Guys, guys... I know it's slightly corny but the best advice is just to be yourself and let the conversation flow. Stop bringing tech interview style approaches into it, just chat!
All jokes aside, many people struggle with charisma and keeping the conversation going. I have grown to be more charismatic with age, largely due to a mix of assertiveness training and having internal rules to keep the conversation flowing.
If you can paper over the awkwardness of transitioning from an answer to one question to asking another question, and you are genuinely inquisitive so as to make a whole conversation from an answer, then these kinds of questions are a fantastic crutch.
Other conversational crutches like the “FORD model” (Family, Occupation, Recreation and Dreams) can help in the event of a stalled conversation.
Could you elaborate on that? These internal rules sound intriguing and potentially helpful for other people struggling with charisma
My wife actually use some ‘30 questions to fall in love’ site on our second date. It worked out pretty well I suppose .
At that point I knew it wouldn't work out between the two of us so I just got up and left the restaurant. I emailed her the solution later because I'm not an inconsiderate human being.
This is the key to success but it isn't good advice.
Unless you suffer from schizofrenia, you can't not be yourself. I am sure you mean well but this often repeated piece of advice is meaningless.
There are people naturally good at social interactions and people who are bad at it. People who are good look at the ones who aren't and see them doing dumb, self-sabotaging mistakes that _they_ wouldn't do. The successful wouldn't act that way so they recommend the lesser fortunate to "just be themselves" assuming that everybody acts the same in their natural state, while in reality they should be recommending "just act like me".
The people bad at social interactions already act like themselves, by definition, and any sort of actionable advice that would improve their situation literally means to act less like oneself and more like someone else.
That’s technically true but in practice useless. Nobody knows how to do almost anything ‘naturally’ in the sense you’re using the word because we have learned to do practically everything. Yes I know there’s nature versus nurture, and innate nature is a thing, but in practice our social interactions are very largely learned.
Do you think it’s possible for people to learn and change? What you are arguing is that what that person learned up until then is the real ‘natural’ them and anything they learn after is somehow unnatural. Do I even need to take that line of reasoning any further?
Yes, if they get actionable advice, which they can understand and follow, which "just be yourself" is not an example of. It's not just useless advice, it's wrong, showing a fundamental misunderstanding by the advisor of what the problem with the advised person is. It's not only frustrating, but it causes the advised person to dismiss any further advice from the advisor.