An almsot fail-safe way to start a chat that quickly turns into a real conversation is the question, "What's on your mind?" It's something of a Goldilocks question, walking a fine line so it is neither too open and broad nor too narrow and confining.
"And What Else" - AWE question - with seemingly no effort, it creates more-more wisdom, mroe insights, more self-awareness, more possibilities-out of thin air.
There are three reasons it has the impact that it does: more options can lead to better decisions; you rein yourself in; and you buy yourself time.
Paul Nutt found that decisions made from binary choices had a failure rate greater than 50 percent. [...] Having at least one more option lowered the failure rate by almost half, down to about 30 percent.
At some stage of the conversation, someone's going to say to you, "There is nothing else." [...] Reframe that reaction as success. "There is nothing else" is a response you should be seeking.
Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox Of Choice (he gives a good TED talk of the same name), brought to light a study of consumers in a grocery store. It was Jam Day, and one sample table had six varieties; the other, twenty-four. While the table with twenty-four types of jam was more popular, consumers sampling from the table of six flavours were ten times more likely to actually buy jam. The overwhelm of twenty-four flavours created decision-making paralysis.
a 1956 paper by George A. Miller whose title tells you exactly what its conclusion was: "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information." Science has whittled that number down over time, so now it's generally assumed that four is actually the ideal number at which we can chunk information.
