Joel Comm's Blog, page 21

3 Proven Ways to Boost Your Energy Levels

When opponents criticized Donald Trump for tweeting at 3am, he responded that when the phone rings in the middle of the night, he’d be awake to answer it. His critics might have countered that when the meeting starts in the Situation Room in the middle of the day, he’d be half-asleep. Experts offer all sorts of advice to boost energy levels but none involve tweeting in the small hours. Here are three ways that successful leaders boost their energy levels and stay enervated throughout the day. 1. Early To Bed, Early To Rise, Early To Exercise Elon Musk has talked of going to bed at 1am and rising around 7am, giving himself a good six hours of sleep. Richard Branson would already have been awake for two hours by then. The Virgin founder says that he wakes up at 5am, then heads out to put to his body to work. “I get up early to exercise because it gives me energy, improves my focus and concentration, and even helps me sleep better at the end of the day,” he told his company’s blog. Branson kite surfs, which is the kind of exercise you can take when you’ve bought your own Caribbean island, but any kind of gym routine, he says, keeps you focused throughout the day. 2. Take Time Alone A recent study by the Wellcome Collection asked 18,000 people in 134 countries what they did to rest. The answers were surprising. Nearly one in four said that they rested by seeing friends and family but top of the list were reading, being outside, and just spending time alone. Those figures included extroverts as well as introverts who you might expect to enjoy their own company. When you want to recharge your batteries, the best way to do it may be to steer clear of other people. That solitude won’t just give you a chance to focus on yourself though. Scientists have found that doing nothing gives your mind a chance to wander. Those moments of you-time will give you a chance to rebuild your energy levels but they’ll also help you to find creative solutions and exciting new ideas. 3. Do Work That Matters Work can be exhausting when it feels like work. But leaders like Elon Musk are able to put in their famed 100-hour workweeks because what they’re doing doesn’t feel like work. That time isn’t a trade they make for money. It’s what they do to give their lives meaning outside of their family. Writing in the Harvard Business Review about the work they did to boost energy levels among employees in the finance sector, consultants Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy explained how Ernst and Young partner Jonathan Anspacher would ask himself what he wanted to be remembered for. The exercise, they said, “was both illuminating and energizing.” When what you’re doing matters, you can’t wait to jump out of bed and do it some more. And you never get tired of it, not while you’re working out, not while you’re sitting alone, and not while you’re doing it.

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4 Easy Exercises to Strengthen Your Confidence

There’s an easy test you can take that will tell you whether your venture will fail. It’s very simple. All you have to do is ask yourself whether you believe you can do it. If there’s any hesitation in your answer, any doubts at all, it’s unlikely you’ll make it. Occasionally questioning your strategy is fine, but to succeed in any venture you have to believe that you have the talent to make it work. You have to believe in yourself. There’s been a lot of research over the years into what builds that self-confidence. Not all of it has been shown to be reliable but four actions have stood out. 1. Dress The Part The idea that you should dress for the role you want is an old one but it’s a concept backed by science. Psychologists call it “enclothed cognition.” In one study, researchers found that when subjects wore a white lab coat that they associated with being a doctor, they showed increased attentiveness, care and attention to detail. The same results weren’t found when the subjects wore a similar painter’s coat. It’s all about the association. Dress the part, and you’ll act the part. 2. Know Your Limitations, And Believe You Can Change Them In her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, psychologist Carol S. Dweck describes setting tasks to see how children coped with failure. The first tasks were easy but as the tasks grew harder, Dweck noticed something she didn’t expect. Instead of becoming frustrated, the children became more determined and focused. They took those challenges as learning opportunities and as chances to grow. For Dweck, it was an entirely new mindset, one that saw ability not as something fixed but as something that can be improved and built on through learning, testing and accomplishment. Know where you struggle and while you might expect occasional fails, you won’t let them hold you back. You’ll embrace them as opportunities to learn and move your abilities forward. 3. Build Rituals Before Your Tasks If you’ve ever watched professional players at a tennis major, you’ll have seen how they bounce the ball before they serve or jump up and down before they receive the ball. Those aren’t just tools for focus; they’re rituals that build confidence and put the players at ease. when Harvard professor Francesca Gino conducted studies into the effects of rituals, she found that they make people calmer and more confident… and they improve performance. That ritual morning coffee and email check might be just what you need to feel in control of your workspace. 4. Don’t Bank On Your Self-Esteem Alone In 2003, Roy Baumeister, a professor of psychology at Florida State University took another look at 15,000 studies into self-esteem theory. He found that only 200 of those studies were up to scientific standards… and none of them showed that high self-esteem produces high results. In fact, he found that boosting self-esteem alone can actually harm career advancement. Instead of telling people where they need to improve, it lets them believe that they’re good enough and that the world needs to improve. It’s one thing to believe that you do have what it takes to succeed, but the real secret of success isn’t to rely on self-confidence. It’s to sharpen the skills that give you that confidence.

