The problem with people-pleasing isn’t just that it’s exhausting. It’s all the lying it requires. Lying about what we want. What we need. Lying about having an actual life — constantly canceling or rescheduling what we had planned in order to accommodate other people’s plans, other people’s schedules.

Last week, I shared the questions I love asking *before* I plan a presentation. But recently, someone very smart*** shared another question with me—their “secret weapon” for gathering deep intel on a specific audience or group of participants. It’s a question that allows you to unlock a mountain of information from the other people in the room.

When we know we’ve got to give a presentation, developing the content can sometimes feel like a guessing game— We wonder what the audience really needs from us. We drive ourselves crazy trying to come up with the right sequence of thoughts, ideas, and stories to engage them.

I know, I know … it’s ME who has been M.I.A. Some of you dear people have reached out, wondering whether I was trapped under something heavy, or perhaps abducted by aliens. The answer is that I have been trapped under something heavy … LIFE. Here’s the God’s honest truth: the pace of professional life + personal life curveballs reached a fever pitch for me this month, and I had to sit myself down and have a very important conversation:

If you’ve been with me for any length of time, you will know that I am decidedly NOT a big fan of small talk. But I am a big fan of real talk. I love and crave (don’t we all?) human connection. While I recognize the role and importance of some measure of small talk, too much of it makes me feel lonely even in a room full of people. So I’m always on the lookout for good ways to nudge conversations out of the humdrum and into the sublime.