Alana Muller Podcast Transcript
Alana Muller joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast.
[00:00:12] Brian Thomas: Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Alana Mueller. Alana Mueller is an entrepreneurial executive leader whose primary focus is to connect, inspire, and empower the community, and is founder and CEO of Coffee Lunch Coffee. She is a networking speaker, workshop facilitator, coach, and an internationally best-selling author of Coffee Lunch Coffee, a practical field guide for master networking, the anthology Growth Deconstructing Grit Collection, and a blog, CoffeeLunchCoffee. com. Her accessible, relevant, immediately actionable approach to professional networking for those interested in connecting with others, getting involved in their communities, seeking to advance their careers, or looking to build social relationships, has helped thousands of people formulate a strategic mindset around networking while creating a game plan to get out there and connect.
Well, good afternoon, Alana, welcome to the show!
[00:01:05] Alana Muller: Thank you. Great to be here.
[00:01:07] Brian Thomas: Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining and it’s so nice to come back to Kansas City and I’m literally physically in the Kansas City area. I’ve been here for a lot of years, just like you, but most of my podcasts go around the world, all over the U. S., North America, and I don’t get a lot of chances, to come back to KC to do a podcast. So thank you so much for making the time and being willing to jump on and talk to me.
[00:01:29] Alana Muller: Oh, that’s great to be with you, Brian. Thank you.
[00:01:32] Brian Thomas: You bet. All right. So, Alana, we’re going to just jump right into the questions here.
Let’s talk about your career in marketing strategy. You are a senior executive board member, author, coach, and now the founder of Coffee, Lunch Coffee. Could you share with our audience the secret to your career growth and what inspires you?
[00:01:50] Alana Muller: Sure. I’d love to. Thanks for the question. I have been fortunate and frankly, I think that we make our own luck. And so what I would say the secret to my career growth, as you describe it, Is that I’ve been able to leverage opportunities as they’ve presented themselves. I was never a fan of the question. So where do you see yourself in five years? It is the truth as I don’t know what I’m having for dinner tonight, let alone in five years’ time.
So really do think that it’s identifying opportunities when they present themselves and then seizing upon them. And what I would say inspires me. Frankly, is relationship building. That’s what I’ve built my business on. I think that what fills my bucket every day is being around and with people and getting to know them.
And as you described that you’ve been to more than 50 countries with your podcast, I think that connecting with people on a global basis really just broadens your mind. It expands the world, and it gives, as I said, more opportunities.
[00:02:43] Brian Thomas: Thank you for sharing. And I love that, I am a techie at heart.
I love emerging tech. I’ve written hundreds of articles on emerging tech. But at the end of the day, it’s people that get us together. And that’s what gets me jazzed. Like I told you before we started the podcast here is just jumping out of bed. Knowing that I get to meet someone new is just amazing. So thank you for that share.
Alana, what does Coffee, Lunch, Coffee mean? Sounds like you drink a lot of coffee.
[00:03:07] Alana Muller: Well, my, my little joke is that I actually don’t drink coffee. So That’s the big reveal is I don’t drink coffee, so it’s not about the coffee. What happened to me is that when I began networking in earnest, when I became very intentional about building better, more meaningful, professional relationships through networking, I thought that if I could structure my day around the days of the kinds of people that I wanted to connect with, that eventually they’d said yes to me, and they would actually get together.
And so my idea was to structure my day around a morning meeting time slot, a midday meeting time slot. And an afternoon meeting time slot. And as a joke, I called that morning, midday and afternoon coffee, lunch, coffee, and it’s stuck. And frankly, that really is how I structure my day. So anymore, it might be coffee, coffee, lunch, coffee, coffee, coffee, drinks, dinner, which is how my day is today.
This day that we’re recording, but what I’ve found is that when you say to somebody, do you want to grab a cup of coffee? They know what you mean. They’re not looking for whatever’s in your cup. That’s really not the point. This is much more about the consumption of people than food and drink.
It is really about getting to know other people, meeting them where they are and structuring your day so that you can be intentional about connecting with others.
[00:04:18] Brian Thomas: I love that. And had no idea you didn’t drink coffee, but that’s so cool. It is a great topic of discussion of course, but I love how you kind of weave that into your daily life and now your business as far as building those relationships.
And as I mentioned previously, that’s just awesome. People make the world go round. So thank you again. And Alana, we’re going to jump into your next question here really is you train people to build more meaningful, more authentic professional relationships. For people who have not engaged in effective networking in the past, what advice do you have to help them get started?
[00:04:52] Alana Muller: Yeah, that’s a great, great question. And when I get a lot from people, especially, the reason I’m employable is that people think that they do not like networking. And it turns out that really, we can all embrace this. I believe.
The networking is really just the combination of connections, community, and belonging. It turns out that as human beings, we crave connection. We need this. It’s in our DNA. Even those among us who perceive themselves as introverts, we still need connection. And the way that we satisfy that connection is we establish community everywhere we go.
So, whether it is in your neighborhood, that could be your community. If it’s the Parents of your kids, little league team members, that’s a community. If you get together one on one with somebody for a cup of coffee, that’s community. We are creating community everywhere we go.
