As an avid gamer, I have a tendency to gamify things in my life — I use EpicWin to track my to-do list, I motivate my partner to do chores with rewards, encourage said system to be used upon me, use my mpg meter to drive more efficiently, etc…

When I organized my conversation tactics into a game, a lot of my clients (many of them gamers as well) can see how everything fall into place better. So I’d like to share it with you, in hopes you can see how bettering your conversation skills can be as fun as a game.

Many of my clients experience anxiety from feeling “defeated” in conversations. They feel overlooked, stuck, silly, embarrassed and their anxiety points increase accordingly. This is a normal response to think you’re not good at something because you’ve never had a good experience with it.

Anxiety increases when you feel “defeated” at conversations.

But when they have a good experience, it naturally helps alleviate that anxiety. Once they achieve a surplus of “wins,” they’ll have less anxiety, and become more socially confident.

So how do you get better at this game? Wait, how do you play it?

I’m including a basic version here. Let’s take a look!

The Game

Don’t drop the ball!

A conversation is like a ball game, where the goal is simple: Don’t drop the ball!

If you don’t want the ball to be dropped, you probably won’t try to throw “impressively,” or try to show how good you are at it. Your goal is for the other person to be able to catch, and throw it back at you.

Minimize hard throws, maximize easy catches!

Examples of throws that are hard to catch:

Ya I know someone you don’t know and she does something you don’t care about (Unrelatable)

“I *did drugs* at the party.” I know someone who is in rehab now and she doesn’t look very good. (Judgment)

Ya, I agree. *State the obvious* It’s going to take a while. (Bland remarks)

I would never do that. I’m afraid of heights, I can’t even look out the window of some tall building. (Negative)

“What about you?” (Unspecific responses)

Your counterpart may not play with you again… :(

Usually the counterpart will show signs of frustration with body languages — eyes looking away / being easily distracted / nodding faster / breathing harder or they will verbally interrupt or make an excuse to leave the conversation.

To avoid this from happening, we need to understand how a conversation is structured. Where are we playing this ball game? It’s inside a topic room.

Staying in a topic too long will lead to its death.

Structure of a topic. You start from broad to specific. When it reaches a point of being very specific, the topic dies. The juicy part of a topic is when it gets specific, but depending on the listener’s interest, it can either be “interesting” or “boring.” The bait part is for you to test whether the person is interested. If not, get outta there!

If you stay in a topic for too long, the conversation ends.

Successful strategies:

Ask questions that would help you generate as many topics as possible.

When you sense the topic may be getting too detailed, try to make a conscious effort to find things you can “associate” to get to a new topic that the other person may have something to say about. The goal is to keep scanning for “common grounds” for you to later go back to. This also helps keep the conversation light.

Avoid linear conversations (basically, ones that involve just information exchanges.)

Every player has various topics they can engage in. They are scattered into three main regions: Casual, advanced and deep secrets. Depending on the person, these topics may be scattered differently. For example, work and hobbies are casual; family / politics / religion are more advanced or casual to some, and health / love life are more sensative subjects in the deep secrets zone for a private person. These zones are separated with barricades.

By going in and out of these rooms, you get a sense of where they lie, as well as slowly wearing down the barricades.

Ultimately, you want to let the other person reveal themselves more than you.

If you stay in the advanced regions for too long you may be perceived as “too serious.”

If you stay at the top of a room (asking for too many specifics) or tread carelessly in the secret zones, you may be perceived as “a bit creepy.”

A good game should look like this:

This is going to cause the other person to be curious about you. At this point they would likely feel they have been “drawn out” so much, that they want to know you better!

A good rule of thumb is the other person has been prompted to talk 70% of the time.

Another good rule of thumb is all these topics are covered “smoothly” by associations, not by dryly extracting or asking broad questions, where the person answering has to expense too much effort in order to retrieve and organize the information for you. For example, instead of asking “what do you like to do in your free time?” it’s better to ask more creatively based on what you’ve observed about them: e.g. “Do you like karaoke because you have a good voice.” or.. “What do you get to do when you get home after such a long commute?”

Mastering this game means having much better and flowing conversations. And what’s even better, is once you get to know a person more deeply, these tactics are less important and conversations will flow more naturally.