Feedback is a powerful tool for reflection and self-improvement. Can you take the heat?

BlogAllison ScharmannAugust 8, 2024self love, self improvement, self help, feedback, harsh feedback, criticism, skip the small talk, conversation, communicationComment

Skip the Small Talk at the Arnold Arboretum

Calling all Boston folks! If you love (1) Skip the Small Talk and (2) The Great Outdoors™️, well then boy do we have a treat for you.

BlogAllison ScharmannJuly 4, 2024skip the small talk, Arnold arboretum, nature, nature walk, conversation, skip the small talk eventComment

5 Ways to Make a New Friend

Move over dating, the scariest part of adulthood isn’t finding love, it’s making new friends!

Allison ScharmannApril 11, 2024friendship, connection, skip the small talk, how to make friends, how to talk to anyone, how to make a new friend, friends, conversation, conversation starters Comments

How to get out of a bad mood

A lot of us prepare for inevitable inconveniences in most areas of our lives; we keep spare tires, we have flashlights for when the electricity goes out, and the most accident-prone (or just prepared) among us tend to own first aid kits. But most of us don’t prepare for the inevitable emotional inconveniences of life: “bad moods,” including sadness, anxiety, and anger.

That’s why it can be a great idea to create a “bad mood menu.”

Ashley KirsnerOctober 6, 2021bad mood menu, how to feel better, get out of a bad mood, how to get out of a bad mood, skip the small talk, anxiety, anger, big feelings, loneliness, grief, self-compassion, prepare for bad mood, prepare for bad moods, difficult emotions, prepare for difficult emotionsComment

The power of listening

Long-time Skip the Small Talker Kip Clark made the news for offering “free listening” in Cambridge, MA (and check out Skip the Small Talk’s mention in the video, too)!

4 signs you should be friends with someone

We’ve already talked about how to know it’s time for a friend break-up, but how do you know that someone would make a good friend? Here are four “green flags” that suggest you might want to keep someone in your life.

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How to be a good ally

I’ve seen a lot of articles about good allyship that all mention roughly the same things: following the leadership of marginalized folks, listening to marginalized folks, doing your own research, and calling out injustice when you see it. (If you do want a refresher in some allyship basics, you can check out this short but great article on how to be a good ally.) Those are all absolutely integral parts of being a good ally, but I’ve noticed that there are crucial allyship skills that pretty much all good allies do, but nobody ever talks about. So I’m going to talk about those here.

One simple trick to make conflict suck less

With any relationship that engenders enough vulnerability and closeness, conflict is usually bound to come up. So one of the best approaches, I’ve found, is to be prepared for it and have a plan for how to handle it when conflict arises.

There’s already tons of literature about how to fight well, but I’ve found one trick that you might not be familiar with.

I call it the “emotional right-of-way.”

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Watch Ashley Kirsner on SideHustle Live!

It’s hard for anyone to be vulnerable, but since I’m someone with a relatively large amount of privilege (for example, if I’m vulnerable and everybody ends up hating me for it, I’ll still be able to pay rent), I find it meaningful to normalize doing things imperfectly, and doing those things publicly and proudly.

So, here I am being totally silly and having the time of my life playing this ridiculous game called SideHustle with its creators. It was silly, it was “messy,” and it was absolutely hilarious.

How to *really* help after a communal tragedy

After national tragedies, we often see an outpouring of support in the forms of donations and volunteer efforts.

And that’s a beautiful thing; humans empathize, feel the pain of others, and want to do whatever they can to alleviate that pain.

The potential problem with that is that often, while the underlying problems that cause these national tragedies are ongoing, the efforts to address them end up being short-lasting.

So how can we use the momentum we feel today to create long-lasting action that doesn’t burn us out? Here are some tips

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10 Questions to ask your S.O. (or other loved ones) on Valentine's Day

As if figuring out what to do on Valentine’s Day isn’t hard enough, a lot of us have some additional pandemic-related parameters this year. So, we’ve come up with ideas for how to have a low-key but meaningful Valentine’s Day at home with your partner. (BONUS: If you’re not with a partner, you can absolutely pick and choose whatever pieces of this feel right to do with a friend or other loved one— we’ve even put together some adapted question prompts at the end of this to ask your friends, family, and other close people).

