Invite a little more connection
In first conversations with people, we tend to do a lot of fact-gathering. Where are you from? What do you do? Do you have kids?
There’s nothing wrong with these questions per se, but the point of conversation is connection. The other person can answer these fact-gathering questions quite quickly — and then you’re hunting around for ways to establish some common ground. The person says he’s from Nashville and you’re trying to think about who you know from Nashville…who the other person is probably not all that interested in. This all feels rather tedious!
That's why I love this tip from Charles Duhigg’s new book, Supercommunicators: make shallow questions deeper. By tweaking these fact-gathering questions just a little bit, you can invite more reflection and storytelling. You will learn a lot more about a person and figure out much more meaningful points of connection.
So, for instance, “Where are you from?” becomes “What do you like about your neighborhood?” or “What was your favorite part of where you grew up?”
“Do you have kids?” might become “Tell me about your family.”
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“What do you do?” might become “What’s your favorite thing about your job?” or maybe even a question or two later, “Did you ever think about doing anything else?”
“Where did you go to school?” might become “What advice do you have for [my kid/my niece/my neighbor/my colleague’s son] who’s about to start college?”
As Duhigg notes, none of these questions are particularly pushy. You’re not asking someone about their deepest regret or most horrible family memory or anything like that. But something like “tell me about your family” lets the other person share something he or she finds particularly sharable - like a fishing trip he just took with his brother who he hadn’t seen in a year. This gives you a lot more to ask about and talk about than the usual small talk fare.
So try tweaking your small talk questions to invite a little more connection. If nothing else, you’ll probably enjoy these conversations a lot more!