Better Small Talk: Talk to Anyone, Avoid Awkwardness, Generate Deep Conversations, and Make Real Friends

by Patrick King

try to embody the term emotional diversity.

Following small talk, you may both feel relaxed enough for the second step: fact disclosure.

The third stage—opinion disclosure—brings you both closer still.

Finding what makes both of you the same is a deliberate attempt to seek out grounds for friendship. Without prying, ask thoughtful questions that will let you find a potential area of similarity.

Try free association with the words “coffee” and “trains” and think about how much easier it is to construct questions and generally converse about something once you can form a mental map of the topic and its related topics. You just feel unstuck.

HPM HPM stands for History, Philosophy, and Metaphor.

History means you reply with your personal experience regarding a topic (no, don’t trawl your memory for an exciting anecdote about life in medieval times). For example, if someone tells you a story about skiing, this is a prompt for you to reply with:

Philosophy, on the other hand, involves your personal stance, take, or opinion on a specific topic (again, this is not to say you need to share your knowledge about Spinoza’s Ethics!). This is where you share personal or emotional material. For example, if someone tells you that same rousing story about skiing, you can reply with:

Metaphor, on the other hand, involves what the conversation topic reminds you of. If you’re hearing the same story about skiing for the third time in the same day, you might not want to talk about it again. Thus, this is a prompt for you to subtly change the topic to something that’s related or . . . not so related. If you’ve been practicing your free association, this kind of thing will come as second nature. It works as long as you can preface it with some sort of transition. That reminds me of . . .

no one has control over the color of their eyes; thus, it’s not a very impactful compliment. However, someone may have made a very conscious choice to wear a specific hairstyle that takes an hour to get ready. If you compliment this, you are telling them you recognize and praise their effort. If you compliment their outfit, you are acknowledging their awesome taste. Other examples include specific habits, words and phrases people use, distinct fashion sense, unique thoughts, and so on.

In today’s frankly fragmented and fractured society, people no longer enjoy the deep kind of social connections they had before. We might feel like we are never listened to, never heard, never understood. This makes us unconsciously hog attention when we do have a conversation, but it’s a vicious cycle—the other person responds by trying to grab it back, and so, instead of a genuine sharing of connection, we end up using dialogue as a kind of tug-of-war. Add to this the scourge of social media, which has many of us internalizing some pretty strange ideas about what conversation and social interaction actually is and what it’s for. When it’s our turn to talk, we may start monologuing for ten minutes like the conversation is our personal YouTube channel, or when other people speak, we may unconsciously think, “What’s he saying? I didn’t agree to have this opinion in my filter bubble,” and have an immediate reflex to downvote or unsubscribe!

Collaboration is the name of the game,

Mike and Jeffrey go to prove something simple: people who are interested are often interesting. In other words, people who actively engage with life are always going to a) be more interesting to talk to and b) find other people interesting.

In the movie Yes Man, Jim Carrey is forced to start saying yes to everything—literally everything. As a result, his life is transformed and he has many unforgettable experiences that he would never have had otherwise. He meets the love of his life, goes on many adventures, and other such things. Well, you need to be like his character and get into the habit of just saying yes

On the other hand, imagine you’re talking with someone and bring up the topic of Brexit, and all of a sudden, the other person launches off into a diatribe about their (very strong) opinion, more or less preaching about why they’re right and everyone else isn’t. When you ask a question or disagree, you get dismissed or “educated” on the right way to think. Good conversationalists know that it’s better to use opinions to drive conversation and connection, rather than shut it down or create division. They are not afraid of disagreement or difference; rather, they explore it with genuine curiosity. In other words, having an opinion per se is not enough—you need to be broad-minded, flexible and able to hear other people’s opinions, too.

There are a couple of ways we can get ready for small talk and warm up, so to speak. The two approaches are what you might assume: physiologically, and psychologically. Psychological preparation is a matter of getting in the mood to socialize and also becoming used to initiating interaction. This can be done with “ten-second relationships,” which plunge you into the deep end if only for a moment. The idea is to start small and short, with low expectations, and build from there. You’ll eventually see that it’s easy and quite safe—you might even find it to be enjoyable, and frequently want to extend past ten seconds.

Physically, you should seek to warm up by reading out loud before socializing and making sure you exaggerate emotional expressiveness and variation. Read a passage out loud three times and notice the difference in engagement, and you can instantly see the contrast

Another aspect of setting the right tone is to search for similarities and also allow the opportunity to create them. When people observe similarity, they instantly open up and embrace it because it is a reflection of themselves.