This is comming from some one who had to learn to make small talk: (I HAD to learn because of the job I had at the time.)
For me, making small talk was dificult because I never felt like I had anything intresting to say. Then I started to study people and realized that 90% of random conversations out there are truely mundane and pointless
For instance: Let’s say I’m driving down a road and some guy cuts me off; I honk my horn at him; then HE has the nerve to flip ME off!!
Now, you see, in my mind: This little episode hardly meritts a conversation. Let alone a conversation with a complete stranger. But yet, apparently, people like to hear about shit like this.
I’ve also realized that starting mundane conversations like this will usually spark more intresting ones. Which makes sense because you can’t just start up these “awesome” conversations with out first “warming up” so to speak.
So, what, your advances have to be accepted every single time or else it means that you must have “strikes” against you? Rejection goes hand in hand with being social, and happens more often than not. It has nothing to do with having “strikes” against you (I keep using quotes around that word because I really don’t like it in this context) – that “strikes” me as a copout.
How does “everyone else” get treated? :dubious: I’d love to know how the way I get treated is so different from the way you get treated that the logical explanation becomes you having these “strikes” against you.
I’m glad you seem to have figured out a way to make interaction easier for yourself, but as ZebraShaSha mentioned you seem to have a “me vs them” mentality.
Well, just like some people will never understand self-confidence, I’ll never understand statements like this. C’est la vie.
Well, the best piece of advice that I can give on meeting people, is to make yourself more interesting.
Now, this sounds like a cop-out, and it’s really not. I suppose what I’m suggesting is that you get a hobbie. A SOCIAL hobbie. Try to choose something that you actually might enjoy, because if you’re sitting there asleep, drooling on yourself, you’re not that interesting.
I know this sounds lame-o, but it’s really not. If you try something new, and you like it, and it’s something that other people do with you, guess what - you’ve just discovered a really easy topic of conversation to have with that person.
Now, I don’t know what you like to do. The best I can suggest is to take a class in something that even remotely interests you - cooking, drawing, painting, brick laying, waffle iron casting, anything that you think is neat. Even if you get there and it’s all guys in the class - no problem, some of them might be married or have girlfriends, and those girlfriends might have single sisters or friends or aunts or cousins that are just dying to meet an interesting fella that’s learning to cook mexican.
Secondly, don’t put so much pressure on the situation - go into it thinking “Maybe I’ll talk to someone interesting today.” as opposed to “Maybe I’ll meet a girl to take out to dinner.” or “Maybe I’ll meet the mother of my children.” or “Maybe I’ll meet the women who I’ll nurse on her death bed.”
Finally, and NO this is not flirting, if you’re ever in Calgary, I’d be happy to go to dinner with you. You seem like an interesting guy, and I talk enough for both sides of a conversation, so until you get warmed up, I can carry things.
Since your advice and mine are identical, alice I doubt yours will be received any better than mine was. ::shrug::
I wrote a post last night that seems to have gotten lost in the mists of dialup. I’ll restate it now. To meet new people your desire for emotional connection must outweigh your fear of vulnerability/rejection. If your fear of people (or emotions) is greater, or if you have an internal conflict about it, it is usually quite apparrent to others and tends to fall under the “creepy” heading to many people. JMHO.
What Misnomer said. There are skills that you can learn to help with this, but even more important sometimes is getting honest and unflinching feedback on what you are actually like socially. This is why seeing/hearing yourself on video can be so upsetting. Such feedback is difficult to get in a context that is still supportive and connected; I had a counselor to help me with it. But it’s worth it. You find out about tics and mannerisms that mat off-put others, and can then decide what, if anything, to do about them.
Yes. This too can be unexpectedly obstructive: if you can’t see past the images in your own mind to people, how can you see how they really are?
:: nods ::
…and that has to do with perceiving the other person, IMHO.
When you talk to someone, are you paying attention to them and their on-going reactions on a moment-by-moment basis, or is your mind filled with plans about what you are going to say, what your goal in the conversation is, etc?
In my counseling group, I got reamed on that, and was accused of ‘having an agenda’. It took me a long time to understand what they meant by that, and it was a lot more subtle than I expected. I thought of an having an agenda as having some great plan in front of me, when oftentimes it was simply losing connection with the other person and going on with an old conversational direction, oblivious of whan just happened.
