709: Vanessa Van Edwards - How to Connect with Anyone, Master Small Talk, and Ask the 9 Power Questions That Deepen Every Relationship

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk

Ryan Hawk interviews behavioral researcher Vanessa Van Edwards about her new book, Conversation, focusing on transforming awkward small talk into meaningful

Key takeaways

• Vanessa Van Edwards explains that small talk is a necessary foundation for deeper conversations but often fails due to autopilot scripts and fact-heavy exchanges.
• The host and guest discuss Dr. Dan McAdams' three levels of conversation, noting that Level 2 (goals, values, motivations) is the sweet spot for most professional relationships.

Main topics

• Small talk mastery
• Conversation levels (1-3)

Notable quotes

Small talk is actually required for big talk.

Conclusion

Listeners gain practical, research-backed tools to replace shallow net

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) We have just opened applications for our once per year learning leader circle. I just got a testimonial from, I think, one of the most impressive members in my current circle, Alex Feldmeier. She is a sensory sciences manager, wickedly smart. But this is what she said about being a part of our learning leader circle. She said, our leadership circle meetings. are experiences that go unmatched with anything else in my life. The biggest part is learning that we have so much within ourselves to catalyze massive potential, but we often don't know how to access it. This group is about learning how to unlock it, live it, and most importantly, sustain it. With the carefully crafted discussion points and the intentional people around us, It's like being invited to a machine that gives us the tools to harvest our own superpowers. So cool. If you want to apply to be part of our next Learning Leader Circle, go to learningleadercircle.com to apply. That is learningleadercircle.com and apply today. Speaker 1 (1:16) Welcome to the Learning Leader Show presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Go to learningleader.com for show notes of this and all podcast episodes. Go to learningleader.com. Now, on to tonight's featured leader, one of my favorites, Vanessa Van Edwards, has spent two decades studying how people connect. Her books Captivate and Cues have been translated into 18 languages and her work reached more than 300 million people just last year. Her new book is called Conversation, How to Connect with Anyone and Make Every Interaction Count. During our conversation, we discuss how to make small talk actually enjoyable. And then instead of asking, what do you do? Vanessa has a far better question to ask. Then she shares one question. you should never ask. We talk about the nine power questions and Vanessa goes deep on us being genuinely intellectually curious. All about authenticity. It's so good. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Vanessa Van Edwards. Speaker 1 (2:28) Vanessa, it is so good to see you. Welcome back to The Learning Leader Show. Speaker 2 (2:32) It's so nice to be back with an old friend. I can't wait. I can't wait. Speaker 1 (2:36) So for Sienna and Claire, use this book to find your best friends, have great conversations with interesting people, and to one day connect with an incredible partner. I like this part. And may you never be faced with awkward silences or boring small talk. What a great dedication. Speaker 2 (2:53) I was like, my one wish for this book is that we can all stop having the awkward small talk that slowly kills our souls. I don't know about you, but as I get older, my tolerance for shallow niceties has gone down every year. And so if I can spare them, I literally, when I would get stuck in my writing process or I'd wonder, should I keep this or not keep this? My litmus test was, will this help my girls have better conversation? If the answer is yes. Great. If the answer is kind of, it went. It got cut. Speaker 1 (3:24) I can tell. It's so tight. I told you this before we started recording. It's like no wasted motion, no fluff. It's right to the point and nothing beyond what is needed. I think that is great. But I used to say, I hate small talk. I never want to do it. And then I realized, you know, we all kind of have to do it sometimes. And so if we kind of have to do it, it's probably worth getting good at it. So how do you, how do we get better at having small talk and making it actually enjoyable? Speaker 2 (3:51) You're right. Small talk is actually required for big talk. Speaker 1 (3:54) We Speaker 2 (3:55) can't skip it, but we can do it better. And I also think it's important for my learners, everyone listening to this as a learner, conversation is a social skill. And there are micro skills underneath conversation. So conversation is a big social skill. It's almost like if I had to give it a metaphor, it's like history. Like really big skill that you learned in school and then you'd have all these classes, you'd have maybe AP Euro or AP US or American history, and then you would dial down to like civics, and then you would