Small talk can change your life (for the better)

A couple of years ago, I gave one of my clients an experiment to practise ā€˜small talk’ with a variety of people in and outside work. In the supermarket, on the many flights he took for work, with colleagues and so on.

There was a solid business case and reason for this as well as a deeply personal one which was about building trust, being genuinely interested in others and getting to know people as ā€˜human beings’ not just roles and titles. In essence it was about helping him to CONNECT with his work colleagues. He’d struggled to do this using the belief that ā€˜private stuff has no place at work’ and it was having a detrimental effect on his work relationships – people described him as ā€˜secretive’ and ā€˜closed’ when of course he simply saw the world in a different way from his peers .

He really wanted to change this (whilst remaining true to what he described as ā€˜my inner introvert’!) and so he started those experiments. He found it hard at first. He thought that talking about the weath...

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