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HOW TO BECOME A BETTER

CONVERSATIONALIST

Talking with other people goes hand-in-hand with career success—it is very difficult to have one without the other in the business realm.

Conversation skills are incredibly important for effectively bonding with your fellow coworkers, with your clients, and especially for leading others. These skills are beneficial in the area of networking and cultivating professional relationships.

However, this can prove incredibly difficult if you are shy or if you simply don’t like to talking to other people.

Next, we will provide you with some tips that should help turn you into a social savant!

INTRODUCTION

The first step is obvious: listen! Listening to the person you are talking with can keep your conversation, well, a conversation, as opposed to a dialogue that you could easily be giving to a wall or a person.

By listening closely to your conversation partner, you will be able to pick up on social cues that will help you determine how well the conversation is going, as well as providing you the opportunity to think of follow-up questions/topics that can keep the conversation moving forward.

HOW TO BECOME A BETTER CONVERSATIONALIST

Speak slowly and deliberately. It can become easy to sloppily mash words and

sentences together when you get talking too quickly, which can obviously lead to some miscommunications.

Instead, be deliberate and slightly slower than you normally would be when talking.

It’s not a race! As long as you’re talking at a reasonable speed and people can understand what you’re saying, you’ll be fine.

HOW TO BECOME A BETTER CONVERSATIONALIST

Avoid one-word replies to questions—these are conversation killers!

Cut the filler and formalities of conversation for actual interactions. Get rid of those “Hello, how are you?” exchanges at the beginning of your conversations.

Try developing a backlog of talking points that you can draw from in case your conversation runs dry. If you are preparing for a specific event, try preparing based on the context of the situation you’ll be in. For example, prepare some networking-specific topics if you will be at a networking event.

HOW TO BECOME A BETTER CONVERSATIONALIST

Similarly, try developing a list of talking points based on your personal life. This will allow you to become comfortable in awkward situations by talking about things you enjoy.

Additionally, this kind of strategy can encourage you to expand your personal life to include more interests, which is a great supplemental benefit to becoming a better conversationalist!

HOW TO BECOME A BETTER CONVERSATIONALIST

Last but not least, don’t fear silence! In some conversations, silence is a perfectly reasonable things to occur from time to time. In fact, it is often necessary at some points.

Consider: if your goal was to constantly be talking with someone, you would probably appear to be a bit odd, and your conversations probably wouldn’t last that long.

Always remember that silence is not to be feared!

HOW TO BECOME A BETTER CONVERSATIONALIST