Today we’re going to be dissecting a question I get a lot and that’s what specific things should you be talking about with your ex when you want them back.

Overall I’m going to go through five types of conversations you should be aiming to have with them.

1. Small Talk
2. Telling Stories
3. Sharing Opinions
4. Virgin Ground
5. Sharing Feelings

This shouldn’t exactly be new since I’ve talked a lot about this before.

Now, before I really get started and begin talking about those things, I feel it’s important to mention that if you’re in a space where you’re really kind of confused about what you should be doing next, you should sort of hit the pause button and take a look at a special quiz I put together.

The quiz is basically designed to tell you what kind of chance you have of getting ex back. After you take that quiz, you’ll learn things about what to do next or even if you should be trying to get your ex back. So it’s the ultimate perfect starting point for most everyone listening to this podcast.

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Lauren Asks; “What Should I Be Saying To My Ex To Make Our Conversations More Powerful?”

Hello, Chris.

My name is Lauren, and I first off want to thank you for your website, Ex Boyfriend Recovery. It’s helped me immensely in navigating some of the reactions and responses that I get from my ex in our communications.

I also really want to thank you for the information about the no contact rule. I did do the no contact rule for 30 days and then when even back into no contact for a while because I just didn’t feel ready after that.

But, I am hoping now that you can help me navigate where I am now. My ex and I have been broken up for about five months. We do speak here and there and the interactions are okay, but I’m trying to push through from okay to great so that we can have those kinds of connections that we need in order to build a better relationship because I do believe he’s the one, I believe he believes I’m the one, and I really want to make this work.

So I’m hoping you could help. Thank you so much, Chris. I appreciate any input you can give me. Thanks. Bye.

A Recap Of Laurens Situation

I want to take a minute and thank Lauren for having courage to come on and ask questions that are sometimes a little bit difficult to ask. Now, as always, what I always like to do is go through Lauren’s particular situation just to make sure that in case you guys skipped ahead or in case that I’m … Because I’m answering these organically in the moment, make sure I have a grip on everything that’s going on.

• So Lauren has been broken up with her ex for five months.
• She has heard about the no contact rule and has implemented it.
• But she actually didn’t feel ready when her no contact rule was over to reach out to him, so she stayed in the no contact rule a bit longer and then ended up reaching out to him.
• They’ve been speaking here and there after their no contact rule, but she can’t really seem to hook into having incredible, meaningful interactions that will move her sort of progress forward.
• So today we’re going to talk about that.

The Correct Way To Start A Conversation

I guess I’d first like to start off talking about what we’ve talked a lot in the past about, and that’s how we start a conversation.

So if you go through our website, Ex Boyfriend Recovery, or even go to our YouTube channel, which is the Chris Seiter YouTube channel, you’ll hear me talking a lot about how to start a conversation with your ex.

And that seems to be the big thing, the big buzzword everyone’s sort of obsesses about.

We’ve come up with sort of an idea of some of the conversations or starters that you can have.

So our kind of idea revolves around this idea of pattern interrupts or having a hook that your ex is going to want to respond to you, and usually that hook has to be something self-interested. Some of the most common examples that we’ve used in the past are starting off a conversation by saying,

“Have you heard the news?”

A great pattern interrupt, something that sort of has a curiosity hook embedded into it. He gets a text that says, “Hey, have you heard the news?” And immediately that intrigues him to want to respond.

Another really common one that we’ve seen work really well is,

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“I need your help but only really trust you to answer.”

This is self-interested, meaning it’s something that sort of strokes his ego a little bit. It also has a really interesting pattern interrupt and a curiosity hook embedded into it. What does she need help with?

And then finally, the very first original pattern interrupt,

I have a confession to make…

Which is sort of a double-edged sword if you don’t really have a great confession to make.

So like I’ve said, we’ve talked a lot about how to start conversations in the past.

But one thing that we’ve kind of glossed over a little bit, and maybe that’s my fault, but also it’s something that we kind of talk more about in the Ex Recovery Program.

And that’s this idea of once you have a conversation started, how do you keep it going?

How Do You Keep A Conversation Going Once You’ve Started It?

How do you keep it going and organically build value?

So that’s the next thing I’d like to talk about.

A lot of you guys will … How do I say this nicely?

A lot of you guys will force things that really aren’t meant to be forced when you’re having a conversation with your ex. And it’s not hard to see why. You’ve just been through this long period of no contact where you are wanting to talk to your ex so badly. And now that the moment is finally here, you just sort of want to rush to the end.

