To Connect with New People, Ask Them About Their Frog
16 questions to turn small talk into big talk
Meeting new people can be lots of fun — but it can also be your worst nightmare if you’re neither good at small talk nor the natural-born life of the party.
Even if you’re the talkative type, after a bunch of lockdowns and Covid-caused isolation, your social skills are like an old key — rusty and hard to open new doors with.
However, holding a conversation with somebody is a piece of cake if you can make them interested in you. But how can you do that? No one would be more able to answer that question than the OG of How to Win Friends and Influence People.
“To be interesting, you have to be interested.”
— Dale Carnegie
Most people love to talk about themselves, so it’s easy to get started this way.
But if you don’t know how to go beyond the usual small talk, your words will Titanic pretty quickly — not breaking the ice and sinking into dark silence.
Keeping a conversation alive is hard if you can’t think of something exciting or the right questions to ask — what do you even talk about if you don’t know someone?
