Human beings are a social species. Connection is crucial to happiness, staving off depression, and keeping healthy—literally. Various studies have shown that the effects of loneliness are akin to eating a poorer diet and exercising less, and can ultimately lead to the same place—an early death.
It might sound a little melodramatic, but companionship is literally the way our brains have been built to survive and thrive. But for the purposes of this book’s topic, there’s an even more important wrinkle: the quality of our interactions matters as well, not just the quantity or presence of other people around us. Sounds like even our brains despise small talk.
A 2010 study by Matthias Mehl had participants wandering around in their daily lives armed with a device that would record their audio environment over three days. The researchers analyzed how long each participant was in the presence of other people, and whether they were having casual conversations or were talking about more substantive matters. Basically, the aim was to capture what kinds of interactions these participants were taking part in, and the effect they had on their lives.
At the same time, the researchers also measured people’s overall level of happiness and mental and physical well-being. They found a clear correlation between substantive and deep discussions and greater well-being and happiness. It’s something you’ve probably suspected or even felt before, but being vulnerable and open with others is a deeply satisfying activity on many levels.
As for small talk, that which is the opposite of substance and depth? Well, it drew a negative correlation with well-being and happiness, meaning it made people less happy. There you have it; real evidence that small talk is something to be avoided, or at least transition out of as quickly as possible.
Researcher Arthur Aron conducted a study in 1997, in which he paired participants who didn’t know each other and gave them a list of fairly personal questions to ask. Although the questions were not offensively intrusive, they were more than just small talk. (“Would you like to be famous and how?
” “Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die? ” “What is your most terrible memory? ” “How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?
”) Aron found that the participants responded to these “deep dives” with openness and intimacy. The participants didn’t feel that the questions, as personal as they were, necessarily invaded their privacy or weakened them in any way. Instead, these questions encouraged honesty, more emotional fluency, and sincerity in the respondents.
They felt closer to the other participants, who were complete strangers before the experiment. Future iterations of this study were given names such as “How to fall in love with 36 questions” because of the powerful effects it had on the relationships between the participants, which were previously nonexistent. You probably already know deep in your bones what these two studies laid out: delving more deeply or intensely in our communications can create positive results far more swiftly than one might think.
Now the question remains: how can we actually do that? In this book, I want to provide a framework, from beginning to end, about how to engage people more effectively and move beyond small talk. We’ll start even before the interaction begins with how you should prepare yourself, and move on through all the stages of small talk to arrive at something more meaningful.
At the prospect of reading this book, you might be overly excited about throwing yourself into the midst of a conversation and seeing what you can accomplish. After all, you’re reading this book for a reason, and motivation can make you overeager—but rushing in would be a mistake for the time being. It would be akin to running into battle without your shield, sword, or even pants.
The Small Talk Mindset There’s more to conversation than thinking off the cuff and creating witty banter out of nothing at all. Very few of us are capable of doing that on a consistent basis, and what’s more sustainable, easy, and practical is preparing for a conversation beforehand. To be specific, you’re not preparing for specific conversations like they are job interviews—rather, you are priming yourself to be able to shine in social exchanges in general.
There’s a distinct difference between the two. When you prepare for conversations, you’ll find being witty much more available and even easy. So the first step to witty banter and small talk is to get ready psychologically—so you’re not caught with your pants down in meeting someone new.
What exactly does this mean? Think about when you just wake up and your voice is gravelly and incomprehensible. Your thoughts are unorganized and swirling, and anything that comes out of your mouth is likely to be responded to with a “…what did you say?
” When you’re only half-awake, you’re caught off guard when you have to respond to anything, and you have a lack of focus and awareness. This is our social status quo—how we normally move through and navigate the world. So warming up mentally is about beginning to stretch and gingerly flex our social muscles so we’re ready for action.
If you’re out at a bar or networking event, you only have one shot at making the right impression. If you fall flat on your face, as will inevitably happen from time to time, guess what? That was your one shot at the goal—will you make the most of it?
Recall that as children, we were always admonished to never talk to strangers. This well-meaning instruction might have served us well in our childhood, when we were likely to be gullible prey to sly criminals. Stranger danger was a real thing to be avoided.
In public places, we plug our ears with headphones and glue our faces to our phones, preferring to keep our interactions with people we don’t know to the bare minimum. Is this habit still serving us well? Likely not if our goal is to become better at conversation and charm.
We should quickly let go of this tendency because, as adults, it only serves to keep us isolated from others. It locks us in a social prison of our own making, and it keeps us socially cold for occasions when we need to be on. At the very least, it leaves us woefully unprepared for engaging with people, exposed as if we were ambushed in the middle of the night.
