Share your own feelings and ask about others

Emotions are the bedrock of deep conversations. You want to try and bring them to the surface to connect with others.

The easiest way to do this, is to be vulnerable to people and if they reciprocate, a connection is formed. To do that, it helps to ask open ended questions about how they feel about something.

It’s similar to Share your goals to enter a meaningful conversation because asking emotional and open questions tend to lead you to share your own feelings.

Using questions like:

• What do you like about where you live ?
• What is the best part about your job ?
• If you could learn anything, what would it be?

will help prompt people to go deeper about their responses. Following up on each question also helps because it tells them that you are interested in what they think.

But it’s still hard to have emotional conversations especially if we cannot reciprocate the feelings of others. But here’s a framework on how to match someone’s emotions.

• The first step is to notice their mood. Are they positive or negative?

• Then their energy, are they high energy or low energy ?

• Positive mood, high energy

  • Happy, excited

• Positive mood, low energy

  • Content, grateful, satisfied

• Negative mood, high energy

  • Angry, insulted, vengeful

• Negative mood, low energy

  • Annoyed, discouraged, grumpy

So to be on the same page as people try matching their energy and mood. If that will make things worse (like trying to calm an angry person down), then hear them out, acknowledge their feelings. Make it very clear that you understand their feelings. If it’s hard to understand someone, try looping to understand someone better

Reciprocity isn’t about matching vulnerability to vulnerability. Rather, it’s being emotionally available, listening to how someone feels and what they need, and sharing our own emotional reactions.

We tend to make connections with those who we think understand us on an emotional level.