And I think that the reason we do this is to deepen our own sense of belonging. It turns out, of course, that the Belonging feels really good. And so in order to establish that sense of belonging in order to drive that connection and to satisfy this need, I think that people can do several things, several easy things that they really already have, in their toolbox. and so 1 of the 1st things I suggest to people, and it may sound a little bit ridiculous, but it’s really just about attitude. It’s about having the attitude that you can do this, that you are a master network, or that if you decide that you’re good at networking, you are, and you have that capability.
I tell people that their number one best tool they have is simply a smile. And so, if you smile at somebody and it doesn’t have to be in a weird or creepy way, but if I smiling at somebody, you’re basically rolling out the welcome mat to networking, you’re saying, I’m open to connecting with you. Welcome to my relationship base.
And so it’s a very simple thing. I also believe that. If we think about the personality traits, the characteristics that we like in other people, and we have those ourselves, if we demonstrate those, if we display those, we will be magnets for others who want to connect with us. So, I would say that that’s step one.
Another thing that I like to encourage people to do is to make what I call their four lists. The first list is a list of people who they already know, people who are already in their relationship base, who they want to reconnect with. And the thing is, I know that we all know thousands of people. This does not have to be such a daunting task.
I’m suggest to people that they make a list, say, of five people, five people who they want to reconnect with. And frankly, it could be somebody that you saw this morning at the gym. It could be a neighbor who you want to get to know better. It could be a business colleague or contact that you haven’t connected with in a while.
That could be your, childhood teacher or a childhood friend, maybe somebody from college, but people that we already have in a relationship base, including family members. By the way. The second list is a list of people who we don’t know, but we’d like to. And then the thing about this is it’s very similar to list one, but we don’t always know who we don’t know.
And so sometimes if we tell. The people on list number one, the kinds of people we’d like to get to know, they can help us to connect with them. The third list I encourage people to make as a list of companies or firms that they want to get to know. And, they may have read about them in the business journal.
They may have heard something about them or seen an article or program on television. Maybe a friend told them about them but companies that they’d like to get to know better. And then finally, the fourth list that I encourage people to make as they. Get started with networking is what I call their non negotiables.
And what this is, is really just a list of their personal values. What are they not willing to give up through the networking process? And so that could mean I want to meet people in my hometown. I want to have a seat at the table as I go to find a new job. I want to work with people who I enjoy being with when I think about my client base.
And so, by making these four lists, what that does for people is it sort of positions them, not just to kickstart or launch their networking, but to keep it going for years to come. So that’s where I would start.
[00:08:46] Brian Thomas: I love it starting out for that smile, obviously but having those four lists that you broke out here for us is awesome. And I never looked at things like that. And like you, I do network and I have quite a bit of social connections on LinkedIn across the globe, but this is awesome. And thank you for sharing some of those nuggets Alana, last question. We are a technology podcast publication.
We love to focus on emerging tech, but we always ask our guests, regardless of their background, if you’re leveraging any of that new and emerging technology in your business. And if not, maybe there’s a cool tool or app that you found useful. You could share with us.
[00:09:21] Alana Muller: Yeah. Oh my gosh. So, so many, and some of them may seem ridiculous in this sort of now post pandemic world, but I’m going to tell you about.
Three that really are meaningful in my life. The first one, frankly, is Zoom. You and I are recording today’s podcast using Zoom. I really think that for me, it saved my sanity during the early days of the pandemic when we really were isolated. And so for people like you and me who want to be around other people who need to be around other people.
That loss was palpable that we couldn’t actually be together. And so, Zoom made it possible not to reach out and touch someone, but to at least see their faces, to see the light in their eyes. And so, to me, Zoom and other things like Zoom, really became important. So, whether your listeners are using teams or some other.
Means of connecting with people through video, video casting, video conferencing. I really think that things like that are important. Another one that I know is received a little controversy over the past several months, but one that I find to be a fabulous tool. And I didn’t always, but. I’ve come to really appreciate it.
It’s just AI tools. So, I have utilized ChatGPT and Google’s Bard in my own business. I think that it’s a great way to generate ideas. It’s a great way to advance. Processes in terms of making them more efficient, so whether that is helping people think about what are good questions to ask during a networking process?
Or as I’m thinking about facilitating an activity, what are some questions that I can ask or ways to. Launch an activity. And so they don’t provide the full solution. I hope that humans are never completely obsolete, but I will tell you that I think that they are really great ways or great tools get us started to help make things more efficient and effective.
The last thing I would say are our podcasting tools like you. I too am a podcaster. I have the privilege to host a podcast called Enterprising for Enterprise Bank and Trust. And There are some tools that I find to be incredibly useful. So, for my podcast, I use two apps. Actually, one is called Squad Cast and that’s the app that I use to do my recordings.
And then I work with a company called Resonate, which helps me with editing and putting those podcasts together. And what I found is that. Through podcasting, we’re able to generate a much broader distribution to get to people as you describe, around the globe. And so, for me, those podcasting tools have really become invaluable.
So those are the 3 things I would talk about again, video conferencing or things like Zoom AI tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard and then podcasting tools like Squad Cast and Resonate.
[00:12:01] Brian Thomas: Thank you. And those are awesome tools. And just with those tools alone, you can do so much especially in your business, but absolutely.
Thank you for sharing the wonderful gems today, Alana. And it was a pleasure having you on today. And I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
[00:12:16] Alana Muller: Likewise. Thanks, Brian.
[00:12:18] Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Alana Muller Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
