Despite being “super shy” and mostly hanging out with the same three friends for 12 years, Kaley Chu made a decision to step out of her comfort zone and launch a mission to have 100 lunches with strangers.
Completing the challenge didn’t change the person she was, but she says it enabled her to overcome her lack of confidence. She still continues to meet with strangers every week.
“I used to hide myself behind a mask, and really worry about what people thought of me and not do the things that I wanted. But now, I’m stepping into the real me,” she recently told Women’s Agenda.
Making more connections is just like anything you want in life, she says: “You just need to put conscious effort in to work for it.”
“If you want a good body then you go workout and if you want good connections, good friends then you go out and meet more people. That’s why I really really love this idea about lunch with strangers because it is something so simple, everybody can do it.”
Now Chu is an author and motivational speaker. She’s come a long way since the bubble she lived in for 12 years, which she says she entered 16 years ago when she first came to Australia.
“I couldn’t talk to people, I was extremely lacking in confidence, super shy. Life was okay, but then I thought there’s more out there and I want to achieve more and I want to meet more people instead of just hanging out with the [same] three friends.”
So Chu thought through ways that she could meet more people.
While evenings and weekends were needed for family time, as a mother of two kids, Chu says lunchtime was the only time she had for herself. Rather than eating alone, she decided to invite strangers to join her, and use it as an opportunity to expand her connections and grow.
“In the beginning, it was really terrifying for me because I was so scared about meeting people and not knowing what to talk about,” says Chu. “But after a while, that’s actually the time that I’d look forward to. I’d be like, ‘Who am I gonna meet today?’ and ‘What story am I going to hear?’.”
Chu used LinkedIn as a platform to connect and invite people to lunch, and says the rejection rate was around 90 per cent. Determined to meet as many people as possible from different background, industries and across different ages, she kept inviting people.
“I’d send them a message and go, ‘Hey, this is Kaley Chu here, I’ve got this New Year’s resolution to have lunch with 100 strangers and these are the photos and posts from my previous lunches and this is a little bit of information about me and I like what you’re doing and let’s catch up for lunch’.
“Some people say ‘yes’, other people say ‘no’, it doesn’t matter. I just keep meeting people from there.”
The lunch itself is also “super flexible” and Chu says it can end in half an hour or continue on for dessert and coffee if they both find a genuine connection and have interesting stories to share.
“The idea is not having 100 best friends,” says Chu.
“It’s to see if you can connect with ten out of those hundred people. That’s a big win for me.”
Quality of the connection takes precedence over quantity for Chu. While her initial goal was to meet 100 strangers in a year, she continues to average “one to two, face-to-face lunches with strangers a week, while using her other lunchtimes to catch up with friends or existing connections.”
One of her biggest takeaways from her lunch experiment has been learning the importance of being herself instead of trying to act a particular way.