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

Ryan Hawk (0:00)

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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. I spent two decades studying how people connect, her books, Captivate and Cues, have been translated into 18 languages in 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. 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.

Vanessa, it is so good to see you. Welcome back to The Learning Leader Show.

Vanessa Van Edwards (2:33)

It's so nice to be back with an old friend. I can't wait, I can't wait.

Ryan Hawk (2:37)

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.

Vanessa Van Edwards (2:54)

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. I can tell.

Ryan Hawk (3:26)

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. Then I realized, we all kind of have to do it sometimes. 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?

Vanessa Van Edwards (3:52)

You're right. Small talk is actually required for big talk. We can't skip it, but we can do it better. I also think it's important for my learners, everyone listening to this as a learner.

Conversation is a social skill.

There are micro skills underneath conversation. Conversation is a big social skill. It's almost like if I had to give it a metaphor, it's like history. 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 civics, and then you would dial down even further to 1800s, and you'd dial down even further to 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.