Falling in love with Table Topics questions

Table Topics is the impromptu speaking section of a Toastmasters club meeting where participants answer questions by speaking for one to two minutes. Making up excellent questions is hard. Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, so it’s appropriate to talk about romantic questions.

On January 9, 2015 there was a very popular article by Mandy Len Catron in the New York Times titled To fall in love with anyone do this. She wrote about applying a technique from an article by Arthur Aron et al titled The experimental generation of interpersonal closeness: a procedure and some preliminary findings which had appeared in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin way back in April 1997 (Volume 23, Issue 4).

That article had described a procedure where two people play a sharing game using 36 slips of paper, each with a question (organized into 3 increasingly personal sets). One reads the question, and then both do what it asks. They alternate who reads aloud. Here are the first twelve wonderful questions:

N01] Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?

N02] Would you like to be famous? In what way?

N03] Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? Why?

N04] What would constitute a ‘perfect’ day for you?

N05] When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?

N06] If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want?

N07] Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?

N08] Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common?

N09] For what in your life do you feel most grateful?

N10] If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?

N11] Take 4 minutes and tell your partner your life story in as much detail as possible. [In Toastmasters we would call this answer an Icebreaker Speech – the first prepared speech project presented by a novice].

N12] If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?

Another New York Times article had listed all the questions. Reader’s Digest also published the list.

This post was condensed from one at my Joyful Public Speaking blog on February 12, 2018.