I’ve lived in the United States for 10 years but I will tell you, I’m still getting my head around the NFL. But, yeah, I’m careful with the word quarterback. Also, I’ve worked with people in Germany, that you have to be careful about the word capitalist because it used to be a socialist society. You’ve really got to think things through.

But the thing that I would say is that if you use your functional skill in the unified message, then it’s not a unified message.

So, if you are in data analytics, and you call yourself the data wizard or the data guru, that’s not going to work for you and here’s the science behind it. People’s brains are focused on putting you into a box to disqualify you or to say, “I need that.” I’ll give you an example. If I go into a networking room, and I say I’m a sales trainer, people will look at me like I’m one step above a scam artist.

And if you’re my ideal avatar, you’re going to say, “Oh, I’m an introvert. I am never going to learn how to sell.” And then I’ve got to dance around that topic and explain how I’ve got a book that sold 100,000 copies helping introverts succeed at sales, and I’ve got to convince you. I’m already starting from behind. That doesn’t work.

And here’s the real key. The goal of the unified message is to do only this, “Hi, my name is Matthew, and I’m the rapid growth guy.” And I say it just like I said I’m an accountant or an attorney. The goal is for you to say it in a way that it feels like it really encapsulates the value of what you do. It feels more authentic. Like, for me, if I say I’m a sales trainer, it doesn’t incorporate the value of what I provide really at all. It’s just a functional skill. It’s like me reading a book, like Emeth, and saying, “Oh, I’m an Emeth person.” It doesn’t define you.

Everyone has got unique talents, unique skills, unique past backgrounds that perfectly qualify them to provide a certain value, and, more specifically, provide even more value to a specific demographic that they’re passionate about. And because of that, what you want to do, and the only thing that you want to focus on, is making sure that your unified message does one of two things. Either get them to say, “How do you do that?” or, “What exactly is that?” It’s to make it vague enough but also to provide interest.

Now, if you’re in a networking room and you’ve read my book, then you know to be interested before being interesting. So, if you’ve been talking to them for 20 minutes, and they say, “Oh, my gosh, Matthew, I’ve been talking to you for the last 20 minutes. I haven’t even asked you what it is that you do.” And you say, “Oh, thanks for asking. I’m the rapid growth guy.” Well, of course, they’re going to want to ask what that is for two reasons.

You’re a puzzle they need to solve, and, secondly, you gave them so much value by being interested in them, they want to give you value back by listening to you. So, that when people then respond with, “What exactly is that?” I can then say, “Well, one of the things that I love to see more than anything in the world and go into my passion mission statement.” Now, notice, I didn’t say, “Well, I do this and I do this, or I have this skill set,” because, again, networking isn’t about talking about you. It’s about expressing your passion and your mission for transforming the world in some way, shape, or form, which is intoxicating for people.

So, let’s look at what a good unified message looks like. A good unified message has a word, and I’m always cognizant of using things like point guard or you said quarterback because those are country-specific, and also sometimes gender-specific, and also whether they’re interested in the sports. It’s complicated. Maven, architect, catalyst, all these kinds of words are, again, above an eighth-grade reading level but, truthfully, a lot of people that are trying to get high-level jobs, most of the people that you’re talking to will understand what they are, but also expresses the value of what you provide in some way, shape, or form.

And, look, you don’t need to hire me to do this. If you’re a small business trying to come up with your version of the rapid growth guy or a career executive, there is a template that I share at MatthewPollard.com/growth, and that will give you a five-step process which will help you, firstly, determine the niche.

And, by the way, if you’re a career professional and you think that you don’t need to niche, you are 100% wrong. If you specialize in an industry, especially when you’re first starting, you’re always going to get paid a higher premium, you’re always going to be able to get headhunted more effectively, and then, over time, you can broaden that niche but this will show you how to niche down as a career professional or as a small business owner, and discover your niche of willing to buy clients or willing to buy employers. And then it will show you how to create your unified message that will excite and inspire people to want to know more.

And it really is about leaning in to your unique passions, your unique skillset, your unique past customers or past employers, and saying, “What was I really good at? What unique situations caused my employers or my past customers to sing my praises, to talk about me in a really positive way?” and really looking at how to then articulate it.

Now, once you’ve got that, you then need to know how to articulate your passion and mission in a way that gets people to be even more interested, and then you need to explain your value for the first time, the jargon of what you do in a story. And if you can do all of that in an interview, in a networking event, or a podcast interview like this, then people will chase you from all over the world to hire you or to get you to be their consultant or their small business guru.