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What These Multimillionaire Founders Saw That You Didn’t

The pitch would have written itself. “Netflix for Clothes” founders Jennifer Hyman and Jennifer Carter Fleiss might have written on their pitchdeck, and investors would have known exactly what they were talking about. It would have worked too. When Rent The Runway finished its funding Round D at the end of 2014, investors gave the pair another $60 million to expand their warehouses, broaden their range of dresses and accessories, and bring in new customers. The investment brought the total amount of funding the two Jennifers had received to $115 million, and valued their firm at $600 million. Each retained a 13 percent stake in the company, making them both worth around $78 million. The company’s concept is simple to understand. Customers pay $129 a month to rent up to three fashion pieces at a time. They can send them back any time they want using prepaid packages, and receive the next piece on their lists. The system works in exactly the same way as Netflix’s DVD mailings worked in the days before the company started streaming. It’s one of those ideas that make you slap your forehead and say, “Why didn’t I think of that?” And the answer is simple too: if you’re a guy, you probably didn’t need it. Jennifer Hyman has explained that she got the idea for the company after seeing the amount of money her sister was spending on new dresses. At a time when every party dress appears on Instagram and Facebook, it’s harder than ever for women to wear the same outfit twice. An easy way to rent outfits for special occasions–or even for daily office wear–looked like a good solution. But guys don’t feel the same pressure. No one cares if we wear the same jacket to a business event or turn up in the same suit. Heck, when Mark Zuckerberg can boast of having a closet that contains of nothing but identical grey t-shirts, it’s clear that male entrepreneurs can get away with wearing anything. So male entrepreneurs were less likely to spot what has turned out to be a $600 million business idea that’s already generating annual revenues of around $100 million. There’s a lesson there. When we’re fishing around for business ideas, it’s tempting to think about trends and market size and marketing, and all of that is important. (Jennifer Hyman and Jennifer Carter Fleiss met at Harvard Business School so they also knew how to do the research and actually make things happen.) But businesses only succeed when they solve a problem and it helps when you can see that problem right in front of you. There are a lot of multi-million and even billion-dollar ideas that are growing and developing into huge companies but you didn’t think of them because it wasn’t you who needed them. But you do have problems right now whose solutions would make your life easier, cheaper or better. Identify those problems that really affect you, plan their solutions, and you too will be writing a pitch for a multi-million dollar company.

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5 Ways to Save a Ton of Money on Your Next Trip

