Transitioning Smoothly Between Conversation Topics and Routines

I have a mentorship student who’s doing a great job with his charisma and with seeking to move the courtship forward with women, but is sometimes forcing things into conversations where they don’t yet naturally ‘fit’.

When he connects quickly with girls and they contribute a lot to the conversation, he does perfectly; the conversation flows naturally and feels good. However, when girls do not quickly connect, and aren’t contributing much yet, he defaults to running his standard material – i.e., his routines.

For instance, he uses a little routine to ask if a girl is trouble and whether he’ll be safe around her. It’s a fun little routine and a nice reversal of the usual frame (where the woman worries if the man is safe), which makes it a tease. However, if it’s just dropped in without warning, it can feel a bit off – it can feel scripted.

It can even end up feeling like something he “just does with everyone” (which, he kinda does! But we don’t want her to know that 😉).

Today’s article is about transitioning into your preferred conversation topics and material smoothly, so the girl herself feels like everything you talk about has just emerged organically from the conversation on its own.

 

Topical Flow Determines Conversational Smoothness

In conversation, the ideal is for every topic to be able to trace naturally to either something discussed earlier or some other natural conversation topic inspired by the people or contexts the conversation occurs in.

This makes the conversation smooth (instead of bumpy and disjointed).

 

Example of a Smooth Conversation

As an example, this conversation is smooth:

HER: … so that’s why I live so far outside of town.

HIM: You know, I love that bracelet. May I see?

HER: [shows bracelet]

HIM: It’s so creative… wait, where did you say you were from originally?

HER: Houston.

HIM: Oh, that’s right! So what’s a cowgirl like you doing all the way up north?

HER: I came here for school and now I work here.

HIM: I see. [inspecting bracelet] Where’d you get this? Is this a Houston bracelet?

HER: I actually made it myself.

HIM: You made it? Like, crafted the metal, all that?

HER: Yeah.

HIM: Wow. You’re a blacksmith!

HER: [laughs] Not really. I blah blah blah [explains]

See how everything relates back to something else?

• She mentioned moving to town and living far away

• You asked to see her bracelet (topic inspired by her wearing a visible bracelet)

• You asked where she was from originally (inspired by her mentioning her move)

• You asked what she’s doing up north (inspired by where she’s from)

• You asked if her bracelet’s from Houston (tying two earlier topics together)

• You asked if she made the bracelet (after she said she did)

• You called her a blacksmith (after she confirmed she made it)

Each topic flows from another topic.

 

Example of an Unsmooth Conversation

On the other hand, this conversation is NOT smooth:

HER: … so that’s why I live so far outside of town.

HIM: Do you like travel?

HER: Uh, sure.

HIM: I love travel. I try to travel at least a couple times a year. Sometimes in the country, sometimes overseas.

HER: That’s so cool.

HIM: You know what, you’re adorable. I’m adopting you as my kid sister. We’ll go swimming and climb trees and I’ll push you on a swing.

HER: Okay? But not too high, right?

HIM: Yeah. Are you a passionate person?

HER: I guess so.

HIM: What are you passionate about?

This is a bit of an extreme example, but can you tell how disjointed this feels? None of the topics ‘connect’ to anything:

• You ask if she likes travel (random topic)

• You tell her about your own travel preferences (only ties to your random travel topic)

• You run the Kid Sister routine (random topic)

• You ask her if she’s passionate (random topic)

• You ask what she’s passionate about (only ties to your random passions topic)

When conversation topics do not ‘connect’, the conversation starts to feel fake or ‘forced’, as if it’s just a series of lines or routines sprinkled in haphazardly with nothing to connect them.

Rather than feel like a smooth, natural conversation, it feels like a jigsaw of mismatched pieces jammed into place. The girl wonders how one topic even leads to another one… they don’t seem related at all.

At this point, she will start to feel that something is ‘off’ about the conversation; that her interlocutor is saying things for the sake of saying them, rather than because they have emerged from the conversation; she may even begin to suspect the material being used on her is just that: material. Scripted, selected, and shoved in.

What we’re talking about is what we might call topical flow: conversation topics must flow organically from one another, or else from something related to the people themselves or the environment (i.e., they are suggested by the people/environment).

If they do not, the whole conversation feels awkward, disjointed, and forced – or even artificial.

 

Conversational Shepherding

The name of the game in controlling the flow of conversation is thread-cutting and thread-amplifying. I’m not going to go into how to do these; if you have a copy of my book or you have Module 2 of One Date & The Dating Artisan, I cover these specifically in-depth there.

But the point is that every new conversation topic you branch to should feel as if you have cut to that thread naturally OR that you are amplifying a pre-existing thread.

This is how you transition between topics.

As you get better at using both techniques, you can then begin to ‘shepherd’ conversations toward the directions you want them to go.

For example: how does Alek Rolstad end up talking about sex with so many women? Do the women bring it up? Not usually. Does he randomly drop it in and hope it sticks? Nope! Instead, he uses transitions to segue the conversation naturally from anything else he might be discussing with women into topics he can use to sexually prize himself.

