Change is a part of life. You either reinvent yourself to its tune or let yourself be passively affected by it. Tony Martignetti sits down for a talk with top business network strategist and author Andy Lopata to talk about the importance of reinventing yourself. Andy shares his life journey, how he has reinvented himself with different careers, and walked other paths. Tony and Andy talk about building meaningful networks and connecting with people. Time to sit down and listen to what they have to say. This will change your life.

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Listen to the podcast here:

Subverting Expectations: Learning To Reinvent Yourself With Andy Lopata

It is my honor to introduce you to my guest, Andy Lopata. Andy is a specialist in professional relationships and networking for many years. Andy was called one of Europe's leading business networking strategists by the Financial Times and a true master of networking by The Independent and Forbes.com. He’s a very experienced international speaker. Andy is the author of five books. He's been quoted in a number of other business books and regularly quoted in the International Press. His two latest books were put out in 2020 and they were category finalists in the Business Book Awards for 2021.

Those two books are Connected Leadership, which is fantastic and Just Ask. He's also the host of The Connected Leadership Podcast. Andy is a fellow and a former board member of the Professional Speaking Association UK and Ireland. He’s a fellow of the Learning and Performance Institute as well as a master of the Institute for Sales Management. He's also 1 of 26 recipients of the PSA's top honor, the Award of Excellence. He lives outside London, a big sports and music fan. I am honored to have him on as a guest. Welcome to the show, Andy.

Tony, thank you very much for inviting me. With that intro, I'm keen to learn what I've got to say.

Everyone else has their great intros and now the pressure's on.

I can live up to that.

The great thing about the Campfire is it's about creating very conversational, easy-flowing conversation for us to be able to share what's going on and really dig into your story of what brought you to be doing this amazing stuff in the world. The way we do that, as we do it through what's called these flash points in your story. They've ignited your gifts into the world. What we're going to do is give you the space to start sharing those points. We'll stop along the way and see what's showing up. You can start wherever you feel called to. Some people like to start early on in their childhood or there are certain pivot points that they saw as they were coming up in their career.

One of the key things for me, when I look back at my journey to where I am now, you look for signs that this is what you were going to do. You don't grow up in the UK, certainly not in the ‘80s as I did and turn around and say, “I’m going to be an international speaker and author.” That's not really the conversation. The conversation is how you’re going to be a solicitor or an accountant. That’s probably what was the expectation of that time to the point where when I was in the latter years of what you would call college, I did a couple of summers before university working part-time an accountant. I had been accepted to university for Accountancy. It was at that point that I thought, “I don't want to do this.”

I left university early because I wanted to work in the record industry. I lasted about three months and then realized I want to keep that as a hobby. I never had a career path that was a fit for me. I don't have a problem with that. You have people who know what they want to do from an early age and stick to that. There are others like me that enjoy all the different varieties and spices that life has to offer and find the right thing if we're lucky. I have been at the right point. In my 20s, I was a civil servant. I ran car parks. I was a runner on film sets in South Africa, I was a cold caller. I was project manager for an organization of the finest golf club in the world. I was a sound engineer. I was never in a job more than two years at that point until I was 29 and I discovered networking.

There may be perks to certain jobs, but if the day-to-day thing saps you, those perks lose their luster.

What was your family's reaction to all of this?

I don’t think there was any overt reaction. I don't think that there was concern. I came from a family where I was brought up to be aspirational. There probably was some concern that I wasn't finding a direction. After a few years in the civil service in the first half of my 20s, it was a miserable environment for me. I was very unhappy. To up sticks and travel for several months was the right thing for me. The latter half of my 20s, when I came back at the age of 26 and really didn't settle in anything, that was probably where the most concern was.

You’re already until a few years. I went to work with my father and he had cofounded a business networking group before. That was only meant to be a stop gap. By then I decided to be a freelance writer. I had business cards printed. I was all ready to go for it. My dad just asked him to come and help out with the new network while I got started. The irony is I never did any freelance writing but I've written five books, magazines, and newspapers and so on all over the world. It wasn't quite well what I'd envisaged. It all came to fruition anyway.

