As I said in my previous post, I used to fret so unnecessarily about small talk. That was, until I covered it in The Social Anxiety Institute’s online therapy course. Here’s what I learned. It may seem simple, but it had a huge impact on me and my life.
An Intro to Small Talk
In my last post I wrote about how learning basic conversation skills – similar to learning what it means to be a good friend – can helps us to be calmer, confident and more rational both before and after social situations.
Small talk is called small talk because it is small. It is no big deal talk. It does not matter one iota what you say when you’re making small talk, as long as you come across as friendly and polite. The only point of making small talk is to give the impression that you are friendly.
(I say give the impression because most of the time I can’t be bothered making small talk and rather wouldn’t, thus amn’t feeling particularly friendly, but as long as you appear that way that’s all that matters. What if you truly don’t care about coming across as friendly? I’d say you don’t really care about how others view you and thus probably don’t have social anxiety so why are you reading this post?)
To decrease anxiety associated with making small talk with people like your neighbours, those serving you at checkouts, other people waiting next to you in a long queue, take the initiative and show that you are friendly first. Plaster a smile on your face and keep it there for as long as is required. Simply acknowledging the other person’s (or people’s) presence with some eye contact and your smile is often enough. Initiate the small talk if appropriate. If it’s with somebody like your neighbour you can just say something like “Hiya, how are you?” You don’t even need to go that far – saying hi with a smile and a wave will often do. It doesn’t even matter if they reply. You showed that you were the friendly one and that’s all that matters.
I’ll get into what to talk about if the person does reply and the situation requires further conversing in my next post.
Until then, tell me, what do you think about this? If you try simply coming across as friendly, knowing that is the only point, how does it feel? Better than before?
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