Ditch “How’s it going” — What You Should Be Asking Instead

“How are you?”

“How’s it going?”

“What have you been up to?”

“What do you do?”

These questions can be incredibly boring and tend to be accompanied by the same meaningless answers…

“I’m good” “Work is good” “Things are good” blah blah blah….

Perhaps we ask these questions out of politeness or maybe you genuinely do care how someone is doing — the point is we’ve been conditioned to ask these default questions whether we encounter an old friend or meet someone for the very first time.

In the hopes of getting to know others better and engage in more meaningful and memorable conversations, I decided to try a social experiment.

What would happen if I changed my first question from different variations of “How’s it going?” and instead asked a backpocket question.

Backpocket Questions

A backpocket question is designed to avoid a default response by inviting the other person to open up and share something meaningful or interesting you might otherwise have missed.

I created a variety of these style questions I could pull out of my proverbial backpocket to spice things up:

“What’s something you’re excited about right now?”

“What’s something you’re looking forward to?”