What is it about you that made you be able to step out and try all these things? Did you always have this courage? What are the things that underlie the ability to keep on trying new things?

I think you could look at it two ways Tony. You can either look at it as a positive personality trait or someone who is courageous, willing to take risks and is going to go out there to find the right things. You could look at it as someone who doesn't settle as impatient. Doesn't brook being managed and falls out with everyone, wherever he goes. I'll let you decide which one it was. Maybe a combination of the two.

It's only what story you want to make up for yourself.

We can all make up the stories.

Tell me more. Here you are in this place where you are continuing to do it from different things. You are working with your father to do the networking business and you’re billing yourself as a freelance writer.

The freelance writer element didn't last long. I'd never heard of the word networking before my dad cofounded this business. I fell into it like a fish in water. It's what I did. I was always connecting people, talking to people and engaging with them. The stuff that I teach now was stuff that came naturally to me. Back then, I didn't have a name for it. I look back to my civil service days and it struck me a few years ago. Here I am as a speaker on networking. We used to have late opening. The department I was in was open to the public and we had late opening on Wednesdays for team training. I would have been 22, 23. I said at the time, “Rather than just sticking our own team and talking about what we want to do in the team, one of us should go to different teams and talk to them.”

I took that on. That is Networking 101, which many organizations missed and speaking. I had no idea that's what I was doing. I had no idea that's what I would end up being my life would define me professionally, at least. I was doing that a decade earlier. I took to it like a duck to water. My father and I worked together with our business partner for a few years before. I was ready to move on and managed to persuade him after a year of trying to come with me and focus on the training business, speaking business rather than running the networking groups. We'd evolved into running a franchise. To be honest, we'd set it up on sand rather than solid ground. It wasn't going the right way. The market was changing.

We weren't equipped to adapt. I could see that I wasn't enjoying my job. I'd moved from what had been quite a creative role of developing the training and upskilling the groups, the members to managing difficult franchisees. I didn't enjoy that. That went straight in my sweet spot, to my bitter spot, if you like. By then, I'd written my first two books. I was being paid to deliver talks and I recognized maybe that’s something. That’s where I’m happiest. We managed it. We had 2,500 members across the UK. We opened in Spain. We did pretty well.

It's funny how sometimes, when you start something out that you have an affinity to, at a point it can turn into something you don't love. It's then a clue to maybe there’s time for something different. It makes me think of a question I often ask myself, “If this does not inspire me then it's not going to inspire someone else.” I have to think about changing it up.

We work for the majority of our waking hours. We should bloody well enjoy ourselves. I have been in jobs which have made me ill and that I really haven't enjoyed. I know the reverse side of that coin. I wanted to get into the music industry. I was also interviewed for a role with my favorite football club. You'd say soccer club but you'd be wrong. It's football being a Brit. We're very strong on that. In both cases, I recognized they should be hobbies, not jobs. Here's where we get wrong. When we get it wrong, when we want to work in our passion, we might be passionate about music. We might be passionate about sports. We might get engaged with networking but where something grows, there’s a big business.

You might be working in that industry but in many jobs, you're doing a technical function that you don't enjoy. It's that technical function that takes up the majority of your time and saps your energy. It's not the industry you're in. When I was doing the sound engineering, they were perks of the trade there. With the record company, my first day in the job, I was handed the tickets to the 25th anniversary of the Nordoff Robbins Silver Clef Awards, which is a music awards for a charity in the UK. It was all the award winners over the 25 years it had been running at Knebworth Park, just outside London near where I live. That may not sound like much to you but I lift who was playing. This is off the top of my head, you could Google it. I think there was Led Zeppelin, Paul McCartney, maybe The Who, Phil Collins, Pink Floyd headlined. That was my first day in the job. You get those perks of the day-to-day stuff. If the day-to-day stuff saps you, the poets lose their luster.

