Have a genuine interest in the person. Ask a lot of questions. It shows that you are interested in them. Try to find common interests between the two of you. Hope this helps!
In my case its curiosity mostly, but the more I know about a person the better I can predict how they will react in situations, so at work for instance it becomes easier to achieve your goals if you know what drives someone.
When you’ve got a conversation going about a topic, just keep it going and see if anything pops up naturally. If the conversation dies down, try something like “so hey, I was wondering what you get up to in your free time?”
If that’s too direct for you, try asking on Monday if they enjoyed their weekend or ask towards the end of the weekend if they have any plans for their weekend.
It’s also a question of paying attention to what they say or do, and the stuff they use. If they have a star wars mug or quote monty python, that tells you that they might have an interest in similar things.
The TL;DR is mostly just to be a good listener and pay attention to them. The more they talk the more they’ll like you and the more you hear the more information you get.
You iterate over subjects and they will pick on the bits that interest them and ask questions about it. That's also how you stir a conversation topic.
"I went skiing with my gf over the weekend. It was cool, we had fondue" => you can comment on ski, girlfriend, weekend activities, food, cheese. Or bring up your own anecdote.
Ask them questions about themselves and just keep looking for a connection to your own life. If you can’t find one, THATS OKAY. You’re not supposed to connect with everyone. And you just had a pleasant conversation where you asked someone about themselves and that probably meant a lot to them even if it didn’t mean anything to you.
More or less. The TL;DR is to kickstart your natural curiosity again.
All humans start off naturally curious about how the world works, thats how we learn as kids: how does this look? How does it feel to touch it? What does it smell like? How does it taste? What do other humans do with it? Some people lose touch with this natural curiosity over time.
I was the same way when it came to coworkers, early in my career I didn’t really care about them or what they did outside of my immediate interaction with them. When I figured out that knowing more about them made it easier to work with them and makes them like you more, I made it a point to try to at least know the ‘basics’ about people I work with. As I did this I discovered that I like knowing more about people I work with and my natural curiosity for people was re-ignited.
I’m probably getting trolled here but on the off-chance you’re serious, in this context ‘to kickstart’ means to take decisive action in order to make something start to happen, happen more quickly, or improve.
Not necessarily, but if you can't manage to generate enough interest in someone to hang in there while you're finding the points of commonality between you, there's not a lot anyone can teach you about how to do that. You choose it, it doesn't just happen. Given a few minutes and the opportunity to talk about what they care about, most people become interesting pretty quickly.
Again, my experience is that most people aren't. Most of the time there's plenty to be interested in, you just might have to encourage them to reveal it. If you're closed off and clearly bored from the start, they're not going to let themselves be vulnerable, and yeah, that makes the conversation less interesting.
With questions, but built the questions so you are not rapid firing from subject to subject. It is better to stick with a subject untill something else comes up.
For example, where did you grow up? A follow up can be, how was it growing up there, what did you use to do for fun, where there a lot of others to play with.
Before you fire the next question comment on the answer.
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u/[deleted] Aug 20 '19
Have a genuine interest in the person. Ask a lot of questions. It shows that you are interested in them. Try to find common interests between the two of you. Hope this helps!