A 2014 study by Epley and Schroeder divided commuters on trains and buses into three groups—the first was instructed to interact with a stranger near them, the second to keep to themselves, and the third to commute as normal. Even though participants in each group predicted feeling more positive if they kept to themselves, the outcome of the experiment was the opposite. At the end of their ride, the group of commuters who connected with a stranger reported a more positive experience than those who remained disconnected.
It seems we feel that only awkwardness will ensue with a stranger, when instead an unexpected connection creates good vibrations. In support of the above findings, another study by Sandstrom and Dunn (2013) revealed how being our usual, efficiency-driven selves while buying our daily cup of coffee is robbing us of an opportunity to be happier. While we routinely rush through the transaction without so much as a smile, the study found that people who smiled and engaged in a brief conversation with the barista experienced more positive feelings than those who stuck to the impersonal, efficient approach.
These studies have two main findings. First, we tend to think or assume we’re better off keeping to ourselves than having short interactions with strangers. Second, we’re wrong about the first point.
The simple act of engaging people in short bursts has been shown to make us happier and more inclined to be social, and it will also help us mentally and psychologically warm up to be our best in conversations and small talk no matter the context. We need to engage in more short interactions—or what researcher Steven Handel calls “ten-second relationships”—with others, because they have the potential to boost our moods, change our perspectives, and warm us up socially. Of course, though we may now recognize the benefits of short interactions, it’s still understandable how the thought of striking up a conversation with a total stranger may be uninviting or even repulsive to those of us who aren’t social butterflies.
We feel ill-equipped to engage in fruitful social interactions, so we prefer the loneliness of keeping to ourselves. How do we counter this and warm ourselves up for routinely conversing with others? How do we get into the habit of being interested in people and build enough social confidence so we can turn that interest into meaningful interactions?
Well, that’s part of the logic behind only trying for ten-second interactions. Hey, you can make it one second (Hello there! ) or five seconds (Hi, how’s your day going?
Great to hear, bye! ) depending on your level of comfort. But keep the goal small and stay consistent.
You constantly encounter multiple opportunities for warming up to interactions and building your social confidence. For instance, think of your typical day. On your way to work, how many people do you spend at least some time ignoring—whether those you pass by on the street, sit with on your commute, or stand beside in elevators?
Greet at least one of those people with “Good morning” and offer either a compliment (“Nice coat. The fabric looks cozy. ”), an observation (“The sky’s cloudless today.
Looks like the showers are letting up. ”), or a question (“I see you’re reading John Grisham. Which of his novels is your favorite?
”). For lunch, do you eat solo, hunched over your work desk? Try instead to spend your lunch hour someplace with shared seating, such as your office pantry or a nearby picnic area.
Sit beside a colleague you always see in your building yet never got the chance to talk to, and get the conversation rolling by asking about recent company events (“I heard your department is starting a new leg of research. How’s it going? ”).
Finally, as you pick up groceries on your way home, chat with another shopper mulling over products in the same grocery aisle you’re in (“I saw this sauce in an online recipe. Have you tried cooking with it? ”).
At the checkout counter, smile and greet the cashier (“How’s your shift going so far? ”). This segment of society is especially suited to help you practice and warm up—in fact, they don’t really have much of a choice.
Baristas. Cab drivers. Cashiers.
The grocery bag boy. Waiters. Doormen.
Valets. Their job performance depends on their customer service skills, and if they want to keep their jobs, they have to be courteous to you. This alone should eliminate the fear you have of crashing and burning in any social interaction, because it’s their job to prevent that and probably laugh at your jokes.
You’ll see that crashing and burning is never really that bad, and people move on quickly—they’ll probably forget the interaction within the next ten minutes. There’s also typically a captive audience behind the store counter or cash register. These employees are usually stuck being stationary in a position for long periods of time, and for those who have held the above jobs… you know that it’s not the most thrilling life.
Most of the time, they are bored out of their minds, so having someone engage them will be a positive experience for them. You will make their day pass faster and just give them something to do. You might be the only one to treat them with respect and show actual interest in them as a person, which would undoubtedly make you the highlight of their day.
In other words, they’ll be glad to talk to you. With service people, you can test different stories, reactions, phrases, greetings, facial expressions, and so on. Unless you offend them in a deeply personal way, these people will still be courteous to you, but you can gauge how positive their reactions are to all of your tactics to know what works best.
You can continuously improve and hone your skills. You can witness your progress with future interactions. As you see their reactions change, you can fine-tune what you're doing and keep stepping up your game.