Yes! If you believe that you are unworthy, you will act unworthily. And it can be subtle things like, if you are undecided about saying Hi to someone as you pass them, feelings of unworthiness may sway you towards ignoring them, but feelings of worthiness will sway you towards saying Hi. And different things will evolve from those choices. make the same kind of coices enough times, and your life will take on a distinct cast (of loneliness or sociality, in this example).
For many years I believed I was basically powerless, and made my social choices accordingly. I did not believe they were choices, but rather just How Things Were, the circumstances of my life.
Recently, through the efforts of my counseling group, my eyes were opened to the fact that I do have power, that I do have an effect on people. This realisation was terrifying: for the first time I actually felt that I can hurt or help people. And sometimes feeling something is what it takes to learn it. Just knowing intellectually often isn’t enough for this deep stuff.
Yet paradoxically, one you know you have the power, you need to forget about it. This is what was mentioned earlier: you have to go ahead and say or do things without “being emotionally attached to” any particular outcome.
A lot of this boils down to swinging your own mind’s obstructive and distorting fears, goals, and mental images out of the way. You can then see the other person and what they are doing, how they are reacting.
And maybe you can then, for example, observe that the attractive woman you just met is uninterested in you, and you can greacefully change or depart the conversation, before your actions edge over into creepiness. This is where non-attachment to outcomes comes in handy too.
My big breakthrough in making small talk and meeting people came when I realized that everyone else at the party was feeling exactly like I was. I like people talking to me (most of the time), so I realized that other people would like me talking to them, too, even if it is about mundane, pointless stuff (and SHAKES is dead right about that). Conversations don’t have to be earth-shattering every time you talk to someone, either. If you see the same person at the bus stop every day, say hi one day. Next day, say, “Nice weather.” Next day, you might make a small joke. Next thing you know, you’ve got a friend that you wait for the bus with.
I would also suggest that you don’t compare yourself with anyone else, Stranger. You’re not your step-grandfather. I have thought in the past that I would like to be more extroverted than I am, but then I realized that I don’t really like to socialize more or have any more friends than than I already do. I’m just the way I want to be.
Back when I first joined the SDMB, one of my first threads was dealing with the same subject.
I’ve come a long way since then, though I struggle to identify any specific thing I did differently. What I did find, though, was that a lot of my struggle lay in being unable to identify the cues that people were sending out that I actually was connecting with them. A few weeks ago I was at an event where there were a lot of people sitting around and socializing. I felt a little out of place, and did my typical wallflower by the door routine, wondering how I’d managed to spend so much time with these people yet wasn’t friends with any of them. I’d talked to most of them, exchanged pleasantries and small talk, etc. but nothing too Earth shattering. Then one woman saw me, and waved me over, and asked me what I was doing being so anti-social. It became somewhat obvious that if I had just walked over and sat down with them, I would have been more than welcome. Had a great, easygoing conversation and all was well.
So the next week I decided to test my theory. I just walked up to people I knew, but hadn’t really considered “approachable” and greeted them, chatted with them about whatever, and when conversation waned, I’d go off to another group and do the same. When I first started going to these events, I had a little bundle of business cards that I had never given out. By the end of that evening, I had given out all of them - mostly by request. And some of them have actually contacted me.
My point, I guess, is that I had never been doing anything wrong - I just hadn’t seen that I was doing anything right. In that early thread of mine, I posited that making friends is a lot like dating, and I still think it is in a way. And I’m just as bad at picking up friendly signals as I am at picking up romantic ones. So now my approach is more: if they haven’t given me any reason to think I’m unwelcome, I’ll just assume that I am. For me, it’s worked very well.
I’ve never had a problem talking to people, I’ll chat with people around me in a line at a store or anywhere else that I happen to be. I’ve always done this as long as I can remember, although it sometimes embarrasses people that I’m actually with at the time.
The conversation usually starts on a commonality, like how long the line is that we’re in, or how that screaming child is such a brat, or anything else that is affecting us at the time. It starts by things we have in common, then sometimes grows beyond that into a full fledged conversation. My best friend makes me promise not to converse with people in store lines ever since one such conversation ended up with 6 or 7 strangers chatting and made her very uncomfortable. She has always been uncomfortable around people she doesn’t know well, although I met her through a random conversation just like the ones she hates.
