Ever killed a conversation by asking too much, too soon? Learn the funnel questions conversation technique to keep dialogue flowing smoothly without making others feel interrogated. Patrick King breaks down how to ask better questions, guide deeper conversations, and use paraphrasing technique to actually listen—so people want to keep talking to you.

⏱ CHAPTERS
0:00 Intro
2:16 Funnel Questions Overview
5:06 Using Funnel Questions in Various Scenarios
8:05 Post-Game Interviews and Question Techniques
13:02 Avoiding Generic Questions for Meaningful Conversations
18:43 Assisting People’s Stories in Conversations
22:02 Patrick King’s Approach to Eliciting Stories

In this episode, Patrick King shares his expertise on enhancing your social skills and communication through powerful questioning techniques like funnel questions and therapeutic questioning. Learn how to master effective questioning and improve your conversational flow with tips on asking better questions, paraphrasing technique, and more, all aimed at helping you have deeper conversations that showcase your emotional intelligence in every interaction.

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Have you ever someone a big question, a personal question way too early and watch the whole conversation just die on the spot?
It happens more than people like to admit.
If you want to know how to ask better questions and keep a conversation going, you’re in the right place.
Today’s a bit of a toolkit episode.
Three different ways Patrick King says you can ask better questions, depending on the type of conversation you’re actually in.
Here’s what’s coming up.
First up, funnel questions from how to speak effectively.
Patrick King uses a job interview to walk through this, and it’s a perfect example.
Nobody wants to feel interrogated on day one.
Here’s how he lays it out.
Funnel questions are what they sound like.
Questions that guide information in increasing detail down a narrowing path.
Like a funnel, the process begins wide and broad with open questions, and steadily narrows to a point with closed questions.
Each question leads on from the last,
but is a little more narrowed in scope, becoming progressively more closed and detailed.
Using such a technique, you ease the other person into answering more direct and specific questions while balancing this with invitations to supply additional information as they go.
Because it strikes a balance between probing or interrogating and genuine conversation, this technique is most often used in occupational settings.
For example, job interviews.
Imagine that an interviewer attempts first to put the interviewee at ease by asking very general, open-ended questions, how they are, whether they found the journey to the office okay, etc.
This soothes any tension.
Slowly and gradually, the interviewer leads in increments to more and more targeted questions.
So, how are you finding this amazing Californian sunshine?
Hope the big move is going well.
What’s the neighborhood like?
Great.
So if I recall correctly, your previous job was in our branch in Minnesota.
Can you give me a rundown of your time there?
I’m interested in hearing more about your work with fundraising around that time.
Can you tell me more about the team members?
Can I ask how much you were able to raise?
You can see the funnel at work if you attempt to answer these questions.
You’ll see that the answers get progressively shorter, but more specific as they go, responding with something like $800,000 at the end.
Importantly, this is an easier and gentler way to ask such questions.
Consider how uncomfortable it would have been to ask the final question first.
The interviewee might have felt put on the spot or interrogated, whereas with some warm-up questions that naturally lead from one to the other, this question is not likely to feel like an imposition.
Here’s a summary of how to ask fun questions.
One, begin with open-ended questions.
Think of these, not even as questions, but as invitations to share information, as the other person wishes to share it.
2.
Ask for additional explanation.
Ask for clarification based on the answer to the above question.
These are questions that help you understand the motivations, reasoning, and cause-effect relationships behind certain situations, as well as the person’s perspective on it all.
You’re not merely being polite and making small talk.
You use the answers you’re given to inform your next questions.
Three, ask for more details according to what you’re told.
Narrow the funnel one step at a time.
You might ask for examples, justifications, explanations, or more specific instances or pieces of evidence or support.
Take another step closer to the specific information you’re looking for.
This may require just one question or it can take many depending on the topic.
four, finally, reverse the funnel.
This final step is optional, but you can also start working the funnel in reverse again, using the very detailed answer you got to inspire another funnel that begins with broad questions again.
