One Question Changed The Room (and it's about you)
Hey ROARers,
😂 Listen, before we get into it. Yes, that photo. I know. Hands flying, mouth open mid-sentence, not my best angle. What can I say? When I'm in it, I'm IN it.
Okay, now let me tell you why I was so animated.
☕ I have to tell you about a moment from last week that I'm still sitting with.
I was in a room with a group of senior leaders. Smart people. The kind who've built real careers, sit on boards, and run massive teams. And I asked them one question:
When was the last time you connected with someone new, outside your usual circle, who genuinely changed how you think?
Not just someone who added you on LinkedIn. Someone who actually shifted your perspective.
I asked for hands. This week? This month?
Most of them stayed down. 🤫
Listen, these are not disconnected people. They have thousands of connections and calendars full of coffee chats. But most of them couldn't remember the last time a new conversation actually moved the needle.
Because here is the truth. We are all so busy "doing" the networking that we've stopped feeling it. We are going through the motions, and the part that actually matters, the extraordinary human edge, is getting lost in the noise.
Here is the reframe, and it's the heart of everything we do in this room.
AI handles the ordinary. You handle the extraordinary.
The follow up template. The thank-you note. The connection request draft. Let AI take it. That's not where your edge is.
Your edge is the conversation that changes how someone thinks. The question nobody else in the room asks. The pause before you answer. The look across the table that says, "I see you, and I'm not in a hurry."
That is the part no machine can replicate. That is why "they" (the boards and the CEOs) are looking for you.
Here is what actually landed in the room.
✨ The professional catfishing examples. When I showed them what AI-built fake profiles look like in 2026, the room got real quiet. Everyone started mentally rewinding through their last ten LinkedIn approvals.
✨ Trust but verify, as a habit. It stopped being a phrase by the end of the session. It became a Monday-morning thing. A quick double-check through a different way before the meeting. A pause before the yes. Most people have heard those three words a thousand times. Almost nobody has been shown what they actually look like in real life.
✨ Connection, not collection. The math changes when you stop counting contacts and start building intentional relationships.
✨ The AI prompts. One person used a prompt during the session to draft an email to a CEO they'd been circling for months. By the end of the hour, they had a draft they were proud to send. AI sharpened the thinking, but the extraordinary part was their courage to hit send.
The room was vibrating by the end.
One question to sit with this week. What's the one thing taking up space in your head right now? The decision you're avoiding? The change you're navigating?