First of all, I'm still at my jaws at the floor learning about your listing of the who's who of who I want to go see in a concert now. This point you're bringing up is so powerful because I talked to a lot of people who say, “I really want to do this.” They talk about this passion play but they often overlook the things that they need to do along with that. Even thinking about entrepreneurship, people wanting to be an entrepreneur. It's great to work for yourself but there are also elements of it that are not quite so rosy that people often don't quite understand and see along that path.

I remember it's a long time ago now when I went to work with my dad, which was the start of the journey of working for myself. That was the halfway house if you like. This is 1999. It was a few years ago but I still remember that feeding that never again will I have to fit in an annual leave sheet. Will I have to barter with colleagues for when I can take days off or weeks off? Will I be restricted to X number of days a year? I had more holidays when I worked for other people than I've ever had working for myself. It's not always rosy. For some people, it's the right thing. I'm not employable. I don't have that personality or temperament to excel in that environment. Others couldn't do what I do. You have to find the right fit for you. The grass is always greener on the other side.

Take some time to step back, reflect and understand what is really going on.

 I'd love to get back into are there any other points in your story where you felt like you had to make a big shift in terms of what you were doing? Do you feel like when you got into this world of networking, it was just a natural this is it? Were there were more struggles?

The first few years of this business, I think the first 5 to 7 years our turnover went up every year, which I prided myself. I always knew it's easy to go up from a very low base. When we got to what I would call a reasonable base, we've really been on a roller coaster. There have been 2 or 3 times where the business has been not financially on the cuff. I remember my sister turning around to me once and saying, “What will you do if this doesn't work?” I said, “There's nothing I can do if this doesn't work. There's no plan B.” That to me has been my secret source. I refused to accept defeat because I can't counsel its alternatives. That's a big thing for me. In terms of those shifts, there have been a few.

The first one was leaving the networking business and striking out with our own. We set up a very early social network. We'd be talking about 2007 now. If you think LinkedIn was 2003, I think top of my head Facebook 2004, this is only 2007. It was early. That failed dismally and cost us a lot of money. We had to reinvent after that. Another reinvention came much more lately. October 2019, the business wasn't doing well. Coming into the pandemic at the beginning of 2020, I had been on a journey of recognizing this isn't working. I cannot keep this boom bust cycle. It is not sustainable. How do we change things? There were various factors that went into that.

One of them was giving up something I held dear. I'd always said from the very beginning if I could invent a word to replace the word networking, I'd make my fortune. Networking has such a bad name, lots of baggage and people jump to the wrong preconceptions when they hear the word. They go straight to networking events where people are exchanging business cards and elevator pitches while they eat cold canopies and drink warm wine. It's not a pleasant place to be going through. It's generally playing on. That's not what networking is. I'll change perspective of the whole world. I can. I eventually realized you can't do that easily.

I shifted. There's a blog on my website if anyone wants to read deeper called Shifting Position. It's on the homepage of my site. It’s on my LinkedIn profile as a featured content on my profile. I basically said, “I'm not changing what I'm doing. I'm shifting my positioning because the positioning isn't working.” What was happening is I was being approached by global names, big firms. I was being employed to teach a group of junior people how to work a room.

You're Susan Rowan's phrase now. No problem doing that and it's a key part of it. Most decent internal trainers can teach people how to work a room. My expertise goes much deeper in this field. It's not the best use of my skillset in my opinion. While I have no problem working with people at all levels where I feel challenged. I want to be challenged more and I feel more satisfaction as we make progress is at more senior levels. Hence, connected leadership was part of that journey to say, “Let's really get across this message that this is relevant to leaders.” Leaders were thinking when networking is not for me, I know how to do this but my team needs me.

In reality, even if you're a good natural networker, if you add some focus to what you do, you get 10% better results. That can be huge when you're talking about leveraging professional relationships. I changed the positioning to professional relationships rather than networking. Teaching the same stuff. Something interesting happened. I say teaching the same stuff but as soon as I changed that positioning, weird things started happening. I started coming up with new, deeper contents and models for the first time in a long time. A lot of the stuff in connected leadership that you've read never got repositioning.

