The BIG Power of Small Talk

Hi, it’s Paul Krismer, your happiness expert, and today I’m coming to you from Philadelphia. I’ve been working with a really enjoyable client, a group of people who are running some youth athletics across the country. They’re enthusiastic, passionate, fit, and ready to go, just an interesting dynamic and a lot of fun. While in Philadelphia, as I try to do, I took in the Philadelphia Museum of Art yesterday. For those of you who are old enough, you’ll remember Rocky, the original Rocky movie where he’s not fit enough to run all the way up to this staircase to the Museum of Art. Towards the end of the film, before the big fight, he runs up there like a champion, and there’s even a big, full life-size statue of Rocky in front of the museum. It’s kind of funny.

Inside the museum, it’s gorgeous. Some of my favorite art is kind of European Baroque and Romantic Period art, and they have a ton of very nice pieces, including a little later period, but Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, which is a marvelous, famous piece. I really enjoyed the museum. I was in a good mood, I knew I had genuine downtime, and I could just enjoy my soak time in the museum. I found myself conversing from time to time with other people who would be kind of standing nearby and looking at some art or people who would go to different rooms, and we’d end up together again. I had a few small talk chats with strangers.

Just last night, I read this article on CBC. David will include a link about the importance of talking to strangers, and how that small talk can actually cause behavioral changes. It’s actually been studied and found to be true. It’s remarkable because one of my very first forays into doing YouTube videos, I talked about changing the culture of the little neighborhood where I was living in Victoria at the time. By simply saying hi to the people who were on this natural pathway close to where we lived, my sons and I found that over time, people were saying hi to us proactively. So, we kind of started this deliberate intention of being very friendly to people as we walked down this path and found, over the course of a few years, that that just became the nature of our little pathway.

You know, maybe we’re giving ourselves credit where it isn’t due, but I think we made a difference by our desire to be friendly. We influenced the behavior and the culture of that whole group. The interesting thing, of course, is that now science is showing that these things are, in fact, true. It causes behavioral change among a group of people if some people show this proactive, pro-social kindness in the way that they relate to one another. That’s not shocking, it makes sense, cause and effect. But, of course, the other really wonderful thing is it shows that we get a personal benefit too. By talking to strangers, overcoming our fear, the fear that we might be rejected and pushed away, which rarely turns out to be true, by overcoming that, we not only feel good about ourselves, we feel that our proactive social behaviors will be rewarded in life. But it’s also self-esteem building and gives you those little blasts of oxytocin that make us simply feel good, the love hormone.

So, that’s all I’ve got to share this week. I’m on my way to Wisconsin. I hope you’re all having a great Sunday, or whatever day of the week it is when you’re seeing this. We’ll be back in touch in one week. Bye for now.