Elevator chatter, coffee conversations, comments about how hot it is or brief comments with someone who also walks the dog seem to be out of use. In a world where everyone goes their own way, looking at their cell phone on the street and closing the elevator doors in the faces of others to be able to go up alone, Mónica Pérez de las Heras, founder of the European School of Oratory, has written Speak with strangers (Oberon).
Anglo-Saxons call “small talk” the casual encounters with strangers that force us to leave our comfort zone and help prevent us from being dehumanized. Pérez defines the English expression like this: “it refers to the small conversations that we have for a short period of time with people with whom we do not trust and with whom we talk about inconsequential topics.”
Although our friends and acquaintances were at some point in the past strange people to us, it is increasingly difficult to repeat a similar serendipity. Experts have detected that smartphones and social networks are helping to bring us closer to those who are very far away and separate us from those who are close to us.
There is a scene from the movie Crocodile Dundee that Pérez really likes: when the protagonist arrives in New York. Accustomed to meeting and greeting everyone in the Australian town where he lives, the friendly crocodile hunter tries to repeat the same thing when he arrives in the Big Apple. So he puts his hand out the window and gives it to an executive who is waiting to pass and, not happy with it, he says: “Hello, good morning, I’m Crocodile Dundee, I just arrived in the city, we’ll see you later.” here”.
This scene is already part of the trunk of memories of the 20th century, despite the fact that specialists calculate that a person still has ten opportunities a day to practice small talk. Any excuse is good to start a little verbal adventure: “How are your children?”; “Will you go to Horta de Sant Joan for Easter?”, “What’s missing is that it rains for a week straight!”
Although Groucho Marx liked to say that “it is better to be silent and appear stupid than to speak and clear up doubts definitively,” the reality is that he did not do too badly to express his ideas with anyone who crossed his path. In the following interview, Pérez, author of 16 books related to communication skills, encourages rescuing the art of approaching strangers.
Where did your last small talk take place?
It happened a while ago when taking a taxi to return home. I had a great time talking to the taxi driver about how the neighborhood is changing and how they have opened stores where there used to be others. I had such a pleasant time that I didn’t even realize the journey.
Have they not talked about politics?
No, you don’t have to talk about politics in small talk. Not about politics or religion or bullfighting or this type of thing.
What would you say to those who prefer to have deep conversations with acquaintances and friends?
That they are missing an opportunity. Of course we have to have deep conversations, but that doesn’t mean we can also start mini conversations with strangers. Small talk is like carrying a multipurpose Swiss army knife in your pocket. If we don’t use it…, what good is it? But it has many uses…
For example?
For example, the ability to learn from others: each person is a walking library from which we can learn many things. If it is someone older, we miss that they can tell us some anecdote about their life experience. Each person has things to teach us, so we lose learning and we lose the possibility of making new friends. The other day an article was published that highlighted that we make fewer and fewer friends, because we interact less and less face to face.
When interacting with strangers, what are your favorite topics?
Those of the environment. If, for example, you are bored waiting for your turn at the doctor’s office, you can ask the person next to you: is this the first time they have come? That is, you can start a conversation about where you are. If you walk the dog, like I do with Obi, a 14-year-old bye-bye who attracts a lot of attention because he resembles a lion, it is common to come across someone who does the same thing and ask them which veterinarian they take him to. The environment is the first basic and classic theme we have. It is very easy to start a conversation with strangers, because in the end we have many things in common with those around us.
Have you ever been afraid of being given poisoned candy?
When we were little we were told not to talk to strangers, but as adults we need to do it. Small talk helps to have a thicker skin, since it is very possible that someone will not greet us back.
What psychological benefits do these mini conversations offer?
Many, because it is a continuous learning that we can practice whenever we want. Active listening helps us work, because we listen to others less and less. It also serves as an exercise in empathy, to put ourselves in the shoes of the person in front of us. It can also help manage emotions, because not everyone is going to be receptive and there is no reason to feel bad about it. It is impossible to please everyone. Likewise, expressing yourself naturally in front of strangers encourages improvisation, improves oratory and helps you laugh at yourself, something necessary.
In the Anglo-Saxon press there are more articles about small talk every day. From what moment do we start to be more “shy-egoistic-closed-social-phobic”, to put it with the words you use in your book?
Surely it was from the emergence of smartphones. It is curious that the technology that we build to communicate better is also the one that is causing us to communicate much worse in a one-to-one way. With all the technology we have created, the most complete communication is still the one used by prehistoric men in caves, being able to interact face to face. That is precisely the communication we are losing.
Today it is difficult to approach someone on the street without exposing yourself to a disapproving look or a scan up and down. The same thing is happening with receiving phone calls: more and more people are getting their hearts racing just by hearing the ring. What do you think?
Well yes, this is evidently happening, especially among young people. I remember an article whose headline was: “The generation that prefers not to talk on the phone.” And it doesn’t just happen with the phone, but also with instant messages. Many young people also do not respond to WhatsApp right away, because they fear immediacy. This is happening because young people communicate less and less in person. In my generation we didn’t have a telephone, so the way we communicated was to see each other and talk.
Although we are encouraged to have “quality of life” (a concept related to the ownership of appliances and the enjoyment of property), we are much less encouraged to have “warmth of life”, that is, to feel close to those around us and not so much with screens of all kinds.
My two uncles, Antonio and Emilia, met on the Madrid metro. If they had had a mobile phone, today they most likely would not be together, because each of them would have been looking at their smartphone on the subway. So they wouldn’t have seen each other, so they wouldn’t have gotten married and they wouldn’t have had the two children and two grandchildren they have now. That’s why people hook up so much now through apps, because… where are you going to meet someone if everyone is looking at their phone or walking with headphones on? I don’t even want to imagine what will happen when we have Apple glasses. Sometimes it is better to have warmth of life than quality of life, it is true.
Any anecdotes that have happened to you with small talk?
I like my public speaking students to practice small talk. I remember that on one occasion I ordered them to go out into the street and talk to someone I didn’t know. A girl got in line at a cafeteria to buy some sandwiches and started talking to the boy in front of her, asking him for advice about sandwiches. But then the boy’s girlfriend appeared furious and she had to escape in a hurry. Small talk has its risks too!