For example, after you’re told that the fundraising team generated $800,000, you can immediately sit back in your chair and say, okay, that’s impressive.
How did you do that?
The conversation continues with you getting the information you want, but without badgering or leading the other person.
Funnel questions are not only for formal or professional situations, however, they can be used anytime you’re trying to extract some information from someone, but in a way that is easy, comfortable, and personable.
A psychiatrist, for example, might need to find out whether a patient had suicidal thoughts.
But this is a difficult question to ask, and so it’s best to lead into it with a long series of funnel questions.
The psychiatrist doesn’t rush through the conversation and genuinely listens to answers, i.e.
doesn’t give the impression that they are hunting down just one desired response.
Gently, the psychiatrist keeps zoning in on those aspects of the patient’s answer that will most likely lead to ideas around depression and suicide.
Near the end of the funnel, the psychiatrist begins to use words like specifically and exactly to continue narrowing down.
But with the psychiatrist’s inviting, encouraging language and a genuine desire to listen, the patient never feels manipulated or hurried along and the psychiatrist gets the information they want.
In your own conversations, whoever you’re speaking to and whatever information you’re trying to get, keep the image of a funnel in mind.
Now think about this from the other side for a second.
Imagine someone you just met, corners you with, so what do you actually want out of life?
Like some kind of conversational bulldozer.
You would just back away slowly.
Now the fix isn’t complicated, but it does take some patience.
You let the broad questions do their job first.
ease someone in, let them get comfortable, and the specific stuff you actually want to know tends to come out on its own without anyone feeling cornered.
That’s really the whole idea here.
Now this isn’t just an interview trick.
Anyone who has to ask a hard question for a living, like a therapist, a doctor, even a good friend checking in on someone, leans on the same gentle narrowing.
You don’t open with the hardest question.
You earn your way there, one step at a time.
Second technique, and it pairs nicely with the funnel.
Don’t just ask better follow-ups.
Ask a question that can only be answered with a story in the first place.
Patrick King likes to use the example of a sports interview.
Think about it for a second.
Reporters in a locker room or after a game somehow managed to get a coherent, usable answer out of someone who just ran a marathon or won a championship and can barely breathe.
Here’s how he says they pull that off.
Most of the focus with stories is usually on telling them.
But what about soliciting them from others and allowing them to feel as good as you do when a story lands well?
What about stepping aside and giving other people the spotlight, an underrated skill in conversation and life in general?
Well, it’s just a matter of how you ask for others’ stories.
There are ways to make people gab for hours and approaches where people will feel compelled to give a terse one-word answer.
For instance, when you watch sports, one of the most illogical parts is the post-game or post-match interview.
These athletes are still caught up in the throes of adrenaline, out of breath, and occasionally drip sweat onto the reporters.
It’s not a situation conducive to good stories, or even answers.
Yet, when you’re watching a broadcaster interview an athlete, does anything odd strike you about the questions they ask?
The interviewers are put into an impossible situation and usually walk away with decent sound bites, at the very least, not audio disasters.
Their duty is to elicit a coherent answer from someone who is mentally incoherent at the moment.
How do they do that?
They’ll ask questions like, so tell me about that moment in the second quarter.
What did you feel about it?
And how did the coach turn it around then?
As opposed to how’d you guys win?
Or how did you turn this match around, come back and pull out all the stops and grab the victory at the very end?
As opposed to how was the comeback?
The key?
They ask for a story rather than an answer.
They phrase their inquiry in a way that can only be answered with a story, in fact.
Reporters provide the athletes with detail, context, and boundaries to set them up to talk as much as possible instead of providing a breathless one word answer.
It’s almost as if they provide the athletes with an outline of what they want to hear and how they can proceed.
They make it easy for them to tell a story and simply engage.
It’s like if someone asks you a question, but in the question tells you exactly what they want to hear as hints.