Essentially, you’re in a safe environment to practice and polish your social skills without fear of any judgment or consequences. More than that, you can learn to read people, process their signals, and calibrate your interactions to different types of people. This is a process that takes trial and error, but you can speed it up exponentially by engaging with the people you come across.
So make it a goal to initiate and create a ten-second interaction with a stranger each day, and especially on the way to functions, events, and parties. This will warm you up for conversation and build the habit of being interested in people. A Childlike Exercise Warming yourself up psychologically and getting into the general mood to socialize on a daily basis are important aspects of being great at small talk, but just as important is the way you prepare your body.
Think of it this way: conversation is a race, and you have to warm up and prepare yourself accordingly. When we want our best race, whether athletic or academic, we always engage in some type of warm-up. It’s almost common sense at this point that you need to prime your body and mind to the kind of performance that you want.
Runners stretch, singers sing scales. What about people engaging in conversation? Well, you might be surprised by how much help your speaking muscles need and how getting them in shape can make you instantly more charismatic.
Recall back in grade school when you weren’t paying attention, the teacher called on you, and you had to spend five seconds clearing your throat while still sounding meek and awkward because you weren’t prepared. That’s what we are seeking to eliminate, as well as imbuing you with a sense of confidence. To warm up your conversation and small talk skills, you just need to do something we’ve done almost every day in our lives: read out loud.
It sounds simple, but reading out loud this time will be different from any other it because you will have a purpose. I’ve provided an excerpt from the Wizard of Oz, which is in the public domain—for those copyright police out there. If this doesn’t pique your interest, you can feel free to find your own excerpt.
Just try to make sure there is a multitude of emotions included, preferably with dialogue from different characters. Here it is: After climbing down from the china wall the travelers found themselves in a disagreeable country, full of bogs and marshes and covered with tall, rank grass. It was difficult to walk without falling into muddy holes, for the grass was so thick that it hid them from sight.
However, by carefully picking their way, they got safely along until they reached solid ground. But here the country seemed wilder than ever, and after a long and tiresome walk through the underbrush they entered another forest, where the trees were bigger and older than any they had ever seen. “This forest is perfectly delightful,” declared the Lion, looking around him with joy.
“Never have I seen a more beautiful place. ” “It seems gloomy,” said the Scarecrow. “Not a bit of it,” answered the Lion.
“I should like to live here all my life. See how soft the dried leaves are under your feet and how rich and green the moss is that clings to these old trees. Surely no wild beast could wish a pleasanter home.
” “Perhaps there are wild beasts in the forest now,” said Dorothy. “I suppose there are,” returned the Lion, “but I do not see any of them about. ” They walked through the forest until it became too dark to go any farther.
Dorothy and Toto and the Lion lay down to sleep, while the Woodman and the Scarecrow kept watch over them as usual. Seems like an easy task, right? Go ahead and try to read the above excerpt out loud to yourself.
Don’t be shy. If you actually did it, you’ll notice that you do literally feel warmed up and more ready to keep speaking and conversing after just using your vocal cords for a bit. But that’s just the beginning.
Now comes the instruction. Pretend like you are reading the excerpt out loud to a class of second graders. Read the excerpt like you’re giving a performance in a contest, and the winner is judged on how emotional and ridiculous they can be!
Pretend you’re a voice actor for a movie trailer and you have only your voice to convey a wide range of emotion. Go as far over the top as possible—which, granted, won’t be much at first. Exaggerate every emotion you can find to the tenth degree.
Scream parts of the story while whispering in other parts. Use different and zany voices for different characters. Make any laughter maniacal, make any rage boiling, make any happiness manic—you get the idea.
For that matter, what emotions are you picking up in the text? Even in such a short excerpt, there are emotional high and low points. Express them, and make them sound like climaxes to stretch your range of emotion.
Pay attention to your voice tonality. Are you accustomed to using a monotone? Would someone be able to tell what the character or narrator is thinking or trying to convey by listening to you?
Use the excerpt to practice your range of vocal expressiveness—try to embody the term emotional diversity. Go ahead and try it for the second time with all this newfound instruction. Did you hear a difference?
Here is some additional instruction: pay attention to your diction and how you enunciate. In a sense, you are literally warming your tongue up so you don’t stutter or stumble on your words when you talk to others. This is another reason to have an excerpt with dialogue—the greater the diversity of the text you are reading, the better warmed up you will be.
If you have the habit of muttering like a curmudgeon, put a stop to it and make sure you are speaking clear as a bell. Pay attention to your breathing. Do you feel like you’re running out of breath?