Every seducer eventually settles on material he uses again and again with women. These are his routines. How does he use them again and again with women, but in a way the woman feels is smooth and natural to the conversation? By shepherding his conversations right to them.

I’ll give you an example of what this looks like.

 

Example Transition Into Routine #1: Kid Sister

Let’s say you want to use the Kid Sister routine.

Let’s return to that earlier example conversation. How could you segue to it smoothly?

Like so:

HER: … so that’s why I live so far outside of town.

HIM: That’s crazy. But you come into town to have fun.

HER: Yeah!

HIM: Because it’s more fun than the boondocks.

HER: Well, it’s not really the boondocks, but yeah, there’s lots more to do here!

HIM: You know what, you’re actually kind of adorable. I’m adopting you as my kid sister. We’ll do fun things around town like go window shopping and eat ice cream and visit the art galleries. It’ll be great.

HER: [laughs] That sounds great.

How do you put together a transition like this?

It’s basically a question of searching for a common denominator.

You have the topic you’re currently on (she lives far outside of town). You have the topic you want to get to (adopting her as your kid sister). What could tie those two things together?

Well, when I think of ‘kid sister’, the first thing that comes to mind is ‘fun’, so the first thing I will ask myself is, “Is there any way that the topic of ‘fun’ relates to her coming into the city?”

Then I realize that ‘fun’ is the whole reason she’s here: she came to do all the stuff she can’t do out in the suburbs.

So I am just going to say that to her: “You come into town to have fun…” (she confirms) “It’s more fun than the boondocks…” (she confirms again) – and now I can drop in the routine, by weaving the ‘fun’ concept in with that (that is, the whole reason I will adopt her as my kid sister is to have more ‘fun’ with her, which, since I know she is looking for that, and she has said she is looking for that, I know she will likely go along with).

As soon as you find that common denominator linking the topic you’re on at present to the topic you want to move toward, you just bring that common denominator to the fore, mention it a few times, then transition into where you want to get to, tying it in nicely.

 

Example Transition Into Routine #2: Am I Safe?

Let me give you another example of the same concept to drive it home.

This time, let’s use that routine my mentorship student has been using, where he asks girls if he’s “going to be safe” around them and he’s not going to wake up with any organs missing.

How can you transition into that naturally?

Well, first off, we are going to start backwards and work back to it. What themes do you associate with “will I be safe… missing organs”? For me, I associate ‘danger’, ‘risk’, ‘unreliability’, etc. So I will look for something in the conversation I can use to thread-cut onto that topic, then use that to get onto the routine.

For instance:

HIM: So what do you do?

HER: I work at an ice cream parlor.

HIM: Are you the scoop girl? You’re the one who handles all the sweetness?

HER: I am the scoop girl, yeah.

HIM: Oh man, you are a valuable person to know. I bet you have friends hitting you up all the time for freebies.

HER: I kinda do, yeah. [laughs]

HIM: Hmm, but what kind of price do you extract for that?

HER: [laughs] Nothing, I just give them ice cream.

HIM: Are you sure it’s not laced with anything? The bill comes due, you know.

HER: [laughs] It’s definitely not laced!

HIM: I’m not gonna, like, eat your ice cream, then wake up missing a lung, am I?

HER: [laughs] Oh my God, no!

HIM: Can I really trust you?

HER: You can trust me!

HIM: All right… I’ll decide to trust you… for now.

HER: [laughs]

That’s a job description I picked at random (I am sitting in a coffee shop and looked up to see a big sticker of a drink with all the cream on top and thought ‘ice cream shop worker’), and I had to find a way to connect ‘ice cream shop worker’ with ‘danger/risk’.

It’s pretty easy to think ‘ice cream laced with something’ then just figure out a path to there. You could just as easily have made some joke about her being the Typhoid Mary of ice cream shop workers, or something else. It didn’t have to be about her lacing the free ice cream she gives to friends. (Though I prefer this kind of topic because it allows me to future-project her giving me free ice cream too, linking me to friends/family in her mind.)

 

Maintaining Your Topical Flow: Always Try to Connect Topics!

Skilled conversationalists develop a bushel of conversational superpowers they did not have when they were starting out. The examples above are things I do very easily and naturally in conversation now, but could almost never do at all (except by happy accident) as a beginner. I had to have lots and lots of conversations, striving hard to connect things as well as possible in them, before it became second nature.

However, you can make this whole process simpler for yourself by always looking for the common denominator between any two topics; the one you’re on currently, and the one you want to get to.

Do that, and you can shepherd your conversations in literally any direction.

Remember you just need a theme of the thing:

• Kid Sister: fun, spontaneity, adorability, etc.

• Am I Safe?: risk, danger, uncertainty, lack of trust, etc.

Look for a theme from the destination you want to shepherd the conversation to, then see if you can map a path there from the topic you’re currently on.

Have fun shepherding!

Chase Amante