I encountered some excellent feedback from last week’s blog about my random expressions to total strangers or happenstance meetings. Someone wrote and asked me for questions to take the conversation deeper once you establish a brief connection with someone. I loved the question and thought it worthy of a part two to last week’s blog. So, here goes, an attempt at taking the initial connection you might encounter with a random stranger a step or two deeper with a follow-up probing question. I have discovered most persons do enjoy talking about themselves. Why not take advantage of that fact?

Try several of these questions to see what might work best for you:

• What do you do? What caused you to seek that profession?
• Tell me about your family.
• What has been the biggest lesson that you have learned so far in life?
• What makes you, you?
• What feeling do you love to feel?
• Tell me about your creative side.
• What do you do for fun?
• Tell me about your thoughts of a personal relationship with God.
• What are your thoughts on eternal life?
• What was your favorite vacation and why?
• Where should someone find their identity?
• Where do you find your identity? 
• Does God talk to you or how do you hear the voice of God?
• What are you trying to prove to the world around you?
• What is the best decision you have ever made and why?

People pay counselors $150.00 for a fifty-minute session and feel tremendous relief thereafter. Why? Someone listened to them. Listening makes others feel important and asking questions and listening reveals you care about hearing what they have to say. Schools teach public speaking courses frequently, but when is the last time you noticed a “public listening” course offered? I don’t think that course exists.