The 7mindsets Social Framework

The craft of skilled socialization

Before gathering with people in a social set ting, you should compile 3-5 talking points to keep in mind when you are there. This does three things:

  1. It gives you confidence because you know deep inside that you have interesting information to contribute. You should hold these points close to your vest.
  2. It gives you conversation boosters that you can share when helpful, which makes you feel good in the process.
  3. It creates pillars for your frame of mind that you can also use to catch yourself if you trip socially.


Talking points are essentially pre-planned riffs that can be restated very easily. The words should melt in your mouth as you convey them. Be smart though, your talking points shouldn’t be used to get over on someone, but instead to get under them 😉 People will get very irritated if they see your ego-inflating every time you say something intelligent. Save the laughter for later if you have to.

The science of gathering talking points

Here is our recommendation for the type of talking points you should setup:

3 short points – Choose three topics or headlines and be able to state a key takeaway. Also, try to formulate an opinion on the topic or story.

2 long points –  Choose two topics or headlines and take a deeper dive so you can discuss them for 3-4 minutes each

We suggest using the news site AllTop for gathering talking points. Scan the headlines and hover over the ones that catch your interest to read the takeaways and pick up quick points. Don’t forget to click through and read portions of one or two full articles to pick up longer talking points.

You should scan through AllTop at least two or three times a week to collect points. We go through this exercise ourselves almost every day and post our talking points to the Today’s Mindset page. Please use our talking points if you don’t have time to prepare them on your own.

For sports news, you can use ESPN’s news feed. They have a breakdown of all the latest sports news by the league. For universal ideas, you can skim through our notebook.


You have to go through the exercise of prepping talking points at least every few days. We suggest this because:

  1. Your short-term memory doesn’t last very long so you will forget the details of your talking points in a week. Your short-term memory capacity only lasts a few days.
  2. The news cycle is so quick that your news points will be stale after one day anyways.

Before joining certain social settings, like hanging with the guys or talking politics, you should look over our Social Mindsets menu in the top navigation bar where we list collections of important talking points based on specific social situations. Note, we are periodically updating our existing collections and adding new ones.

You should definitely bookmark our Today’s Mindset page and our notebook on your smartphone so you can pull them up at any time of day and load ideas into your mind.

The art of balancing inner confidence with sounding smart

How, when, and if you should release your talking points is more of a psychological art than a science. If you keep your ideas in mind then you will have a better grip on your confidence. On the other hand, if you can convey your ideas in the right moments you will sound like a charming, smart person. So you have to find the right balance between holding the points in mind and narrating them.

When you do reveal your talking points, you have to do it naturally as opportunities present themselves in your conversations throughout the day. Otherwise, your intelligence may sound artificial. If no such opportunity presents itself, you can bring them up at a random time but you have to do so with a natural opening or connect them to something that was talked about earlier.