Every friend group seems to have one person other people describe, almost apologetically, as having “good energy.” Nobody can quite explain what that means, so the compliment tends to get chalked up to charisma, or some warmth you either have or don’t. But watch that person in an actual conversation and the mystery mostly dissolves. There are three specific things they keep doing that most people skip. None of them require charm. All three are just habits, which means they can be learned by anyone willing to notice they’re missing.
The rest of this piece is about those three habits: pointing out something specific someone else did well, resisting the urge to jump into a silence with a story of their own, and following a first question with a second one instead of moving on. None of them are complicated on their own. What’s interesting is how consistently research on relationships, interviewing, and everyday conversation keeps landing on exactly these three moves.
1. Naming what someone else did well
The easiest version of this habit to spot is a compliment that’s actually specific. Instead of “good job” or “nice work,” the person with good energy says something closer to, “the way you handled that objection on the call was smooth, you didn’t get defensive once.” It sounds like a small difference, but naming the specific thing does something a generic compliment can’t. It tells the other person their instinct, not just their outcome, was noticed and worth repeating.
A study led by psychologist Shelly Gable at the University of California, Santa Barbara, looked at what happens inside relationships when one person shares good news with another. Gable and her co-authors found that responses which were both active and constructive, meaning the listener asked follow-up questions and showed real interest instead of a distracted “that’s nice,” predicted better relationship quality than any of the other response styles they measured. The researchers described this style as one where a partner “often asks a lot of questions and shows genuine concern about the good event,” rather than changing the subject or offering a flat, low-energy acknowledgment. That gap, between noticing and merely nodding, is close to what people mean when they describe someone’s presence as energizing.
None of this requires flattery. If anything, vague praise is easier to shrug off than specific praise, because it could apply to almost anyone. Pointing at one particular thing a person did, the joke that landed, the extra hour they put in, the calm way they delivered bad news, tells them exactly what to keep doing. It also signals that someone was actually paying attention rather than waiting for their turn to talk, which turns out to be the thread running through all three habits on this list.
2. Letting a silence sit
The second habit shows up in what someone doesn’t do. When a conversation hits a natural pause, most people rush to fill it, often with a related story about themselves. Someone mentions a rough stretch at work and the reflex is to say, “that reminds me of when I,” and the conversation quietly changes owners. People with good energy tend to let that gap sit a beat longer than feels comfortable, which gives the other person room to keep going instead of handing the floor back too soon.
Robert Caro, the biographer behind a decades-long project on Lyndon B. Johnson, has talked about this exact tactic as a working tool rather than a personality trait. In an NPR interview about his interviewing habits, Caro described writing “SU,” for shut up, across the top of his notebook pages as a reminder to himself. “So silence is a great weapon,” he explained, describing what happens when he resists the urge to jump back in after asking a question. “After a while, there’s a human need to fill silences. So they’ll fill it by telling you what you want to know.”
Caro is describing an interview technique built for getting reluctant sources to talk, but the underlying mechanic works the same way over coffee or at a dinner table. Silence doesn’t need to be patched the moment it opens up. It’s often the exact moment someone decides whether to go one layer deeper or stop at the easy, surface-level answer. Jump in too fast, and that decision gets made for them.
3. Asking the second question
The third habit is the easiest to test on yourself, because it’s mostly a matter of counting. After someone answers your first question, do you ask something about their answer, or do you steer toward a new topic, or start talking about yourself instead? Karen Huang, who was a Ph.D. student at Harvard when she led a series of studies on this exact behavior, found that the number of follow-up questions someone asks in a conversation is one of the strongest predictors of how much the other person ends up liking them.
One of Huang’s studies used recorded speed-dating conversations. Speaking to NPR about the results, she summed up the finding this way: “After each date, they reported whether they wanted to go on a second date with that person. And we found that the number of follow-up questions one asks predicts the partner’s willingness to go on a second date.” Total talking time didn’t predict much on its own, and neither did switching to brand-new topics. It was specifically the follow-up question, the kind that only makes sense if you were listening closely enough to the first answer to be curious about it, that moved the needle.
That’s the gap between a question and a follow-up question. “What do you do for work” is something anyone can ask a stranger. “Wait, how did you end up doing that” only occurs to you if you were tracking the first answer closely enough to notice there was more underneath it. It’s a small distinction to make in the moment, and it’s the one that tells the other person the conversation is genuinely about them, at the exact point where most people have already started planning what they want to say next.
To sum up
These three habits don’t depend on some rare talent for warmth. They’re closer to three defaults anyone can set on purpose: notice the specific thing, resist the reflex to redirect, ask what’s underneath the first answer.
All three fit inside a single ordinary conversation without much extra effort, which is probably why the people who run them consistently just get called warm, when what they’ve actually built is a short list of specific, practiced habits.
