By Alison Wood Brooks
I enjoyed this book and found it helpful. TALK is an acronym for Topics, Asking, Levity, Kindness.
Topics – The book advocates planning topics in advance. She points out that people are afraid that it will make conversations less natural and fun if topics are prepared in advance, but her students who tried it out found that their conversations were more enjoyable. This was true even when they didn’t use the prepared topics. Simply having comfortable topics to fall back on made it easier for them to engage in conversation. Another note on topics was that lingering on topics too long is a conversation killer. Changing topics more frequently prevents things from stalling out. Again, there’s a concern that changing topics too rapidly would feel unsatisfying, but that’s not how her studies worked out. In general, conversations would be improved if topics changed more frequently.
Asking – Asking good questions of the other person is important. It has been covered in other books, but she reiterates that people will find you cool and interesting if you help them feel cool and interesting. Open questions, follow-up questions, and questions with sincere curiosity will help move the conversation forward. As in the topic advice, the author addresses an obvious concern that people will feel put off by too many questions, that it’s nosy, or feels like interrogation. This is certainly possible for some conversation partners, and in cases with poorly selected questions, but again, counter to instinct, asking more questions was widely correlated with more satisfying conversations. Even sensitive questions are better received than people expect.
Levity – Humor helps. I didn’t take as much away from this since I’m already committed to humor. The author noted that even jokes that miss can still make a person more likeable since people can recognize the attempt at levity.
Kindness – Brooks says that much of conversation is about intention and aiming to be a good conversation partner, conscious of what the other person needs from the conversation. Try to be a good partner rather than trying to only fulfill your own needs.
One bit of guidance in the book that hit home was about parties. She described standing off to the side of a party while other groups of people are chatting and feeling like it would be intrusive or unwanted to approach other groups or pairs to join in. I feel this completely. She pointed out that people consistently appreciate the additional conversation partner and that the fear of intrusion is nearly always misplaced. I don’t know that reading this point will pull me out of that, but it’s good to be reminded by someone with data about conversations.