Hi! I'm Kyle Ingham founder of The Distilled Man.
And up next we're gonna talk about that thing that so many people dread,
small talk.
Ahh, small talk.
That dreaded small talk.
Conversation skills are so important to our interactions with other people.
That it's amazing it's not taught in most formal schools.
Being able to make small talk and have conversation with someone
can make a huge difference in terms of your first impression
Whether it's trying to impress that future boss.
Whether it's a lady friend who might be someone you're interested in,
or whether it's just a good friend who you want to make a good impression on.
Being able to make small talk and carry on a conversation can go a long way.
"But small talk is awkward, I don't like it!"
I know that's what you're thinking right now.
But the thing is, life would be a lot more awkward if we didn't have small talk, can you imagine?
"Uhh, excuse me, um my name is Bill. Very nice to meet you.
I need you to tell me your position on abortion.
And tell me your deep seated religious beliefs."
Small talk is a necessary evil, but it doesn't have to be evil.
Ultimately you'll just have to recognize that it's an entry point for potentially even deeper conversation.
With small talk the true goal is rapport.
And rapport is that situation where you're talking to the other person
and you both kind of forget that you're having small talk.
That suddenly things have transitioned past that.
You've got a connection of some sort.
And the conversation just flows naturally.
So the two things that you can do to help improve your chances of having successful small talk are:
1, having a more fundamental connection with that person, and we'll talk about that in general just a second.
Number 2, trying to use small talk to find common ground.
So how to connect with other people on a more fundamental level?
The fact is people make snap judgments about you.
Based on how you appear, your attitude, your presence, how you carry yourself, you know, how you dress.
But most of all, how you make them feel.
And you want people to trust you and feel comfortable around you.
So one of the things to do is really look at your attitude and look at your body language
Would you just make sure that you've got a positive attitude, first of all
and that you've got open body language.
And what does that mean?
It means squaring off to that person, facing them and really making your body open to them.
As being opposed to being closed off,
or having your arms folded,
or being distracted, you know, looking at your watch all the time or something like that.
If you go into that situation and you're maybe not really interested in talking to that person,
or if the entire time during the conversation you're just in your head thinking about,
"Oh, I'm terrible at small talk, I'm so socially inept."
You know, pretty soon you're gonna start picking up on that.
And that's not gonna be a good experience for either of you
What's interesting too, about making fundamental connections with people,
is that people are drawn to people who are like them.
Do you ever notice how when you go traveling, say in Europe and you meet somebody from the United States
over in Belgium or wherever you are.
And immediately you have a connection even if you've never met them.
Suddenly the contrast of being around these people speaking in a different language to you
and then meeting this person who speaks your same language, has the same sort of cultural vantage point as you do.
You have this immediate connection, because they're like you
People like people who are like them.
So Nicholas Boothman in his book, How to Make People Like You in 90 Seconds or Less,
talks about this idea of synchronizing with someone.
The idea is you're going to try and match up
with their tone of voice, their mannerisms to the extent that you can, their posture.
I know it sounds a little creepy at first but if you're doing it subtly and you're doing it with
the actual intention of doing rapport not just creepily mirroring what they're doing,
then ultimately it really will work.
At the end of the day, the real purpose of it is just sort of communicate that,
"Hey, we're on the same wavelength."
So we talked about the first way of creating more of a fundamental
connection with a person that helps sort of expedite rapport.
The second trick to making small talk work for you, is to think about small talk a little bit differently.
To think about it as a way to find common ground.
And if you can be patient with small talk for just a little bit,
so that you actually do find that common ground, once you do it can be really rewarding.
Pretty quickly if you're both playing the game and talking small talk,
but knowing you're going to get to something deeper, you might just find that one thing that
you're both passionate about.
All of a sudden it's no longer small talk.
"Oh you like snowboarding as well.
I just went and where do you go?"
And the conversation just takes off.
So when you're with someone you don't want to sort of just ask them random questions.
You want to try particularly stay away from closed ended questions that are just going to give you a yes or a no.
Like, "Hey, did you go to the movies?" "Yes."
or you know, "Are you from Idaho?" "Yes."
The conversation just ends there.
What you want to do is have open ended questions that really elicit a response, like
"What do you think about such and such?" or "Tell me about where you're from?"
And that's something that's actually gonna actually lead to a deeper conversation.
So you might be wondering, how do I even start a conversation?
Especially if it's somebody that I've never talked to before.
And there's a very simple formula that you can use
and it actually works really well once you're in the conversation as well.
And it's the idea of alternating a statement and an open ended question.
An easy way to do it is to make a comment about the location or the ground that you're both share.
Say you go to some sort of event.
And you walk up next to this person and you say,
"Gosh, the ballroom really is beautiful. I'm amazed at how heavy those chandeliers must be."
And then you transition quickly to an open ended question,
"How do you know the Johnsons?"
And from there what you've done is, you've sort of disarm them a little bit.
You've broken the ice by offering up a comment that they can react to
And you've followed it up with a nice open ended question,
that's hopefully gonna lead to them explaining
how they know the Johnsons, you can talk about how you know the Johnsons.
And then pretty soon hopefully the conversation will continue from there.
But this rhythm can actually work really well
once you've gotten into the conversation.
