Tips to Talk About Anything

We all fear the awkward silence when we're expected to make small talk with a stranger. Perhaps it's at a business dinner, and you're sitting next to a new colleague. Maybe you're at a wedding, and you meet a friend of a friend of a friend. How do you get past the initial introductions? How about when you're in a high stakes situation such as a job interview when you're expected to outshine the competition?  Then there's always the blind date. How can you turn it into the start of something big (assuming you want to)?

Everyone has a different conversational style. If you have an extroverted personality, you can probably be planted in any social situation and at least get the small talk started without feeling too much pain. If you're on the introverted side, however, these situations can make you cringe. All you can think about is how much you'd like to escape.  Most people are somewhere in the middle on the introversion-extroversion dimension but everyone has moments of greatness and everyone has moments of utter failure when the pressure is on to be scintillating.

Success in the small talk domain is a lot like success in other social situations, including online chats, job interviews, and social networking. The basic premise is that you find common ground with the people with whom you communicate by using the right amount of self-disclosure, empathy, and tact.  I've found that perhaps the most useful guide for small talk sphere comes from the person-centered approach to therapy of Carl Rogers. In the 1970s, Rogers made tremendous contributions to counseling and clinical psychology by teaching therapists how best to listen, reflect the feelings of their clients, and turn these reflections into change-promoting insights. Obviously you're not going to perform psychotherapy in your chats with random social companions.  But you can use the insights provided by Rogers to smooth over the rough patches in your chats with strangers.  Add to these pearls of wisdom a little social psychology, and you've got a perfect formula for succeeding no matter who you're talking to or how much you dislike or are averse to meeting strangers.