How To Skip the Small Talk and Connect With Anyone | Kalina Silverman | TEDxWestminsterCollege

to generate empathy across the boundaries of space and our perceived external differences? So I was very captivated by these questions and I started giving

talk

s at workshops, doing Big Talk workshops. I created this deck of

small

cards: 90 Big Talk Mini Question Cards. Each question had to be universal, you could ask

anyone

, meaningful, thought-provoking,

skip

the

small

talk

, and open-ended, sparking a story, that you. I could sit with another human and listen to their life story. There were questions like: What do you spend too much time on? What is the new habit you want to form? What is your biggest fear?

To be honest, I became more and more obsessed with the idea of ​​growing Big Talk, and I wanted to… I started reading blogs about entrepreneurship, how you build a big movement and a company around it. I thought, I'm going to take this idea to Silicon Valley, and that's what I did. I went to San Francisco and led a Big Talk seminar at the Thiel Summit. I started hosting dinner parties with strangers, like the Big Talk rednecks with strangers, and I had people also write down their own Big Talk-style questions to ask each other. Then I started spending a lot of time on my computer, figuring out how I can grow Big Talk.

I put up this website where I posted all the events, cards and everything, and then something strange started happening. In trying to grow this movement, it was about: Originally created out of my own loneliness in freshman year and desire to meaningfully

connect

with people, I suddenly found myself feeling very alone and dis

connect

ed from the world. I forgot to mention that I also decided to take time off from college last year, halfway through my junior year of college, to work on Big Talk. So, a wise professor once told me, before you go out and try to feed the world, you must learn to feed yourself.

So that's what I did. I began to ask myself: how can I scale these meaningful connections using new technologies without losing my own humanity in the process? And I asked myself these questions from the big speech, like: Who am I? Y: What is the most important thing in life? Why am I so passionate about Big Talk? I started making a big talk with myself. I took the package of 90 Big Talk mini questions and started using them as journal entries and used Big Talk to reconnect with myself. And so now that I'm more comfortable with a sort of re-understanding of why I started in the first place, my original vision remains strong and I'm ready to embark on it again and understand that it takes time to figure it out.

The important things, we are not going to solve them immediately. The ultimate vision is to use Big Talk to build global empathy through the power of connection about sharing stories, about our universal human experiences, but also, equally important, to use Big Talk as a tool to understand and connect with oneself. . In light of today's TEDx theme: "You Can," I want to leave you with one more Big Talk question to ask yourself: How can I take advantage of what I learned today to make my life different tomorrow? Thank you. (Applause)