An Easier Way To Gain People Skills

We all need skills. Nothing worthwhile is possible without them.

And one of the best is people skills. Technology cannot touch that.

Without much labor on this point, people skills are important. The whole thing starts and ends with people, you know. So gaining a good handle on how to deal with people is key to a whole lot.

How, then, can you start working on yours, if you feel unsure when interacting with people? How can you get comfortable having meaningful conversations with others?

A simple conversation where you set out to learn is all it takes. Interview others as a way of learning from them, and get the by-product that comes with it: experience and a relationship.

Here’s an easy way to get started.

Take out your smartphone, and look for the voice recorder that came with it (it should be one of the apps that came pre-installed). Plug in headphones that have in-line microphones and test it out. Say some words into it. Play back the audio to yourself. Good? Works?

The voice recorder on my LG phone. This works.

Okay, now find someone you know and interview him. Someone you are close to and are comfortable around. You can place the phone on a table that can take both voices and begin, if you don’t have headphones.

Ask simple questions. Ask questions around something you are both knowledgeable about. For example, if you both like soccer, start with that. Like these:

1. What do you think makes soccer unique from other sports?
2. What got you interested in the game? Is there a particular personal story behind it?
3. Is there a particular aspect of the game that you really like — tackling, scoring, dribbling, passing, teamwork, etc? Least favorite?

Just those. Start there, and leave enough time for a response from whoever you are interviewing.

Now playback the interview. How does it sound? What can you improve?

This is critical because you can only improve on something you have done, not something in your head. And the most important thing is to start.

With your lessons from this one, interview another person — your mom, dad, teacher, or brother. Review that one, too, and learn from it.

This series of interviews should give you a good degree of comfort to start with. Take it a step further and interview someone you are not very close to — like a co-worker or a neighbor. Do this enough times, like say 10 of them.

Do that, and now you have something under your belt, some experience. Don’t worry about mistakes, action is what matters, at this point. Many ideas have failed for lack of action and fear of mistakes.

Finally, to really use this skill to advance your career, find someone who is doing something you’d like to do — a professional, most probably, and interview them on their personal story in that industry, or what they’d like to share with a newbie in the industry. Just simply humble yourself and learn from them through the interview.

(If you’d like to be a teacher, find a good teacher in your town/city and interview him/her; if you’d like to be a chef, stop by a good restaurant and schedule a 15 minute interview with their top chef and learn; if you’d like to be a football coach, pick the brains of the local high school football coach in 15 minutes)

Or, like David Rogier, if you become really good at it, you can use it to land a job/internship. David wanted to land an internship at IDEO (a reputable product design consultancy company), so he used his interviewing skills to interview 23 people at an airport about baggage claims, created a book on all the insights he gained from the interviews and how he would improve the process. He found a way to share his findings with the company. He got the internship.

Or, use it to gain more skills by doing a local interview project around something you are passionate about. Like I did over 21 days with small business owners here in Austin, Texas. Seeing the initiative behind my project and the fact that I was documenting my journey online, one of the owners offered me a job application while I interviewed him, and another brought up the possibility of working on a project together.

So to keep it simple, you can organize a 14-day interview project around culinary skills, for example, and interview 10 chefs in local restaurants, and work on your writing skills by blogging your daily lessons on a simple blog.

You will come away with not only people skills, but you will work on your writing skills, your pitching skills (an ability to present your project’s idea to a professional to set interview appointments), create a relationship with whoever you interview, and come away with a story to tell.

But the most important thing is to start. Interview the first person.