Because a lot of people who don't do as well with conversation and small talk,
have heard, "Oh, well I need to ask questions."
And so all they do is fire off question after question after question.
And if you're in the receiving end of that it can feel a little bit like you're in an interrogation.
You don't want that
So what you can do is kind of make a statement,
follow it up with an open-ended question,
and sometimes that statement can be
where you're offering up information, because ultimately as you start to build rapport,
that's what you're doing is that you're offering a little more information about yourself,
they're offering a little more information about themselves,
and soon you start to build rapport and you find that common ground.
One of the biggest mistakes people make with small talk,
this is what really gives small talk a bad rap
is when people kind of do the small talk on autopilot thing
and this especially happens with say coworkers and when you see each other maybe like after the weekend.
"Hey Bill, how's you're weekend?"
"Good, yours?"
"Fine."
"How's the familly?"
"Good, yours?"
And it's just sort of like this surface level thing that there's no intention of ever
kind of making it go deeper and making it into a more interesting conversation.
So, again you're always looking for ways to kind of
go a level deeper with your conversation.
So, even if maybe that your partner in the conversation isn't, doesn't have that agenda
or isn't thinking that way.
There are ways for you to do that as well.
One of the ways is to not only ask open ended questions but to open your response a little bit.
Like giving it a little more detail, more richness with your response.
So, in the example we just talked about just a second ago with the two coworkers.
We're going to do the autopilot small talk.
A guy named Marvin Brown in his book, How to Talk to Anyone Anytime... Anywhere...
gives sort of an alternate take on how that conversation go.
So the coworker says, "How's your weekend?"
"It was amazing! You know we took the kids to this amusement park and we rode all the rides.
And you know I hadn't been to an amusement park like that in years,
the kids had a great time, but I think I may even have more fun.
We had cotton candy, we rode all the rides.
So by offering up all these rich details, you're actually helping to expand the conversation
because you're taking it past that small talk autopilot
and giving some meat to the conversation for lack of a better word.
So when you're trying to take the conversation deeper,
one of the big things you don't want to miss out on is what Nicholas Boothman calls "free information".
And these are little nuggets that someone throws out
that if you seize a hold on them and follow it up on them would help lead to a deeper conversation.
So in his book, Boothman talks about a story of a young man who is on the train
and he sees a woman and that he want to go talk to.
He was not hitting on her necessarily but he just wants to chat her up and be nice.
So he goes and sits next to her.
And he says, "Oh hey, I haven't seen you here on the train before."
And she said, "Yes, you know I'm new, it's my first time. I'm starting a new job at an ad agency in town."
And in response he says,
"Oh yeah, you know it's tough to get a seat on the train sometimes at this hour but fortunately you did."
And then the conversation sort of peers away.
But did you see the free information that he passed on, that he didn't realize was an opportunity?
She offered up information that he could have easily followed up on.
The fact that she was starting a new job in town at an ad agency.
She offered up that free information that he easily could have seized.
And asked a nice open ended follow-up question.
Which would have led to a further conversation.
"Oh, how long have you worked in the ad agency field?" or
"Where are you from? Are you new in town?"
So there's lots of ways he could have continued the conversation, rather than
keeping it on the focus of just the train car itself.
She was offering free information about herself that he could have taken to the next level.
So Marvin Brown talks about it in a way, he says,
"You can kind of think of people like a novel and with most books,
you have a table of contents that you can skim
and understand what they're all about or what the major components are.
But, similarly to the free information idea,
there are sort of these hidden tables of contents that if someone reveals it,
it can give you a better idea of what makes them tick inside.
And these are the things that if you listen carefully,
you can suss out and follow up on.
And this is why in professional situations sometimes it's actually better to try and relate to someone
on a personal level or rather than just talking about business.
John Corcoran, who runs a website called Smart Business Revolution,
talks about how sometimes this is the best approach at a networking event.
Not to go in and not talk about your business or their business,
but to try and connect with them on a human level,
ask them about their family, ask them about their vacations
and things they like to do for fun and that sort of thing.
Because ultimately, especially when you're in a position where
they might think that you're trying to leverage that conversation to
improve your situation professionally.
They're gonna be a lot more open to connecting with you
if you try to connect with them, like I said, on a human level.
And I've actually seen this on my own life where in my first job
I, at one point found myself in an event cornered by a really senior level client of ours.
And I was so scared because I was terrible at small talk
and I was terrified that he would want to talk about business or work,
that I would reveal myself as not really knowing what I was doing because it was my first job.
I didn't have that much experience
But being a seasoned conversationalist that he was,
he gave me a break and said, "Hey listen, what do you like to do for fun?"
And so we ended up talking about music and hiking and cooking and all these other things that
some of them ended up being really common interests between the two of us.
And pretty soon I think we both forgot that we started out as having small talk.
So remember nobody likes small talk for small talk's sake, it really is a means to an end,
and ultimately it is worthwhile to create deeper conversations and ultimately build rapport with people.
It still is frustrating and scary for some people to try and make small talk if you fell like you're not good at it,
but the more you practice and if you can incorporate some of these techniques
that we just talked about the more comfortable you'll be.
So, how about this weather we're having, huh?