You have a lot to say and are enthusiastic about what you have to say, yet you’re lacking one key ingredient – no one can understand you because you mumble. You may mumble and not even be aware of it – although a good indicator is when people are always asking you to repeat yourself because they didn’t hear or understand what you said.

Yesterday, we talked about how to get someone prepped for a conversation so today we’ll get to the meat of it - what to say. This is where many people find the most difficulty so let’s jump right into it.

5. Comment about the situation.

This is the essence of small talk. Mention the weather, make a comment about the place that you’re at, talk about the lengthy wait or whatever other reason you can think of that builds some commonality with the person you’re about to converse with. You’re both somewhere for a reason so if you’re waiting for a train, a doctor, service for your car or waiting in line, you both have that in common. If the weather is unusually nice or there’s something pleasant about the situation you’re in, mention that.

Shyness is one of those qualities that can stand in the way of your success. If you consider yourself shy, you’re far from alone. Meeting new people is the second biggest social fear (public speaking, of course, is number one). So how do you learn to overcome shyness? The same way you learn other skills - practice.

So if you want to deal with shyness, simply practice starting conversations with people. Yes, you could go to a business networking event which is the easiest place to learn how to start a conversation. But if you can’t get to such an event, all you need to do is be somewhere where there will be other people. So how do you start a conversation, here’s a few simple ways:

Speed networking has to be one of the coolest trends for business events in recent years. It’s not only good for experienced networkers, but it’s the best thing to happen to nervous networkers. Even if you have no clue what to do at a networking event, you can walk away from a speed networking event with dozens of connects.

If you’re not familiar with speed networking, it’s an event format that allows you to meet a lot of folks in a fixed amount of time (usually 30-90 minutes). You usually have two or three minutes to talk to your networking partner and then a whistle blows and it’s time to switch.

If you’re like most people, you probably feel some sort of discomfort speaking to groups or going up to someone you don’t know and introducing yourself. As you can imagine, you’re certainly not alone as you’d be surprised at how many people are deathly afraid of either of these situations. But the good news is that there are things that you can do to deal with your fears – and they’re not as scary as you might expect them to be.

Practice makes perfect:

Networking is something that’s both easy and natural for us to do. We network with people practically every day (and most of the time, we don’t realize it). Yet when we’re at a formal networking event, something as basic as starting a conversation seems like a big challenge and many people walk away from networking events feeling like they accomplished nothing.

Part of the problem is that many people just don’t understand how to network. I’ve been going to networking events for about a decade and some of the things that haven’t seemed to change are the mistakes people make. Here are some of the big ones that you should try to avoid:

I once heard that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. Well I’d like to add a second definition: trying to please everyone. Trying to make everyone in a group happy ranges from difficult to impossible and the only guarantee you have is that you’ll wish you never tried.

This topic comes up frequently in both my public speaking and networking classes as people are concerned about what others think. I think we all have a natural tendency to focus on the audience members that aren’t paying attention to us during a speech or the folks at a networking event that say “it was nice to meet you – I see a client on the other side of the room” immediately after you introduce yourself.