Not sure if this belongs in the newbie thread or not but figured I would post it here as we can all use a refresher every now and then. I helped someone out in the newbie forum with this, but thought it could be useful to more than one person. Enjoy!
Conversation is crucial to every interaction; it’s the boat that carries everything along. In a sense, it propels the interaction forward and without it, you’re dead in the water; everything comes to a standstill.
Connecting with a girl or anyone for that matter, on what they’re saying builds rapport and comfort and the person naturally becomes more attracted to you.
When I first started out I was a shit conversationalist. An example of what some of my interactions would look like would be as follows:
“So what do you do?”
“I’m a student”
“Oh cool, me too. What are you up to today?”
“Oh I’m shopping!”
“Nice, what do you think about the weather?”
“It’s nice, I like it when it’s sunny”
“Cool. So….”
“Listen I have to go, nice meeting you”
On the surface it looks like a basic conversation. But if you look deeper the girl is giving you tons of stuff to work with but you aren’t using it.
The above interaction is an example of ploughing: you don’t care what the girl says because you’re just going to say what you had planned to before NO MATTER WHAT she says. This is because a lot of guys when just starting out (myself included) have one of the two following reactions to the idea of talking to girls:
“I don’t know what to say” AND/OR
“I run out of things to say”
and so they go into the conversation style as described above, memorizing so many derivative questions. The girl will get bored.
There’s nothing different and exciting, she doesn’t feel a sense that you two are connecting. As well, you can only memorize so many things... you need to be able to think on your feet in the moment.
Conversational mapping is a technique used to expand upon what someone has said to improve your skills in extending and carrying conversations. Practicing this on lines that have come up when speaking to anyone, target or not, will help you expand on your communication abilities. Now this isn’t going to describe how exactly to form your communication during an interaction, but it helps expand your thought process in what you can talk about instead of a) stating the obvious, b) not even paying any attention to what’s being said, c) regurgitating derivative lines.
So, how does it work?
Take for example this sentence that might come up:
“I study psychology at Florida State”
Pick apart the keywords of the sentence… Any subjects, proper nouns, verbs… Anything that’s not just at, the, be, etc. So here:
“I study psychology at Florida State”
There are three items here we can expand on. What topics could be brought out from them?
Study
Does she look like a typical student?
What does her fashion sense and style look like?
Does she like being a student or can she not wait to be out of school?
Did she think of doing anything else before entering University?
Have you gotten a sense of her maturity level?
How does she act and communicate?
Psychology
Why did she choose to study this area, what attracted her to it?
What does she plan to do after she’s finished with the degree?
Does she want to pursue further into a medical degree/psychiatry?
Does she have a lot of spare time or does her program keep her busy?
Florida State
What does she love about the school?
Why did she choose to come here?
What is it about the city that excites her?
Did she live here her whole life, or did she move away from home?
Now for each of the three areas, we have four questions. She’ll provide an answer and then from there we can imagine more action words to move forward on, and expand our map.
Practice this technique to improve on your ability to connect and communicate, as well as to not be “stopped dead in the water” during a conversation. You can always keep going. Almost have an imaginary conversation with someone and create possibilities and what you could answer, and then their possible answers. Write it down. In this way, you create “trees” of where the conversation could go and you’ll pretty soon see, there’s no reason to run out of material.
Once you improve in this sense, you can worry about how you form your dialogue. If you are having trouble making a conversation last, don’t worry about HOW you communicate. Subtleties like questions vs. statements, how much talking you should do vs. her, tonality, etc… You can worry about those once you know that you aren’t running out of things to say. If you are connecting deeper on questions that actually relate to the conversation, you may be surprised at what results occur, and how the individual on the other side might reciprocate.
Conversation is crucial to every interaction; it’s the boat that carries everything along. In a sense, it propels the interaction forward and without it, you’re dead in the water; everything comes to a standstill.
Connecting with a girl or anyone for that matter, on what they’re saying builds rapport and comfort and the person naturally becomes more attracted to you.
When I first started out I was a shit conversationalist. An example of what some of my interactions would look like would be as follows:
“So what do you do?”
“I’m a student”
“Oh cool, me too. What are you up to today?”
“Oh I’m shopping!”
“Nice, what do you think about the weather?”
“It’s nice, I like it when it’s sunny”
“Cool. So….”
“Listen I have to go, nice meeting you”
On the surface it looks like a basic conversation. But if you look deeper the girl is giving you tons of stuff to work with but you aren’t using it.
The above interaction is an example of ploughing: you don’t care what the girl says because you’re just going to say what you had planned to before NO MATTER WHAT she says. This is because a lot of guys when just starting out (myself included) have one of the two following reactions to the idea of talking to girls:
“I don’t know what to say” AND/OR
“I run out of things to say”
and so they go into the conversation style as described above, memorizing so many derivative questions. The girl will get bored.
There’s nothing different and exciting, she doesn’t feel a sense that you two are connecting. As well, you can only memorize so many things... you need to be able to think on your feet in the moment.
Conversational mapping is a technique used to expand upon what someone has said to improve your skills in extending and carrying conversations. Practicing this on lines that have come up when speaking to anyone, target or not, will help you expand on your communication abilities. Now this isn’t going to describe how exactly to form your communication during an interaction, but it helps expand your thought process in what you can talk about instead of a) stating the obvious, b) not even paying any attention to what’s being said, c) regurgitating derivative lines.
So, how does it work?
Take for example this sentence that might come up:
“I study psychology at Florida State”
Pick apart the keywords of the sentence… Any subjects, proper nouns, verbs… Anything that’s not just at, the, be, etc. So here:
“I study psychology at Florida State”
There are three items here we can expand on. What topics could be brought out from them?
Study
Does she look like a typical student?
What does her fashion sense and style look like?
Does she like being a student or can she not wait to be out of school?
Did she think of doing anything else before entering University?
Have you gotten a sense of her maturity level?
How does she act and communicate?
Psychology
Why did she choose to study this area, what attracted her to it?
What does she plan to do after she’s finished with the degree?
Does she want to pursue further into a medical degree/psychiatry?
Does she have a lot of spare time or does her program keep her busy?
Florida State
What does she love about the school?
Why did she choose to come here?
What is it about the city that excites her?
Did she live here her whole life, or did she move away from home?
Now for each of the three areas, we have four questions. She’ll provide an answer and then from there we can imagine more action words to move forward on, and expand our map.
Practice this technique to improve on your ability to connect and communicate, as well as to not be “stopped dead in the water” during a conversation. You can always keep going. Almost have an imaginary conversation with someone and create possibilities and what you could answer, and then their possible answers. Write it down. In this way, you create “trees” of where the conversation could go and you’ll pretty soon see, there’s no reason to run out of material.
Once you improve in this sense, you can worry about how you form your dialogue. If you are having trouble making a conversation last, don’t worry about HOW you communicate. Subtleties like questions vs. statements, how much talking you should do vs. her, tonality, etc… You can worry about those once you know that you aren’t running out of things to say. If you are connecting deeper on questions that actually relate to the conversation, you may be surprised at what results occur, and how the individual on the other side might reciprocate.