dial down even further to like 1800s, then you dial down even further to like civil rights movement. It's exactly the same thing in conversation where conversation is a really big topic. And small talk, I would say, is a chapter. Meaning the way that we get better at it is we understand it is a skill to be flexed. And here are the traps you're trying to avoid. So in small talk, your traps, the ones that make small talk painful are one, autopilot. So you're asking questions but not actually connecting. Where are you from? What do you do? How are you? How's it going? Where your brain clicks into that autopilot and there's just no actual connection happening. And I think this is the most draining of all. We're talking all the time but not actually connecting. So trap number one is trying to break script. Trap number two is going for facts, not stories. And this is really hard because we have to actually fight our instinct here. As humans, there's something that I call a hierarchy of facts. To be able to connect, we kind of have to know the basic facts about someone. We have to know their general traits. This is level one conversation. Their occupation, their hometown, their family status. So of course, we default to those questions over and over again. But because they're so autopilot, because they're not exciting, we end up kind of Google fact-checking each other. Like really bad small talk is kind of like reading someone's Wikipedia page. And so we have to break that by not going for the facts, by going for the stories. And we can double click on any area, but those are the two traps we're trying to avoid. How Speaker 1 (5:48) do you go for stories? Let's say I'm the person who is going to tell a story. Just like when I comment on your background and you immediately told me the story behind the background, which is beautiful, right? So it wasn't a fact, it was a story of how you came to be and then some cool little elements of it. So how do we... get a story from somebody else so we know how i think to potentially tell one how do we get one from somebody okay Speaker 2 (6:11) so actually let's use what exactly just happened for this call okay so we hopped on you could have said but you didn't and neither did i thank goodness good job us how are ya how's it been going we did not do that because the answer always is good fine busy right like it's always the same instead you immediately gave me a moment of awe and i actually think awe awe is the best small talk ingredient. If you can do it authentically, I never want to fake it. The video popped on and I have a kind of awe-worthy background. You go, wow, your background is so cool. So by the way, I think that's also better than a compliment. Like it is a compliment, but actually it's better that you were kind of wowed. So you gave me awe and awe typically is a story soliciting emotion, right? Positive awe is wow. Negative awe is compassion. And both are good. So, wow, that's amazing, or that's cool, or that's interesting, or what is that? Great, those are like, tell me about that. And then negative awe, is everything okay? Can I help? It seems like something is going wrong. That's compassion awe. Both are story solicitors. And then I had a choice, because you're going to be faced with boring questions sometimes, to answer. I could have said, oh, thank you so much. Yeah, I'm in a new studio. Fact. dead end. I just put the conversational burden on you to try to pick it back up. But instead, there is a kind of fun, cool story, which is happy to share is I asked AI, what should my background be? I'm Vanessa Edwards. And it sucked up to me. And I love a suck up. I love when AI tells me I'm wonderful. It said, you should be an angel. You should be a Renaissance angel. And it picked out this ring light and it picked out all lights for me. So we were able to then riff on that and stories. So one is you're being story ready. Even if you get, how are you? Don't say good, busy, fine. You answer with, oh my gosh, today, the craziest thing happened. Today, the weirdest thing happened. Today was such a great day. You know, today was such a horrible day. Can I just tell you? Right? So I am ready to break the script with my answer. That's the easiest way because oftentimes people are going to come at you with social scripts. The second way is you flip your answers to be, and this is the nuance and this is hard. we can't go too deep too fast. I would love to break a social script by saying, what are your greatest dreams in life? What are your deepest fears? Those are okay, but it's too much, right? It's level two. We can talk about level two conversation. So you have to be socially acceptable, socially safe, but flipped. So my flip questions are story hunters. So simply like everything been good or tell me something good or what's been good. It's a very slight. change for optimism on how are you. Checking in on something from before, you know, I noticed that you dedicated your book to your daughters. How old are they now? What are they up to? Right. So like a slight update change. Speaker 1 (9:07) Love that. And I