Name: How to Make Small Talk | The Distilled Man
Uploaded: 2018-01-06T17:28:33.000Z
Duration: 13 min 9 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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,

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.

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.

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

It means squaring off to that person, facing them and really making your body open to them.

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

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

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,

At the end of the day, the real purpose of it is just sort of communicate that,

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

All of a sudden it's no longer small talk.

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."

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.

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,

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

Subtitles ListPlay Video

How to Make Small Talk | The Distilled Man

awkward

ultimately

sort

situation