Skip to main content

Questions vs Statements: How to stop being the interrogator in a conversation?

Image
By


Have you ever had the feeling of being an interrogator/interviewer rather than being a part of the conversation? Asking questions is unavoidable to get the conversation rolling but once it is rolling, you should make them very few and as distant as possible. But today I will teach you a powerful technique of conversation which will not only make your conversation more interesting but also more friendly, unlike the ones where you sound like an interviewer.

The Approach:


When you see friends talking, you know they talk in statements than questions. The main idea here is to talk in statements rather than questions. Questions are a way of asking people information, but statements are a way of giving information, having deep conversations and building relations. The technique that I will talk about today is called the “Cold Reading Technique” where you make a statement about the person pretending that you intuitively know it without actually knowing it. What we do here is that rather than asking a question, we assume its answer and say it. Most psychic readers and astrologists use this technique of cold reading where they just put forth general statements that could apply to anyone(Are you being manipulated to believe in Astrology? ).

For example, rather than asking “How many siblings do you have?”, you say “You seem quite assertive, I guess you are the eldest of your siblings”. This is much better since what people like more than talking about themselves is listening about themselves.

People are generally worried that if their guess comes out wrong they will look foolish but that is not the case. There could only be three possibilities with your cold reads.

1.    Your guess was wrong, and he/she will correct you and won’t talk about it after that.

2.    Your guess was wrong, he/she corrects you and asks you what made you think of them like that. Lo and behold, you have just started a topic of conversation without sounding like an interviewer, you could steer the conversation accordingly from here.

3.    Your guess was right, and he/she is startled by the fact that you are a good observer and might ask what else do you think about them?

See? You cannot go wrong with cold reading and would sound much more interesting when you will make statements than asking questions. This doesn’t mean that you should go out of your way to make statements to avoid asking questions, you shouldn’t do that, or you might come up as mechanical. So, focus more on statements and ask them questions when necessary. Below are a few examples of general questions with their cold reads.

Question: Do you read books often?

Cold Read: I am getting a bookish vibe; you must be an avid reader.

Probable responses:

1.    No, I don’t read.

2.    No, I don’t read books. It must be my glasses; I knew it, they look nerdy.

3.    Yes, I love reading books! Do you read too?

Question: Do you live around here?

Cold Read: You seem to know this place very well; you must be a local.

Probable responses:

1.    No, I am not a local, but I like to visit this place frequently.

2.    Yes, is it that obvious?

 


If you did find the content insightful, share it with your friends and subscribe for more content like this. Also let me know what are your thoughts|comments on this.

Comments

  1. ShinchanJune 23, 2020 at 7:29 PM

    I think that it should have been a bit more elaborate, cauze I was enjoying it.
    Its something which will help people like me who are really bad at starting conversations.
    Thanks a lot.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. O.JJune 23, 2020 at 8:29 PM

      I completely agree with you that the blog was short. Earlier I was going to add a lot of cold reads that I use but then I realised that it was not a good idea since a lot of people will try to mug up the cold reads and this will cause the loss of genuineness. My main aim here was to give a general idea and let people build their own style of cold reads on it. I am glad that you liked the content. And about being bad at starting conversations, you will surely get better overtime!!

      Delete
  2. UditJune 24, 2020 at 8:01 AM

    Wonderful advice. Thanks

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The "Association and Dissociation" Technique and "The fear of Public Speaking"

By
The "Association and Dissociation" Technique Benefits Neutralize Experiences of low to medium intensity. amplify the positive feeling or some positive experience that you had in the past. This exercise is not recommended for traumatic experiences Note : To understand this technique, we will perform an exercise. You don’t need any equipment to perform this exercise but it is expected of you to sit in a quiet place with minimal disturbances so that you can focus on this exercise. Running Exercise Sit straight with your spine and shoulders erect. Close your eyes. Now imagine that you are seeing yourself running from a distance. i.e you are observing yourself running from far away. Well, you can imagine seeing yourself running on the road while you are sitting on a park bench. How do you feel about it? Most of you will probably feel nothing. Now merge yourself with the object i.e imagine yourself running and observing through the eyes of a runner. You would ...
7 comments
Read more

How to give Feedback when stakes are high?