Sometimes we think we’re doing the heavy lifting in a conversation, and the other party isn’t giving us as much to work with, but that’s an excuse that obscures the fact we aren’t making it easy for them.
They might not be giving you much, but you also might be asking them the wrong questions, which is leading them to provide terrible responses.
In fact, if you think you’re shouldering the burden, you are definitely asking the wrong questions.
Conversation can be much more pleasant for everyone involved if you provide fertile ground for people to work in.
Don’t set the other person up to fail and be a poor conversationalist.
That will only make you invest and care less and cause the conversation to die out.
When people ask me low effort vague questions, I know they probably aren’t interested in the answer.
They’re just filling the time in silence.
to create win-win conversations and better circumstances for all.
Ask for stories the way the sports broadcasters do.
Ask questions in a way that makes people want to share.
Stories are personal, emotional, and compelling.
There’s a thought process and narrative that necessarily exists.
They are what show your personality and are how you can learn about someone.
They reveal people’s emotions and how they think.
Last but not least, they show what you care about.
Compare this with simply asking for closed-ended answers.
These answers are often too boring and routine for people to care.
They’ll still respond to your questions, but in a very literal way, and the level of engagement won’t be there.
peppering people with shallow questions puts them in a position to fail conversationally.
It’s the difference between asking, what was the best part of your day so far?
Tell me how you got that parking space so close instead of just, how are you?
When you ask somebody the second question, you’re looking for a quick uninvolved answer.
You’re being lazy and either don’t care about their answer or want them to carry the conversational burden.
When you ask somebody one of the first two questions, you’re inviting them to tell a specific story about their day.
You are encouraging them to narrate the series of events that made their day great or not.
And your query can’t really be covered with a one word answer.
Another example is, what’s the most exciting part of your job?
How does it feel to make a difference like that?
Instead of simply asking them the generic, what do you do?
When you only ask somebody what they do for a living, you know exactly how the rest of the conversation will go.
Oh, I do X.
What about you?
A final example is, how did you feel about your weekend?
What was the best part?
It was so nice outside, instead of just how was your weekend?
Prompting others for stories instead of simple answers gives them a chance to speak in such a way that they feel emotionally invested.
This increases the sense of meaning they derive from the conversation.
It also makes them feel you are genuinely interested in hearing their answer because your question doesn’t sound generic.
Consider the following guidelines when asking a question.
One, ask for a story.
Two, be broad, but with specific directions or prompts.
Three, ask about feelings and emotions.
Four, give the other person a direction to expand their answer into and give them multiple prompts, hints and possibilities.
Five.
If all else fails, directly ask, tell me the story about.
Imagine that you want the other person to inform your curiosity.
Other examples include the following.
One.
Tell me about the time you versus how was that?
Two.
Did you like that versus how was it?
Three.
You look focused.
What happened in your morning versus how are you?
Let’s think about what happens when you elicit and provide personal stories instead of the old tired automatic replies.
You say hello to your coworker on Monday morning and you ask how his weekend was.
At this point, you’ve catalogued what you will say in case he asks you the same.
Remember, a person probably doesn’t care about the actual answer, good or okay, but they would like to hear something interesting.
But you never get the chance because you ask him, how was your weekend?
Tell me about the most interesting part.
I know you didn’t just watch a movie at home.
He opens up and begins to tell you about his Saturday night when he separately and involuntarily visited a strip joint, a funeral, and a child’s birthday party.
That’s a conversation that can take off and get interesting, and you’ve successfully bypassed the unnecessary and boring small talk that plagues so many of us.
Most people love talking about themselves.
Use this fact to your advantage.
Once someone takes your cue and starts sharing a story, make sure you’re aware of how you’re responding to that person through your facial expressions, gestures, body language, and other nonverbal signals.
Since there’s always at least one exciting thing in any story, focus on that high point and don’t be afraid to show that you’re engaged.
