Adventure Capitalist

Being a solo-traveler can be lonely unless you do something about it. Personally during these last two months I’ve made a conscious effort to get out of my comfort zone and get to know new people, some of them have been interesting conversations for part of an evening, others might become friends for life, it remains to be seen.

However, a post at Untemplater got me thinking about what it is that actually makes people feel comfortable and familiar around each other, even if they have never met before. It is a subject that has been written about for decades, in everything from classics like Dale Carnegie’s “How to win friends and influence people”, to academic psychology literature and all the way down to more crude and simplistic “howto pick-up chicks” courses flogged to lonely men.

How to make anyone feel comfortable and familiar around you, and make yourself feel the same way is actually quite simple, all it requires is being perceptive to others, paying attention and getting out of your own head..

Don’t interview
The mistake most people will do when getting to know anyone is that they go into “interview mode”: they start asking for facts, like “What do you do?”, “How old are you?”, “What do you do in your spare time?”. It’s like asking for numbers from a phone catalogue, and it’s about as interesting for both parties as reading one. Besides, specific simple facts about a person actually say very little about an individual, what you do in an office cubicle rarely defines the persona and personality of someone.

Elicit what a person is about
Instead of “interviewing” a person, get a person to talk about the things in life that they are really passionate about, and WHY they are passionate about them. Get them talking about what they love and really pay attention and listen. The favourite subject of most people are, no surprise, themselves, if you show an interest in actually getting to know them on a deeper level, probing into what they really like and why, what they really are about and what their values are, people will find it really hard to dislike you.

And, if they go on talking, let them! If you get someone to really start talking passionately, all you have to do is pay attention. At most, you can steer the conversation at times in the direction of the things that you are more interested in knowing about the other person.

The principle of elicitation works for a very simple reason: psychologically, whenever we think of something, we have to associate with it and the states that it brings up in us. If you get someone to talk passionately about something they really like, they will most likely at some point start to indirectly associate you with the positive feelings that it brings up.

Relate and tell stories
If you want to get to know someone and make a new friend, the focus should be on the previous point, so let the other person talk. But to keep things going, relate and sum up what they are saying, tell them about similar things that you can relate with in the form of short “stories”. If you can do this, you’re probably already in a very good, deep conversation that is engaging both you and them.

Keep it fun, lighthearted and positive
There is nothing worse than people who complain all the time. By the same token that people will indirectly associate you with positive feelings you might elicit, they will associate you with negative ones if you bring up negative subjects. Keep things positive, lighthearted and fun. It goes without saying that we all love laughing, humour is the biggest ice breaker in the world, bar none.

Not everyone has to like you, you don’t have to like everyone
When you start eliciting a what a person is about, some people might be worried and think: “What if they like things I hate? What if I can’t relate?”. Well, the truth of the matter is, if you fail to find any common ground with someone, there is no one forcing you to like someone, or them to like you. It’s life, different people like different things. If your objective is to be universally liked, your bound to fail, and you have the wrong thing in mind. To me, getting to know new people is about finding people you have common ground with, that you can enjoy spending time with. If you don’t think it’s a possibility, be courteous and move on.

I can’t stress this enough: though it is nice to be liked, you can’t like everyone, and everyone can’t like you. Personally, I prefer to focus on making a few, really good acquaintances rather than getting to know large swathes of people that I will have very little in common with. When it comes to what people you are going to spend time with, you are more than allowed to discriminate heavily in favour of people you actually like or think you could come to like.