By Royane Real

Do you want to become better at making small talk with new people?  Do you want to become better at networking with others?  Nothing will improve your networking ability and you ability to make successful conversation with other people more than if you can show genuine curiosity about them. 

When you are genuinely curious about other people, you will be interested in finding out what makes them tick.  You will want to discover some of the interesting ways that they are similar to you.  When you’re curious about them you’ll also be interested to discover the ways in which they think differently and live differently than you do.

If you can’t be genuinely interested in other human beings, why are you even talking to them?  You would be better off staying home and talking to yourself.

When you have genuine curiosity about others, you will be much less self conscious and your conversations will work a lot better.  Instead of worrying to yourself, “What can I say next that won’t sound stupid?”, you will be focused on learning more about the other person. 

Making small talk with strangers can be tricky.  We’ve all heard the advice that we should pick something out of our immediate environment and use that as a focal point to start our small talk with the other person.

It’s true that this can be a great starting point for a conversation.  However, when you focus too much on discussing things like the weather in your city or the décor of the restaurant you are sitting in, you can bring the conversation to a painful, grinding end very quickly.  The other person will sense that you are desperate to make conversation, but that you have no genuine interest in really getting to know them.

Perhaps this is the reason that so many people hate making small talk.  They have had too many experiences where they were stuck talking endlessly about the minute details of the weather yesterday, the weather today, and the weather tomorrow.  The person they were talking with didn’t know how to get off the topic of the weather and start discussing something more interesting.

How can you keep from becoming a small talk bore? 

One way is to watch the other person for clues they will give you about what is really interesting to them.  When you get these clues, use them to start making the conversation a bit more about their life, their opinions, and their experiences.

After you have had a couple of minutes to break the ice, try looking for ways to make the conversation a little bit more personal.  Ask the other person for their opinion about something that is a bit more personal but not extremely so.  The first few minutes of talking to someone new will not be the best time to ask the other person their opinion on religious or political matters.  However they might be happy to discuss their favorite football team or musical band.

( The introductory comments above are by Royane Real, conversation expert and author of several books, articles and reports on the topic of making friends and making conversation )

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By Royane Real

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