By:Royane Real
Do you hate making small talk? Lots of people do. Many people find small talk irritating, boring, and they don’t want to participate in it.
What is small talk? Small talk is the name we often give to the fairly low key chatter that goes on between most people much of the time, particularly when they don’t know each other well.
Neighbors may chat about the weather and their children, strangers might chat about the price of gas or the latest celebrity gossip. Co-workers might chat about a shopping spree they just finished. Teens might talk about a concert they’ll be attending.
The basic characteristic of small talk is that it is about unimportant matters.
The fact that small talk deals only with unimportant matters is one of the reasons that many people don’t like this form of idle chatter.
In particular, people who are very shy, or those who are very intellectual, tend to hate making small talk. These people often try to avoid making small talk because they are not very good at it, or because they think that shallow conversation with relative strangers is meaningless and has no purpose. They would rather have conversations about deep, important matters instead, with interesting people.
If you are one of the people who dislikes making small talk, you are not alone. However, there are important reasons that small talk exists, and once you learn why, you may be more patient with it.
Instead of avoiding small talk at every opportunity, you can actually learn to become much more skilled at making small talk if you practise more. You will find that making small talk can actually lead to some positive dividends, such as an increasing circle of friends, more social opportunities and better career possibilities.
So, if small talk deals only with trivial matters, why is it important?
The reason is that small talk actually has an important place in the process of people getting to know each other better.
When you first meet someone new, it’s very unlikely that you will start to reveal everything about your deepest self in the first few minutes. You aren’t going to start telling a total stranger about your painful childhood, your fear of abandonment, or your hopes to turn your life in a new direction. And if a total stranger started to reveal such intimate matters in the first few minutes of meeting you, you would probably be very alarmed.
These are the sorts of secrets we only reveal to others once we know them very well and trust them on a deeper level.
But in the process of getting to know which people we can really trust to know us deeply and like us anyway, we have to go through a series of deepening exchanges. We start out offering to other people only the most superficial and polite layers of our personalities. We must both test each other gradually as we get to know each other before we decide whether or not we feel safe in taking our relationship deeper.
When people first meet each other, they don’t know yet whether or not the possibility for deep trust is there.
When we first meet somebody new, we don’t know whether we have enough common interests and enough of a similar point of view to form the basis for a possible deeper relationship.
Almost everyone has a public face that they present to others in social situations. That public face may be very different from the person they are underneath. It is only when you get to know someone over a longer period of time, in a variety of situations, that you get to have an understanding of who that person really is.
The process of making small talk is usually the first step in getting to know people at the very basic level of social interaction. Your public persona meets and interacts with the public persona of the other person.
If there were no such thing as small talk, then all of our interactions with every person we encountered might be deeply heartfelt, agonizing and perhaps even disturbing. All of our interactions with everyone we met would be very intimate, or perhaps even traumatic, within the first few minutes of our initial meeting.
We would be telling each other some very painful details without knowing whether or not we could really trust the other person.
Without layers of small talk to protect social interactions, complete strangers would be constantly telling us their innermost secrets, and demanding that we interact with them in a very open and intimate way.
So, while one of the purposes of small talk is to protect us from having to have very intimate conversations with strangers, another benefit of small talk is that in the course of idle chatter with people we only know socially, we can reveal some small hints of the topics that are important to us.
And the other person in turn can reveal some of the topics and concerns that are important to them. As you start to explore each other through small trivial talk, you get the opportunity to see if there is enough common ground to start to develop a further relationship.
We may have close, special friendships with only a few out of the many thousands of people we meet over the course of a lifetime. When we refuse to participate in small talk because we think it is beneath us, we will lose out on the opportunity to get to know many people who might turn out to be good friends, if only we would give them the opportunity to start interacting with us in this very small, safe way.
So, by participating in more small talk, with more people, more often, we improve our social skills, and we also increase the number of people who can possibly become our friends.
