How To Stop Killing Conversations
Talking is hard. People are confusing. Making friends is difficult, and interacting with coworkers is tortuous.
You want to make friends, you want to reach out, but it's hard and every time you start a conversation it dies, or limps along until both you and the person you're talking to are looking for excuses to kill it and put it out of it's misery so you can both escape the increasingly awkward situation.
As an introvert who has suffered a lot of social anxiety in my time, let me share a few tricks I've learned over the years going through hundreds and thousands of excruciatingly painful conversations until I found something that works. I've kind of distilled the process.
ALWAYS ASK A QUESTION!!!
The first thing is to always leave your partner an opening. You need to let each other talk for a conversation to get off the ground, but it's more than that, really. You need to actively encourage each other to talk. The best way to do that is to ask questions.
Here are two examples of an introduction:
Example A
You: Hello.
Them: Hello.
You: Nice to meet you.
Them: Nice to meet you too.
Example B
Y: Hello, nice to meet you, how are you?
T: I’m doing well, yourself?
Y: I've been really well. How are you liking the weather?
T: I'm so happy the weather's finally getting cooler, I'm looking forward to pumpkin spice season. Do you like lattes?
Do you see how in Example A the conversation wasn’t going anywhere? It just kinda died, because there weren’t any openings for new topics, whereas in Example B, there were openings to keep the conversation going.
But what do you do if your conversation partner is as socially inept as you were two minutes ago and doesn't play along? All is not lost.
Example C
Y: Hello, so nice to meet you, how have you been doing?
T: I'm doing well.
Y: That's great, are you enjoying the nice weather, then?
T: Yeah. I'm glad it's finally fall, I'm looking forward to pumpkin spice lattes.
Y: I love pumpkin spice lattes! Pumpkin spice anything, really. I recently got the best pumpkin spice candle at the shop down the road, have you been there?
Even if they don't leave you an opening, you can usually make one. It may be difficult, especially when they don't give you much to work with. This is where having a go-to script is a life-saver--me, I always default to talking about the weather, so when in doubt, you can do that.* The important thing right now is to keep fostering the conversation, so once you bring up the weather, segue into a question. When they answer the question, make a brief comment or observation from your own experience and build off of that comment or observation to ask another question.
"But I don't want to make it about me. Doing that's bad, right?"
This is why that questions are important. If you haven't been asked a question, you kinda have to make it about you, you don't have a choice. But to keep from being an attention hog, follow up your shared experience or anecdote with another question.
Example D
T: I love pumpkin spice lattes
Y: Me too. I had the best pumpkin spice latte the other day at the cafe down the road, have you ever been there?
Now you've circled the conversation back around to them again, and you aren't taking the limelight. Sharing an experience is so important, you're trying to show that you understand, that you sympathize, that you relate.**
This really is the most important element of being a good conversationalist. You have to keep asking questions.
The one other thing I will touch on is introductions. DO NOT get into turn based combat.
Example E
Y: Hello
T: Hello
Y: Nice to meet you
T: Nice to meet you too.
Y: How are you doing?
T: I'm fine. You?
Y: Me too.
This will kill any possibility of continuing a conversation. Instead, get it all out of the way all at once, if at all possible.
Example F
Y: Hi, it's nice to meet you, how are you doing?
This is good, but this is better
Example G
Y: Hi, nice to meet you, how are you liking the weather?
Don't ask how they are doing, or if you do, before they can answer, follow it up with your placeholder (weather etc.) so they have to say some thing like
Example H
T: I'm fine, and I'm really liking the weather.
or
T: Not so great, the weather sucks.
Either of those options are much easier to work with than your basic "I'm fine."
Usually, if you can get past the introduction, you can get a conversation going. And then, even if you don't end up hitting it off with the person you're talking with, you at least don't leave the conversation feeling like you've died a thousand tiny deaths.
In fact, if you get past that introduction, you may have just made yourself a friend.