You pick your profession because people these days are actively looking for a message that they identify with. And for that, they’ll pay a premium. The problem is that in today’s overly cluttered world, most people still only push vanilla content, like they come at high skill, or, “We know insurance,” or, “I’m a marketing person, and I’ve got 20 years of experience,” and the truth is, if you can’t be the clearest, you have to be the loudest.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you mentioned building relationships with momentum partners and champion relationships. Any pro tips on identifying these people and making the approach?

Matthew Pollard
Absolutely. And, by the way, introverts listening to this, you should love the idea of this because it means you’re going to networking events and not looking to be transactional. What I find is a lot of extroverts do this, which is they’ll go into a networking room, and they’re like, “Do you want to buy from me? What about you? What about you? Or, are you looking for somebody to hire? What about you? What about you?”

A lot of extroverts don’t like doing that either. They feel like it’s transactional but that then leads into what I call endless networking, which is where you don’t kind of downplay yourself. It’s, like, somebody asks you what you’re doing, you’re like, “Oh, my day job is this.” I mean, who wants to hire someone like that?

So, because of that, what I suggest is be more strategic about the networking events that you go to. So, firstly, a lot of people that go networking, they don’t do any research before they go, and that drives me crazy. It’s, like, if you’re going to go to a networking event, especially if you’re an introvert, which means it’s a little bit more uncomfortable, I want it to be more like a bunch of pre-planned meetings than anything else.

So, let’s talk about how that actually works. I spoke at Intel a few years ago, and I deliver this presentation about how storytelling could be used for marketing and from a sales perspective.

One of these executives came up to me afterwards, and he said, “Matt, look, I’ve really loved my conversation with you.” He said, “I can’t talk to anyone that’s here as easily because I don’t know anything about them. Like, after your presentation, I had lots of things to talk about. As an introvert, I had lots of questions I wanted to ask.”

And I said, “Well, I’m confused. Like, from what I know about Intel, you’re classified as a newbie if you’ve been there for less than 20 years.” I said, “You’re part of the top 100 senior leaders in sales and marketing. I would assume that you’ve done this before.” He’s like, “Oh, we do it every year, but every year I still awkwardly connect with people.” And I’m like, “Well, isn’t there like a guest list? Like, couldn’t you connect with them beforehand, find out strategically which people are a part of internal groups or associations that you might be interested in, and then research what books they’ve posted about, or what they’re posting on their LinkedIn profiles?”

So, if you’re an executive that’s listening to this, I don’t want you to think that internally this is impossible. You can, these days, search everything about a person. I remember I was trying to get sponsorship off Dell, and I found one of the senior leaders had an open Instagram profile, and all he did was publicly talk about how much he loved Peloton.

Well, I’m a runner, and it was wintertime in Texas. It’s freezing to run outside. So, we were in a conversation, and he said, “How are you?” I said, “Oh, I’m great. I wish I could go running. The weather is terrible.” And for the next 20 minutes, all he did was talk to me about Peloton and how amazing it was. He would’ve bought anything I said to him after that because I was so interested in what he was talking about.

So, the first thing is that all relationships come from pre-research so that you go into networking events with a little bit of due diligence. And if you go into an interview, by the way, if you know who’s interviewing you, you do some due diligence on the person, not just the company. But then when you go to a networking event, you’ve got to look that people really fit into three boxes, “Who could be a potential client or who could potentially employ me?” And that will get you a short-term win, if you’re a small business owner, of money coming in the door.

But momentum partners, they need to hear something different. They don’t want to hear about your functional skill. They want to understand the difference you want to make in the world in a way that they can articulate to other people. And then they want to understand a simple way of sharing that. Now, a momentum partner is, and these are informal relationships, it’s not a tit-for-that thing. But if I believe in what you do, I might start recommending you to other people that I know that you would get value from connecting with, and you would for me. These are people that are around the same credibility level as me or lower.

On the other hand, champion relationships are a kind of like the senior leaders. For me, Ivan Misner, the founder of BNI, is an amazing champion for me. He’s endorsed my books, he’s had me speak at his conference, he’s constantly talking about how great my work is, he’s had me on his podcast twice. He and I are great friends but, truthfully, if he called me tomorrow and said, “Fly to Texas. I need you to pick up my drycleaning,” I would do it. These are the relationships you want to foster.