But what’s important for you to understand is that we’re a big believer in Ex Boyfriend Recovery with this idea of building value, but building it in an organic way.

So what do I mean by that? Well, ultimately your main goal is to convince your ex-boyfriend that he made a mistake in breaking up with you or that you need to be the number one priority in his life. And you really only do that by building value in his eyes.

So the thing that we tell women is that don’t try to accomplish this all in one conversation. I often use this example, which is featured prominently in the Ex Recovery Program, and that’s this concept of tide theory.

What Is Tide Theory?

Well, the analogy I use so often, you can even see in my a YouTube channel, even on this podcast, and even in the articles I write for Ex Boyfriend Recovery, you’ll hear me talk about this concept of when you go to the beach in the morning, the tide is pushing the waves up the beach at a certain level.

If you stay at the beach for the entire day, you’ll notice by end of the day the tide has pushed the waves all the way up to where maybe you had your towel when you went to the beach. This is such an incremental process that you don’t even notice it even as it’s happening.

It just happens organically. It happens in such a subtle and minute way that you’re not even aware of it.

When we say build value with your ex, that’s what we’re talking about. We want it to be this organic, slow process that’s … And that’s not going to happen overnight. Sometimes it can even take months.

But how do you have conversations that does this naturally? So what we’ve done through many different years of research and talking to our clients is we’ve sort of compiled a list of the five types of conversations that you can have with your ex.

Now, these conversations range from small talk to sharing feelings, but what’s important is that there’s a certain hierarchy that the conversations sort of fall into.

The Five Main Types Of Conversations

So, like I said, there’s five main types of conversations that you’re going to have with your ex. It’s important to remember that you’re going to have these conversations at different stages of the process. Because if you try to go from stage one to stage five, you’re just going to fall flat on your face.

That’s the big issue we see a lot of women sort of going into.

So what are these five types of conversations that will help you build value with your ex?

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Well, first up we have,

1. Small talk
2. Telling stories
3. Sharing opinions
4. Virgin ground
5. Sharing feelings.

Let’s talk a bit more in-depth about these five types of conversations.

Dissecting Small Talk

Now, what’s interesting is if you start at the beginning with small talk, small talk is a type of conversation that you can have with literally anyone, a stranger on the bus, a stranger that you’ve never talked to at work.

You can even have it with your parents, or your lover, or your best friends. Small talk is the universal conversation you can have with anyone, and it’s because there’s nothing risky about it.

A perfect example of small talk is, man, we’re having some great weather today. You’re talking about topics throughout small talk that aren’t going to offend anyone.

But, small talk more often than not is just usually to hook someone into a conversation.

It’s a way to break the ice.

Where really value starts to get being built is in the next level of conversation, and that’s telling stories.

Dissecting Telling Stories

So telling stories, I don’t think I have to do a lot of this, but storytelling is one of the biggest time honored traditions of the human race. It is something that we share with our ancestors when they were cavemen.

They would sit around the cave and draw pictures to tell stories or they would sit around the cave and tell stories about their day.

Stories captivate us. And stories can do so many things if you have or rather tell a story to your ex.

You can tell a story to your ex that makes him interested in talking to you more. You can tell a story to your ex that’s funny, meaningful, insightful, upsetting. There’s so many ways you can do it.

But here’s the thing, stories are usually things that you only tell strong acquaintances, I would say. You could tell a story to your boss. You can tell a story to a work colleague. But you’re not going to tell a story to a random stranger on a bus.

Usually, they have to get to know you before you’re comfortable telling a story. And the type of story that you tell someone who you’re aware of, someone who’s a friend is going to be different than the type of story that you’re telling to someone that you just met for the first time, for example.

You kind of have an idea of what they’re like. It’s not like you met them for the very first time just a minute ago. But maybe you’ve met them and have known their acquaintance for a couple of hours. You’re not going to tell them a super embarrassing, funny story.

You’re just going to tell them a story that makes you attractive, a story that makes them want to hear more.

Well, think of it like this.

When you’re talking and telling stories to your ex, at first, you don’t want to tell them stories that are a little too personal. You want to tell them stories that make them want to hear more. It’s like any good TV show.

We call this often the Zeigarnik effect, which is a concept that people remember interrupted or incomplete tasks better than completed ones.

So this is a huge thing.

I use this example all the time that Hollywood uses as they’re telling stories. Think of one of the most popular TV shows of all time, Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones, every single episode ends on a cliffhanger that makes you say, “I want to know what happens next.” Well, when you tell a story to your ex, that’s what you want him to say.

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But again, telling stories, you can only get so far with that. So let’s move up to the next rung of the organic value building conversation ladder, and that’s sharing opinions.

