This is incredibly helpful, holy shit.
In case it helps anyone else, Iβm gonna try to share something I got from a book on social skills (itβs by Daniel Wendler, written by an autistic person whoβs learned the rules for autistic people who havenβt yet, highly recommend!) on the flow of conversation.
If youβre like me, maybe you struggle with infodumping and talking too much and forgetting to ask questions. If people donβt share as enthusiastically as you without direct prompting, youβll accidentally dominate a conversation. Donβt worry, I get it! I thought, Iβll share what I want to share and theyβll share what they want to share, easyβright?
As Iβve had to learnβ¦nope. 95% of neurotypical people (and a lot of neurodivergent people too!) wonβt feel comfortable sharing without being invited to.
So, that βnaturalβ back-and-forth of neurotypical conversation goes something like this:
You talk for a little bit. The less you know this person, the shorter your individual βblocksβ of conversation should likely be in most cases. So if youβre at small talk stage, you say maybe a sentence or two; if you know them better you can get away with more.
Then itβs on you to pass the ball back. Your job here is to communicate βhey, your turn, Iβm interestedβ, and to give them a cue of what to talk about so they donβt feel stranded and like they have to βcome up withβ an answer.
Not giving any cues is where awkward silence comes from, and itβll feel to them like youβre communicating βI want out of this conversation!β So if your conversations with people often awkwardly peter out, check if youβre giving them a cue every time you finish talking!
There are, broadly speaking, two types of cues:
Invitations: these are questions, or otherwise direct prompts for the other person to speak.
Theyβre very direct cues, and theyβre the easiest for the other person to respond to. That means that the less you know someone, the more youβll likely rely on invitations (but not exclusively! That makes people feel interrogated. 2-3 questions in a row are fine, after that you might want to throw in an inspiration or two to break it up and be less intimidatingβmore on that below!)
Try to always keep invitations at the same level of intimacy as the current conversationβdonβt talk about the weather and then ask where this stranger grew up and what the weather was like there. These are such direct cues that itβs inherently awkward for the other person to dodge them, so make extra sure your invitations arenβt uncomfortable.
Inspiration: this is essentially referencing things that the other person can easily latch on to for their response.
These are more indirect cues, and a little trickier in my experience. Essentially, you want to make sure that you end your bit of the conversation with something thatβs deliberately easy to respond toβavoid ending on something thatβs very niche that people canβt relate to or thatβs very unique to you. If you want to mention something like that, you can, but tack something more general on after as inspiration (or just end on a question). Inspirations are still cues, theyβre still meant to give the other person an idea of what to respond with, otherwise the conversation will feel awkward and unwelcoming!
What the other post mentioned re: offering slightly more personal information of your own often falls under this category. For example, if youβre talking about the weather as in the first example, but you mention where you grew up and what the weather was like, that can be inspiration for the other person to also talk about where theyβre from!
But, unlike with a question, if they donβt want to share that information they can usually dodge it without having to make it extremely obvious that thatβs what theyβre doing. They can ask you something else, or shift the topic, and it might not be super subtle but it allows plausible deniability, so theyβre not forced to either a) answer a question they donβt want to, or b) expose their discomfort (which is personal in itself!)
The more you know someone, the more youβll likely automatically rely on inspiration to keep conversation flowing. Thatβs because you two have context for each other, something you say might easily have a bunch of things they could use as inspiration just because of past conversations youβve had or things you already know about each otherβanything can be a cue if thereβs context! But with people you donβt know well, youβre gonna want to be a bit more mindful of it.
Generally, every time you talk in a one-on-one conversation, you want to leave some kind of cue for the other person to respond to!
Donβt worry too much about it thoughβif they want to talk to you, theyβll deliberately look for inspiration. If you throw the ball badly, theyβll still try to run to catch it anyway! It doesnβt have to be perfect.
But the less you know someone, the less youβll be willing to βrunβ (because hey, thatβs a lot of mental effort for a stranger who hasnβt proven theyβre worth it, for all you know they might be an asshole!) and the more intentional you want to be about giving cues and making the ball as easy as possible to catch.
Iβm very much still learning to βpractice what I preachβ here, but thinking of it this way has helped me enormously, so perhaps itβll help someone else too!