It came in one night. It had been building up in my subconscious for a while. I was due to give a deliberate workshop to staff for GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceutical company, one morning. It was a 9:00 AM start. It's the other side of London, which means a drive around the M25, which if you don't know London, the M25 is the traffic jam that we have that goes around the outskirts. If any LA residents, that's the whole of LA. It's a similar thing. To get there for 9:00 and be ready, you got to leave at 5:00 in the morning, get there at 7:00 and sit in the car park for an hour. If you leave at 6:00, you've got a problem.

I knew I had to get up really early, which meant I went to bed at 9:00 and didn't get to sleep. You just couldn't. Every time I closed my eyes, a new model of relationship would come up. A lot of the stuff that's in the book. It was quite funny, I kept jumping up, scribbling on Post-it notes and then going back to bed. Coming up with more things, jumping up, scribbling on the Post-it note, going back to bed. I was delivering a training course the next day. I got to certain points. The first point was where this would come in. I said, “You have a choice now,” to the group. I said, “You can have the content I planned for here that I've been teaching for a while or you can have the new content that kept me awake last night. Which do you want?” They said, “We want the new stuff.” It went down really well. It got a great response, I think it took my work to the next level.

I got a lovely testimonial on LinkedIn from the session I delivered lately from someone who sat down and doesn't take professional relationships to the next level. He takes it to several levels beyond that. That's what that restless night did. I've always tried to do that. I try to push the envelope a little bit and come up with new ideas. That repositioning pushed me forward. I looked at my whole business model and how I could reinvent that. I've since had a lot of success over the last six months or so, the second half of 2020 onwards and probably a bit longer than six months.

It has pushed back some of the ideas I had because I'm focusing on the delivery that's come in. Now I've got a much clearer vision of the next stage of growth for the business. I want to take it in slightly. Keep doing the same stuff but also, I can see how I can grow it further and create more excitement around it. That's what you have to do, culturally re-explore, reinvent. If not your topic, which I do to a degree as outlined there and as I've done with other things like my other book in 2020, Just Ask. Also, how you deliver and how you engage with people.

Learning about your story makes me think of this element of having that patience and persistence to be able to keep on showing up and learning. Some days you're going to have these massive amounts of epiphanies that would be like, “That’s what it is.” It took always showing up, taking information in and then it comes. You then have to also think about from an execution perspective. It's not about immediately acting on everything. Sometimes, you have to know balancing the execution on that. There's something about the knowing of when to execute on certain things is also important. Sometimes, you act immediately because it’s brilliance.

That tends to be me because I get energized by ideas and I'm not good at withholding them. I want to share them with the world. That's why writing a book is a nightmare because the gap between putting the idea on paper in the first place and people reading it can be as long. Just Ask takes 3 to 4 years. Connected Leadership was 3 to 4 months, which was a bit easier. When I write a new blog, I want to publish straight away. What I tend to do is send it to people and say, “What do you think about this blog I've written?” I find that hard because I want it to go to the world, “Look what I've written.” Same when I record a podcast episode although I'm streaming mine live on LinkedIn now. That does fill that gap a little bit. I tend to be impulsive. I need to sometimes hold back and I know that.

That fact that you're impulsive maybe comes from that background you've had of being able to jump in, try new things and getting new jobs. Part of the journey that you've been on is trying to figure out when to hold on and when to let go.

I knew when to let go too quickly when I was employed. I was quite impulsive in that case. I Quit was my middle name.

When you look back and reflect on your journey to this point because I know there’s a lot more to be revealed. Tell me what it is you've truly learned about yourself? What are the big key lessons that you've learned about yourself?

