How to Get Over the Fear of Small Talk

For some people, having to make small talk is a uniquely horrifying mode of torment. If this is true for you, it’s likely that you can recall in grim detail your last attempts to find a way to make conversation when to be silent would be considered rude and inhospitable. Perhaps you’re waiting in a long line with one of your neighbors while you both happen to be shopping at the same local store. Having exhausted the most obvious list of topics, you’re left now grasping for some new ideas to fill the awkward silence. Your neighbor, too, seems unwilling or unable to contribute to the conversation. Now you feel the onus is on you to come up with some new and clever set of discussion points.

If you watched any of the coverage of the recent royal processions and ceremonies to honor the late Queen Elizabeth II, it might have struck you that the commentators seemed to be exceptionally good at saying something when there was nothing really to say. Did you notice how often they repeated the same observation or dug back into the same historical facts about the late Queen and her monarchy? How did they manage to fill the time despite any lack of content? What could you learn from them?

Small Talk and Why It Matters

York Saint John University’s Ruth Lambley (2021) wrote in a recent article about the importance of small talk to put other people at ease. Her work focuses on a specific function of small talk as a way to promote better communication between research interviewers and participants, or what she calls “allyship.”

As a research method, interviewing presents unique challenges, which you can imagine immediately once you think about the situation. Indeed, it’s likely that you’ve been “interviewed” even if you don’t realize it. When a researcher interviews a participant, it is the interviewer’s intention to elicit some type of information from the person they’re questioning (just as you might be interviewed by a health professional). Unlike ordinary conversation, the interviewer has control over the conversation, creating a power differential.

In mental health research, as Lambley points out, “unequal distributions of power are a frequent barrier to the involvement of those with mental health difficulties” (pp. 586–587). An allyship makes it possible for the “co-production” of responses, meaning that the interviewee partners up with the interviewer to try to arrive at the most accurate possible set of responses. In addition, co-production makes it possible for research participants to be actively involved in creating a study’s findings, which, Lambley notes, is becoming an increasing focus of funding agencies who seek to ensure the “quality, validity, and credibility of findings” (p. 588).

On this last point, imagine that a health provider is interviewing you to establish your quality of physical function and symptoms. What would make you feel that you can admit to something that isn’t working all that well, particularly if your problem is one you’d rather not think, much less talk, about?

Using Small Talk to Get a Conversation Going

Here’s where small talk can serve to bring about an equalization of the power differential in an interview situation. In the research method that Lambley and her team developed, researchers used small talk to build rapport and allow the interviewee to feel more comfortable sharing their feelings of anxiety. The members of her team even shared, with participants, their own personal experiences with mental health. This might seem to you to lead to biased results, but the British researcher showed that the trade-off benefitted the quality of the research by providing higher-quality data.

Now that you can see the value of small talk as a way to reduce power differentials and create a bond between two conversation participants, it’s time to move on and look at specific tools you could adopt as you work on improving your chatting skills.

In the first place, you might stop and ponder the idea of a “power differential” between you and the other person. Is there something about that neighbor of yours that makes your neighbor feel you’re judging them? Perhaps unwittingly, you’ve created an impression that you think you’re better than them in some significant way. You’ve “humble bragged” about a situation such as a renovation you’ve done on your home, complaining about how much it cost while also making it clear that you’re in better financial shape than they are.

With this realization, you can go on to the next step of creating a small talk bridge to repair the damage you’ve done in that previous interaction. Be careful and don’t enter into humble-brag territory but instead try some actual humility. Although standing in line at a store doesn’t present the best opportunity for the sharing of personal information, you could use whatever time you have to reveal something about yourself that was a bit painful or difficult. Maybe the reason you’re at that store in the first place has some small talk potential.

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Moving on to a situation that is not fraught with prior history, the Lambley article also contains some other pointers that you could implement to improve your small talk skills. You might be seated next to someone you don’t know all that well at a dinner being hosted by a mutual friend. Maybe in the past when you’ve been in similar situations, you decided to break the ice by asking a bunch of questions. Without realizing it, you may have created a dynamic in which you’re coming across like an “interviewer.” The more questions you ask, the more you’re setting this other person up as someone who may not feel like providing information to someone who seems so “nosy.”

In the York Saint John University’s research team, another approach that interviewers used to deflect this possibility of a question barrage was to ask participants to share their reflections on a piece of music or photograph. They also asked participants to tell stories or describe their impressions of a picture.

Translating these strategies into an ordinary social occasion, you could try bringing up topics that allow the other person to share stories about themselves. You could even share a story that you think might be neutral enough to allow the other person to decide whether or not to share their own reflections in return.

Small Talk as a Springboard for Better Relationships

If the simple sharing of experiences is enough to put a research participant at ease enough to talk about difficult topics, imagine how small talk can improve your own relationships. Redefining a potential small-talk situation from an “interview” to an opportunity to share reflections could produce myriad unexpected benefits. You and your neighbor, now on friendly terms, might enjoy some common activities as you take advantage of your proximity to each other. Maybe you’ll learn something new about where you live that can provide some helpful tips.

In situations in which you’re meeting someone new, there are an infinite number of possibilities for a small-talk conversation to lead to a “large-talk” type of relationship. Bringing your, as Lambley notes, “lived experiences” into a conversation can help the other person feel that you’re the type of person who can be trusted. Who knows where all this might lead?

To sum up, reframe small talk as an opportunity for sharing life experiences either with new or familiar people, rather than as a test of your social skills. Your fulfillment, and that of your conversation partners, may benefit in unexpected ways.