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Small talk can be painful, but the FORD method can help.

Some people enjoy small talk and are naturally good at it. For others, it feels like mental and emotional torture. There are many reasons why people are nervous about entering social situations where they have to make small talk, such as a work event, a party where they don’t know many people, or at school. Some people don’t enjoy small talk because they get frustrated talking about seemingly unimportant topics.

At the same time, others are shy and afraid they’ll say the wrong thing or run out of topics of conversation. Psychologists suggest those who are uncomfortable knowing what to say should use the FORD method of conversation starters. It’s an acronym that’s an easy way to remember four different topics of conversation that work with just about anyone.

According to Nicole Arzt, M.S., L.M.F.T at Social Self, the FORD acronym stands for Family, Occupation, Recreation and Dreams. Here are some examples of questions that fall under each category.

Family

Just about everyone has a family, so it’s a great way to ask someone to share some information about their personal lives without being too forward. Arzt suggests the following questions when making small talk:

family, small talk, ford methodYou can ask people about their parents, kids, siblings, grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles, or just family in general.Photo credit: Canva

Do you have any siblings?

How did you two meet? (if you are meeting a couple for the first time)

How old is your child?

How is your____ (sister, brother, mother, etc.) doing since ____ (event that happened?)

Occupation

Just like a family, almost everyone has a job. Or, if they do not, that can be an interesting topic as well. Here are some starter questions you can ask someone about their job.

jobs, occupations, ford method, small talkeYou can take questions about someone's occupation beyond simply, "What do you do?"Photo credit: Canva

What do you do for a living?

How do you like working at _____?

What’s your favorite part of your job?

What made you interested in becoming a _____?

Recreation

You can learn a lot about a person after knowing how they spend their free time. It’s also an excellent way to determine if someone is like-minded and shares the same interests. Here are some questions to get the ball rolling:

hobbies, what do you do for fun, recreation, ford method, small talkPeople often love talking about what they do for enjoyment outside of work. Photo credit: Canva

What do you like to do for fun?

Have you watched (or read) ______(popular show/book)?

What are you up to this weekend?

Dreams

Learning someone’s hope for the future can tell you much about who they are on a deeper level. They may have just told you about their current job or how they spend their time. But, ultimately, what do they wish to do with their lives? Here’s how to ask someone about their dreams.

hopes and dreams, ford method, small talkeAsking people about their hopes and dreams can be a great way to make more meaningful small talk.Photo credit: Canva

Where do you hope to be working in the next few years?

Where would you like to travel?

What’s something you’d like to try in the future?

Would you ever consider trying _____ (particular hobby or activity)?

Arzt also notes that you shouldn’t just be an interviewer. You have to talk about yourself, too. In other words, you need a mutual take-and-give. “Pay attention to someone else's answers and think about how you can draw from your own experience to connect," she wrote. When you're feeling socially anxious, it can be hard to listen to the other person while also thinking about your own responses, so thinking of the FORD acronym for yourself and having something to share in each category ahead of time can be a way to avoid the dreaded awkward silence that sometimes happens during small talk.

It can also be tricky to know how much you should be talking vs. how much you should be listening. If you're not sure how much to say during a conversation, follow the 43:57 rule. A numbers guy at Gong.io analyzed over 25,000 sales calls with AI and found the perfect speaking-to-listening ratio. Sales soared when the salesperson talked 43% of the time and listened for 57%.

Even though this insight is from business calls, it applies to everyday social interactions. It's really about listening and making the other person feel special. After all, who doesn't love feeling heard and appreciated?

Small talk doesn't have to be torturous, even if it's something you don't look forward to. With a little preparation and some genuine curiosity, it might even become enjoyable as you make new connections with people.

This article originally appeared last year.

All her life, Dorothy Williams dreamed of being a star. Now 90 years old, she finally got her chance.

Thanks to "America's Got Talent," the nonagenarian had the opportunity to perform in front of a massive live crowd (not to mention the millions of viewers watching on TV). She wasn't about to let this golden opportunity go to waste.


Image from "America's Got Talent"/YouTube.

For 1 minute and 19 seconds, all eyes were on Dorothy.

Her routine was met with raucous cheers from start to finish. Audience members gasped, clapped, and roared as Dorothy performed a strip tease (complete with nipple tassels, whaaaat?!) on the stage. She exuded joy, standing as living proof that you can be amazing at any age.

GIF via "America's Got Talent"/YouTube.

"A star is born tonight!" host Nick Cannon exclaimed as the crowd again erupted into applause. It was a good night for Dorothy. A very, very good night.

Watch Dorothy do her thing in the video below, and be sure to stay tuned for the emotional ending.


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3 important lessons to help you find your calling.

Most people don't know what to do with their lives. And that's OK.