When you’re at home, you know all the tricks to save money. You buy your dog food in bags the size of cement sacks to land a bulk discount. You pay down your credit card bill to avoid hitting high interest payments. You know when the local restaurant has its all-you-can-eat buffet, and you make sure you get your money’s worth. But as soon as you hit the road, all of that thrift goes out of the window. From the moment you reach the airport to the minute you leave the hotel, you’re falling for all sorts of money-sucking tricks. Here are five you can easily avoid and keep more cash in your pocket. Comparison Shop Before You Hit The Duty-Free Stores, Then Claim Back The Tax Duty-free stores look like the last chance to grab a bargain before you head back home. Visit London, for example, and any gifts you buy in the city will be subject to a 20 percent sales tax. In theory, if you can pick up the same item in the airport, you’ll cut 20 percent off the price. In practice, it doesn’t always work that way. When the duty-free store asks for your boarding card, it’s so that they can claim back the tax. But they don’t always remove the tax from the sticker. Comparisons of airport and city stores have found little difference in pricing for many items. And even when airport stores do remove the sales tax, some use their monopoly to hike the base price so high it would still have been cheaper to shop in town. A survey by travel site Skyscanner found that the price of a bottle Martini Bianco can range from 7.70 Euros in Berlin to as much as 15.95 in Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport. Instead of waiting for the last minute and assuming you’ll do better in the airport, check prices online before you fly. If it’s cheaper to buy in town, pay the tax… then claim it back at the airport tax counter. Pack Smart And Skip The Baggage Fees Check your bag on a flight and you won’t just have to wait for it to come out the other side, you’ll also have to cough up a fee, usually around $25. Since 2007, airlines have collected more than $26 billion in baggage fees. That’s almost enough to buy Delta Airlines. Unless you really have to travel heavy, avoid those fees by packing smart and sticking with one bag. You’re unlikely to need that extra stuff. That’s easy enough to do on the way out but on the way back, your full suitcase might also have to pack in some gifts. So here’s a thought: that rule about only taking one bag on the plane has a loophole. You can also take your duty-free bag on the plane with you. If you are going to be shopping at the airport, get your money’s worth by asking for the biggest bag they have. If your bag has swollen so much it won’t fit in the overhead compartments instead of checking the bag, use the duty-free bag for your overflow. Don’t Pay For Airline Internet The spread of the Internet onto planes has finally brought something that we now find essential all the way up to 30,000 feet. And it’s brought a giant bill with it. When Ben Schlappig flew business class on Air Iberia from New York to Madrid earlier this year, he was grateful to be given 4 free megabytes. That allowed him to check his email. Once. To do it again would have cost him $4.95, and to use 22 megabytes would have been $19.95 with an additional $0.17 for each extra kilobyte. A better solution? Check your email and make your downloads before you get on the flight. You can last a few hours without the Web. Beat Phone Charges With A Local Sim When you travel abroad, your mobile phone provider will want you to pay for an international plan… on top of the plan you have anyway. So that’s one plan you’ll be paying for and not using. The price varies but can be as much as $40 per device for just 100 minutes and 100 megabytes. A better solution is to pack an old phone and buy a local sim. Before you fly, check out the neighborhood around your hotel on Google Street View, and find a nearby store that sells sim cards. You’ll be able to head straight down there as soon as you arrive. The store owner will help you set it up and you can often get away with paying little more than five bucks for enough bandwidth and calls to last you your entire stay. You won’t be charged the earth for making local calls and once you email the number back home, you can still be in touch with your family. Use AirBnB To Cut Your Food Bill There are plenty of advantages to skipping the chain hotel and staying in a good AirBnB. For the same price as a standard room, you’ll get a place the size of a suite. But there’s another advantage: you won’t have to eat every meal in a restaurant. That’s a benefit that’s often overlooked. Sure, eating the local food is one of the best bits of travel but staying in a place with a kitchen will give you a better taste of local life by sending you to the supermarket. You’ll save money on some of your meals and you’ll even have a reason to take a doggy-bag when you do eat out. It’s not a saving that AirBnB advertises but the kitchen might well be your biggest moneysaver of all.

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The One Tell-Tale Sign That Your Company Will Make It

It’s one of the most repeated pieces of advice that start-up founders are told. It’s also the one that causes the most head-scratching. If it didn’t come from one of the world’s most famous investors, it would probably be laughed off as impossible. The advice, which comes from Fred Wilson, is to keep a pitch deck to just six slides. The co-founder of Union Square Ventures followed that advice himself when he was raising funds for his investment firm. The result, he said, was that he presented just six powerful points and was able to spend the rest of the meeting holding a “real, substantive conversation.” Reducing your entire plan, your story, all your research, your team bios, your background and your proofs of concept to just six slides sounds like a huge challenge. But I’d bet that what would win the round wouldn’t be on any of those slides. Companies need all sorts of things to build a successful business. They need a good idea, but those are easy; good ideas have a habit of popping up every time you turn on the shower. They need a team that can execute that idea. That’s harder but certainly not impossible. Job sites, colleges and connections can all lead to people with the skills to get stuff done. It might take a few trial periods, some difficult conversations and lots of recommendations but eventually new businesses end up with teams they’re proud of. So maybe what businesses really need is a product that customers are prepared to pay for. Or maybe not. Lots of billion-dollar companies, from Google and Facebook to Twitter and Snapchat, have started with the idea that first you build the audience, then figure out how to squeeze money out of them. Usually, the answer is to charge other companies for the chance to squeeze money out of them. Even the idea that you need paying customers, as some experts still recommend, is old school. What makes a successful business is what Fred Wilson’s investors would have seen after he had finished presenting his six slides. They would have seen that he really enjoys what he’s doing. Sure, he wants his business to make money but Fred Wilson is already a rich man. He turned an investment of a few million dollars of Twitter shares into $1.5 billion. He earned 27 times his investment in Tumblr when it was sold to Yahoo, and sold both Zynga and Geocities at the right time. He doesn’t need to work any more. He manages a VC fund because he loves it. That’s the one sign you know your business is going to succeed and it’s the sign that has investors opening their wallet. If you enjoy what you’re doing, you’ll keep doing it. You’ll push through the challenges, you’ll put in the hours and you’ll make it work. Not for the money, not for the rewards but for the sheer, unbeatable fun of it. If you’re having fun with a good business idea, you’re almost guaranteed to have success with it.

