How To Never Run Out Of Things To Say In Conversation (Matthew Hussey, Get The Guy)

Last week we talked about the idea of competence in our love lives. The things that we can do every day to get us closer to the goal of finding a great partner, feeling confident, feeling able socially. And this week I wanted to back that up by giving us something to increase our competence. I want to talk about how to never run out of things to say in a conversation. I'm gonna do this by talking about three big mistakes people make in conversation and why they run out of things to say. The first reason is people think think too linear in their conversation. Great conversation doesn't care about structure. It only cares about what's interesting. So you can go off on a tangent anytime you want. Great conversation isn't tennis, it's basketball. Tennis, you hit the ball to me, you say, how are you? And I go, I'm fine thanks, how are you? And then you go, not bad, what are you up to today? Basketball is, you pass me the ball, I can dribble, I can shoot, I can move around with it. Conversation is moving backwards, forwards, side to side. It's going in different directions. It's not feeling like you have to follow the exact structure. It's not feeling like you have to answer the question you got asked. Politicians do this all the time. What do they do? They don't answer the question they were asked. They answer the question they wish someone had asked. An astute conversationalist knows the difference between someone asking a question 'cause they care, in which case we should give a real answer to that question, or somebody just asking a question because they don't know what else to say, in which case we should help them out and do them a favor as a great conversationalist by taking it in a direction that's actually worthwhile and interesting. The second problem with people in conversation is they don't edit their life. 24 hours a day, things are happening to us, right? There's situations, there's experiences, there's moments, but what we do is we allow everything to just blend together. So when someone asks us, how was your week? We don't really have any immediate answer that we can give somebody. When somebody says, how was your last holiday? We don't have any immediate answer we can we can give somebody. I had this experience recently coming back from Tokyo. I spent a couple of weeks in Tokyo with my family. We had the most incredible time and I had a bunch of people saying to me, how was Japan? At first I did, I broke my own rule. I was like, oh, it was amazing and the food was great and, you know, oh, man, there was so much great stuff. I mean, we were busy and we went out and the people were polite and, and I thought, God, I sound like some boring travel guide. Now, what I have to do is go back to that experience of Japan and edit out some of the most interesting parts of that so that I can use them in conversation. There was a strip of bars called Golden Guy. This particular strip of bars has like a hundred bars in this tiny tiny little area of like three or four tiny little streets. Each bar has only four or five seats. So when you go into a bar and when I was there, I was there with five of my family, you go into a bar and you take over the bar. You literally take every seat in the house and that barman becomes your own personal barman for the evening. unbelievable, so much fun. You kind of build a relationship with your barman because you're there with them the whole evening. There are many things that happened in Japan that were fun, exciting, whatever. There are probably a hundred different moments I could talk about. But when I think of all of them or when I think of the whole trip, I don't think of any of them. All I do is give a very lame answer about how that trip was. And you know how frustrating it is when you've done something interesting and you can't put your finger on it in conversation, you can't give someone a terse answer. That's really frustrating because you know great things happened. You just can't think of it. It's like when someone says, how was your weekend? And you go, What did I even do? You don't know because you didn't edit as you went along. The third problem in conversation is that we don't stimulate our own minds. Recently, I stimulated my own mind by reading a book called Sapiens. A book that has taught me so much that I didn't know about the history of mankind. This book speaks of thousands of years ago when animals existed that I didn't even know existed. Rodents the size of bears. in America and Canada. Giant sloths, six meters high. Look, there's a picture. Look at those. Did you know those existed? I did not know those existed. Now look, we may not be reading a new book every single week. That doesn't mean we're never stimulated. Sometimes just looking at our everyday routine in a new way can stimulate us. If we have the same routine every day and we're bored of it, we're never going to speak about it with interest. But if we're able to view our routine in an interesting or exciting way. For example, I run retreats every single year. I plan these retreats every day. There's something I'm thinking about for these retreats. Now on the surface that looks kind of boring. Someone would see me for hours a day on my laptop not doing very much. But in my mind what I'm doing is building this theme park for adults that I know they're gonna enjoy, that they're gonna be surprised by, shocked by, they're gonna be in awe of. And I get so excited about constructing that world. That's what I'm doing. I'm not sitting on my laptop. I'm building a world. So when someone asks me, what have you been up to today? I can talk about the theme park I'm building. I can talk about the world I'm creating. I'm not going to say, well, I've just been sitting on my laptop. It's understanding where the excitement is in your everyday. And I don't care what you do in life. There is excitement to be found in every life if we know where to find it. Stimulate yourself before you worry about doing it for somebody else, because if you are not entertained, you will not be entertaining. Okay, that's it for now. If you're interested in that adult theme park I've created on the retreat, I want you to click this link. You can learn more about it there. I will see you in the next video.