New building, new faces, new coffee machine you don't understand yet. Time to walk in like you belong.
It's 8:47 on a Monday morning and you're standing in a lobby you've only seen in a job advert, holding a lanyard that still smells of the printer. This is it: day one of the new job. You got here twenty minutes early because the thought of being late made you feel slightly sick.
Nobody expects you to know anything yet — but everybody's forming a first impression, whether they mean to or not. The trick today isn't to look like an expert. It's to seem warm, willing and easy to work with, and to ask for the help you genuinely need without sounding like you're drowning on your first morning.
Heading over to meet you: a colleague who's been here years, remembers exactly how their own first day felt, and has been asked to help you settle in. Get this right, and by lunchtime you'll have an ally.
Nervous but hiding it well. Keen to make a good impression, useful rather than helpless, and to get through day one without breaking anything — including the coffee machine.
Been here years, seen a dozen first days, quietly kind. Knows every unwritten rule, every shortcut, and exactly which questions you're too shy to ask.
Here's your toolkit. You don't need to memorise it. Read each phrase, say it out loud once, and pick the ones that sound like you. You'll have it open while you practise.
Draw a card and say what you'd say, out loud, in one or two sentences. Use your own words or the toolkit. Then peek at one possible answer.
Done a few rounds? Try again with the toolkit covered. When it flows, you're ready to hear them in a real conversation.
Read it out loud, one role each, then swap. Spot as many phrases from your toolkit as you can. Listen for how the new starter turns every "I don't know" into a warm, confident question.
1. Sam admits to two small nerves in the first few lines — turning up far too early and being braced for a hundred questions. How does Sam say these things so that they sound charming and self-aware rather than anxious?
2. Priya volunteers two "heads up" warnings that Sam never actually asks for. What are they — and what do they tell you about the kind of colleague Priya is?
3. Near the end, Sam offers to help rather than only asking for help. Why is that a clever move on a first morning — and how does it change the impression Sam leaves?
No script this time. You'll have a real conversation with a real person. They have their own mind, and you have a goal.
Say each step once, out loud, in your own words. No writing, no peeking at the phrases.
Pick your situation. Your partner plays the other person.
🏆 You win when colleagues smile at you and you know where the coffee is.
Start the scene first. Partway through, draw a card. Whatever it says, it just happened.
Now you're on the other side. Your partner takes your old part.
Draw another twist whenever you like.
Tick what you actually did, in either seat.
Run it one more time. Draw a twist before you start, and try to reach a good result faster than before.
Around 210 BC, the first emperor of China was so anxious about his own big new start — the one into the afterlife — that he had an entire army built to report for duty alongside him. Around 8,000 life-size soldiers in clay, each with a different face, buried in silent ranks near the city of Xi'an: the greatest first-day preparation in history.
Every one of them a new recruit, standing to attention, waiting for orders that never came — because they were only rediscovered in 1974, by farmers digging a well. Two thousand years, and still turning up on time.
You've got it easier. No clay army, no eternity — just a login, a lunch invitation, and a coffee machine to master. And unlike the emperor's soldiers, at least someone's shown you where the button is.