It’s because your diaphragm is weak and not used to projecting or sounding confident. That’s the reason singers put their hands on their stomachs—it’s to check that their diaphragms are engaged. Try it and make sure that your stomach is taut and tight.
The point here is to literally breathe life into the words that you are speaking. Those who speak without their diaphragm inevitably come off as quiet, meek, and mouse-like. The better you can project your voice, the wider the emotional range you can create.
Another key element of how you say something is, of course, your pacing—the speed at which you talk. Your speaking speed can either be your friend or undermine what you’re trying to say. Rate of speech can imply an emotion all by itself—for instance, when making a big point, you should slow your pace to allow the impact to be felt.
If you use the wrong speed or your pacing is off, a lot of what you have to say can easily be lost or confused and misinterpreted. In addition, well-timed pauses can say just as much as an expression through words. Ready to read through the excerpt one more time?
Make sure you’re utilizing everything you just read. Now compare your third version to the first version you did without any instruction. That’s the difference between warming yourself up and not, and most likely, the first version is how you’re coming across the vast majority of the time.
Hopefully that’s illustrative enough evidence for the benefits of warming up. Was this exercise, along with all the included direction, a massive challenge for you? It’s probably a good idea to evaluate how unexpressive you are coming off in everyday conversations.
The added bonus is that while you are feeling silly and over the top, you are actually stretching your limits in terms of emotional and vocal expressiveness. The simple act of getting out of your comfort zone, even in private, will extend your boundaries and make you more expressive and confident-sounding in general. All this from reading out loud?
Yes, if done with purpose and deliberation! Your Conversation Résumé Previous points in this chapter about pre-conversation have centered around your psychology and your physiology. In other words, to hit the ground running and have great small talk, you’ve got to find ways to put yourself in the mood for it.
However, we haven’t covered what to actually say yet, have we? Now we’ll rectify that. As mentioned before, conversation isn’t always about thinking quickly on your feet in the heat of the moment.
That’s an entirely different skill that can be developed, but what’s more easy and useful on a daily basis is to create for yourself a conversation résumé, which you can draw from in nearly every conversation. What the heck does this mean? Well, a couple of things.
First, we don’t really think about ourselves and what is interesting about us to others. Have you ever played the game “two truths and a lie”? It’s a social ice-breaking game where you are supposed to name interesting facts and stories about yourself—but this is pretty difficult for most of us because we simply don’t often ask ourselves, What do people want to hear about us?
Constructing this resume helps confirm your identity, quirks, accomplishments, and unique perspectives; in fact, it helps us gain self-awareness and self-confidence. Second, when we’re in the heat of a conversation and an awkward silence is looming, sometimes we stress and our minds blank completely. We try to think on our feet, but our feet are frozen to the floor.
A conversation résumé comes to the rescue because it is an annotated overview of who you are. It’s a brief list of your best and funniest stories, your notable accomplishments, your unique experiences, and viewpoints on salient and topical issues. It allows you to keep your best bits ready for usage.
It’s no different from a résumé you would use for a job interview—but with a very different purpose in mind here. Know your personal talking points, rehearse them, and be ready to unleash them whenever necessary. However, just like in a job interview, having this résumé allows you to present the version of yourself that you most want others to see.
It may seem inconsequential to have such thoughts prepared, but imagine how excruciating the silence is in a job interview when you have to scramble, think of an answer on the fly, and respond while knowing your words are generic or useless. If someone asks you what your biggest flaw is, you won’t have to grasp for straws, and instead can begin expounding on why the fact that you are too dedicated and work too hard can be a flaw. It’s the difference between having a good answer or story when someone asks, “What did you do last weekend?
” versus simply saying, “Oh, not too much. Some TV. What about you?
” And how few of us can answer the following without stuttering and stalling: “So what’s your story? ” The conversation résumé allows you to remind yourself that you’re not such a boring person after all, and that people should have reason to be interested in you and what you have to say. Developing and constantly updating your conversation résumé can save you from awkward silences and make it nearly effortless to connect with others.
It may feel difficult to come up with right now, but imagine how much easier it will be without the stress of someone staring at you, waiting for your reply. It’s this process of mental agony that will translate to real conversational success. What you come up with on your résumé won’t always make it into everyday conversation, but the more you have it on your brain, the more it will be apparent to others, and the more captivating you will become.
There are four sections to your conversation résumé, and it’s not a bad idea to update them every couple of weeks. Admittedly, you may never have thought to answer any of these questions before, which means these parts of you definitely aren’t coming through in conversation. Don’t sell yourself short!