Remember folks, basically everyone around you is more afraid of you than you are of them, and in this benighted age no one has been taught conversation skills, so we are all pretty much in the same boat. (Unless you were born an extrovert, in which case we are all deeply envious and would probably kill you if we didn't need you in our sad and lonely lives so much.)
Have grace for one another, and for yourselves because talking with people is difficult.
Go forth, and stop killing conversations.
*If you are one of those awful people who likes to brag about how you hate small talk and only want to talk about important and meaningful things, I have one question: Do you ever have a conversation that lasts long enough to become meaningful? I thought not. Small talk is an important skill. Develop it.
**This is how you deal with sad or difficult situations too. When you want to show you sympathize with someone going through a hard time.
Example:
Y: How are you doing?
T: Not very well. My dog died last week.
Y: Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that. My own dog died last year and I still miss her a lot. How are you handling it?
Now you've circled the conversation back around to them again. You aren't making it about you.
If y'all want, next time I can share how to extricate yourself from a conversation.
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sometimes i really don't think we've fully absorbed the realization that humans are animals. we keep trying to find new and spectacular ways to delineate between us and them, even as we try to deconstruct the beliefs of past western science
first we were put above other animals, who in the name of science were declared nothing more than organic automatons devoid of personality. today we know this isn't true, that every animal is the culmination of billions of years of chance and choices, and then a lifetime of experience to fine tune the rest.
so the discussion moved to the question: why are we different? breaking ourselves down to try to separate out the True Human Experience. we have tools--but so do other animals. we build homes and cities--likes termites and coral. we are intelligent--but then, what even is intelligence? we have culture--and yet again, so do other animals.
so we venture in vain to other traits. humans must be uniquely violent, destructive, upheaving the ecosystems of the world in a way no other creature has
but hundreds of millions of years ago, photosynthesis evolved and spurred one of the worst extinctions earth has ever seen. a species can encounter a new habitat and spread like wildfire, sometimes as destructive as one as well.
so surely our systems and our hierarchies set us apart in their depth and complexity. but it's myopic, naive even to think that other creatures don't form their own complexities outside our purview. we see our complexity because we are born and raised in it, but it's hardly what makes us different.
and in this journey to find out what makes us so different, instead we've found out the many ways that we are similar. the way our brains are similar to those of other mammals, how our bodies are all stretched out from the same general base tweaked and formed over an inconceivable number of generations. how the further we trace ourselves back, the more and more animals we share ancestors with.
i don't know where I'm going with all this. i think im frustrated with our medicine, how so much of it is grounded not in biology but in our own culture.
when we see a human not performing well, we call them lazy. when it's an animal, then something must be wrong. we understand the physiology of other animals and treat them within those bounds, yet despite what we know about the human body the way we discuss it seems frustrstingly disconnected.
maybe it's because we can talk to each other and so we assume that we can verbalize the problems we're experiencing, but language is a dismal thing to base healthcare on when most of us don't even use the same words to describe things. it's a subjective, moving target, and it assumes that the patient themself knows what's wrong. we rely too much on the ability of a patient to describe what they are experiencing, and not enough on observations of their behaviour.
my dad's shoulder hurts. he dislocated it a while ago, and it never stopped bothering him. but when i watch him he holds both shoulders forward and tense. slouching has for a long time been deemed lazy and improper, but it doesn't line up--the way my father strives for a healthy, active body but can never seem to make it work. the way he loves to be active, the way he wants to exercise, to walk and run, but it seems no matter how hard he tries he can't.
he told me his shoulder hurts, but the more i watched the more i saw that he doesn't move with the relaxed, easy movements that a man who's as active as he is should be. a human is an animal that loves to walk, and in many ways we've developed anatomy to this end, from the balanced efficiency of our bipedal forms to the way we utilize momentum as the driving force of our movement. we have science that says all this, so why does this not seem to hold true for some people? and why are we looking at them and calling them lazy? why aren't we looking for something gone awry, like the way we would a dog with a limp? we wouldn't blame the dog for not standing up the way a dog should, so why does this not hold true for humans?
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