"We see in order to move; we move in order to see." — William Gibson

These days, there’s a lot of talk about discovering your dream. Now, more than ever, finding calling seems a god-given right for anyone with a brain and an Internet connection. We all want to do work that matters. But the truth is, the journey to get there can be confusing.

More and more people are unwilling to exchange their ideals for a paycheck. But how does this work practically? The place most of us begin is wrong. We search for epiphanies when, in fact, we should be learning to live with ambiguity. The clarity we seek is a myth.


I’m sure there are people who know exactly what they were born to do, who have had a vision of their life since they were six years old. I’ve just never met them. Most who have a dream struggle to articulate it. They don’t know what it is or what it should look like. Often, all they know is this thing that they’re doing is wrong.

So where do you go from there, if all you’ve got is an itch, a vague premonition of an un-lived life?

That was the question I sought to answer in my book, "The Art of Work." I interviewed hundreds of people, trying to figure out what common themes you can see in the lives of people who have discovered what they were meant to do. Here are three lessons I learned.

Lesson 1: Don’t wait for clarity.

"I have never had clarity; what I have always had is trust." — Mother Teresa. Photo by Keystone Features/Getty Images.

The other day, I was on a call with a young woman who was passionate about getting involved in social work — she just didn’t know where to start.

As the discussion continued, she confessed she didn’t know what her calling was. Was this her dream or just another idea? Due to her own inexperience, she was hesitant to name anything too specific. The hardest part of finding your calling, it seems, is naming it.

The problem, though, is we don’t often know what we should be doing until we start doing it. Experience leads to competence, and competence creates confidence. Until you’ve done a few things, it’s easy to hold back from committing to any certain path. It might, after all, end in failure.

But why is failure something to be avoided instead of embraced?

A calling is the accumulation of a person’s life’s experiences, skills, and passions — all put to work. It is, I believe, what you were put on Earth to do, your assignment, if you will. So you should be a little cautious in naming it, of course. But who said you ever had to get this thing right the first time?

Once you name a dream and chase after it, there are major consequences to that. But I find so many of us are wont to name it without taking any action. I’d prefer the reverse: act, then define what you’re doing. We all want clarity before we’re willing to take action, but more often than not, clarity comes with action.

Take your time in coming to the realization of what you were made to do. Hesitation is only natural. But action is not optional.

Takeaway: Clarity comes with action.

Lesson 2: Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean you should quit.

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit." — Aristotle. Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

I’m wary of people who can name their dream immediately without having had any real experience with it. The flame that is fast to light is also the quickest to burn out.

Although you occasionally encounter rare cases of people knowing what they were meant to do since childhood, most struggle with the clarity concept. But what if we at least temporarily disregarded it?

Often, I hear people tell me they would gladly follow their passions in life if they just knew what they were. Or they have too many interests in life and don’t know which one to focus on.

So where do you start?

Instead of following your passion, as Cal Newport says, maybe you should let your passion follow you. We all tend to enjoy activities we’re good at and shy away from the things we’re not. So if you don’t have something like that, don’t wait for passion. Just get so good that the enjoyment soon follows. And if it doesn’t, you can always pick something else.

Naming and claiming a dream is a popular trend these days. What’s far less popular is the disciplined practice of a craft — spending thousands of thankless hours getting great at something before sharing it with the world.

If you tell me "I want to be an author" but have never written a word, I’m skeptical.

If you say "I was born to be a carpenter" but have never lifted a hammer, I’m doubtful.

You may like the idea of being a writer or the image of being on a construction project, but you haven’t done any actual work. You don’t understand the cost of the dream, of putting yourself out there and risking failure. Therefore, it has no real value to you. You have to practice.

But not all practice is equal. In fact, most people have no idea how to do something with excellence, which leaves little wonder why we drift from one meaningless job to the next. Maybe what we need is not less work and more four-hour work weeks, but the kind of practice that demands our total presence and most serious attitude.

This is what Daniel Coyle, author of "The Talent Code," calls "deep practice." It is the kind of the activity that requires all your strength and attention but also ends up being the most fulfilling thing you could possibly do. No, it isn’t always easy, but since when did your calling have to come easy?

And if you choose to wait, to bide your time before beginning to figure out what you were meant to do with your life, well that’s a form of practice, too.

Takeaway: You become what you practice.

Lesson 3: Commit, but be prepared to pivot.

"Desire is the key to motivation, but it’s determination and commitment to an unrelenting pursuit of your goal — a commitment to excellence — that will enable you to attain the success you seek." — Mario Andretti. Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

The hardest part of finding your calling is naming it, as it should be. This is your life’s work we’re talking about here. It won’t be easy, and it may take time to figure out. But this constant questioning of yourself and wondering what you’re meant to do can paralyze you. You can get stuck doing nothing.