There's so much over the years and I've done some self-development work as well, which has had a huge impact. I think there are a number of key things that really stand out for me. First of all, you talk about being impetuous. I can be like that in relationships. This is common for teachers’ professional relationships. I've learned the importance of taking some time, stepping back, reflecting, understanding what was really going on in a situation, not reacting as emotionally as I might want to do in a variety of scenarios. That goes from when a client looks like they're going to place a big order. You don't celebrate until that's in. People ask me, “How did that go?” after I’ve delivered a talk or a workshop. I'll normally say, “I don't know. It’s not for me to determine. I’m asking for feedback.”

Connecting on an authentic level. That means being vulnerable. It means not being perfect. It means asking questions.

I delivered a talk lately and a colleague of mine, another speaker was in the audience. He emailed me probably within a half an hour. He said, “I really enjoyed your presentation. I learned so much. Thank you for it. I have some ideas about how you could make it better. Would you like to chat?” My natural thing is to ignore that whole first line as courtesy. Everything, he took away that he'd liked, treat that as him being nice to me and then focus in on how you could make it better and read it as it wasn't good enough. I've learned to try to accept the praise when it comes in. Recognize that in myself, my gut still tells me it's all about negativity.

When I spoke to him, I purposely put it off over the weekend to speak to him because I don't want constructive feedback straight after something, I want to know it was brilliant. That's the human in us. We've invested everything into something. We don't then want to know we fell short. After a few days to reflect, we can look at it in a slightly different way. When I spoke to him, he gave me some really valid feedback. There was nothing wrong with what I did but it would enhance. I put a story back in that I'd taken out to open the presentation because I recognized it would create a greater connection with the audience than the opening that I had. That wasn't his point but what he said made me recognize he was talking about energy level. This is a remote presentation delivered virtually sitting down. You lose all that energy of striding the stage.

My style, I talked to someone else who was on that call and we talked about that feedback. He said,
“That's not your style. Your style is not motivational speaker wham bam. Your style is authenticity speaking from the heart and that's a different style.” You weigh that up. He talked about one of the things was, “Andy, there wasn't any reason for people to get back in touch with you afterwards,” which is an internal thing for me. That's not an audience thing. That's about how do I get this audience to say, “We want to work with you and know more.” I put something entailed with that. Going through your question and why I say that is in the past, I would probably have been a lot more hung up on my emotional reaction to the email and my interpretation. One of the things I picked up from the self-development program that I did was nobody's words have any meaning other than the meaning we attach to them. I was attaching meanings to those words very quickly.

I love that you bring this into the space. It makes me think of so many other things that I wanted to pose back out to you. This reflection is really powerful because many people struggle with that of how to accept and take in something from someone else. Here are two things I'm going to throw back at you and get your reaction is number one, there's an element of connection like the old saying about love. It doesn't exist unless two people feel it. I think there's an element of you have to make sure that the audience, you can't say, “How did it go?” “I don't know until I know for sure if they felt something too.”

I know what I felt but I don't know what they felt until we've had a chance to really see what transpires. The other thing is that the deeper that conversation, everything happens through conversation, which I think as Judith Glacier said something that was her quote. There's an element of seeing that the deeper the conversation, the more that the possibility of things that can really unlock. Maybe we can get your reaction to some of that. Give me your take on your opinion on conversations and connections that you feel are key takeaways from this.

I think there are a couple of things. I love that saying that there's no connection unless both people feel it. That's wonderful. It's beautiful. Building from that, one of the biggest mistakes people make is they think the connections are all about themselves. I have something that I call the eye test. If you want to truly connect with people, you have to pass the eye test. The story I use to illustrate this is if someone wants to connect with me on LinkedIn, I don't have an open connection policy. I only have a semi-open one. I will connect with people I don't know but there has to be a good reason for it. It's not a random connection or mutual friends who you don't even know, that type of thing. I will consider. What will happen is if someone sends me a connection request, how did they personalize it, which that's a message to anyone reading this. Ideally, they've personalized it. If they haven't, I send them a message and I'll say, “Tell me why you'd like to connect?” If someone sent me their response to that, they would be nice in the response and zero use.

