An interesting conversation was had today, and it was about having conversations with people. It was sparked by a book which had, for different professions, a list of questions you could ask them that might help start conversation. These questions were a bit outdated, but it led to some interesting methods of getting people talking being suggested by those of us talking about it.
I don't know how to continue this post to make it interesting to comment on, but I will mention several ideas: one was that (for a self-centered conversation), you can bring up a general area/idea that people are likely to ask questions about, for example, if you just traveled somewhere interesting, mentioning that can lead to many more questions about what it was like, and so forth. Another was that even with small-talk sorts of questions, it can help to give longer answers, because it gives more information people can use to continue the conversation, or to find a shared interest. I think there were several more ways mentioned, so if you were there, or know of something interesting about this, please post :)
3 comments:
The one thing there that rings a bell is bringing up stuff that will compell people to ask follow-up questions, as---assuming one wants the follow-up questions---that is a very good interview strategy.
We also talked about developing interesting answers to the more common conversation starters, "Where're you from?", "What do you do?" That's something I'm still working on.
Don't forget the this classic: "What House are you rotating out of?"
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