This is an IHeart podcast.

Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of IHeart Radio.

Good morning. This is Laura.

Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.

Today's tip is that conversation breeds conversation.

The more you talk with a person, the more you have to say to each other.

Far from exhausting topics, when you know about a person's daily life,

you are able to pick up on these threads and expand from there.

So plenty of people with full lives would like to have closer relationships with their extended

families. But when they find time in their busy schedules to get together, they sometimes

discover that they don't have much to talk about.

After a lackluster family dinner, you might decide that you are just not that close to the

relatives and downgrade your relationship to a we will see you at Thanksgiving sort of thing.

But I think there is another option.

My best of both worlds co-host, Sarah Hart Unger, noted that with her extended family,

she has found that the more you talk, the more you have to say.

She has a group text going with her family where they share details of daily life.

So when she sees her family,

they already know about their recent search for a car, her foray into Pilates, and she knows the headlines of their lives, too. All of this suggests conversation topics that can be

continued. Now, I know that group texts could get a bad reputation.

It is true that some people hijack them or post a lot,

but you can be judicious about these things.

...