That’s failing the eye test for me. I can see from your reaction, you get what I'm saying. In case you don't get what I'm saying, it said, “I want to connect with you because I do this. I'm trying to achieve this. I this, I that.” Not even an indication that looked at my profile and knew who I was. I don't say that from an ego perspective. When I say know who I was, it could be anyone. Know who I am if you want to connect with me. There was no indication of that. It was purely I. In sales, it’s known as weeing all over the place. The classic sales pitch goes, “We are based here. We have this many staff. We were founded in.” We, we, we. The poor prospect is sitting there thinking, “What about me?” That goes to there's no connection unless both people feel it.

One of my sayings that I've been saying for years is take yourself out of the equation. When you're talking to someone and I was going to customers on a mentoring session with clients of mine per day. When you're talking to people, don't have an agenda. Take what you're trying to achieve out of the equation. Focus on them and listen to what they say. What's really interesting here is the small talk which can be derided might be the biggest thing you have going for you. Small talk is big talk if you treat it the right way. That small talk is where you connect with people on a truly authentic level. You find out about them. You learn about the person, not the job title.

My final point on this is connect on an authentic level. This is what helps you do that. Connect with the individual, the person. That means being vulnerable. It means not being perfect. It means asking questions. It means sharing what's going on in your life. I've had a procedure on my back. I've been resting up a lot. I delivered a workshop. I promised some follow-up but as part of that follow-up, it might take me a few days because I'm not working in the afternoons. I'm recovering from an operation. The senior partner of that law firm sent me a note thanking me for the presentation, giving me some feedback, positive or good, and then saying, “Are you okay? It sounds like you're convalescing.” Now we're in a conversation on a human to human level.

Do you think we might have a better human connection than if he had said, “Thanks for your presentation. It was excellent?” I said, “Thank you very much. Stay in touch.” Sometimes, you open up a little bit about yourself and what's going on in your life. Since I've had back problems, I can tell you we’ve all got back problems. We've all got things going on. When we know the other person or us isn't super human, we feel less fallible and applaud ourselves. It's easier to connect if we feel better about ourselves. We're more able to connect with the human being off of us.

It's about seeing the humanity in others and then putting that back in yourself. That's so beautiful. I love that. This message is what we all need. It’s poignant.

Picking up on the phrase you used, it’s seeing the humanity in others and reflecting it back on ourselves. We've created a positive cycle here because to see the humanity in others, you've got to show them the humanity in you. Once you do that, they share their humanity with you. We can see it. We feel more connected and more human as a result. We're more in tune with our humanity and so the cycle continues.

I have one last question to ask you. What is one book, if you want to break the rules it can be two books, that has had an impact on you and why?

There could be a lot because I read a book a week. There are two that spring to mind here. One is a book by Amanda Palmer called The Art of Asking. She's also got a very popular TEDx Talk by the same name, one of the most popular TED Talks. For those who don't know Amanda Palmer, she's a punk rock star. She was a living statue and is well-known for sofa surfing. If she’s traveling the world, she'll reach out on Twitter and say, “Whose couch can I sleep on tonight?” It was all about when she was a living statue and effectively begging to a degree for a living. She had to get over herself and learn how to ask.

My latest book is called Just Ask and it's all part of that same journey, the ability to drop that need to look good, to allow other people to help us and asking people if part of that journey of allowing other people to help us. If we don't ask, how do they know what help we need or that we need help in the first place? The Art of Asking is an excellent book. I might add, she could write a follow-up called The Art of Answering because I did reach out to her several times for my book and I never heard back but that's another question.

The other is a more practical book in terms of running a business or whatever you do for work. That's Deep Work by Cal Newport. That was required reading as part of the business accelerator program I was doing. I'll be honest, despite writing business books and I've read a lot. I don't read business books that often anymore. I read relaxation to a large degree. That doesn't necessarily mean that the books I read are that relaxing. I'm reading the first of two extensive volumes on Henry Kissinger at the moment. They're not exactly like reading always but I tend to veer away from business and wind down a little bit. I'll read the occasional one. It was required reading for this program. There are business books that I love. The Tipping Point is a great example. Chip and Dan Heath, they come breaking all your rules now.

