It will be easier further: how to start a conversation with a stranger

29.09.2021 15:26

Society

In the lives of each of us there are situations when we do not know what to talk about with strangers. How to do this correctly and how to immediately win someone over?

When and how should you start a conversation?

Not all situations require starting a conversation. It is absolutely not necessary to do this while sitting or standing in line somewhere, in public transport, in a taxi, in an elevator... But if you were introduced to each other at a party or you were brought together by some joint business or project, then you will have to start talking.

To begin, smile welcomingly at the person, extend your hand to him if you are dealing with a man (if a woman, she extends her hand first). Try to look your interlocutor directly in the eyes.

Now choose a suitable topic for conversation from several options.

Why is it worth making acquaintances and communicating with people?

Do you think our environment greatly influences us? Remember how carefree we were as children and how easy it was to make acquaintances. But then they began to unconsciously learn from others and the media how to behave “correctly.” How much have we changed? 100%, with rare exceptions. Our environment has a huge influence on us. As one popular business consultant says:

“Show me the 5 people you spend the most time with and I'll tell you how rich you are”.

The same applies to health, relationships, level of education and other areas of life. Therefore, it is very important to know how to communicate with new people in order to make acquaintances with those who will be useful to you and will make your life better.

Of course, you can resist the influence of your environment. But still, the people with whom you spend your time influence and change us more strongly. And that is why you need to choose your environment yourself, and not leave everything to chance.

Give the right compliments

Compliments are a very powerful tool if used correctly. The correct way to use compliments is to make them about something the person is proud of. Eg:

• If the person is in good shape and it is obvious that he spends a lot of time in the gym, compliment him on his figure.
• If a person is successful in their career, compliment their creativity, business acumen, or intelligence.

Don't compliment people's qualities unless they have achieved it themselves. Don't tell a beautiful girl that she is beautiful. She already knows that.

Reviews

Many girls and boys have already tried to adhere to the tips and recommendations described above. They all leave positive reviews about this technique. Most of them claim that as soon as they began to change, the attitude of all the people around them immediately changed, and it became easier to make new acquaintances. You just have to start with yourself, and the whole world will meet you halfway.

Applying Economic Concepts to Conversation

Imagine that your conversation is a bank. If you have a lot of investments, then things are going well. If loans are more than investments, then something needs to be changed. Transferring this metaphor to communication, we get this.

Emotional Investment

1. Agree with your interlocutor
2. Correct body language
3. Use the other person's name
4. Tell jokes
5. Encourage your interlocutor's ideas
6. Listen attentively
7. Ask for an opinion

Emotional loans

1. Disagree with your interlocutor
2. Incorrect body language
3. Talk a lot about yourself
4. Lie
5. Flattery
6. Vulgar and personal questions

Imagine that your conversation starts with zero balance and do everything to increase it!

Laws of rhetoric of dialogue

To understand what rules of dialogue you should try to adhere to, you need to study the basic laws of communication. Here's what we're talking about:

• The law of resistance to the new. Any non-standard idea that differs from usual beliefs is usually received with hostility. Therefore, if you want to emerge victorious from an argument, you must develop a clear and convincing argumentation system. You must think about how your interlocutors will react to your speech in advance.
• The law of dialogical socialization. Its essence is that you must always respond to the speaker. Even if you are busy at the moment or are making a speech yourself, it is worth distracting yourself, listening to your opponent and giving him an answer.
• Law of boundary conditions of invention. Classic rules of dialogue imply taking into account cultural and national traditions. The outcome of the conversation largely depends on compliance with the conditions of rhetorical invention.
• Law of elimination of harm. When listening to the opinion of your interlocutor, you should think in advance about the negative consequences that accepting this point of view may lead to.

Work on yourself

Constant communication is one of the important components of developing communication skills. But sometimes the problems that make us afraid to communicate can be deeper. Therefore, it is worth working on the following points:

• Accept yourself as you are. If you can't make a drastic change at the moment, then why worry about it? Will being overly concerned help you? Of course not.

Learn to love yourself. The following will help with this:

• Praise yourself more often
• do not give control over your self-esteem into the wrong hands;
• keep a success diary in which you write down each of your victories

By doing this, you will stop dwelling on your mistakes.

