Do you ever feel like you’re not quite understood by other people? Have you ever feel like you don’t really have many friends who you can call the best friends/real friends? Do people seldom ever tell you that they seriously enjoyed speaking with you? If so no worries because most people feel this way. What that means is that there’s room for improvement in the skill of holding a deep conversation.
What is a deep conversation?
A deep conversation is a conversation with another person that builds a personal connection. People who are extremely good at holding deep conversations can make you feel like you’ve known them for months when you’ve only just met them for a couple of hours.
The ability to hold deep conversations is single-handedly the most powerful skill in terms of building close relationships with other people. This skill will drastically improve your success in areas like dating, making quality friends, and networking.
In order to hold/start a deep conversation, three things need to happen. Before we get into any of that we have to understand that in order for this loop to be started someone has to be willing to share first and the majority of people are shy.
You have to be the one to take the initiative, you should be sharing first. In order to properly share you need to reach deep down into yourself and express your true feelings and opinions about things.
The key here is to avoid facts and to seek emotion. Facts like your occupation, what school you went to with, what major the events of last night’s sports game, the events of some random TV show, gossip, and drama, this is all surface-level conversation. It’s fine for making acquaintances but not for building a deeper relationship.
Because none of that tells me who you are, none of that allows me to say hey I felt that before too. What you want to do is you want to seek emotion.
3 Things need to happen to hold/start a deep conversation
1. Seek Emotions
Emotions like: how you felt when you fail that something, how you felt when you had your first success, how you felt when you moved for the first time, something that you regret, something that you love, something that you hate your dreams, your fears, your stories, your feelings, your aspirations, your regrets, an embarrassing moment, a happy moment, a sad moment, your opinions about things, how you feel about things these are the things that you want to talk about because they elicit an emotional response.
Why is it that people feel so connected to certain movie characters? It’s because you see how they feel when they fail, you see how they feel when they lose someone that they love, you see how they feel when they finally made it, you see them for who they truly are and this is a type of material that you want to be sharing.
You want to share yourself as a movie character who shares himself with the rest of the theatre. Now you’ll know you’re sharing correctly at first. When it feels like you’re laying your body on a dartboard waiting to get hit this is because sharing something deep makes you extremely vulnerable.
It gives the opportunity for other people to laugh at you and this is what prevents most people from sharing in the first place. They’re scared that they’re gonna be mocked and laughed at. But the more you share the more this feeling will dissipate over time. You’ll not only learn how to share but you’ll also be learning how to love yourself warts and all.
Deep conversation topics:
Here are some practice questions that you can think about that will help you share more about yourself:
- What is the moment that you regret? Something that you wish you could go back and redo. Why do you want to go back?
- What is something you dream about accomplishing but you’re too shy to tell the rest of the world? Are you scared of not being able to accomplish it? why?
- What is the best and the worst moment you experienced with your family? How did you feel when these things happen? How have they shaped you as a person?
Now many times after sharing the other person who is listening will be prompted to share something deep about themselves as well.
Sometimes if they don’t you can prompt them by asking something along the lines of: Have you ever felt something like this before? or Has something like ever happened to you before?
Now this leads us to the next step which is listening.
2. Listening
The large majority of people are not good listeners. When someone shares something deep in meaningful with you, they’re giving you an opportunity to dive into the depths of their world.
They’re trusting you enough to share something deep about themselves that they rarely ever share. So you better make sure you’re listening correctly.
The key to being a good listener is to be as present as possible. Listen to them as you would watch a movie become enveloped in the world for the brief period of time that they are speaking.
You want to hold strong eye contact for at least 80% of the time while they are talking. You want to ask questions that will allow them to elaborate more on points that you’re interested in and most of all you want to let them do 90% of all the talking.
If you find yourself dozing off and thinking about other things you need to work on your ability to stay present to the moment and the easiest way to fix this is by practicing meditation. But let’s save that for another article.
You’ll know you’re a good listener when people start complimenting you on it, there aren’t many good listeners out there. So people really appreciate a good one.
And finally the last step to hold/start a deep conversation is to relate.
3. Relate
We may come from different places with different backgrounds, yet we are all very similar inside. There are things that each and every person experiences. These things that we all have in common that we all go through are our emotions, fear, bliss, love, regret, anger, embarrassment, and many other emotions.
The first thing you want to do is identify which emotion the other person is conveying through their story or whatever it is that they’re sharing and you want to be able to relate to them by bringing up something that is similar. So you can tell them hey what you went through I felt the same thing before.
The best way to go about starting a deep conversation is to first build some rapport. You want to talk about surface-level things at first because this is what is socially acceptable.
You can also throw in humor in order to build rapport quickly. After building this rapport you want to start off by sharing some positive emotions first. You don’t want to talk about your greatest fear and regret immediately at the get-go with someone you just met.
Talk about something like your ambitions, like what made you happy or a funny moment that happened to you.
Now having a deep conversation is going to be uncomfortable at first, especially if you are not used to having them. But over time you’ll start enjoying it more as more people open up to you and you open up to more people.
More people will compliment you and you’ll also learn above all to face your past, to be proud of what you’ve been through, and to share it proudly with the rest of the world.
Learning how to start a deep conversation is one of the most useful social skills that you could have in your arsenal. It will open up so many doors and build so many relationships that you will cherish for the rest of your life.
I hope you guys enjoyed reading this wonderful article on the deep conversation. Please share this with your friends and family.