love the phrasing in the book too. You said, turn small talk into a treasure hunt. You said Katie Couric had a good spin on a question, which is a lot of things that he said, hey, what do you do? Right. We get this all the time, all the time. And instead of saying, what do you do? She would ask, What do you like to do? Tell me why that's a much better question. Speaker 2 (9:27) I was really grateful. I was reading all these memoirs. To research the book, I try to read as many memoirs as I can because people often talk about their conversational hacks without realizing it. So I got a lot of conversational hacks through memoirs. Then it's, of course, reading the research. What does the research have to say about conversation? But even things sort of related to conversation, psychology, behavioral economics. And in Katie Couric's memoir, She said that she's done thousands and thousands of interviews with very powerful people. And she doesn't let herself ask, what do you do? She says, what do you like to do? And that was an aha moment for me because it realized that we can make single word swaps that have major potential. And really, a micro skill in conversation is what can I swap here that is still safe, but is going to light someone up or turn someone on. And in that way, it's a treasure hunt. right you're searching for those moments those little light bulb moments those tiny little swaps where you're in conversation with someone you're like okay i'm looking for their gold everyone has gold everyone has gold and we don't know what that is but it's something there's a story that someone has or a perspective or advice it's going to be freaking so interesting you just have to ask the right questions or share the right stories yourself to be able to find it and so that mindset One, it gives you intention to your questions. You're searching for liking, you're searching for excitement, you're searching for compassion, you're searching for awe, both good and bad. Treasure hunting isn't always hearts and rainbows. It can be hard too, which is good. But second, it also takes away the awkwardness. You know I joke that I'm a recovering awkward person. And I think the reason I was so awkward for so many years in conversation is my goal was to be impressive. Speaker 1 (11:11) like horrible, it sounds so, but as Speaker 2 (11:15) you know, I was like, I have to, you know, be funny and, and show, impress people. And, oh God, no good conversation comes from that. And so shifting to treasure hunting is also less pressure. And it's also going to take you out of your own head for my other awkward folks. Speaker 1 (11:32) What you're talking about, I think too, is being very curious and I love. being around curious person. I think I've developed this skill from doing this a lot over the past 11 and a half years. How do you view curiosity? Is that a skill to be developed or is this more of like a natural thing you're born with? What do you think? Speaker 2 (11:51) I think curiosity does have to be innate. This is really hard and I think almost everything is teachable. I really do. I think almost everything is teachable. But if you're not innately curious about someone, these are gonna feel manipulative. Speaker 1 (12:08) Just Speaker 2 (12:09) bottom line is there is an assumption that I make in the book, which is that you picked up the book because you are curious about having good conversation. And so if I teach you five likable phrases and I teach you these conversation swaps and these questions, I'm okay with you using them because the intention there is to learn. The intention there is to treasure hunt or discover. or make a connection or find a soulmate or ask for your raise, right? There's all different kinds of romantic social business. But if you're not curious, it will only last for so long. Yeah. Some of the techniques might work, but when you're found out, it will not be good. Speaker 1 (12:49) Yeah. And nobody wants to be around like the one who's manipulative or isn't authentic. That leads me to another one in sales training. I was in sales for 12 years when I came out of college and one of the teachers would say, you know, use the sweetest word to that other person and that is their name. And now I have such a, if somebody does it too much and it doesn't feel natural, it's not a good feeling. There was a viral clip on Twitter recently. Oh, Speaker 2 (13:18) I Speaker 1 (13:18) saw. Okay, you saw. Tell Speaker 2 (13:19) everyone. I would love to hear your summary of it, Ryan. Speaker 1 (13:24) You just used my name. It did make me feel good, but it felt natural. Okay. I like it when it feels natural and authentic and real, but I've also felt it when it is obviously used as a tool to make me like them. So Vanessa, tell me, how do you feel about using somebody's first name? Speaker 2 (13:46) Well, first of all, that viral clip was really interesting. for me to watch that whole thing. And Jefferson's a dear friend of mine. So I was almost like, thank goodness in this book, I didn't tell people to use their name. I didn't even Speaker 1 (13:56) know who said