Conversation Tips - Conversation Skills in a Nutshell

Conversation Tips - Conversation Skills in a Nutshell

Anyone typing 'conversation tips', 'conversation skills', or 'conversation techniques' into any search engine is going to find page upon page of links good advice. Is that a good thing? Not necessarily. After all, what has been asked for are a few hints or tips on how to improve one's technique, and instead there seems to be so much advice available, it would be easy to think that conversation is an Olympic-standard activity.

That, however, is not the case.

The fact is that those people we admire who are what might be thought of as Olympic gold standard conversationalists are really proficient in very few areas.

The list below details the main conversation skills, and chances are most of us are good at quite a few of these techniques anyway, and already practice them without thinking.

Note also that a lot of these skills are related, like 7, 8, and 9, and 13, and 14. So in reality, there aren't that many conversation skills to master at all

1) Listening
2) Body language
3) Getting into the right frame of mind
4) Introducing yourself
5) Conversation starters
6) Conversation topics - the old standbys and other more tailored themes
7) Developing the conversation
8) Using the big six questions
9) Establishing common ground
10) Jumping and hopping topics to take the conversation in unusual directions
11) Self-monitoring
12) Monitoring your conversation partner's responses, both spoken and posture
13) Knowing when to exit
14) Knowing how to exit

Quick conversation tip: if it seems there's so much advice that you feel like giving up, don't. Why not concentrate on improving just one of these skills at a time?
A useful one is to start with is skill 8, applying the big 'W' questions such as who what where, etc to what you are hearing. In fact, it's a useful skill to apply to everything you do in life, not just conversation.

But that's a subject for a whole different article.

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