That sounds completely right—in general having a library of short stories about yourself and your life for various conversational openings/topics is helpful.
For 2, something that has helped me is realizing that it’s okay to be greedy—except for possibly the very highest status people, who get more than enough affirmation, people often really like it if you are curious about something very specific about them, and only hold back on talking about it because they don’t want to bore you.
For me, I think this was a case of reverse typical mind fallacy (I don’t know if there’s a standard name for this) - assuming that other people couldn’t possibly be like me, because I’m weird and nerdy and like to talk an unusual amount. When I learned to be more socially adept, a lot of it involved suppressing things I wanted to talk about because there was no conversational cue indicating that it was welcome. It took a little while to realize other people must be doing this too.
This is certainly true, although I’ve seen it fall into one of two failure modes.
1) Both parties follow this strategy very conscientiously, with the result that one person asks about the other’s life, is generally interested, but receives no detailed answer because the other thinks it’s impolite to talk about themselves too much. (Of course, this lack of an answer can also just be a sign that this level of interaction is simply not desired, but that’s not what I’m talking about.)
2) People overestimate the interest you actually have in them and grow more attached to you than you’d like.
Neither of these failure modes strikes me as particularly worrisome, though. 1) is probably very, very rare, and 2) is, if it even is a failure mode, easy to fix.
That sounds completely right—in general having a library of short stories about yourself and your life for various conversational openings/topics is helpful.
For 2, something that has helped me is realizing that it’s okay to be greedy—except for possibly the very highest status people, who get more than enough affirmation, people often really like it if you are curious about something very specific about them, and only hold back on talking about it because they don’t want to bore you.
For me, I think this was a case of reverse typical mind fallacy (I don’t know if there’s a standard name for this) - assuming that other people couldn’t possibly be like me, because I’m weird and nerdy and like to talk an unusual amount. When I learned to be more socially adept, a lot of it involved suppressing things I wanted to talk about because there was no conversational cue indicating that it was welcome. It took a little while to realize other people must be doing this too.
This is certainly true, although I’ve seen it fall into one of two failure modes.
1) Both parties follow this strategy very conscientiously, with the result that one person asks about the other’s life, is generally interested, but receives no detailed answer because the other thinks it’s impolite to talk about themselves too much. (Of course, this lack of an answer can also just be a sign that this level of interaction is simply not desired, but that’s not what I’m talking about.)
2) People overestimate the interest you actually have in them and grow more attached to you than you’d like.
Neither of these failure modes strikes me as particularly worrisome, though. 1) is probably very, very rare, and 2) is, if it even is a failure mode, easy to fix.