It’s okay. I love this. What you're saying is fantastic.

There are some like those books and The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki, that stands out for me as a fascinating read, brilliantly written and stick in my mind. Deep Work by Cal Newport is the one that's had the biggest impact on what I do day-to-day. As a result of reading that book, I had a year planner on my wall with different colored stickers for the different types of work I was going to do whether it was going to be sales and marketing, writing, whatever it might be. I had about four different colors. In my diary, deep work session. As I completed an hour or two hours, I'll put the sticker on the wall planner. I would turn my radio, phone, email off, everything. For that hour in my calendar, everyone knew do not disturb me. That led to so much productivity. That happened in a year I published two books and a podcast. Cal Newport’s Deep Work.

I lately interviewed for my podcast and read the book by Rebecca Seal called Solo. It came out in the US in February 2020. Rebecca Seal is a food writer and a general lifestyle writer for mainstream newspapers like The Guardian and The Observer in the UK. She's a television presenter on a Sunday morning mainstream show. She'd written a book all about how to work alone without losing called Solo. I had one idea from that. I've always had paper to-do lists. In my office, I have a white board, which had populated with loads of things but I was never looking at it.

I've divided it into thick sections, the thick areas of my work. It might be client work, business development, relationship development and so forth and including personal as well in there, which is really important. Each one is split into two columns, high priority, that’s deadline-driven and needs doing. I put my to-do list into those boxes. Every day, I look at it and go, “What's in that high priority box? What needs to move across?” It transformed the stuff that was just never getting done. It transformed my productivity and that came from Rebecca's book.

I’m going to pick that one up. I’ve heard of it. I haven’t gotten that one yet.

It’s great. If you want her on the show, she’d be delighted to do it. I’ll introduce you. It’s an excellent book.

You are full of many great insights. I loved hearing your story of what brought you to this place making so much impact. Thank you for coming on the show. Before we wrap, I want to make sure people know where to find you. What’s the best place that I can direct them to?

First of all, the advantage of having a name like mine is as long as you can spell it, you’re going to find me. I have a page on Linktree, Linktr.ee/andylopata. That will take you to links to my book, my podcast, my social and so forth. With a name like mine, you’ll find on all the social platforms. My website is AndyLopata.com. I’m pretty easy to find. You’ve got no excuse.

Thank you for coming on the show. Thank you to the reader for coming on journey with us. I know you’ll leave with great insights. Go out and buy his books. Go out and listen to his podcast. Consume Andy and all the things he’s doing in the world. Thank you, Andy.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

Important Links:

• Andy Lopata
• Forbes.com
• Connected Leadership
• Just Ask
• The Connected Leadership Podcast
• Shifting Position
• LinkedIn - Andy Lopata
• The Art of Asking
• TEDx Talk - The art of asking by Amanda Palmer
• Deep Work
• The Tipping Point
• The Wisdom of Crowds
• Solo
• Linktr.ee/andylopata

About Andy Lopata

Andy Lopata is an acclaimed professional relationships strategist, with global clients including PayPal, GlaxoSmithKline and Brother.

He has written four books on networking and often been quoted in the media, including The Sunday Times, The Financial Times and Inc. In fact, the FT called Andy ‘one of Europe’s leading business networking strategists’ and both Forbes.com and The Independent called him ‘a true master of networking’.

Andy holds the PSAE award – that’s the UK’s top award designed to recognize excellence in professional speaking. He is a Board Member and Director of the Fellow’s Community of the Professional Speaking Association (PSA) UK and Ireland and a member of the Global Speakers Federation (GSF). He’s also a Fellow of the Learning and Performance Institute (LPI), and a Master of the Institute of Sales Management.

He started working in networking in 1999, and spent eight years as Managing Director of a UK networking organization that had over 2,000 member companies.

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