Since we were all sitting together at the end of the luncheon, let me start off by explaining that our lunch was not a formal women in business luncheon. We were talking about women in business and there was a lady in attendance that I didn’t know. I was sitting across from her, and I saw her exchange a look with a couple of other ladies, I think perhaps they were all her colleagues at the conference.

In business lunches, it isn’t just you and your colleagues that get together, it’s the women in attendance as well. It’s a very important part of the networking that we do. Because when we meet with other women, we know that we’ll be meeting with the kind of women we want to work with. So when we sit down with our peers we don’t just hear our own ideas.

Women in business lunches often talk with each other. We can’t think of a better way to say to them, “I have your ideas, I’m listening to your ideas,” than to say to them, “I want you to take the risk to listen to mine,” rather than to ask them to take the risk to listen to mine.