Vanessa Van Edwards says introverts drain energy from small talk because it relies on tired questions like "How are you?" and "What do you do?" She suggests replacing them with open prompts like "Working on anything exciting these days?" to trigger dopamine and get real conversations instead.
The biggest challenge that introverts face is they have bad conversations that are draining, and so they don't want to do them. So first is you have to be willing to break the social scripts. Awkward, bad, terrible small talk happens like this: How are you? Good, busy. How about you? Yeah, so, uh, what do you do? Where are you from? Okay, well, it was nice talking to you. Our brain is like brain dead when we have that conversation. There's a lack of dopamine. An introvert, I want you to challenge yourself to go on a small talk diet. No more how are you, no more what do you do, and no more where are you from. If you get rid of those 3 questions you become instantly more interesting and your conversations look better. What do you replace them with? Instead, I want you to ask, "Working on anything exciting these days?" That question breaks the script very subtly. What does that do? It makes me literally think of all the things in my life I like. So if you ask that question, you're giving them a gift of dopamine, of excitement, of optimism. It allows me to answer with a little bit more depth. And let me tell you, as human beings right now, we need depth.
