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Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio.
Good morning.
This is Laura.
Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.
Today's tip is to make shallow questions deeper.
By tweaking your usual small talk ever so slightly, you can wind up with much richer conversations.
Today's tip, like another one this week, comes from Charles Duhigg's new book, Super Communicators.
In this book, he shares strategies for how anyone can connect with others more effectively.
Duhigg notes that many of us ask pretty straightforward questions when we are getting to know someone.
Where do you work or what do you do?
Where are you from?
Where did you go to school?
Do you have kids?
And there's nothing wrong with any of these questions per se.
But the problem is that the point of conversation is connecting.
A person can answer all of those questions quite quickly.
And then you might need to keep reaching to forge some sort of connection.
And doing so can feel tedious.
Like, oh, you're originally from Dallas.
And now you're racking your brain to think of who you know from Dallas.
And the other person probably doesn't care about this person that you know from Dallas.
So, Duhigg suggests making shallow questions deeper.
Instead of, where do you live?
You could ask something like, what do you like about your neighborhood?
Instead of, where do you work?
You might ask, what was your favorite job?
Or even, what's your favorite part of your job?
Or another question or two later, you might ask, is there anything else you ever dreamed of doing?
Do you have kids or are you married?
Can become the more open-ended, tell me about your family.
How long have you lived here becomes, what's the best place you've ever lived?
Where did you go to high school or where did you go to college might become.
What advice would you give someone in college right now?
As Dweck says in Super Communicators, none of these deeper questions are incredibly pushy.
You are not asking someone you have just met to tell you about their deepest regret, or something like that.
You could ask any of these slightly deeper questions in a professional or personal setting.
But you will definitely get to know people a little better.
You will know something important about them which will allow you to connect.
If the person tells you that the best part of growing up in Dallas was the tight-knit neighborhood they lived in and wow, that neighborhood has changed a lot over the past 30 years.
This just gives you a little bit more to work with.
You can talk about that change in general, rather than the person you know in Dallas who your conversation partner doesn't know from Adam.
So as you talk to people, think about ways you could switch up your usual questions.
Invite a little storytelling and reflection.
You will probably wind up feeling closer.
And you will enjoy your conversations a lot more.
In the meantime, this is Laura.
Thanks for listening.
And here's to making the most of our time.
Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast.
If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at laura at lauravandercam.com.
Before Breakfast is a production of iHeart Media.
For more podcasts from iHeart Media, please visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Good people.
What's up?
What's up?
It's Questlove.
So recently I had the incredible opportunity to have a real conversation with actress and producer Jamie Lee Curtis.
From Routines to Recovery, True Lies and a certain Jermaine Jackson music video.
Jamie's real and raw, and it's something I really admire about her.
I am so happy that I'm the head in charge at 67, that I have the perspective that I have at my age to really be able to put all of this into context.
Listen to The Questlove Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ready for a different take on Formula One?
Look no further than No Grip, a new podcast tackling the culture of motor racing's most coveted series.
Join me, Lily Herman, as we dive into the underexplored pockets of F1, including the story of the woman who last participated in a Formula One race weekend, the recent uptick in F1 romance novels and plenty of mishap scandals and sagas that have made Formula One a delightful decadent dumpster fire for more than 75 years.
Listen to No Grip on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is an iHeart Podcast.
Guaranteed human.
