Hello, my name is Heidi and I am bad at small talk. It’s not that I don’t have things to say — I can think of plenty of things to say. The things just don’t make it out of my mouth.
Enter Debra Fine, self-help author and speaking coach. She believes small talk is a skill that can be taught and mastered by even the most hopeless conversationalist. Fine begins by detailing her own life experience as a poor conversationalist and how she remade herself into a conversational dynamo.
And she hopes to do the same for her readers.
Most of the advice in The Fine Art of Small Talk is common sense stuff, but I can still see it being useful to me in the future.
For example, she encourages readers to be brave and initiate conversations in public situations. Look for the people sitting by themselves. They might appreciate your attempts to chat. Also, if you don’t start a conversation, he or she may believe you’re being stand-offish. That’s not a belief you’d want to encourage.
Actually, I have a very shy friend, one of the librarians I worked with, who swore by this technique of finding a person sitting by themselves. She did extremely well at parties by finding the quietest person in the room and starting a conversation with them.
Next, once you’re talking to someone, learn his or her name and how to appropriately pronounce it. Ask open-ended questions to foster the conversations and reduce any potentially awkward pauses. Fine recommends using the acronym “FORM” to help you create these questions. FORM stands for family, occupation, recreation and miscellaneous.
Don’t be rude and press into topics that people seem reluctant to talk about. Just gently steer the conversation around the recommended general topics and let the person you’re conversing with lead. Make sure to pay attention to any verbal cues or body language the other person gives you. Obviously, this can be more difficult over the phone, so just actively listen.
And finally, exit the conversation gracefully by going back to the topic you started talking about in the first place or offering to follow up with the person by giving a phone number or email.
Now that you have all the tools of small talk, your assignment is to practice it. Yikes.
As I said, nothing earth-shattering in here, but in an age of increasing social disconnection because of technology, perhaps these tips could be useful to anyone who is seeking to improve their relationships through small talk.
Recommended for all the tongue-tied bibliophiles out there, like me.
Thanks for reading!
- The Ballad of a Small Player: a Metaphysical Movie Review
- Otherwhere: A Field Guide to Nonphysical Reality for the Out-Of-Body Traveler by Kurt Leland
- Psychic Dreamwalking: Explorations at the Edge of Self by Michelle Belanger
- Archetypes on the Tree of Life: The Tarot as Pathwork by Madonna Compton
- The Goddess and the Shaman: The Art & Science of Magical Healing by J.A. Kent
The Help Desk Book Blog 