I can handle most small talk. Weather, current events, exchanging compliments about outfits, recounting funny stories…I can do these successfully. Sometimes I can even find it all interesting, almost fun. I understand how small talk serves an important purpose in greasing social interactions and putting people at ease. So I try to “small talk” every day, just to get me out of my comfort zone.
However, I do have my areas that I suffer through. Mundane and pointless personal information is one. Listening to someone’s blow-by-blow account of what they had for breakfast makes me want to leap out of a window. And being invited to give my own MPSIMS also makes me want to run away. “What are you going to do this weekend?” is the question I dread every Friday. I avoid people on Monday so I don’t have to answer “What did you do over the weekend?” Nothing I say ever seems completely satisfactory, and then I am bombarded with MPSIMS that I didn’t ask for, don’t want to hear.
I know why I’m like this. But I want to know how much I should be beating myself up. Is enjoying chit-chat, especially personal chit-chat, a hallmark of highly sociable people? Or can you be sociable and friendly as all get-out and still dread it?
According to Dale Carnegie, the best way to win friends and influence people is to be genuinely interested in what they have to say. He also said that this was a talent that could be cultivated. I don’t think you should be beating yourself up over your feelings, but if you truly want to be sociable with people who don’t have the exact same interests that you do, then you probably need to work on caring more about the things that interest them. Once you start to find other people interesting, it will be easier for you to respond to them without dreading it. The message you’re giving out now, by feeling uncomfortable with other people’s small talk, is that you don’t care about them, and that they are boring, stupid, uninteresting people. That’s not a great basis for forming a relationship.
True. And, besides, there’s nothing wrong with a bit of friendly prompting. “Okay, you told me that part already; what did you do after you put the milk on the Wheaties?” Or even, “Hey, skip ahead a bit. After breakfast, what?”
Get them to generalize. “Do you prefer a cold breakfast or a hot one?”
Get them to speculate. “If the ancient Romans had Wheaties, would they have retained their Empire longer?”
Listening isn’t solely a passive activity; a really good listener also knows how to elicit the best story that his friend is able to tell.
I’m with Carnegie. My real self no doubt is that this shit is… Shit. Total shit. Shity shity shit shit.
But you can make it interesting by having other levels of stuff going on while mrs boring talks to you. Try to gauge her reactions and why she did whatever bring shit she did in response to the totally uneventful thing that happened, is what it comes down to. Basically treat her (or him but tbh I am far better at getting men off boring shit, whether that is due to a deficiency in me, a deficiency in men, a deficiency in women, or just mars/Venus I don’t comment on) as a psychology subject. Mostly she’ll say exactly the same predictable crap and that is justified. But if she doesn’t and says something more interesting - well, golly, two things happen basically at once. Firstly she becomes a more interesting “subject” but secondly and far more relvantly suddenly she’s actually an interesting person - so you can now stop treating her as a lab rat and possibly feel guilty you were doing so, and now treat her as an engaging and interesting human.
It gets to me…I start to fidget and squirm and sometimes cut the talker right off before she can mistake my polite cues of listening as genuine interest in what her son’s boyscout leader did at menards, or how she made up the guest room for her FIL. Fuck me, I DON"T CARE!
Some people are genuinely interested. They ask where the kids went to school, how old are they, my how time flies, are they doing well, etc., etc.
I just don’t really care. If I want to be friends with them by default I’m interested in what they have to say. I don’t need to be friendly with everyone. Plus, I’m really good at faking it.
I don’t like this question either, mostly because I always feel vaguely obligated to start giving a blow-by-blow account of everything I did from Friday to Sunday.
However, the thing to remember is that people aren’t really asking what you did over the weekend. They are essentially saying, “Tell me something interesting.” It’s just a conversational ice-breaker. So now instead of saying, “Well, on Friday I stayed at home playing computer games and then on Saturday I went to pub trivia and Sunday I slept in,” I’ll say, “Well, we had this crazy question at pub trivia last night. Let me tell you this question and you tell me if you agree that there’s a zero percent chance that anyone could be expected to know this.” Or whatever. Just pick one thing out of your weekend and share that.
This strikes me as a wise and useful way to look at the question. I would add that many people who ask the question are really interested in telling you something that they feel is interesting.