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Why you need self-compassion in your life and how to do it (even when you don’t want to)

At Skip the Small Talks, we ask attendees to have compassion for others and for themselves as they try out new ways to hold conversations. It’s probably obvious why we care about people having compassion for each other at an event where strangers are getting to know each other for the first time, but equally if not more important in that context is self-compassion. That’s because any attempt at change or improvement generally goes much more smoothly if you’re not beating yourself up after every setback. Connecting genuinely often requires taking some risks (like sharing things that feel a little vulnerable), and having compassion for yourself when those risks don’t pan out the way you hope can help you continue taking some risks in the long-term, and can help make the learning process easier for you in the short-term.

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The normal you wish you were

“It’s hard spending time with people who are the normal you wish you were,” said one of my closest friends. Her husband was struggling with a dependency on alcohol, and he found it painful to hang out with friends who could have a few drinks and call it a night. He would regularly talk himself into thinking he could be “normal” like them and just have a few drinks, but “a few” invariably turned into “too many” for him, and he would end up feeling shame about not being able to control his relationship with alcohol.

The fastest compatibility test you've never heard of

Okay, we’ll run with the title and make this quick. When someone new is entering your life, whether it’s a friend, a coworker, a romantic interest, or someone else you’re still figuring out how and to what extent you’d like to fit them into your life, try asking yourself:

How to ask for help

Asking for help is vulnerable; when we solicit support of any kind, we open ourselves up to the possibility of rejection and all the accompanying feelings and self-judgments. So, it’s understandable that many of us feel anxious about it or have a hard time asking others for much beyond passing the mashed potatoes at dinner-- and even that can raise anxiety.

How to write better e-mails

“Tuesday at 3 pm is great. Thanks for your flexibility. Looking forward to chatting then.”

Imagine that the above e-mail pops into your inbox. Do you get the impression that the message’s author is actually looking forward to talking to you? It probably depends on context, of course, but stock language like, “Looking forward to chatting,” or, “Thanks for your patience,” or even, “Sincerely,” are so overused that they’ve mostly lost their meaning. Those phrases and others like them are the “small talk” equivalent of e-mail; they’re polite, they usually don’t offer meaningful content, they don’t require a great deal of thought for either person in the interaction, and they are often the easiest mode of communication for people who don’t know each other well. (We’ll focus on work e-mails in this blogpost, but everything here applies just as much to other types of e-mails or online messages.)

Do you know how to "be yourself?" The question that will help you be authentic even when the stakes are high

“Just be yourself!”
“Don’t worry about what other people think of you!”
“Dance like nobody’s watching!”
“To thine own self be true.”

We consume these truisms from the moment our infant brains can understand them and we don’t stop until we’ve seen one too many cliché-littered Pinterest boards. But the reality is, if you’re flailing your limbs on the dance floor without a single thought of who’s watching, or who’s within arm’s reach, you might accidentally smack someone in the face. How do you dance like you’re aware that people are watching, but you know that you’re dancing for yourself, and not for them? How can you think about the space you're taking up on the dance floor without having it affect your self-expression? How soon until we're done with this metaphor? It's important to "be true to yourself," but if you’re not thinking about how others respond to your behavior, you might be missing out on opportunities to connect, and you may even hurt others or yourself in the process.

Five Thanksgiving icebreakers that don't suck

Ah, the holidays: A time when we hope our lives will look like those wholesome cartoon specials we watched as children, but also a time when anxieties about getting stuck in conversation with people who hold different political and moral ideologies might keep you from doing that happy dance from A Charlie Brown Christmas.

This Thanksgiving, we encourage you to take some time to connect with others in ways that feel authentic without feeling emotionally exhausting. To help the conversation flow, we offer you some ice-breakers that will get others to share about themselves while subtly nudging everyone’s mood in a positive direction. So if you do end up having the “here’s why racism is bad” conversation with Uncle Joe, you’ll have a buffer of positive experience--and perhaps some common ground--that’ll make it easier for you to communicate with one another.

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