Start with Hello: How to Convert Today's Stranger into Tomorrow's Client

Chapter 5

Sameness creates comfort, difference creates opportunity

In other words, I would be giving in to a myth of sameness which I think can destroy us.

Audre Lorde

I believe life is very much like a kaleidoscope; when you shake things up a little, you see a different picture. So why not try to make some simple changes to your routine to give yourself a chance of stumbling across something or someone fresh and exciting?

A story of my own

I live on a fig orchard, and in the autumn months I lend a hand picking the fruit each morning before the birds get to them, which, when the sun is shining, is lovely; when it’s wet, definitely not so!

Each morning, I would walk up and down the rows searching for ripe fruit, and I always did the same rows in the same order: down the right side, and back up the left side. One afternoon after I had picked my rows, I had reason to walk down the rows again, but I walked down

the left side of the row, the opposite way from earlier on in the day, and noticed that I had missed a quantity of ripe fruit. How could that be? It was only a few hours ago that I had picked all of the ripe fruit, hadn’t I? Then it dawned on me that because I was looking at the rows from a different view I had seen all of the fruit that was ‘hiding’ under leaves and branches, fruit that I couldn’t see by walking in the other direction. But it was there, and if I didn’t pick it, it would go to waste.

Since my realisation of possibly letting great quantities of fruit spoil, ...