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Why Virtual Reality is the Next Big Marketing Opportunity

If you’ve been following the election coverage, you’ll have heard a lot about jobs and opportunities and the future. Everyone sounds worried. Or almost everyone… because Robert Scoble isn’t worried about jobs. In a recent Facebook post, he agreed that self-driving cars are going to wipe out a bunch of professions but something else will conjure up “many millions of new jobs.” That something, he says, is virtual reality. It sounds bizarre, and his post triggered a big debate on Facebook, but I think he could be right. These are early days but I’ve already been playing around with an Oculus Rift headset, and the more I use it the more I can see the opportunities. Nothing is more immersive than virtual reality. It puts you in a location and lets you believe that you’re really there. You can roam around and play games like you’ve never played them before but here’s what really makes the difference: you can also interact with other people. Back in the early days of the Internet, we had chatrooms and then we had Second Life where people could meet and chat. But the immersion and the interaction in virtual reality are on a different scale altogether. I’ve been roaming around a virtual environment called Altspace VR, and I’ve been blown away by the experience. It’s easy to see how entertainment companies are going to use this. Performers today have to earn from live concerts but there’s a limit to the number of tickets they can sell. Not any more. If you’ve failed to land a ticket to some sold-out Taylor Swift concert, you’ll be able to buy a virtual ticket that will put you right there in front of the stage. Look to your left, and you’ll see the friend who wanted to come with you. Look up, and there will be Taylor singing live right in front of you. People already pay large sums to watch sports matches on a flat screen. They’ll certainly pay for an experience that puts them right there in three dimensions. Community events will also going to be virtual. If you can’t make it to a conference, you’ll be able to attend sessions from your living room, and still be able to interact with other people. Already, designers and architects are using virtual reality to explore environments and make changes to products before they go into production. This isn’t about video games, fun though they are. This is about an entirely new way of communicating, using entirely new tools and interacting in an entirely new way. Businesses will want to be able to show their products in virtual space, and they’ll want tools that can help them to do it. They’ll need staff who are as comfortable selling in a virtual world as today’s millennials are interacting on social media. After working out how to sell online, they’ll need to know how to do business virtually. The next big thing is already here. The question is whether you’re there too.

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What You Can Learn From One of the Most Successful Product Launches of All Time

Seven billion dollars. That’s how much shares in Nintendo have risen in the days since the game company released Pokemon Go. The app store hasn’t seen anything like it. Gaming hasn’t seen anything like it. Usage figures are already rivaling those of Twitter, a ten-year- old company valued at around $10 billion. And that’s for a single downloadable app. In one week, Pokemon Go accomplish what Foursquare couldn’t in seven years. So what can we learn from what is already one of the most successful product launches of all time? What elements contributed to the app’s success that entrepreneurs can slip into their own products? First, we can take out some characteristics that are hard to copy and might only have had a marginal effect anyway. Nostalgia for a loved brand probably helped… but not much. Some thirty-somethings will have downloaded the app to return to their teen years. But the user numbers are too big to be powered by happy memories. Plenty of younger people who missed the Pokemania of the nineties are now meeting Pokemon for the first time. I’m 52-years old and I love the game. And it’s not in-built virality. The original Pokemon games were multiplayer. Players who told their friends about the game were rewarded with the chance to battle or trade their Pokemon in the school playground. If you didn’t join in, you were left out. Pokemon Go will likely become multiplayer at some point, but for now it’s entirely single player. What has driven the app’s growth is traditional word-of-mouth marketing. People who enjoyed the game told their friends so that they could enjoy it too. That happens naturally with every good product. The freemium model has also helped. If Niantic, the game’s makers, had charged a dollar for a download, instead of charging for in-game purchases (and loading up on valuable data), the number of users might still have been high but nothing like the incredible spread we’ve seen. But what’s really made the difference is the combination of mobile gaming and the real world. Most of the games in app stores take users out of the real world. Gamers stare at the screen and forget the world around them. But apps like Pokemon Go that combine the gaming world with the real world hit a sweet spot. It’s not just getting out in the world. It’s that players see others out in the world. Pass a stranger who is obviously playing and smiles are exchanged. There’s the knowing nod of the head to a pack of people passing you by who are excited because they just found Pikachu. And there are the conversations which inevitably take place because a shared experience has sprung up where none existed before. As I was walking through Washington Park in my hometown of Denver, CO last night after dark, my friend and I came upon a group of no fewer than thirty people gathered at a single location. The energy of the smiles, laughter and excitement was palpable. Strangers became friends, united by silly cartoon monsters. Perhaps that is the most salient point of all. We live in complicated times. The political, social and economic dividing lines in The United States, and indeed in many regions of the world, are creating a great deal of tension. So when something as simple as a children’s game can bring people together regardless of political and religious beliefs, it isn’t just a game anymore. Perhaps more powerful than protests, bringing people together can become an instrument for true social change. Whether Pokemon Go is a passing fad or not depends on how well Niantic creates new features that keep people engaged. Regardless of the app’s longevity there’s no doubt it has earned a place in the history books as a global phenomenon. If you can find a way to bring people together in your marketing remarkable things can happen.