I think if I faced this kind of small talk on a regular basis I would probably try to prepare for it during my commute., think of a couple of interesting things in advance.
I love small talk with strangers, but small talk with co-workers who I only see at work wears me out if it goes beyond “fine, thanks, how are you?” I feel like they are asking questions for the sole purpose of gaining an opening to tell me something they think is fascinating about themselves or worse: they are mining for office gossip. I think a lot of conversations begin with a lure-questions like “What did you do this week-end” or “What did you think of the half-time show” because they want to tell you what they did or what they think. Unless I have a relationship with them outside of work or sit beside them, I feel like most of these open-ended questions indicate an agenda, and I don’t wanna play.
I would characterize myself as gregarious and can mostly tolerate even the most inane small-talk on the off-chance I might learn something I either need to know or find interesting. An example is a woman I work that I would frequently get stuck talking to in the kitchen while we both warmed up or prepared our lunches. She loved to talk about, of all things, grocery shopping. Now since it’s something I have to do on a regular basis for a whole family, it’s not completely uninteresting to me, I mean swapping sales and stuff like that is moderately useful. But she was so DEDICATED to it. It’s all she ever wanted to talk about! I had fairly good luck after a while steering her to other subjects such as recipes and cooking, etc. But shew, what a chore.
Any more I am not interested in talking about myself much at work, so a few half-responses and I start asking people about themselves and I don’t have to. People are always happy to go on and on about their favorite topics and I’m relieved of the necessity of divulging anything personal.
I’m pretty sociable. If I like someone and find him or her interesting, then I’ve got no problem with pointless small talk. Even if he isn’t saying anything interesting at this exact second, he will soon, so that’s grand; I’m enjoying his company in a general way, even if I’m not passionately engaged in this specific conversation. We can just enjoy that company and bounce the chitchat ping-pong ball back and forth, till one of us moves the conversation onto really interesting ground.
If I don’t really know the person, then I’ve still got no problem with the chitchat. It’s a way to figure out whether we like each other and are interested in each other, and whether we’ve got anything more to talk about - whether the chitchat will take us anywhere more interesting.
If I find the person boring to start with, then yeah, the chitchat makes me itch and I get out of there as fast as I can.
I think for me, I am not driven by pleasure to engage in chitchat, but rather a desire to conform and “be nice”. This is the problem.
It is considered good form for one to dance with people in an informal, pleasant way. If you don’t do it, you are considered rude and aloof, and then people won’t like you. This can result in negative consequences. I like having things go smooth and easy. So intellectually, I get the dance even though I feel like a stupid monkey doing it.
But it is still a chore for me. It’s never something I look forward to or really enjoy. I’m kind of always waiting for it to end.
It’s not for lack of effort on my part. I really do try. But I’ll try even more, I guess. Last week my slip showed a little, and I’m feeling a bit guilty over it.
Being ‘sociable and friendly’ is all about other people’s perceptions of you. If you don’t intrinsically enjoy any aspect of socializing - NEVER beat yourself up. What is important is that other people feel like you care, and that you like them. You don’t have to go to the ends of the earth, or torture yourself, to accomplish this. Smiling, being kind, and extricating yourself ASAP from painful small talk is more than enough. You’re not under any obligation to make everyone at work feel like the blow-by-blow of weekend is fascinating to you. Anyone who gets butthurt because you don’t want to talk to them all day… is being somewhat childish in my book. There are a lot of introverted people out there who don’t like mundane pointless chatter, and an extrovert with half a brain will realize that as an adult.
I used to be absolute hell at small talk, not only did it bore me but I couldn’t force myself to offer anything half the time, and it was highly stressful. I’ve been working at it hard for a few years, and now I rather enjoy it, and can even tell people all about my own MPS quite naturally. A lot of it too is that I’m no longer afraid of people thinking I’m weird. So when I tell anyone who knows me that I spent my days off alone in my house avoiding my room mates and cooked up 5 lbs of ground beef recipes to freeze, they don’t bat an eye.
It’s possible it will come more easily to you with time, effort, and if you want it to. But you know, if it never does - it’s okay. Take care of you while still being polite to others. Some people are just shy, or asocial, or reserved, or any number of things which means they don’t much enjoy chatting about nothing with acquaintances.
