Starting Conversations With A Stranger When It Feels Scary

What do you really need to start a conversation?

The words are stupidly simple. It is just, for example, a “Hi, how are you?” and a follow-up question on something to get small talk started.

But that’s not the hard part. It’s that you get stuck on the words. You just can’t say them.

Maybe you get super anxious when thinking about approaching people? Maybe they seem like they don’t want to talk to you? Maybe you expect them to reject you? Maybe that you would seem too desperate for a social contact?

I’ve had all of those. When I wanna speak up, all my anxieties, fears, and insecurities surface at that exact moment.

Chatting up a stranger triggers some subconscious fears from within us. And this fear is multiplied for shy and introverted people, because chatting itself is outside our comfort zone. What a killer combo to prevent us from ever actually talking to strangers.

Logically speaking, people in general are lovely. They wouldn’t mind actually talking to us if we talked to them.

But we can’t help but freeze from all the scary scenarios we come up with.

The fear is subconscious, so we need to gain experience to unlearn that subconscious reaction

Logically, these make sense. Did they help me? Not one bit.

I still had the exact same fear whenever I tried to talk to strangers. No matter how much I assured myself, meditated on it or tried to reason with the problem.

This happens because the fear when talking to strangers isn’t logical. It’s subconscious reaction that jumps up every time you try to talk to strangers. Your body is conditioned to be scared of it and will fight against you each and every time.

But over the years, I’ve gotten decent at talking to strangers. So I know it can be conquered.

The answer in short is to build evidence that you can do it, which slowly overrides your subconscious reaction of “oh hell no, get the fuck out NOW!” with “yeah, I can probably do this”.

Build Evidence that you can do it

In principle, if you were to experience similar interactions multiple times, you would roughly know from experience how they would go.

Let’s go through an example like going to a total stranger on the street and saying “Hello, how’s your day?”. Nothing weird, just a greeting.

The first time probably is scary as fuck. After all, you don’t know how it’s gonna play out.

After 10 times, you maybe notice that some interactions have similarities between them. Maybe they didn’t use the exact same words, but people tried to communicate the same thing. Or maybe not.

After 100 times, by now you probably do notice these similarities and because you’ve had the same interaction many times, some particular scenarios aren’t as scary. You might still get flustered if they something completely new happens.

But what about 1000 times? Or 10k times? 100k? At that point, you’ve probably experienced all variations and know roughly how to respond to each one.

The more you experience it, the more evidence you have to draw your response from. And the more evidence you have, the more confident you seem because you’ve already experienced similar interactions. You know from your experience roughly how it’s gonna go.

This technique has multiple names like exposure therapy, tiny habits, learn by doing, progressive overload, Pavlov’s dog…

You slowly but surely teach your subconsciousness that it’s gonna be OK. You won’t die.

Jumping straight to talking to strangers is too much

Yeah yeah, I know. Talking to random strangers on the street is the god tier level. Especially if you’re like past me, who barely was comfortable talking to classmates I needed to do group assignments with.

Take a moment and think, what’s your level of comfort with talking to strangers now.

Can you open a conversation randomly with a classmate, workmate or hobby buddy you’re often together with? What about a person you’ve had a chat once or twice, but not much more? What about person who probably knows you exist but never talked with? A random person in your school, work, or hobby? A random person outside of those e.g. on the street, in a party or an event, at the night club, or video game chat?

Knowing where you are now is crucial so you don’t try to take on too much. You should pick a step that’s doable even if challenging.

For example, I’m quite comfortable starting a random conversation with people as long as I’ve exchanged a word or two before (even if not specifically to each other). But I’m still quite awkward in starting a conversation with a person I’ve never talked to even if in the same hobby circle. So the doable but challenging step is to focus on getting better at talking to randoms in that hobby circle.

Facing your fears and doing it anyway

Now that you roughly know where you’re at, there are 4 actions I’ve noticed I need to do each time I up the difficulty.

The invisible wall of fear

Whenever I push myself to talk to strangers not within my comfort zone, I feel like there’s an invisible wall preventing me from talking to people. It’s made of my fears and anxieties in my head, so it’s not a physical wall but that’s how it feels.

In the end, I need to talk to the people. But because of that wall, I can’t. So the first goal is to push against it, not to talk to the people. In other words, I try to do the action needed despite my fears.

Say, you’re thinking that you should talk to a person at your school, work or hobby. But there’s this wall of anxiety stopping you.

Push yourself to where it feels just a bit uncomfortable and stay with that feeling. Show your body that the fear and the anxiety of daring to think about doing it doesn’t kill you.

Now you’re creating evidence for yourself that you can do at least this much. Next time, you can probably get to the same level of uncomfortable. Or maybe try “what if I push just tiny bit more, because now I have evidence for myself that I can always tone it back down and be good”.

Start small

At first, what you do can be extremely minimal.

When I started, for a long time I pushed against that wall of anxiety daily without physically doing anything. I kept thinking “Today, I’ll talk to them” until I started feeling uncomfortable near that wall and then just stayed with the feelings.

Every day that I did that, I noticed that the wall budged a little. Meaning that while there was no outward results, there was improvement in how many subconsciousness reacted to me thinking about doing it. First the idea of talking felt too much. Then I got comfortable that maybe I could talk, but actually doing it is too much. Then “OK, maybe I could actually talk to them, so turn now” and I froze.

All small steps within my head, but there was progress. Each time I managed to push the boundaries my anxiety placed.

Eventually, I could do the leap and say “Hey, so how was your day?” to start a conversation.

It probably won’t a huge deal to others, but for us it is a leap that we never thought we could do.

Reflection on negative thoughts

The main reason the invisible wall is there are our fears, anxieties and insecurities.

These essentially sum up what makes up my invisible wall that I bash against.

You can’t meditate yourself to get rid of these. But the more experience and evidence you have that says these are not true, the more you can reflect how much truth are in these negative thoughts.

Building experience and reflecting on negative thoughts build on each other and help you improve further.

Keeping it up

You done it once, maybe twice. It felt really uncomfortable and you’re wondering will it get any better.

The most important part here is to keep doing it. If it feels too challenging figure out a way to dial it down a bit. Remember, start small! But still keep doing it and slowly increase the difficulty level.

If you try to rush ahead too fast, you’re more likely to stop doing it. When trying to unlearn our subconscious reactions when talking to strangers, slow and steady wins the race.

We often overestimate how much improvement can happen in couple weeks. And severely underestimate how much progress we can make in 3-6 months if we keep doing it.

Takeaways

• The fear of talking to strangers isn’t logical, but subconscious. Your body is conditioned to avoid it. But you can teach your subconscious that it’s not dangerous and that you can do it.
• Reflect what’s your level of comfort in talking to strangers now. If you can barely talk to anyone, don’t try to talk to strangers on the street as the first step. Each goal should be doable even if challenging
• Your anxiety, fears, and insecurities try to block you from talking to strangers by creating an invisible wall. Each time, push yourself to the level where it’s uncomfortable but bearable, and stay with that feeling. This creates evidence for you that you can handle this much, then you can push yourself a bit further from here the next time.
• Start small. No outward results does not equal no results if you feel more comfortable with the idea of talking to strangers each day.
• Pushing yourself to the edge of your comfort zone raises negative thoughts. Alternate building experience by pushing the boundaries of your comfort zone and reflecting on how true your negative thoughts are against the newly built evidence that you did it.
• The changes won’t happen overnight. Steady and slow improvements over months will cause drastic changes.