Keep in mind that if someone asks you a question, you don’t have to answer them literally, and instead can redirect them to something else that you’ve prepared on your conversation résumé. After all, when someone asks “How was your weekend? ” they don’t necessarily want to know about the weekend, they just want to hear something entertaining to fill the silence.
If you’ve ever felt like your mind was going blank, this is the cure. There are so many pieces of information that you’ve just dug out of yourself that it should be nearly impossible to run out of things to say. Remember to review this résumé before you head into socially intense situations, and you will be able to keep up with just about anyone.
You just may realize that while some people appear to be quicker than lightning, they may simply remember more about themselves at that moment. Conversational Stages Look, small talk gets a bad rap. But failing to understand the value of small talk is like saying you want to be married but hate dating—one typically leads to the other in a very sequential manner.
The first thing to remember, then, when attempting to improve your social skills, is that small talk has a very important place in the art of conversation, and mastering it will get you to the “big” talk a lot faster. Conversation, and by extension socializing and cultivating relationships with people, is something that happens by degrees, not all at once. Zoom out and you can see where small talk fits in and why it’s so important—it’s the first of many steps in closing the distance between you and another person.
It can be useful to think of conversations as occurring through four different stages, each one progressively more intimate. By gradually securing trust and rapport with a person, you’re more likely to lay the foundation for a good relationship. Similarly, race through these steps or get them wrong and you may well get off on the wrong foot, and ruin a potentially good connection with someone.
The first level is, no surprise, small talk, also known as exchanging pleasantries or general chitchat. This is getting a conversation off the ground from a cold start. It needs to be small.
Conversational warmup should center around a topic that everyone will be able to comfortably engage with. After all, at this point you don’t know the person in front of you at all. Weather, very general current events or something that is happening in the moment are all good topics.
This stage is not about sharing who you are per se, but making contact, and starting things off on a positive foot. Avoid anything too intense or specific, prolonged eye contact or physical touch. Keep it light and smile.
Your goal is to comfortably move along to the next stage. Following small talk, you may both feel relaxed enough for the second step: fact disclosure. This is a “getting to know you” phase where you can start sharing details of your life—where you work or live, interests, what you’re doing at the moment, or something that connects to the previous small talk or the position you both find yourselves in currently.
You get the chance here to open up a little more and share yourself as a person, which allows trust and confidence to build. However, keep in mind that this is fact disclosure—keep strong opinions and emotions out of the picture for now. Let the other person get to know you gradually, and only increase intensity if they are comfortable and are responding to your disclosures with their own.
If not, it’s OK, just stay at this level. If they return your information with some information about themselves, you can likely move along to the next stage. The third stage—opinion disclosure—brings you both closer still.
Finding common ground allows you to share viewpoints and opinions. 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.
You may need to chat for a while to stumble upon some shared reference of common opinion, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be a massive connection. If you’ve done your small talk well, and you’ve disclosed some useful facts about yourself (and listened to what you’ve been told in turn) you can start to find interesting points of commonality to discuss. Did you study a similar subject at university, do you both have kids, or do you share an unusual interest?
The context of your conversation will determine how in-depth you go. A random chat to an interesting stranger at a bus stop is likely to be a little more shallow than meeting your sister’s new fiancé. But the steps will be the same.
Good conversationalists know how to keep their ears pricked for facts and details they can draw on or ask questions about. People can be really fascinating if you only ask them the right questions! Be aware, however, that if you haven’t been too successful at the previous stages, seeking out a shared connection might feel a bit forward or unwelcome if the other person wants to move more slowly.
You may accidentally uncover a source of friction, and you need to be able to fall back on some good rapport and friendliness from the previous stages. Conversation is a fine balance—you want to connect with others but need to stay respectful and observant, and maintain a comfortable distance as you get to know the other person. Simply understand that opening up honestly to another person takes time and trust, since it could lead to plenty of discomfort or misunderstanding.
Move on to the third stage only if the conversation feels relaxed and positive. The final stage of emotion disclosure is where you open up even further and share personal feelings directly. This has to be genuine.
Everyone has different thresholds for this level of intimacy, so it’s important that conversation partners are both authentically trusting and comfortable with one another—hence all the previous stages! You might talk about something you’re excited or fearful about, or share a sincere compliment or private opinion. Of course, a good relationship will stay in this final stage and deepen when it comes to mutually sharing emotions and more vulnerable ideas.
Whether it’s a romantic, business or family bond, getting to this stage takes effort, and is not to be taken for granted. Though small talk might seem like a waste of time to some, think of it more like a commitment to laying the early foundations of a closer relationship down the line.
