How to Avoid Soul-Sucking Small Talk
Hate answering the same questions over and over? Me too. Here’s what you can do about it.
Where do you work?
What do you do?
Where are you from?
How many times have you been asked these questions?
The sheer lack of imagination applied to most conversations makes it seem like our species only developed speech a few decades ago and we’re still trying to figure it out. Either that or we’re so hamstrung with worry about asking the wrong thing that we decide to only ask the safe questions — the ones we know won’t offend anyone or reveal anything too personal.
In every conversation, we’re given a rich palette of colors to paint with, but we dip our palaver paintbrush into the same boring hues time and again, resulting in the same boring conversations.
Probably due to my hatred for small talk, the art of asking questions has always fascinated me. Questions are the key to making conversations more interesting, so if we want to improve our conversations, we need to improve our questions.
Two years ago, I attended a leadership conference in Texas that profoundly influenced the way I think about questions. In a room packed with 5,000 people, the conference…
