| Go work retail somewhere that doesn't try to hard-sell people. Most places will start by giving you some training materials on how to initiate friendly, non-threatening interactions with the customers. These are basically to burn some non-business cycles with the customer to prove that you're not trying to hard-sell them by using aggressive and manipulative techniques on them[1]. There are a lot of open-ended, safe topics you'll use for this. But once you get comfortable with the technique, you'll realize that you could use almost any question. Even rather specific ones like, "What's your favorite sandwich" can start a perfectly fine conversation with someone. Most people like new, unpredictable utterances and as long as you present it as non-threatening it can lead to a fruitful conversation. Along with this you'll learn to time your speech to provide plenty of spaces where your interlocutor can cut away if they so wish. E.g., if you've told 3 pithy little stories which were each less than 15 seconds, they will feel at ease staying for one more before they go away. If on the other hand they aren't able to predict whether your next story is going to be a fun 10 seconds or an excruciatingly dull 5 minute rabbit hole, things are going to get awkward real quick. Finally, if you don't listen you won't sell shit so you will have a nice daily scorecard on your progress. 1: It's amazing how well this works. Hard-selling commissions must be so razor thin that the salespeople can't even spend 30 seconds to build normal rapport with another human being. I've literally never had the experience of an employee starting out as a human being and then pivoting to aggressive/manipulative tactics. But maybe all the salespeople who excel at that are employed by big pharma and since I'm not a doctor I don't have contact with them. |