Dissecting Sharing Opinions

Now, sharing opinions is something that you do not do with anyone.

The old phrase or the old saying is that you will never … leave politics out of … leave your political beliefs out of meeting someone new because it just always ends up creating friction. That’s because it’s an opinion of yours. So usually you only share opinions when you know the person and know they’re vibing with you.

So you’re comfortable sharing opinions with your parents. Oftentimes, we get into arguments with our parents because we want to share our opinions and they don’t let us share our opinions. We’re comfortable sharing our opinions with our friends sometimes.

If you’re not comfortable sharing your opinions with your friends, that means you’re not very comfortable around that friend.

And most of the time, we’re comfortable sharing our opinions with people who we are romantic with. We want them to be opened up to us.

So if you’re at the stage, usually, the biggest mistake people make is when they start … They get through the no contact rule, and they start conversing with their ex over text message or over the phone.

They go right and start sharing their opinions. That’s a mistake. Because what you’re supposed to do is break the ice with some small talk, engage them with stories. And sometimes stories can last weeks.

You just sort of tell different stories or different things that you learned throughout the day, which is a type of story.

That’s all building a foundation of value.

Once that foundation is built and you trust in it, that’s when you start sharing your opinions, and it can be an opinion about anything. But generally speaking, you don’t want to go crazy about something that you know for a fact will upset your ex.

But, sharing opinions is a way of building on that foundation. But the next one is really the big one, and that’s virgin ground, the fourth rung of the ladder. Notice we haven’t gotten to sharing feelings yet because a huge strong foundation needs to be built before you truly share your feelings with your ex.

Dissecting Virgin Ground

Now, virgin ground is something that’s a little hard to describe, but here’s the way I try to describe it to most people. You’re looking to get your ex to talk to you about something that he’s never told to anyone before or things that he’s told very few people before.

So it’s sort of like only the two of you are in on this secret thing, and that really builds a close connection. And here is the best way to sort of talk on virgin ground. It’s this idea of reciprocation.

The last podcast episode I talked about these four pillars of attraction and how one of the pillars was reciprocation.

Reciprocation is where when I say I love you I’m expecting them to say I love you too or I love you back. That’s reciprocation. Well, oftentimes, getting an ex to say something or tell you something that he’s never told anyone before can be a little hard. So you have to break the ice first and you have to be the one to share something with him that you’ve never told to anyone before. And that builds sort of a strong bond.

And it’s important when you tell your ex something that you never told anyone before you literally follow it with saying,

“You know, I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone that before. You’re the first person I’ve ever told.”

It makes them feel special and more bonded to you. And what you’re looking for is for them to in turn reciprocate the behavior, to tell you something. Now, the trick here is that you can’t fish for it. Generally speaking, if you’ve done a really amazing job of small talk, you’ve done a really amazing job of telling stories and sharing opinions, it makes them more open to sharing little known details about their life.

Then once you’ve built a foundation of those four things, that’s when you share your feelings.

Dissecting Sharing Feelings

A huge mistake we see people making is jumping right from the no contact rule to sharing feelings.

Now, here’s the one prerequisite I tend to tell people when it comes to sharing their feelings. Only do it in person. It’s a lot more meaningful, and it’s not as … You kind of get a gauge on whether or not it’s okay.

You can gauge if they’re vibing you. But more often than not, if you’re doing things right, your ex will be the ones sharing their feelings with you first. I can’t tell you how often …

There was one client we had one time that … She was a mess. I’m not going to lie. She really, really struggled a lot with knowing exactly what to do and when to do it. We just sort of reiterate this concept of these conversations.

Make sure you’re building value in small talk, and stories, and opinions, virgin ground. She was doing a great job of that. And then finally the time came where the two of them saw each other in person. I think he invited her back to his house.

Whatever.

So they’re sitting there on the couch, and he literally just starts gushing his feelings towards her.

She tells me afterwards … She was like, “I was really so obsessed or worried about when I was supposed to share my feelings with him, and here he is sitting on the couch sharing his feelings with me, and I didn’t know what to do.” So that’s when it’s also important for you to reciprocate.

So more often than not, if you do a really great job of small talk, stories, opinions, virgin ground, your ex will be at a point where they want to share their feelings.

Now, it’s a lot more complicated than just dividing things up and do five different types of conversations, but think of it like this. These conversations categorize the types of things that you should be talking about and when you should be talking about them.

So hopefully that helps you, helps clarify the picture a little bit more of what you’re supposed to do to get the maximum results with your ex.