“How’s it going?” How I learned to Talk to Strangers at Work

How are you doing?

If you’re like most people, you just thought to yourself, “good, how are you?”

People are wired to be social. When we’re asked how we’re doing, we will ask the question right back. That’s just how things work.

However, this was never obvious to me.

As you might have guessed from my previous post, I have some work to do on my communication skills. I feel like communication is one of the hardest things to get right. Sometimes I say too much or too little, or I don’t get the idea that I want to communicate just right. Even worse, sometimes I offend people without meaning to.

It can be a slippery slope, because socially it makes you seem like an elephant in a china shop.

Bottom line — communication is not easy.

I know you feel like you could also improve your communication skills, and that is why you are reading this post.

There are many ways we can improve our communication, but simpler is usually better.

So I want to talk about an idea from one of my all time favorite books: Nick Kolendas Methods of Persuasion. If you haven’t already read it, I suggest you buy it right now, if you want to become a better communicator.

I want to talk about one of the simplest tools from Methods of Persuasion which I’ve used to great effect. It’s mindblowingly simple, and unbelievably effective. Using it is a walk in the park.

Before we go into the nuts and bolts of it though — some context.

I’ve always found it a bit awkward to talk to people I don’t know. When I’m standing at the coffee machine, and there is a random person standing next to me, I never know what to say. It always kind of turned into a weird nodding competition with miscellaneous primitive sounds thrown in.

Picture this scene:

Two people standing awkwardly at a coffee machine.

Me: *nodding*, “mm”, *smiling weirdly*.
Other person: *Half smile with dead eyes*. *Leaves*

Have you ever had this experience?

This would be close to 100% of my experience when I would meet people and there would be no direct reason to interact, other than out of politeness. So I figured i might as well use some tools to improve, because my current success-rate was abysmal.

So I took a page out of Kolendas playbook, and started saying “How’s it going?” to people I would run into.

The difference this made is almost unbelievable. In Kolendas book, he talks about how humans are hard-wired to respond affirmatively to these types of requests. This in turn, increases peoples likelihood of complying with whatever you request of them. Of course I have no direct requests to make when I’m standing around the coffee machine. I only have an implicit request to not make the situation weird.

The first time I asked a person the question “How are you doing?” I felt like my heart was about to jump out of my chest, because it didn’t feel natural. I was sure the other person would look at me and the interaction would be even less stellar than before.

But it turns out, that that’s not what happened.

People respond with “Good, how are you?”

This caught me off guard to begin with, because I wasn’t used to it. It seemed like magic to me. I had turned an interaction that was almost always lose-lose, into something that made me feel jittery on the inside and was good for both parties.

It was like magic.

But the magic doesn’t stop here.

Humans are social animals. We like to talk each other. So when someone shows interest in us, we’re hardwired to reciprocate that interest and that almost always turns into conversation. “What are you working on?” “How long have you been here?” “What’s your background?” That kind of thing.

As you can probably imagine, this is incredibly powerful.

However, this type of interaction works in more ways than just making better small talk at the coffee machine.

My job involves talking to a lot of people; talking on the phone with people, meeting with people and I’m sure yours does too.

Usually I’d just get right down to discussing the business at hand.

So after my initial success at the coffee machine, I figured I’d try it out in a more general way. Whenever I talk to people I start with some version of “hey, how are you doing?”

The results make me feel like a snake charmer. People move to the tune I play. And it’s all because of one tiny little sentence at the beginning of the conversation.

The power of this tiny change in my communication has benefited me tremendously, and I wholeheartedly encourage you to try it out. You will find that you get better at whatever job you do, because all jobs involves interacting with people.

If you like this article, I suggest you share it with your friends, because they will probably like it too.