Conversation Is Career Insurance

Vanessa Van Edwards is a behavioral investigator and the founder of Science of People, and the author of "Captivate" and "Cues." Her new book, "Conversation: How to Connect with Anyone and Make Every Interaction Count," draws on what she describes as 20 years of studying master conversationalists, with the formal research starting eight years ago in a speed-networking experiment. She calls herself "a recovering awkward person" who spent years asking the wrong questions, and much of her work now is with founders, leaders and teams who are brilliant but uneasy in conversation. She recently moved from Austin to Los Angeles to be near family, and says her one regret is feeling alone as a new mom while building the business. These signals are from Vanessa Van Edwards's interview with Steven Bartlett on The Diary Of A CEO.

1. The Best Opener. In Van Edwards's speed-networking experiments with 500 participants, "What do you do?" ranked last of six assigned conversation starters, and "How are you?" came fifth. Both are social scripts that put the brain on autopilot, and the pairs who used them ran out of things to say. The winner by a lot was "What was the highlight of your day?", followed by "Working on anything exciting these days?" and "Have any fun plans coming up?" Each one asks the other person's brain to search for something good, and the last one hints at a shared future, which she says is how people start to bond.
2. Three Levels of Connection. Van Edwards builds her method on psychologist Dan McAdams's finding that people get to know each other in three distinct levels: general traits, personal concerns and self-narrative. Skipping ahead backfires. In her study, "What's your story?" scored either a 5 or a zero, a score that wasn't on the scale, because it is a level-three question that pushes introverts into "conversational fear." Her fix at level one is to keep the facts and go looking for story and emotion, because "a fact is a stop sign. A story is a doorway."
3. Communication Friction. Many founders Van Edwards works with treat small talk as a waste of time, and she says the research shows the opposite. Teams with high communication friction lack psychological safety, struggle to brainstorm, withhold information and build silos, all of which she says costs companies money. She recommends a weekly "tell me something good" round at the start of one meeting, where everyone shares a win in 3 to 5 minutes; her own team does it on Tuesday calls. Work conversations rarely need to reach level three, she says, and people who invest in conversation skills now are "creating career insurance."
4. Dream Building. Level two is personal concerns, and Van Edwards's test is whether you know what gets someone up in the morning and what keeps them up at night. She sorts these into "pet projects," which people discuss with pride, and "pest projects," which carry shame and need safety before anyone will share them. Her go-to questions are "What's your biggest goal right now?" and "What have you always wanted to learn?", timed to birthdays, January, a new quarter or a performance review. She argues that people now keep their goals to journals and to-do lists, so whoever invites those goals into conversation gets to be an ally.
5. Dream Killing with Logic. "Very smart people tend to dream kill by accident," Van Edwards says, by fact-checking ideas before they're fully formed. The other person then feels they have to prove themselves, digs in and talks more. Bartlett described a candidate at his previous company with exceptional credentials whose interview feedback came back neutral or negative because the candidate cared only whether things were true. She cites research that competence without warmth leaves people suspicious and that 82% of our impressions of others rest on warmth and competence: "You can be the smartest person in the room, but if people don't feel connected to you, they don't believe your smarts."
6. The Better Answer. Van Edwards treats "What do you do?" as a chance to stand out and offers a formula: "I do [blank] for [who] by [how]." She overheard a man on a date describe himself as having "a system for maximizing achievement in young learners" before admitting he was a fifth-grade teacher, which gave the listener too many "conversation calories." The better version leads with the label: a fifth-grade teacher who spent 10 years building a system that speeds up reading. She also suggests writing down the questions you get asked most and preparing answers that give the other person something to respond to, like her friend Jason, an editor at Entrepreneur magazine, who tells dinner companions he can't taste or smell and asks what he should try.
7. The 30-Second Turn. Van Edwards cites the CANDOR corpus, a large study of conversation mechanics, to put a normal speaking turn at 15 to 30 seconds, with 45 seconds as the point where it becomes a monologue. She also cites a survey of more than 1,000 Americans in which 95% had worked with someone who talks too much; those co-workers spent an average of 90 minutes a day talking, and 71% of respondents said they got in the way of their work. Her checks are timing yourself on recorded Zoom calls and a "yap challenge," where you record an opinion without notes and see whether you finish inside 45 seconds. Overtalking is often driven by fear: in her survey of about 4,000 people, the most common conversational fear was awkward silence or running out of things to say.
8. Entertainers and Appreciators. Van Edwards watched person after person approach a very famous man in a green room with a compliment or a question, and he brushed each of them off with a quick selfie. Then an AV technician who was about to mic him asked, "Can I tell you the funniest story?" and soon had him laughing and asking questions. She concluded that people split into entertainers, who want to talk, tell stories and give advice, and appreciators, who would rather laugh at someone else's stories. Before approaching a boss or a VIP, work out which one you're facing, because entertainers want questions and appreciators want stories.
9. Behavioral Interviewing. Van Edwards says "What's your greatest weakness?" gets a rehearsed answer, so she asks "What would your last manager say is your greatest weakness?", ideally adding that you'll be calling that manager. She replaces "Tell me about a time you managed a project" with "Tell me about the most recent time," within the last 2 or 3 months, so the candidate can't pick their best story. Her sneakier question is "Are you lucky?" A fast yes suggests gratitude, confidence and a sense of control; a no is a cue to ask why, since arguing with it reads as toxic positivity; and a hedge means the person hasn't thought about it or doesn't feel safe with you yet.
10. Narrative Archetypes at Work. Van Edwards sorts the stories people tell about themselves into five archetypes she admits are "more art than science": the ambitious hero, the contented pragmatist, the selfless helper, the creative disruptor and the unlucky struggler. She says they predict how someone works and suggests matching them to roles, with ambitious heroes in growth and rainmaker jobs and a contented pragmatist, who is happy in stable, regulated settings, "running your books." Ambitious-hero founders tend toward shiny object syndrome, which Bartlett says he manages with systems, citing Jeff Bezos's line about having enough ideas to sink the company and releasing them at a pace it can tolerate. Selfless helpers can be conflict-avoidant, but the best of them make strong managers because they deliver hard feedback as "I so want you to succeed."
11. The Liking Gap. People assume their liking for others is obvious when it isn't, a bias Van Edwards calls signal amplification bias, so she tells people to say it out loud: "It's always so fun talking to you" or "I love when you're put on my team." She felt it herself when a friend reported that a date Van Edwards had found only okay "just loved" her and had already bought her audiobook, and she immediately liked him more. She also cites a finding that the most popular kids had the longest lists of people they liked. At a VIP party in Austin where guests introduced themselves with ever bigger accomplishments, she called herself "a recovering awkward person," everyone after her said the same, and most of the room came to talk to her afterward because she was the easiest person there to talk to.
12. Voice, Eyes and Exits. Van Edwards tells leaders to speak from their "maximum resonance point," the low end of their natural range, by breathing in and talking on the out-breath; many people open Zoom calls holding their breath with a tight, high "Good morning." She recommends 60% to 70% eye contact in Western cultures, concentrated in the first seconds of a greeting and when checking how a point lands, since people look away to think. When presenting to a C-suite or investors, she watches for a lower-lid flex, a cue of intense focus, and either notes what she just said or stops to check whether it makes sense. She also ends conversations on purpose: mention a future plan, add a compliment or an action ("I'm going to grab more coffee"), and step back, because a lingering goodbye is "kryptonite for charisma."

Watch the full video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2cg1gEYWJQ.