One quick tip to show that you’re involved and even willing to add to the conversation is something I call pinning the tail on the donkey.
There’s probably a better name for it, but it’ll suffice for the time being.
The donkey is the story from someone else, while the tail is your addition to it.
It allows you to feel like you’re contributing, it makes other people know you’re listening, and it turns into something you’ve created together.
In essence, you’re taking the impact that someone wants to convey and you’re amplifying it.
You are assisting them in their own storytelling.
They want to extract a specific reaction from you and you are going above and beyond with the tale.
People will actually love you for it because when you do this, your mindset becomes focused on assisting people’s stories and letting them have the floor.
Here’s an example.
Bob’s story.
I went to the bank and tripped and spilled all my cash, making it rain inadvertently.
Tail.
Did you think you were Scrooge McDuck for a second?
When you make a tail, try to hone in on the primary emotion the story was conveying, then add a comment that amplifies it.
The story was about how Bob felt rich, and Scrooge McDuck is a duck who swims in pools of gold doubloons, so it adds to the story and doesn’t steal Bob’s thunder.
Sabrina’s story.
After I ate lunch, I ran into the president of my company, and he said he remembered me because of the great ideas I had at the last meeting.
Tale.
Just like you were winning a beauty pageant.
The story about how Sabrina felt flattered and hopeful, and so the concept of a beauty pageant, amplifies these emotions.
Get into the habit of assisting other people’s stories.
It’s easy, witty, and extremely appealing because you’re helping them out.
Takeaways
Captivating people usually refers to telling a story that leaves them listening like children in a good way.
Storytelling is a big topic that is often made overly complex, but there are many ways of creating this feeling in small, everyday ways.
To captivate others is no easy feat, but the material and ability lies within all of us.
We just have to know where it is and how to access it.
An easy way to imagine everyday storytelling is that your life is a series of stories.
Many stories, to be exact.
Instead of giving one word answers, get into the habit of framing your answers as a story with a point.
It creates more engagement, lets you show your personality, and allows for smoother conversation.
The bonus here is that you can prepare these before a conversation.
The one-to-one-to-one method of storytelling is to simplify it as much as possible.
The impact of a story won’t necessarily be stronger if it’s ten sentences versus two sentences.
Therefore, the one-to-one-to-one method focuses on the discussion and reaction that occurs after a story.
A story can be composed solely of one, one action, two, one emotion to be evoked and three, a one sentence summary.
Don’t get lost rambling and also make sure your listener feels that they are fully participating in the conversation.
The story spine is more or less the formula for every movie that exists.
It’s a simple framework that you can use in your everyday stories and conversations because it teaches you what emotional beats exist in a story.
There’s the status quo, the event that kicks things off, the set of consequences for changing the status quo, the climax or resolution, and then what happens after the fact.
Stories can also be the basis for an inside joke.
When you think about it, an inside joke is something that comes up multiple times with the same person and evokes a positive emotion.
It’s the same topic brought up in a different context.
Thus, you just need to call back to a story through a conversation, and there’s a good chance it will stick as a, remember when we talked about?
Moment.
The more you use it, the more a unique bond is created between only the two of you.
Improving your storytelling ability is important, but what about eliciting stories from others?
You can phrase your questions carefully to ask for stories rather than answers from people, which is a simple way to make conversation easier and more enjoyable for everyone involved.
There are ways to make people open up to you and want to keep gabbing.
Remember the lesson we learned with the 111 method in pinpointing the emotions that people are trying to evoke.
To amplify this, you can pin the tail on the donkey and strategically add on to people’s stories.
Now notice the shape of that.
A specific detailed question with a built-in direction.
Instead of something lazy like, who was your weekend?
You’re basically handing the other person an outline and inviting them to fill it in.
Do that, and you’ll never get stuck with a one-word answer again.
Once someone’s telling you that story, don’t just nod along.
That pinning the tail on the donkey bit is worth stealing on its own.