So, what you need to understand about these relationships is they don’t want to know how much you know. They want to know how much you care. So, I’ll give you an example. If I’m in a networking event, and I introduce myself as the rapid growth guy, well, most people would say, “You know, I’m a marketer, and I specialize in customer-centric engagements for a large corporation,” or something horrible like that. It’s so, “I, I, I,” it’s so transactional.

Where what I will do is I’ll say, “I’m the rapid growth guy,” and when people ask me, “What exactly is that?” I will say, “Well, one of the things I love to see more than anything in the world is an amazing introverted service provider with enough talent, skill, and belief in themselves to start a business of their own. But what I find, more often than not, is they constantly get stuck in this endless hamster wheel of struggling to find interested people, trying to set themselves apart, trying to make the sale, feeling like people only care about one thing – price. Do you know anyone like that?”

Now, if I’ve done my research before, I’ve likely connected with these people in advance, there’s familiar faces in the room, I’ve walked up to them to talk to them. I know they’re like that. So, because of that, they’ll respond in the affirmative. And then when they say, “Well, yeah, absolutely. I’m like that,” and I’ll say, “Well, I’m on a mission to help introverts like yourself, realize you’re not a second-class citizen.”

“Your path to success is just different to that of an extrovert, and rapid growth really comes down to three steps outside the scope of your functional skill, which you’re usually amazing at. And if you just focus on these three steps, you really can build a rapid growth business that revolves around you, your family, and your life, not the other way around.” 

And because of that, momentum partners and champions will go, “Wow, I want to introduce you to so-and-so. Or, have you thought about joining this association or this support group or this initiative that we’re having? I want to have you as part of it.” Because people are so used to getting so bored with these mundane introductions of what you do.

And when they hear passion, “I love to see this, I hate to see this, and I’m on a mission to do this,” for the first time, it is intoxicating and they will open up their rolodex for you. And, depending on whether they’re a momentum partner, i.e., the same level or below as you, or a champion, a higher level, the doors that they will open will be compelling. And, especially, you’ve been interested before interesting, and offering people in your rolodex, offering to just give them value in any way, shape, or form that you can beforehand, you will find that all of the doors will open for you, and you’ll create relationships like you’ve never seen before.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Matthew, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Matthew Pollard
Firstly, there’s nothing wrong with being an introvert. But, secondly, it’s not something you can change. 

Introversion is just this – where you draw your energy from. That’s it. It doesn’t mean you can’t engage in small talk. It doesn’t mean the strategies of small talk are different. And if you try to copy extroverts, my gosh, it’s going to be a really uncomfortable inauthentic feeling that you’ll have afterwards, and that’s why a lot of us ruminate afterwards.

But what I want you to know if you’re an introvert is, firstly, you’re not a second-class citizen.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Matthew Pollard
My favorite quote, is that “We can change who we are at every moment.” We get a second chance every second.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Matthew Pollard
There’s a Stanford study that says when we tell a story, it activates the reticular activating system of the brain, which means that the brain, between the storyteller and the story receiver, actually synchronize. It creates artificial rapport which we introverts can create into deeper rapport.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Matthew Pollard
I really loved Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I felt like that was a really great book for all people, whether they’re entrepreneurs or career professionals. I feel like it’s a really great book for everybody.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Matthew Pollard
I actually love at the moment ChatGPT. It’s providing a ton of value for a lot of different things at the moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Matthew Pollard
So, for me, I think planning is my favorite habit. And I think for introverts, I think that planning is absolutely essential because, otherwise, you’ll go into a sale and you’re uncomfortable. For me, any day that I feel like I’ve got anxiety or stress, it means that I’m moving away from my goals. So, I will re-read over my goals.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they tweet it, they Kindle book highlight it, etc., the say, “Matthew, that was so brilliant and touching when you said this thing”?

Matthew Pollard
The words “Introverts are not second-class citizens. Our path to success is just different to that of an extrovert.” And then you say right after that, “And I am an introvert, I should know.” And then tell your personal story, and my bet is you will find out that many of your bosses are also introverted so it will help you move up the ladder but also will inspire so many people below you to believe they can.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Matthew Pollard
Go to MatthewPollard.com/growth, download that template, and create that unified message, and discover your niche of willing to buy clients, or discover your niche of employer, and create a unified message.

My books are a great resource. Just go to TheIntrovertsEdge.com, download the first chapter, and I literally help you believe that you can sell, and then give you the exact process.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you, Matthew. This has been a treat. I wish you much fun networking.

Matthew Pollard
It was my absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me on.