(Not So) Small Talk and... the Gold Rush?

Samuel Brannan was California's first millionaire. He made his millions during the Gold Rush, but he didn't do it by finding gold. Rather, he mined the periphery.

While everyone was focusing on gold. Samuel Brannan focused on the periphery. He focused on what was adjacent to (but just outside of) their opportunity radars. He sold shovels. In fact, he bought up all of the shovels for miles... all of them. 

With all of these people coming to California trying to find gold, trying to find their fortunes, Samuel Brannan asked, "What do they need?" He mined the periphery and in the periphery, he found a need for shovels.

Small Talk Can Be Awkward and It Can Be Difficult, But Small Talk Isn't Small

What else is in our periphery that is of extreme value? Often viewed as "off to the side", "extra", "useless", or "small" - Small talk isn't small at all.

Small talk is a potential goldmine. It's the thing that tells you where the gold is.

Small Talk As A Hallway Of Doors

Imagine small talk as a hallway full of doors. You can walk through one door and it can lead to conflict and argumentation and difficult discussions. Other doors, though, are potential connections, these potential gold mines.

Walk through the door where there is potential connection. Connection leads to rapport, which is where the magic happens.

In the conversational hypnosis model of conversation. You can imagine a series of concentric rings, and outside of these concentric circles is when somebody is nearby but not engaged. And then the edge of the circle is the greeting. After the greeting, there's typically small talk. You can bounce around to different topics really quickly, and then the interaction ends and you move on. No big deal.

Where The Magic Happens - The Change Agent of Change Agents

If rapport is established though, that moves you deeper into the circle, towards deeper connection, deeper intimacy - the place where magic happens. Deep rapport is where the best of your relationships, the best of human connection occurs. In fact, rapport is the flow state of human-human connection. 

Once a rapport is established, that's the change agent of change agents. That is the place where growth and love and connection and all those things occur. Once you have rapport, you're typically in a space where you can potentially have deeper talk.

In the conversational hypnotherapy model and in actually most therapy models in the deeper states of rapport and connection, they look for problem states and they look for resource states. Then they basically help that person connect those two - and ultimately solve their own problems. (Typically with a powerful reframe)

Every single time you are in small talk, you have the potential to get slightly deeper and make someone's month. Why? Because you can give a gift - the gift of a transformational change.(In hypnotherapy, we often call them "hypnotic gifts" - where you give a gift to somebody)

When you give a powerful reframe in a moment of deep connection and rapport, you change someone's life forever. It can be a pivot moment, and by "moment" I mean moment. It can occur in a sliver of time. Someone's entire life can pivot on a single moment. And small talk is your doorway to those moments.

Your job in small talk:

1. Assess whether you even want to get deeper.
2. Get curious. View it as a hallway of doorways. Which one would you like to walk through?
3. Go deeper and you have the potential to change your life and the life of the person you're talking to.

Small talk is not so small. It is an opportunity. In fact, go to DrTori.com or InfluenceEverywhere.com. There's an opportunity to take a super micro-course on how to change someone's life in a single conversation. And in that conversation, I give an example of a pivotal moment that occurred in small talk by quickly accelerating into rapport from small talk.

Small Talk Now, Deep Rapport Later?

Ask yourself, how can I optimize my small talk with other people to either establish rapport now or to establish a rapport later?

When you're talking, you're bouncing around to different topics and even these like super mundane topics or and somebody mentions like an event or something that's occurring, you know, their daughter is getting married or they're going on a trip or their mom had surgery, whatever. The thing is, they mention it. If you ask about it later, you just say, "Hey, I'm just... I was curious. I was thinking about you the other day. How did your mom's surgery go?" Now that is a establishing rapport later with a small talk doorway that you saw earlier.

Small talk is only small if you want it to be small. It's only small if you look at it that way. You have the power to use small talk, to make magical moments in people's lives, including your own.

I hope you found this helpful. Get curious and look at small talk is not so small. I'll see you in the next episode.

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Do You Want To Take Your Conversations To The Next Level?

Go to: https://www.drtori.com/offers/ukqSTL77 - There's a free micro-course called How To Induce Powerful Change In A Single Conversation