Find the emotion in what they’re telling you and hand them a line that amplifies it instead of trying to top it.
Now, quick heads up before this last one because it might sound like it contradicts everything we just said.
It doesn’t.
It’s just a different tool for a different situation.
Funnel questions start broad and narrow down, but this next technique, which we’re pulling from the introvert survival guide, actually runs in the opposite direction, specific first and broad after.
If you’re low on social energy and just need an easy structure to lean on, here’s Patrick King’s approach.
As the previous point mentioned, the part about social interactions that drain your social battery is really responding on providing your own material, such as telling a story, or just talking about your day.
Being creative, weighty, and original are cognitively draining, not to mention quite stressful.
Asking questions of other people ranks far, far lower on how it drains your social battery.
It represents a more passive role versus active role in answering questions.
Think about a job interview and how much more the interviewee is expected to talk and feels the pressure.
You should strive to be on the more relaxed side of the interviewer.
In other words, to make conversations less effort, turn into the question master.
People enjoy talking about themselves and what interests them.
So if you can ask questions that convey your interest in them, you’ll be set for a while.
In fact, many people will experience you as more interesting precisely because you are interested.
Without spending any extra energy, you come across as engaged, thoughtful, and receptive.
And to be honest, people want that in a conversation partner more than they want someone who can think up funny jokes on the fly.
Once the last time you asked someone five questions in a row, does that feel weird or uncomfortable?
If you mentally answered yes, you clearly don’t ask many questions and are putting yourself into the active role in a conversation of answering questions.
Here’s my suggestion for extending your social battery.
No matter how the other person replies, you will ask them four questions.
Then after the four questions, share something about yourself.
There’s essentially a ratio of four to one of talking about the other person to talking about yourself.
Even if you know you should ask more questions, sometimes it can be hard to think of what to ask, effectively fatiguing you and undermining the whole thing.
So instead of struggling with that on the fly, here’s an effective template of sorts for asking more effective questions.
Specific question, specific question, broad question, broad question.
Specific questions are about specific details and components of a topic.
If you’re talking about tables, specific questions would be where you bought it, how much it cost, what the material is, why you bought this particular table, or who paid for it.
You’re asking for distinct pieces of information and facts.
Broad questions are when you zoom out on a topic and try to understand the context around it.
If you’re talking about tables, broad questions would be the motivation for a new table, home decor, the thought process, or why the old table was inadequate.
You’re asking for thoughts and reasons, as opposed to information and facts.
You don’t have to use this template, but it does behoove you to ask more questions and occasionally put more pressure and conversational burden on other people.
It’s also possible to simply pay attention to what you’re told and let the other person guide you.
In effect, you’re paraphrasing what they say to you in the form of a question, inviting them to speak more and go deeper.
For example, someone could say they’ve spent the morning doing their driving test and now they’re exhausted, even though they’re happy to have passed.
So, to be clear, this isn’t a better or worse version of the funnel.
It’s built for a completely different problem.
Funnel questions are for when you’re steering someone towards something specific.
The question-master ratio is for when you just don’t have much social energy left and need a low-effort script to fall back on.
Same toolbox, different job.
Three ways to ask better questions and three different jobs for each one.
Narrow the funnel when you’re working towards something specific.
Ask for a story when you want more than a one word answer.
And lean on the question-master ratio when you just need an easy, low-effort structure to fall back on.
All three of these come from Patrick King’s books, How to Speak Effectively, The Art of Woody Bantor, and the Introvert Survival Guide, and it’s worth grabbing either of these if anything clicked for you.
Now, section two was your favorite.
The Art of Woody Bantor audiobook spotlight is the one to watch next, and we’ll link it in this episode.
And if you like straight talk breakdowns like this one from author Besides Patrick King II, that’s what my main channel is for.
It might be worth a look.
The percussionist Evelyn Glennie has spent her career listening in ways most of us never have to.
As she put it, hearing is a form of touch.