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 about a question that can help you feel a little closer with someone.

If there is a person you often see in a particular place, you can ask,

what do you do when you're not here?

This question will help you get to know them a little better.

We tend to know people within specific contexts like work, volunteering, exercise, parents of the

kids in your kids' school or activities, neighbors, book club, church, and so forth.

But it's easy not to know what's important to people when they are not in the context you share.

You can build the relationship by asking about that.

So as you are figuring out your arsenal of small talk questions, add this one in.

What do you do when you're not here?

I think this is a great question for a few reasons. The biggest one is that

it doesn't make assumptions like a lot of other questions do. I hear from a lot of stay-at-home

parents who find it awkward when people ask, what do you do? Because they know that question usually

means, what do you do for paid work? This question can also be awkward for people who are

out of work and may not really want to talk about it right then. It's also very open-ended. The person can

choose what part of the rest of their life they want to talk about. Maybe a parent wants to talk about

his job or all the things he's doing with his kids, but maybe he'd like to talk about. Maybe a parent wants to talk about his job or all the things he's doing with his

kids, but maybe he'd like to talk about his recreational soccer league, or that he just marched

...