Small Talk, Plastic Smiles

Many people who meet me for the first time say that I am a quiet person. My wife often tells me that her friends say that her husband is the shy and silent type, never speaking unless spoken to. And that even then, my responses are short and curt. She tells them that they don't know Charles. Those who know me better hold the opposite view. That I am talkative, full of opinion and argumentative. I quietly smile to myself when I hear these comments.

To be honest, my problem has always been with small talk. I find myself in many situations where I am just there, with nothing to say. It is for these reasons that I hate cocktails or networking events where I hardly know anybody. I find it quite difficult to walk up to a stranger and start chatting without any specific agenda. When I was a kid, whenever I joined a new school, I would keep to myself for sometime,not really mingling with other kids until much later when we got to know each other well and I identified those that I thought I shared with a common interest. When I actually think about in now, both in my primary school days, high school and even through college, my friends were drawn from a small circle. I was not the type who was friends with the whole school.

This set-up suited me fine until I started to get into management positions. When I worked for FilmAid as the Programme Manager for their Kakuma programme, I suddenly found myself being invited to events simply by virtue of my position to represent the organization. Now I had to serve some bitings and wine and mingle with other heads of organizations and government people and make small talk. I survived this however because Kakuma was a small community and everyone soon got to know everyone. Furthermore, I more or less interacted with these people in the course of my day to day work. After a few weeks I was familiar with everybody who mattered. But after sometime I was moved to the Nairobi office as the Country Manager. Now I was being invited to all manner of events to mingle with new sets of Country Representatives, Government people, donors ambassadors e.t.c. And because these were not people I saw on a daily basis, the conversations became even more difficult. I remember once being invited to an event at the US Ambassador's residence and discovering to my horror that I knew almost nobody at the event (luckily my wife had tagged along). I was relieved when later in the evening I met two guys I knew and they were able to introduce me to more people.

Networking in events has always been the most difficult part of my job descriptions. Don't get me wrong, I can seek out an organization that I think will be useful to me, make formal contact and discuss business. Later we might even become friends. I am talking about the appearing in an event and suddenly laughing and being familiar with everybody type of networking. I find that it involves pretense and wearing a fake smile. After some time my jaws begin to hurt.

When I moved from FilmAid, I thought I was now going to spend most of my time implementing projects and doing less plastic smiles. But with transitions in the organization, I once again find myself having to do this. As I write this, an invitation to an event at the end of the week has just landed on my desk. But as is the story of my life, I just have to keep learning, even if it learning some of the stuff I find ridiculous. I wish I was my smaller brother Biko...He is the type who walks into a room full of 100 strangers and in less than 10 minutes, he knows all of them...and they know him!

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