Hi, I'm Matthew Hussey, welcome to Love Life. It's a privilege to be able to offer you bite-sized bits of advice on this podcast that you can use every day.

But what if you're ready for a big transformation and you want to do it now?

You want to reinvent your career or finally find lasting love or break free from the self-doubt that's holding you back from living the abundant life you were meant to live.

If you're saying yes, Matt, that's me. I'm going to tell you exactly how to do just that at the end of today's show. So make sure you stay tuned.

First, let's get to today's episode.

Awkward silences. Let's talk about those. We all have them. We've all been prone to them in the past. It's one of the reasons that we get afraid of going into conversation in the first place.

We're incredibly concerned that at some point we're going to run out of things to say. The truth is the reason we have awkward silences is because we over-sensor ourselves.

We get incredibly worried about saying the wrong thing. Now I think of this kind of in the same way as I think of writer's block. When a writer gets writer's block, what it really comes down to is they're overly censoring themselves.

That's where writer's block comes from. It comes from trying to be a perfectionist about what you're writing. And one of the greatest ways to get over writer's block is to lower the standard for what you're writing down.

Stephen King said write for the waste paper bin. In other words, just write for the trash can. And if you do that, you'll be able to get words on the page.

And of course, the intelligent thing about that notion is once you start getting words on the page, you start to get into a flow state.

Once you've written down 10 bad ideas, you actually have a good shot at stumbling across an eleventh idea, which is a good idea.

Now the same is true in conversation. The reason we don't want to do that is because we don't want to say 10 stupid things in order to say one intelligent thing.

But of course, how do you start getting more witty? How do you start getting better in conversation, thinking of more interesting subjects to talk about, getting more natural in the way you flow in conversation?

It's by having more conversations that are of better quality. But in order to get to quality, you have to actually start going for quantity. In other words, get your practice in.

So Christopher Hitchens, one of my one of my big idols, he said be a self publisher, even in conversation.

So most people by the way are a self editor in conversation. They just self edit the entire time and they never actually get to publish it.

If you see someone you're attracted to, if you see someone that you know it would benefit your life to go and talk to, go and talk to them.

Don't self edit before you've even gone over there, actually go to self publish, go to talk to them. And if all else fails, if you can't think of anything to say, I have one quick cure for you.

And that's to get intensely curious about whatever area you want, whatever area they know about, whatever situation you're in, be curious about life.

People who are intensely curious about life never struggling conversation, because even if they don't have much knowledge in an area, they know how to ask a question.

And the best way to ask a question is earnestly. If you were to come across someone who knew far more about art than you did and you knew nothing about art.

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