Life of Matt

This is the sixth article in “Things You Don’t Talk About at the Dinner Table“, a series about how to create an environment of trust and openness, where anything can be discussed.

One thing that I’ve seen lots of confusion about regarding connection is questions and their relationship to connection.  On one hand, you have people who think that asking questions shows weakeness and stops you from “offering value” to the interaction.  On the other hand you have people who think asking questions are the end all and be all of connection, and they’ll ask questions till the person they’re with is blue in the face.

The truth is, just like most things in interpersonal interactions, there are good questions and  bad questions, and good times and bad times to be asking questions.  For the purposes of connection, I have a very simple definition of what defines a good question:

A good question is a question that lets someone else talk about what they want to talk about, and let’s you hear something you want to hear about.

That’s it.  Anything else for our purposes is considered a bad question.  Any question that fulfills those simple criteria will enhance connection, 99% of questions that don’t fulfill that criteria will hurt connection (the exceptions will be discussed in a later article about enforcing standards).

So there are two aspects you have to worry about when asking questions.  The first part is “Am I really interested in the answer?”.  If the answer is no, you’ll want to learn how to develop a sincere interest in other people.  The second part is “Does the other person want to talk about the answer?”.  To figure out what other people want to talk about, read on.

What Do Other People Want to Talk About?

Figuring out what other people want to talk about is another challenge entirely, it involves some amount of trial and error, casting around a bit until you hit upon a topic that makes the other person happy to be talking.  What you can do is greatly increase your chances by focusing on a topic that is universally important to human beings:  themselves.  The trick is to find an aspect of them that THEY consider important.  I’ll list a number of possible topics below.  If you can think of any more, let me know and I’ll add them to the list.

1.Their Passions

2.Their Worldviews

3.Their Future

4.What’s On Their Mind

5.Their (Happy) Memories

That list is just a short list to get you started.  Anything that people like to think about, they’ll usually like to talk about as well.  The trick is showing that you’re genuinely interested in what they’re saying, and letting them feel safe enough to talk about it.  Next week, I’ll talk about conversational tools you can use to better hone in on the right questions.

Click Here to Read the Rest of this Series.