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This One Simple Driving Trick Can Clear Traffic Jams From Your Commute

There are a lot of good reasons for entrepreneurs to start their own businesses, but one of the best is the dream of ending the commute. Americans spend an average of more than 40 hours a year sitting in traffic according to a Texas A&M annual urban congestion study. That’s an entire work week spent doing nothing but sitting and listening to the radio. Imagine what your business could have done with that extra week of workhours! It might just be possible to win much of that time back. Traffic congestion happens for a number of reasons but one of the most common is the effect of traffic waves. Someone cuts into a lane to reach an off ramp or joins congested traffic from an on ramp, forcing the person behind to brake suddenly. It takes a second or so for the next driver to react so they have to brake harder still. The slower the reaction time and the closer the cars are bunched together, the harder the drivers have to brake until eventually a car stops. The car behind that one has to stop too but when the first car moves off, it takes a second for the second car to react, giving time for more cars to come to a halt. As long as new cars are joining the blockage faster than cars are leaving it, the traffic jam will grow, moving down the road like a wave. That’s why you can sometimes sit in traffic for minutes at a time for no apparent reason. The solution is smart driving. In 1998 William Beaty, a civil engineer with a Seattle commute, decided that instead of stopping and starting at traffic jams, he’d try to drive at a steady speed. If he saw a jam developing ahead, he slowed down so that by the time he reached it, the jam had already broken up. By not adding to the traffic jam and forcing the cars behind him to stop, he was actually giving time for the clots on the highway to dissolve. It’s a technique that can be used to unblock jams that have already happened but it can also prevent jams from developing in the first place. Cars brake when drivers cut in too close to them. If you allow enough space for cars to change lanes safely in front of you, not only won’t you have to brake, but you prevent that driver from forcing someone else to brake as well. It’s a bit like operating a zipper: when the teeth slide easily in front of each other one at a time, the zipper works smoothly. When teeth have to be forced into a tight space, the zipper catches and everything stops. Drive at a steady speed and leave enough space for cars to enter your lane safely ahead of you, and you’ll be able to cut your commute even before you’ve started your own business.

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5 Reasons Your Forties Are Better Than Your Twenties

