012 (Not So) Small Talk and the Gold Rush

This is Dr. Torrey. Welcome to the Influence Every Day show, where we make every day better and we influence for good. I don't know if you've ever heard the story of California's first millionaire, but California's first millionaire made his millions during the Gold Rush. Now, that might make sense to a lot of people if you think about what the Gold Rush meant, right? Discovering gold, potentially finding this valuable resource, and then selling that valuable resource, or finding a mine even better, and being able to continually mine that for the valuable resource. But that is not how Samuel Brannan made his millions. Samuel Brannan was California's first millionaire. He made his millions during the Gold Rush, but he didn't do it by finding gold. Rather, he mined the periphery. He looked outside of what is happening during the Gold Rush, what is needed during the Gold Rush. What do all of these people who are coming to California to try to find gold, to find their future fortunes, what do they need? And here's what he did. He sold shovels. Samuel Brannan sold shovels and became California's first millionaire. Now, he's had some character flaws and all these other things, so I'm not putting out there as a role model or anything, but certainly he was onto something. While everyone was focusing on gold, Samuel Brannan looked in the periphery. He mined the periphery. And in the periphery, he. He found a need for shovels and therefore, mind that thing. Now, why am I bringing that up? What else is in the periphery that is of extreme value? I want to point out something that we tend to miss every single day in most of our conversations. That is periphery, often viewed as off to the side. We even call it small, and that's small talk. Now, you'll see many things out there on Facebook, LinkedIn, et cetera, where people are saying, you know, that small talk is invaluable. It's awkward. It can be difficult. Certainly it can be awkward. Certainly it can be difficult for a lot of us. But here's the thing. Small talk is a potential gold mine. It's the thing that tells you where the gold is. I'll tell you why. Imagine small talk as a hallway full of doors. There's a hallway full of doors. You can walk through one door, and it can lead to conflict and argumentation and difficult discussions, right? Like, this is typically why we avoid discussions of religion or politics in the workplace or in school. Because sometimes that can lead to conflict, because people have sort of solidified where they stand on things. Maybe you don't walk through those doorways, but there are Other doors that you might start off talking about something as mundane as a sport or the weather or something that you've done recently, a trip or something like that. And it starts off as small talk. Those doors are potential connections, these potential gold mines. The reason they're potential gold mines is because if you walk through the door, where there is potential connection, connection leads to rapport. And rapport is where the magic happens. In the conversational hypnosis model of conversation, you can imagine a series of concentric rings. And outside of these concentric circles is when somebody is nearby but not engaged. And then the edge of the circle is the greeting. You might greet somebody. Let's say you're standing by an elevator, or you're at the beginning of a meeting, or you just bump into somebody. So there's a greeting after the greeting. There's typically small talk. Now, small talk can end there. You can bounce around to different topics really quickly, and then the interaction ends and you move on. No big deal. And perhaps those weren't very valuable. Maybe they were, maybe they weren't. But where it becomes valuable are two main spots. One is when you. You nudge it a little further and you start to establish rapport. Once rapport is established, that moves you into deeper into the circle, towards deeper connection, deeper intimacy. The place where magic happens, essentially, the place of deep rapport is where the best of your relationships, the best of human, human connection occurs. In fact, rapport is the flow state of human, human connection. Right? You've. You've heard of people in, say, playing a sport or playing a musical instrument or doing their craft, an artist doing their work, a writer writing their piece, whatever that thing is, they're in a flow state. That flow state can exist not just for an individual, but it can exist between individuals. And one of the best and most magical of them is that of rapport. Once of rapport is established, that's the change agent of change agents. That is the place where growth and love and connection and all those things occur. Once you have rapport, you're typically in a space where you can potentially have deeper talk. And in a place of deep talk, in the conversational hypnotherapy model and in actually most therapy models, in the deeper states of rapport and connection, they look for problem states and they look for resource states, and then they basically help that person connect those two. So my point here is to say small talk is a doorway into deeper connection. And once that deeper connection happens, that deeper connection is where the magic occurs. It's where Human. Human connection and rapport and engagement and love and growth. That's where it occurs. You have the potential. Every single time you are in small talk, you have the potential to get slightly deeper and make someone's month. Why? Because you can give a gift. In fact, in hypnotherapy, they often call them hypnotic gifts, right? Where you give a gift to somebody where a transformational change. Remember the prior episodes we talked about reframes and things like that. When you give a powerful reframe in a moment of deep connection and rapport, you change someone's life forever. It can be a pivot moment. And by moment, I mean moment. Like it can occur in a moment. Someone's entire life can pivot on a single moment. And small talk is your doorway to those moments. So your job in small talk is, first of all, assess whether you even want to get deeper. It doesn't mean you don't have to make every con, every conversation deep. Right? In fact, sometimes you may want to use small talk as a way of exiting the conversation. So you can break rapport in small talk, but you can establish rapport in small talk. My point here is to view small talk, get curious, view it as a hallway of doorways. Which one would you like to walk through? And if you walk through it, you have the potential to change your life and the person you're talking to. I hope you view small talk as not so small. It is an opportunity. In fact, on my website, if you go to drtorey.com or influence everywhere.com, there's an opportunity to take like a super micro course on how to change someone's life in a single conversation. And that in that conversation, I give example of a pivotal moment that occurred in small talk. By quickly accelerating into rapport from small talk. Your job simply is to view small talk as not so small. And now start to ask yourself, how can I optimize my small talk with other people to either establish rapport now or to establish rapport later? What do I mean? When you're talking and you're bouncing around to different topics and even these like super mundane topics or, and somebody mentions like an event or something that's occurring, you know, their daughter is getting married or they. They're going on a trip, or they have. Or their mom had surgery, whatever the thing is, they mention it. If you ask about it later, you just say, hey, I'm just. I was curious. I was thinking about you the other day. How did your mom's surgery go? Now that is a establishing rapport later with a small talk doorway that you saw earlier. Do you see? Small talk is not small, it's only small if you want it to be small, it's only small if you look at it that way. You have the power to use small talk to make magical moments in people's lives, including your own. So I hope you found this helpful. Get curious and look at small talk as not so small. I'll see you in the next episode. This is only the end of today's show if you let it be. 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