• Don't run away from hard work and fear. If you encounter something that you don't think you can overcome, just tell yourself: “Yes, it will be hard, but it is possible. At least I’ll try and if it doesn’t work, I’ll gain communication experience.”

This will be useful if you want to get to know someone, but you are caught by one of the fears that we described in previous chapters.

• Learn to be patient. You can develop your communication skills endlessly. It's like sharpening a sword: no matter how much you sharpen it, it will never be perfect.

You should want to develop communication skills, but at the same time, do not care about the result. Because it will prevent you from developing in communication. Just work on yourself and praise for every achievement: a new acquaintance, an exercise completed, an interesting conversation with someone, etc.

• Read more fiction. The more vocabulary you have, the more interesting and competent you will be able to conduct a dialogue. What to read? Whatever you like: you can have classics, you can have detective stories, or you can have novels.

The main thing is that reading brings you pleasure - this will help you not to stop and learn to communicate with strangers.

• Learn to be cheerful and open. Why is this so important? Because when approaching people, the main value you can give is positive emotions. And you can call them if you are an open and cheerful person.

You can share your failures in conversation and laugh at them - this is one of the best ways to win over your interlocutor and relax.

Causes of excessive talkativeness

The inability to keep one's mouth shut is explained by the following reasons:

1. Psychology . Increased talkativeness is often associated with a person’s personality traits. This may be selfishness, arrogance, a desire to prove one’s own superiority or to attract the attention of others to one’s own problems, the desire to have any information or to have the last word in a dispute. The ability to remain silent can only be acquired through awareness of one’s psychological characteristics. To achieve the goal, you should deliberately limit yourself in statements when they are not necessary. If you have doubts about the advisability of expressing your own thoughts, it is better to remain silent. It is important to force yourself to answer the questions posed clearly, without developing the topic.
2. Gaps in education . Lack of information about norms and rules of behavior can cause increased talkativeness. Striving for self-development and taking appropriate measures will help you get rid of this habit and learn not to say unnecessary words.
3. Mental illnesses . The lack of competent communication skills may be explained by difficulties with social adaptation. Such people need regular care and treatment in specialized medical institutions. Learning the rules of communication is fraught with great difficulties for them.

Why do we sometimes have “nothing to say”

Sometimes the question arises: “How to start communicating with new people if I don’t know what to say to them after “Hello!”.” We've all encountered this problem. We want to make a positive impression on a person, but all words and thoughts seem to evaporate. Because of this, we experience discomfort and feel somehow “wrong.”

In fact, we always have something to say. It is fears that block your communication skills. Because of fear, we limit the topics we can talk about in order to:

• Don't seem stupid
• Don't insult your interlocutor
• Do not make a negative impression about yourself, etc.

As a result, it turns out that we either cannot say anything at all, or we say mediocre questions like “How are you?” or “How was your day?”, which don’t really mean anything. They are asked simply to fill the void.

But give up these inhibitions and allow the conversation to go in an unknown direction. Do you know what kind of conversation goes on a straight line? Boring. So just talk about everything that comes to mind. Ask questions and then it is important not to speak yourself, but much more important to be able to listen to your interlocutor. Remove all blocks! Even if you accidentally offend your interlocutor, there is always the opportunity to sincerely apologize.

Structure

Dialogue is mutual communication, the meaning of which is the alternating remarks of the interlocutors. Studying the rules for constructing a dialogue should begin with an analysis of its structure, which is shown in the table.

Completion

The most important thing to remember about learning how to communicate with people is to try to meet new people. Reading useful material like this article is just a help. You need to constantly take action to develop communication skills.

• keep starting conversations,
• be tactful
• polite,
• smile,
• take initiative
• maintain eye contact,
• ask questions
• The main thing is to listen carefully to your interlocutor,
• think about him
• be relaxed
• move forward and don't expect results.

So forget about what other people think about you and learn! Remember: we learn valuable lessons not only from successful attempts, but also from failed ones. Please share your experience in the comments.

Exercises to erase fear of public opinion

Your fear of communication is your “monster”. Only when you get rid of this “monster” that takes away all your conversation topics and makes you feel uncomfortable, will you begin to easily meet new people.

It is important for you to create the right attitude towards other people. What exercises will help you with this?