By
I don’t want to hurt him/her. But he/she needs to know this because this is affecting his/her relationship with me and other people around us. Have you ever been in a similar situation and wondered if there is a warmer way to do it without hurting the person. Yes, there is a way to give honest feedback without hurting the person in front. To learn this way, we will first understand the “Gain-Loss principle” given by Elliot Aaronson and Darwyn Linder based on the results of an experiment conducted by them in the year 1965 first. The experiment: In this experiment, people who volunteered as the subject were interviewed by a confederate(Someone who assists in a plot) of the experiment. Then in this experiment, the subject would overhear the conversation between the confederate and the researcher where the confederate would describe the subject to the researcher. The Description of the subject was always one of the four mentioned below: 1.         ...
4 comments
Read more

Are you being manipulated to believe in Astrology?

By
To understand this, let us first talk about the “ Confirmation bias ” and the “ Egocentric bias ”.   Confirmations Bias: The tendency of people to seek confirmation of their current beliefs and impressions.                People generally tend to ignore the things that are against their current beliefs and tend to stick with the ones that support their belief system. That is people try to absorb only the information which fits in with the information they currently have. This could be seen with the fact that people generally marry their spouses who have a similar mindset and depart from the relationships where their beliefs are being questioned and challenged.   Egocentric bias: People relate more to situations and stigmas that apply to them than the ones that aren’t.                     People tend to keep themselves at the cent...
3 comments
Read more

How to motivate yourself?

By
Have you ever set a goal where you were really motivated at the start and eventually lost the interest/motivation to pursue it? This habit is not only hindering your goals but also decreasing your confidence in yourself. When the frequency of non-fulfillment of goals is increased, your sense of self-worth suffers, and you start thinking that maybe you’re not made for that work or maybe you are just an average human who is not made for non-average things. Today we will talk about a better way to commit to your goals. If this doesn’t work for you, it doesn’t mean that you are not good enough perhaps you need to understand that same jabs and hooks don’t work for all boxers and you should rather try to find the ones that suit your style. To understand this technique, we must first understand the experiment which proved its effectiveness. The Experiment: This Experiment was conducted by two renowned psychologists Morton Deutsch and Harold Gerald in 1995 . In this experiment, the parti...
6 comments
Read more

Emotional Intelligence: Acknowledging the Irrational/Emotional Side of our Brain

By
“Why do I become so irrational during discussions?” “Why do I get so anxious over things so simple?” “Seriously! What was I even thinking?”   Have you often noticed yourself asking these questions? If yes, then you have come to the right place. Today we will talk about why we behave irrationally under emotions. Before understanding why and how this happens, let’s delve a little into how our brain works.   The Brain: We will not go into the intricacies of our brain. The only parts of the brain that concerns us are the Frontal lobe and the limbic part of the brain. The Frontal lobe is responsible for the rational/logical decisions that we take while the limbic part of the brain is responsible for our behavioral and emotional responses. The limbic part is more primitive while the frontal lobe is a newly formed part of the brain. The limbic part is responsible for emotional memories. It controls how you process strong emotions like fear and pleasure. During vario...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to not worry/panic/procrastinate?

By
In often every conversation, you will hear people saying things like “Don’t worry about it” or “Don’t Panic”. Consider this, if I ask you to not imagine a “A cute Panda”, what would immediately happen? You will imagine it right away. Despite listening to what I said, you will still imagine the Panda. The same thing happens when we say   “I won’t procrastinate today”, our brains do not know how to process the negative language. Instead of not doing what we are asked not to do, we do it. Have you ever been in a moment where you said “I won’t do this, this is destroying my health/wealth/reputation” and you end up doing it right away? Take the case where you say “I won’t panic” and you end up panicking a lot. What happens is you end up panicking about what would happen if you would panic, so you end up panicking about “Not Panicking”. This is what Mark Manson in his book “The Subtle Art of not giving a F*ck” referred to as the “Feedback loop from Hell” where you worry about the p...
2 comments
Read more