I like talking to people in store lines, too, or just having a friendly exchange with the cashier. In fact, Stranger, I came in here to recommend it as good practice in just getting used to talking to people about nothing. In addition to the topics Who_me? mentioned, the magazines at the supermarket checkout can be good for a shared laugh – or you might be entertained to find someone who believes every word of the Weekly World News. You’re a clever guy – I bet you could come up with a humorous observation about something in the experience you’re sharing with the people in the vicinity. The benefit of practicing in situations like this is that if it doesn’t go anywhere, no one will mind, and you won’t be forced to stand around with this person for several minutes trying to figure out how to exit gracefully.
It seems to me that threads around here usually run 15 to 20 views for each post. Currently, this thread is running about twice that number of views per post. Why?
Maybe because for most of us meeting people, making new friends, is hard. If there’s a magic pill or a secret handshake we want to know it. And so we’re all looking at this thread, hoping that someone will post the secret. But no one does. Instead, there’s stuff like, “just get out there!” and “practice on strangers!” Which is good advice.
But, you think, I’ve been doing that. I smile, and I ask questions, and I try to strike up conversations, and it doesn’t work.
That’s right. It doesn’t. Sometimes. But sometimes it does. The problem is that you can’t tell in advance which kind of conversation you’ll have.
Like most things in life worth doing and having, it takes time, patience, practice and some effort on your part. For some people, it’s easier to complain than it is to actually do the work to change (not pointing fingers at anyone here - just a general observation).
The suggestion that you practice in line at the store is a good one – comment on a tabloid headline. Either the person you address your remark to will smile and say something back, or they won’t. And if they don’t, no biggie, you’re outta there in a few minutes anyway. It gets you used to saying something to someone you don’t know. No, you’re not going to actually make friends with the person in back of you in line at the supermarket – but it’s good practice anyway.
Also, keep in mind that even brilliant conversationalists (like, oh, myself) aren’t always, um, brilliant in their conversation. The other night I was walking down the street with my best friend and started telling him this really stupid anecdote. After I finished, I said “That wasn’t the most interesting thing I’ve ever told you.” “No,” he agreed, “it wasn’t.” And we both laughed and it was fine.
Absolutely true. It’s always frustrating, though, when you see someone who is so much better at something – you wonder what the secret is. Sometimes it truly is talent, but most of the time it’s hard work. A lawyer I once worked with said that he tries to read all the books on the bestseller list, not necessarily because he finds them interesting, but because they make good topics of conversation with many people, and generally all you need is a jumping-off place to make a connection with someone. I thought it was an interesting trick.
Stranger, if you’d like, I’ll buy you a Coors Light and chat about this (or about your terrible taste in Thai food). Send me an email (in my profile).
My husband is a baseball coach for pretty high level 16-19 year old boys, and he has seen and told me about so many talented kids who came through his league. He says you have to be born with a huge helping of talent to make it, but the kids who actually DO make it in baseball work their talented asses off. Talent is very rarely enough.
In my life, I have run into very few things that I couldn’t get better at by working at them, even if I wasn’t born with a talent for them.
Perhaps what we may be suffering from is a generational issue? I mean, if I read all of the bestsellers, and then try to drop this knowledge in a conversation at some party, I would get looks like this :dubious:
Maybe the acting interested and asking questions, will work for older people. But, for people under 30, it just isn’t sufficient. Young people seldomly read and we seldomly have hobbies. So, what’s left to talk about? Parties, drinking, weekend trips, spring break, hook-ups, break-ups, and nights out at the bar/club. Sometimes entertainment, like what happened on Laguana Beach last night. Sometimes opinions about the current environment. But, most of young people’s conversations revolve around recaps of what happened in their personal lives. This put newbies and outsiders at a big disadvantage.
Y’know, that summarizes up pretty neatly the reason why I hang out with people who’re at least 7 to 10 years older than me. People my age (I’m in my late 20’s) tend not to share the same interests as I do. :dubious:
I call major shenanigans. Since graduating college I have met many people my age through my hobbies (including my old-fart hobbies such as crocheting). If you have a hobby you will meet other people with hobbies. Without interests, you’ll only meet uninteresting people.
I am 30, by the way, and have never cultivated friends significantly older than myself (the only friends I have which are older, I know through my old job). So I think its safe to say that all my friend making – up till this year – has been with the under-30 crowd.
