Name: Have Better Conversations: The S.E.A. Small Talk Method
Uploaded: 2025-06-17T16:45:43.000Z
Duration: 15 min 55 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The imperative

Hey, look, E on the C. He's a seaman, he's got a little boat, I think he's in the American

Well, today is a specific method working on small talk.

You might be thinking, what is small talk, why is it important?

I need to do big conversations and big presentations, and I need to make friends, and I want to get a partner, all of these involve big talk or a lot of talk, serious talk.

I got to tell you a little secret, and the secret is this, anything that goes big starts out from something small.

Small talk is the talk that you have with someone that gets them interested in you to want to have more conversations.

Now, if you're an introvert and you speak English, this is something we need to work on as native speakers, but if you're also a language learner learning English, small talk is your way to get into these larger conversations, because someone who's really good at small talk invites bigger, better conversations because the people think you're capable of them.

Now, E, we got the C method, right, S-E-A method, and there's three steps for this, which leads to an easy conversation for you, good conversation starter, or how to go from one conversation, small one, to a larger one.

What I want to address is how we're going to use our small talk.

There's many different ways of getting to small talk, asking questions about something someone's wearing and other things.

Today, I want to really focus in on stories.

Because stories, humankind, mankind, people have for thousands of years sat around fires, you know, you can imagine there's a fire, the cold's going up, and the people sitting there, it's dark at night, and they hear the wolves, so they're in a circle, huddled, you know, holding together, and then someone would tell a story.

A long time ago, when the great moon came down, and our fathers... and it brought the people together.

So, stories create connection, bringing different people together.

The other thing about stories, when we tell stories, we can take the everyday, and I meant it this way, the everyday means regular day, not every day, Monday, Tuesday, but your regular day, and we can make it extraordinary.

Because in a story, you take an everyday event, and we take a regular person and we make them special.

Now, when you do that in small talk, you make the person you're speaking to feel special.

Well, we have three steps, and as you can see, we're missing them, but I'm going to fill them in and explain them to you so you will be able to start making your own stories and making the everyday extraordinary with small talk.

The first one is S, and after it says simple one-sentence story.

Well, if you have a simple one-sentence story, it's going to be short.

You're nervous using this language, talking to people, so if you have a big story in your head and you make mistakes and you're getting it wrong, what's going to happen is you get more nervous and you might forget parts of the story and you're going to lose the person's interest.

So, why don't we make a story very, very short?

In marketing and advertising, they call this type of thing an elevator pitch, and if you're wondering what an elevator pitch is, you know when an elevator moves at a certain speed going up or going down, and they would say you should be able to tell your story between the floors.

So, if you're going from the first floor to the second floor, if you were trying to sell something to someone, you should give them all the information they need within that movement.

And if you can do that, that's called an elevator pitch.

It will be informative, it'll have information, and it will get them interested.

All of these things in a short period of time.

That's what a TV commercial does, and that's what you're going to do.

We're going to make a short story that's one sentence, simple, so you can remember it.

A story without emotion is like a house without colour or food without seasoning.

It's there, but you're not going to get much joy from it.

In fact, what I've written here is emotion creates a picture that gets them involved.

In our brains, we have something called mirror neurons.

It's cells in our head that helps us to understand other people.

And when we put emotion in a story, the other person's mirror neurons, it's like looking in a mirror.

Because they can see themselves in your story, they think it's not them, but it's you are them.

And they're, oh, I'm interested because this is happening to me.

Using a bit of psychology here to get them involved in your story, and emotion creates that.

Emotion creates a picture for them to get involved in.

Because when you're scared, they want to know why, because they're feeling scared, too.

Now, how we make this even stronger is we want to add something that's going to create energy.

Have you ever been at home lying down on your chair for, I know you have, five, six, seven, eight hours, and then you think, I should get up and exercise.

And then you think, no, I'm not going to.

Or you've ever slept in bed for too long, instead of getting out of bed, you stay there, hit the alarm, hit the alarm, hit the alarm, you want to go back to sleep.

That's because you're missing an important ingredient, because once you have this, this thing creates more and more energy and gets you more and more excited, and will help with the emotion, and that is action.

I'm in action moving my hands, speaking, looking, all these g-i-n-g words we're using.

Eating, sleeping, walking, playing, running.

Every time we do a little bit of it, we get a bit more energy to keep doing it.

If you add action-right?-the energy with the emotion being involved, in a short story you have an unbelievably powerful way to connect and communicate with people, making the everyday extraordinary.

So, I'm going to give you some examples of how you could use what I've just shown you, because you're like, James, you talk about I've got to get action in this story, I've got to get energy, I've got to...

I barely speak English, but that's the point.

Because you don't have great English skills, we're going to keep it simple.

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Have Better Conversations: The S.E.A. Small Talk Method

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