I’d always had a difficult time socializing / making small talk, so around my early 20s, for several weeks, I would stay after church service so I could listen to people make small talk and pay attention to the way word selection would seed / branch into the next topic of discussion. I then attempted to apply this to my own *thought processes when conversing.

I thought this was probably how everyone else had learned to converse in a natural manner.

*corrected a word