Small talk can be so awkward. You’re trying to fill the silence, but the conversation just isn’t clicking. What do you do? In this episode, I’m sharing 3 ways to make small talk feel natural, engaging, and even enjoyable. You’ll learn how to ask better questions, keep the conversation flowing, and avoid the awkward silence trap. These tips will help you turn any small talk moment—whether at a party, in line at the grocery store, or before a meeting—into a real connection. Like what you hear? Don’t forget to subscribe and leave a 5-star review! Pre-order my new book, The Next Conversation, today! Suggest a topic or ask a question for me to answer on the show! Want a FREE communication tip each week? Click here to join my newsletter. Watch my podcast on YouTube Follow me on Instagram Follow me on LinkedIn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Episode
If there is one thing to unite this world, it is the hatred of small talk. It doesn't matter if it's a corporate company event or maybe it's just a weekend networking. It can be terrible. It can be downright scary at times. So how do you do it and how do you get better at it? Well, I gotcha. Today we're talking all about how to never struggle with small talk.
Welcome to the Jefferson Fisher podcast, where I'm on a mission to make your next conversation the one that changes everything. If you enjoy learning tools to improve your communication, I'm going to ask you to follow this podcast. And if you would, please leave a review. If you have any suggestions for a topic, just throw them in the comments.
Also, my new book, The Next Conversation, is officially out on pre-order, and you can find links for it down in the show notes. Small talk. It's gross. So how are we going to fix that? Let me give you some hints. Number one, instead of just asking, how's work? How's home? Those kind of questions just fall flat. They do nothing for you. They don't move the conversation at all.
Instead, we're going to switch it to ask questions that are action oriented. That means questions about the doing. So instead of, how's work? How's home? How are you? You're going to be asking questions like, what did y'all do this weekend? What do you have coming up? Getting things that they're excited about. What are you excited about today or tomorrow or this week?
When you say, what are you doing or going? Those are action oriented things and they're going to help push the conversation forward. Number two, now what matters is how you do it. If you notice, I didn't say, do you have anything going on this weekend? Because how are you going to respond to that? You're going to respond to that as either a yes or a no. That's it.
When you ask questions typically that are did or did you have fun today? Did you have a good day? When you ask your kid, when you pick them up from school, did you have a good day? You're really only giving them a few options to say yes or no. When you ask questions that are closed, that's what they're called, closed-ended questions, they only leave you hardly anywhere to go.
It's just a yes or no question. Did you go to the store? Yes or no. Instead, you're going to be opening it up with asking and beginning the phrase or question with what. You see how we say, what did y'all do this weekend? Or instead of, did you have fun this weekend? You hear the difference between, what did you do for fun this weekend? Versus, did you have fun this weekend?
One invites you to open up, the other closes it down and ends the discussion. So anytime that you can, I want you to ask an open ended question. You do that by beginning with what or how or when, because it gets them to continue to talk. That's what you're after.
And also, number three, if you find that you just don't have that much to talk about or it starts to go downhill and you're finding that each of your responses are getting shorter and shorter, That's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. People feel like there has to be a certain amount of time for it to count as small talk.
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