How often do you wish you were young again? Fewer lines. Thicker hair. A slimmer waistline. Life would be great if we could just go back and do it all again. But only if we could take the knowledge we’ve picked up with us. Because by the time we’ve reached the end of our forties we’re not just twice as old as early twenty-somethings. We’re also likely twice as wise. Here are five things we know in our forties that we wish we’d known in our twenties. 1. Time Is Limited… And It Disappears Fast When we’re in our twenties, we feel that we have our whole lives still ahead of us and also think that we’re going to live forever. In our forties, we look back and wonder where those years went. A lot of time probably went into playing video games. Some of it was lost on lolcats. Perhaps too much of it was wasted. Forty-somethings know that time is short, and we spend it smarter. We set ourselves deadlines and make sure we meet them. And when we look away from the screen, we make the most of those leisure moments by spending them where they’ll make the biggest difference: with our families and our friends. Once you have kids demanding your attention, time has a whole new meaning. 2. Good Ideas Aren’t Worth The Paper They’re Written On Dorm rooms are bigger generators of great ideas than any Silicon Valley incubator. But you can count on your fingers the number of college rooms that have churned out a Mark Zuckerberg, a Larry Page or a Jeff Bezos. That’s because by the time we’ve reached the end of our forties, we know that ideas are easy. The hard part is the implementation. That requires organization, determination and a host of real skills that are only acquired with practice and time. It’s great to see the passion of a twenty-something. But in our forties we know that if it doesn’t come seasoned with some hard-won experience, it won’t last long and it won’t make an impact. 3. Hard Times At Work Are The Best Times At Work Walk mid-week into a bar visited by ambitious twenty-somethings and much of the conversation you hear will be about their bosses. They’re always terrible. They push too hard, demand the impossible, and have no idea what they’re supposed to be doing. They’re taking the company in the wrong direction and they don’t understand how the firm really operates. Talk to people in their forties, and they’ll tell you it was the first bosses they had in their twenties who were their best. They were the people who pushed them to their limits… and beyond. They showed them what they were capable of doing and proved that they could do much more than they assumed. A tough boss might make a young person miserable now, but they set up much of the satisfaction that will come later in life. 4. Pay Isn’t Everything Twenty-somethings have time and no money; forty-somethings have (a little more) money and much less time. But that money has less value as time goes on. Once you’ve put down your house deposit, can pay the mortgage, put money into the college fund, and are funding the retirement pot, a few more bucks in the savings account doesn’t make a great deal of difference. Personal satisfaction does, and a sense that you’re doing something worthwhile. Twenty-something jobseekers ask how much a job will pay them. Forty-something career builders ask where their job is taking them. 5. Things Get Better Riding a rollercoaster for the first time is terrifying. You don’t know what’s around the next corner or whether you’ll survive the next loop. Riding it the second time is a lot easier. You know that one twist is followed by another and that if you’re upside-down one minute, you’ll soon be the right way up again. By the time you’re in your forties, you’ll have been through enough loops and twists to know that you can survive them… and that between those loops are long, straight, comfortable sections when you can relax and enjoy the view. The twenties are a terrifying, anxious time. In your forties, you might be older, wrinklier and more prone to nap in the afternoon, but that’s only because you’re more content, more relaxed and happier than you’ve ever been.

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How a Handshake Can Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Someone

Grip long, grip hard. That’s what we’re usually told from the moment we’re old enough to greet someone with a handshake. It doesn’t matter how much success we’ve had or what we’re about to achieve, those few seconds in which we physically connect will reveal more about our character than any letters after our name or the title on a business card. There might even be something to it. Research conducted by psychologists at the University of Alabama in 2000 tested the handshakes of 112 volunteers and compared the impressions they made with the psychological reports the volunteers completed afterward. The researchers found that a “firm handshake” corresponded to personality traits that included extroversion and “openness to new experiences,” while those with a weak handshake were more likely to show higher levels of shyness and anxiety on their psychological reports. Women generally had weaker handshakes than men, but women who shook hands firmly were rated positively. Even among women, a strong handshake suggests a strong personality. But the factors that went into judging the handshake were complex. The “handshake judges” underwent a month of training in which they were told to look out for eight different characteristics: Completeness of grip Temperature Dryness Strength Duration Vigor Texture Eye contact That sounds like a lot to bear in mind when all you want to do is shake someone’s hand and find out what they do. The good news is that the characteristics tended to correlate, and for the judges they all boiled down to “firm” or “weak,” a “positive impression” or a “weak impression.” The volunteers who held on, shook with vigor and maintained eye contact also had a strong grip, warm hands, and didn’t have sweaty palms. A firm handshake might have eight characteristics, but if you’ve got one, you’ve probably got them all. But getting one if you’re a nervous networker might not be easy. Dr. William Chaplin, who led the study, said people’s handshakes remained the same across time and were always in line with their personality traits. Body language experts aren’t so sure. Their advice suggests that even if you’re shy and introverted, there are things you can do to show there’s strength behind those social nerves. Other than remembering to pull tight and hold on, they recommend keeping your body facing the person you’re meeting to show that you’re open and listening to them. Make sure you shake hands while standing, a rule that now applies to women as well as men, and keep that eye contact. Don’t offer to shake hands with someone whose hands are obviously full, and if you’re at a reception, hold your drink in your left hand. That will make sure it’s not damp with condensation or ice cold when you do your meet and greet. Then it’s just a matter of smiling, standing straight… and gripping long and hard.

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