Ninja skills
Learning to talk to strangers: Week 3
I’m currently doing a 6 week course Transformational Conversations led by Georgie Nightingall. Each week I’m sharing a few things about what I’ve learned.
This week we had fun. The skills we added to to our toolkit felt particularly ‘ninja’ because they seemed to unlock hidden paths in conversation and felt like we could perfect them with practice.
I spy
It’s easy to head down conversational pathways that focus our minds away from the very situation we are in — into recounting past stories or futures we are anticipating. But, as we learned last week, there’s an awful lot to be gained if we ground ourselves in the present moment. Last week we practiced being present in silence. This week we practiced the act of noticing and sharing what we observed.
“I see you’ve got lots of plants…”
“I’m noticing that everyone’s a bit low on energy today / is energised today”
“It sounds like you really care about this”
This act of drawing our focus to curiosity about the present moment makes the person you are speaking to feel seen and heard. Sharing our observations, without judgement, shows our interest in others. It also means there’s always something to bring up in conversation. As a phrase, ‘I’m noticing’ also sparks curiosity and invites people into the conversation — they can share their observations and start noticing too.
Just one word
The next ninja skill was about sparking conversation by echoing back just a single word. Unlocking good conversations might involve less words, not more. This echoing skill was powerful — both for the person echoing and the person being echoed.
When you are listening for a single word to echo, you realise the number of potential pathways in a conversation. If someone is talking about their last holiday you could echo back the location (Oh, Scotland!), the feelings (peaceful?) or the activities (wild swimming?!). The single word encourages your conversation partner to elaborate and share more about the experience. It’s a great way to show you’re listening and create more space for others in conversation.
Leaving out hooks
One thing that really struck me this week was Georgie talking about how she leaves out a number of different conversational hooks when she’s talking to people, to see which ones people bite . This might be mentioning a couple of quite different interests when someone asks, or “I ought to tell you it’s my mum’s cooking, but I really, really love chips” in response to what you love to eat. It’s an interesting idea about serving up the opportunity for more than one pathway in a conversation. It also struck me that this is what people are doing a lot of the time naturally in the things we share, and we, as conversation partners, have the power to use our curiosity to pick the topics that matter to others or spark our interest. Sometimes picking the less obvious hook can also lead us down surprising and interesting conversational pathways.
With each week as we learn more about the art of conversation and I take this back to my life, I’m noticing the dynamics and patterns that shape my daily interactions. I’m spotting opportunities to move away from well scripted paths, towards more authentic and deeper connections. It requires effort, it’s not always easy to break the script. Rather than trying to change everything at once, just trying one small change is powerful enough to make a difference.