1. When walking down the street, say “Hello” or “Hello” to strangers.

1. If the first exercise is too easy for you, ask people for time or directions to a place.

1. Give compliments to strangers. You can stop them by saying something like this: “Hello! Please stop for a second. I wanted to say that you have great style!” Then you can say have a good day and just move on. Remember that by doing this you are not doing anything bad to the person, but on the contrary, you can lift his mood.

If these exercises are uncomfortable for you, then you definitely need to do them. Why? Because first of all, it will show you that most people are friendly and don't mind chatting with you at all. And secondly, that you have realized your problem and really want to overcome your fears

Of course, not everyone will answer. But the problem is usually not you: most people are so immersed in their thoughts that they don’t hear anything around them. Or they don't have the energy to respond to you at all.

So don't worry about being ignored. This is the whole point of the exercise - to feel discomfort and understand that nothing bad will happen to you if you talk to strangers. Be a polite and tactful interlocutor, then the maximum that can happen to you is that you will be ignored.

Features of conducting scientific discussion

The rules for conducting scientific dialogue are somewhat different from social or business conversation. Here are some recommendations to follow in this case:

• Before joining a scientific discussion, consider whether you really have something to say. There is no point in repeating well-known facts.
• Speak only to the point. Don't try to make your hypothesis more marketable by attacking your opponent's personality or contradicting his opinion.
• Speak constructively. Ideally, each statement should be supported by real examples or references to the work of reputable researchers.

How to make friends with strangers

We talked about what we talked about above, now a little practice. How to start communicating with people, making acquaintances at work, school, various events, or just on the street? How to appear attractive to other people?

There are several rules for this:

• Use not only words, but also voice intonation, facial expressions and body language

Agree, it is much more interesting to communicate with a person who, during the conversation:

• speaks loudly
• changes the intonation of the voice in interesting and significant places in the story,
• uses hands to show something
• and openly expresses emotions on the face through facial expressions.

Pay attention to this important skill, it will significantly improve your speech. By applying these simple tips, you will be able to conduct a dialogue more lively and interesting than those who speak monotonously and are in tense positions. People willingly make acquaintances with such active people.

• Smile

Everyone likes to see sincere smiles on the faces of people around them. Smiling requires you to make an emotional investment in the conversation, but you will be rewarded.

Therefore, when making acquaintances, smile more often - this way your appearance will seem more friendly to others, and they are unlikely to refuse to get to know you.

• Talk to strangers as if you were talking to loved ones

Don't stress when you want to talk to a stranger. Imagine that you have known him for a long time. Do you think this is strange? But put yourself in his place: would you really be pleased if people around you were afraid of you and were nervous when talking to you? Of course not. And the people around you don't want it either.

• Making eye contact will help you succeed in a conversation.

Look the other person in the eye when you communicate. Only occasionally look away so that it doesn’t look strange.

In order to make acquaintances, you can use several more reasons:

• discuss the purpose of the meeting (if you are at the event);
• find out how things are going in the company,
• what kind of people are here (if this is your first day at work);
• what brought your interlocutor to this educational institution (if studying).

Don’t ask yourself the question “How to communicate with people correctly.” It is untrue in itself. After all, there are no prohibitions and no right ways to develop a conversation.

Just be active: constantly communicate with new people. Then you will have an interesting circle of friends and you will develop your communication skills.

What can stop you from becoming sociable?

Various settings can interfere with this issue:

• "I'm imposing."

Photo by EKATERINA BOLOVTSOVA: Pexels
This is a very common attitude when you may feel that your questions now will not be appropriate and you may interfere with another person. In this case, you need to remember that if you make contact at an inconvenient time for the other person, they will tell you about it. And also, you don’t need to think for another person. If it is important for you to enter into dialogue now, enter.

• “Who needs my opinion.”

Definitely, if your opinion was not asked, then there is no need to give advice or criticize someone or something. By doing so, you will violate the personal boundaries of another person. But if your opinion was asked, then you shouldn’t remain silent. This is a great opportunity to express yourself and share your vision of the situation. For someone, your opinion may be important.

• “I’d rather completely agree.”

This installation is very closely related to the previous one. In this attitude lies a great fear of being criticized. You may be afraid that your opinion may run counter to the opinions of others and may be ridiculed. And you can choose a position in which you agree with everyone. But this position will not make you a good conversationalist. A person with his own opinion is always interesting.