The truth, though, is you’re not really doing nothing. You’re working at Starbucks or in corporate America. You’re living in your parents’ basement or a loft in the city. You’re contemplating quitting or going back to school. You say you’re waiting for the right opportunity, but let’s be honest:

What you’re doing is stalling.

When you stay stuck in that job you hate without making any movement toward change, when you keep thinking about doing something but never follow through on it, you are wasting an important part of your life. And that’s a shame because what you need to do is not that hard.

You just need to keep moving.

So I propose an alternative, a compromise between doing nothing and picking the wrong dream: Make a seasonal commitment. Choose something that strikes your fancy based on the possibility that it could be your dream. In other words: Experiment. Not in a flaky, noncommittal way. Pick something, and commit to it for a season.

Call it a seasonal dream if you want. Iterate on it until you reach a point where you know this is what you should do or not. Then go deeper or move on. This will give you experience, broaden your skill set, and teach you the value of commitment.

Most likely, this is how you will find your dream. Not by waiting around for a sign from the heavens, but by doing something and doing it with a degree of conviction and commitment that requires you to grow.

Takeaway: When in doubt, commit.

The next step.

There’s one thing you can be sure of: You won’t find your dream by standing still. Finding your life’s work won’t be easy. You will have to work at it. It may, at times, even hurt a little. But it will be the good kind of hurt.

Discovering what you were meant to do will require action and reflection, and this is how awareness of our calling is grown. Which is what will ultimately lead to the realization that this thing you’re doing, this all-important something, just might be what you were born for.

Family

America's favorite science teacher Bill Nye explains how your dreams work.

You know emojis have taken over when scientists use them to explain how things work.

In a new series from Mashable, Bill Nye, America's favorite science teacher takes a look at the science of dreaming.

When you turn off your alarm clock in the morning, your day is just beginning. You're groggy. You're tired. You hit snooze like a million times (if you're me). But you're awake.

Your brain, on the other hand, never went to sleep. It was busy working the overnight shift.


We've all been there. Image via iStock.

Sometimes you wake up and your dreams from the night before are so vivid. Sometimes they're just straight up bizarre. And sometimes you can't recall them at all.

The average person dreams about four to six times a night, so whether or not you remember them, if you're sleeping, your brain is busy dreaming.

Basically, it's always up to something. One brain would never walk up to another and be like, "Hey brain, what's up?" and receive an "Oh, not much" in response. It'd be more like ... "EVERYTHING IS UP! ALL THE TIME! I'M A BRAIN!"

Or to put the beautifully complex behavior of the brain simply...

Bill Nye has found the perfect emojis to explain just what the heck your brain gets up to at night.

GIF via Mashable Watercooler/YouTube.

Basically, neurologists say your brain can be found in three states:

1. Your brain is AWAKE!

That's your brain RIGHT NOW! That's why you're reading this! And getting lost in Wikipedia rabbit holes and getting distracted by the Internet and living your life. I can't even explain it more because it's so obvious! You're awake! And your brain is too!

She's awake! GIF from "30 Rock."

2. Your brain is in a rapid eye-movement (REM) cycle.

This is a fun one. This is when things start to get weird and dreamy. This is the part of your sleep sleep cycle where your eyes start to move rapidly (ha! rapid eye movement! get it??) and your body goes through many physiological changes. Your limbs become limp and your breathing becomes irregular. This, believe it or not, is the perfect condition for dreaming.

When you're in the REM state, your imagination runs wild. GIF via Mashable Watercooler/YouTube.



3. Your brain is in the non-rapid-eye movement (NREM) cycle.

Non-rapid eye movement doesn't sound as fun because it's considered dreamless sleep, but it takes up more of your life than REM. So you should get to know it.

About 80% of your sleep takes place in NREM. This is when your breathing and heart rate are slow and regular and you are pretty still. This is most likely not the time when you are talking in your sleep or rolling around stealing the covers from your partner. Which they definitely appreciate, by the way.

Word of the day: extrastriate. GIF via Mashable Watercooler/YouTube.

Nye briefly touches on this, but humans aren't the only ones who experience dreams. Animals likely do too.

Most mammals experience rapid-eye movement, so "it is reasonable to suppose that animals have something like what we call dreams," Patrick McNamara, director of the Evolutionary Neurobehavior Laboratory at Boston University, told National Geographic. That's pretty cool to think about.

Scientists are busy discovering more about how the brain works in humans and in animals.

From the amount of sleep disorders faced every day to the effects smartphones may have when you're trying to get some shut-eye, we're giving scientists plenty of material to work with.

While we wait to learn more, just try to get a decent amount of sleep at night. Netflix will be there in the morning. And besides, you're clearly awesome at dreaming, so DREAM BIG.

Here's Bill Nye to explain more about your dreams: