I am willing to put real work into this and I have the reps available: a barista every morning, colleagues at lunch, a gym desk, neighbours. What I do not have is any idea what I am supposed to be practising, because just talk to more people is not a drill, it is a slogan. Six months, several low-stakes interactions a day. What specific thing did you work on, and how did you know it was working?
Disagreeing with the drill framing. I spent a year running mental checklists and became noticeably worse, because the attention I was spending on the checklist was attention I was not spending on the person, and people can tell. What actually moved it was volume of genuinely low-stakes contact with no goal attached: the same barista, the same neighbours, no technique in mind. Drills for a week to notice a habit is fine. Drills as an ongoing practice made me a worse conversationalist and a more anxious one.
I think we agree more than it looks. The drills are scaffolding you take down — I ran each one for a few weeks until it stopped needing thought. Running four checklists at once forever would have wrecked me too.
Both experiences are common and I suspect it depends on whether the underlying issue is a skill gap or anxiety. Drilling helps the first and feeds the second.
Worth separating the two possible problems before you spend six months. If you know what to say and cannot say it because your heart is going, that is not a skill deficit and no amount of drilling fixes it — that is worth raising with a professional, and it was for me. If you are calm and simply do not know the moves, drills are exactly right. I spent two years practising skills I already had while ignoring the actual problem.
I did an improv course for eight weeks, which cost about the same as a couple of months at a gym, and it was the most useful thing I have ever done for this. Not because of anything performance-related — because every exercise trains the same reflex, which is accepting whatever the other person just gave you and adding to it rather than replacing it with your own idea. That is the entire mechanic of a conversation that flows. I was terrible at it and it worked anyway.
Measure something. I counted how many conversations I started rather than joined, weekly, in my phone. It went from about two to about nine over four months and my sense of whether I was improving stopped being a mood.
One drill, six months: ask a second question. That is it, that is the whole programme, and it is worth more than every list of conversation starters ever written.
@question_jar · 6mo ago · 3 replies
The drills that changed things for me, roughly in the order I did them. One: use the person's name once in the conversation, which forces you to actually catch it. Two: ask one follow-up question about the last thing they said instead of switching to your own related story, and notice how hard that is. Three: tell a small story in three beats and stop, because most bad storytelling is not knowing where to end. Four: end conversations on purpose while they are still good. I did roughly one per month with the barista and the neighbours, and the follow-up question one alone changed how people responded to me more than everything else combined.
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@borrowck_ben · 6mo ago
The follow-up question drill is the one that separates people. Most conversations are two people taking turns to talk about themselves, and being the person who asks a second question about the same subject makes you memorable for no additional charisma.
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@circadian_cass · 6mo ago
Number three is my whole problem written down. I tell a story and then keep going because I cannot find the ending.
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