Ask:
- Why is that important to you?
General:
- What and How questions
- Small talk is important for mutually establishing tone and finding boundaries. You cannot force good conversations to happen. You have to allow and invite them, and small talk is where you get to the point of extending the invitation.
- VIEW, pay attention to them, as they speak, pregnant pauses, micro expressions, invite them to go deeper on these
- Don’t force it if you aren’t in a mind to be curious and genuinely want to know more about people
- Good silence is powerful. Good, deep conversations usually contain silences where you can reorganize your thoughts or simply occupy the flow of time together. You can signal that this is permissible, and thus that your interlocutor has space to relax into, by leaving good silence in a conversation: friendly silence where there’s some degree of maintained eye contact, receptive body language, and so on.
- Some people are on autopilot most of the time. They talk a lot and it has nothing to do with you, ever. These are pretty much the only people I can’t stand talking to. This often stems from externalized self-suspicion—the ongoing need to defend one’s identity by hurling boilerplate at anyone who will listen.
- People like responsiveness
- Meet people where they are. To do this, be whole yourself, and impartial—you don’t need anything from them.