Being a good conversationalist is a skill that can be learned.
“We should explicitly teach people, from a young age, how to be good conversationalists,” David Brooks writes in his book: How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.
But we do not.
“In an attempt to make up for this lack, I’ve spent some time talking with conversation experts and reading their books,” David writes.
Here are five “nonobvious ways” to excel at becoming a better conversationalist:
Strategy #1: TREAT ATTENTION AS AN ON/OFF SWITCH, NOT A DIMMER.
“We’ve all had the experience of telling somebody something and noticing that they are not really listening,” David observes.
“It feels like you’re sending a message out to them and they’re just letting it fly past.”
How do we respond? Most often, we become self-conscious, begin stumbling, and finally peter out.
As listeners, then, we are wise to view our attention as “all or nothing,” David suggests.
“If we’re here in this conversation,” he notes, “we’re going to stop doing anything else and just pay attention to this. We’re going to apply what some experts call the SLANT method: sit up, lean forward, ask questions, nod your head, track the speaker.
“Listen with our eyes,” he recommends. Because “that’s paying attention 100 percent.”
Strategy #2: BE A LOUD LISTENER.
“When another person is talking,” David suggests, we “want to be listening so actively that we’re practically burning calories.”
Exhibit one: Watch and listen to Oprah Winfrey as she interviews someone.
We “can see her feeling, in her highly reactive way, the emotions the other person is describing,” David notes.
“Her mouth hangs open in surprise, her eyes light up with delight. When the conversation takes a happy turn, she volleys back musical verbal affirmations: “Aahh…oooh…eeee,” a subtle chorus of encouragements.
“When the conversation takes a sad or serious turn, she wears a concerned look on her face and sits in attentive silence, allowing a slowing pause that invites deeper reflection.”
Exhibit two: David’s friend Andy Crouch, “who listens to other people as if he were a congregant in a charismatic church. While we’re talking, he fills the air with grunts and ahas, amens, hallelujahs, and cries of “Preach!”
“I love talking to that guy,” David reflects.
As listeners, why is paying 100% attention and being an active, loud listener so important?
Because “everyone in a conversation is facing an internal conflict between self-expression and self-inhibition,” he notes. “If we listen passively, the other person is likely to become inhibited. Active listening, on the other hand, is an invitation to express.”
Strategy #3: FAVOR FAMILIARITY.
Our assumption might be that people like to talk about new and unfamiliar things.
Wrong, David suggests. “In fact, people love to talk about the movie they have already seen, the game they already watched,” he writes.
The social psychologist Gus Cooney discovered that there is a “novelty penalty” around new topics or concepts. “People have trouble picturing and getting excited about the unfamiliar,” David surmises, “but they love to talk about what they know.
To kick-start a conversation, we can look for ideas of things with which the other person is most connected.
“If they’re wearing a T-shirt from their kid’s sports team, ask about that,” David suggests. “If they’ve got a nice motorcycle, lead with a question about it.”
Strategy #4: MAKE THEM AUTHORS, NOT WITNESSES.
“People aren’t specific enough when they tell stories. They tend to leave out the concrete details,” David notes.
As listeners, how can we help? By asking specific questions, we allow the person to revisit the moment in a more evocative way—“Where was your boss sitting when he said that? And what did you say in response?”
We want to know not just what happened, but how the person experienced what happened.
We might say: “How are you feeling about being laid off?” “Was your first thought ‘How will I tell my family?'” “Was your dominant emotion dread, humiliation, or perhaps relief?”
But we don’t stop there. We ask how the other person is feeling now about what they experienced then: “In retrospect, was getting laid off a complete disaster, or did it send you off on a new path that you’re now grateful for?”
David’s larger point: “Sometimes things that are hard to live through are very satisfying to remember. It’s our job to draw out what lessons they learned and how they changed as a result of what happened.”
Strategy #5: DON’T FEAR THE PAUSE.
“In some conversations,” David notes, “it’s fun when everything is rapid-fire. People are telling funny stories or completing each other’s sentences. But other times, somebody says something important that requires reflection.”
For her book You’re Not Listening, Kate Murphy interviewed Matt Hovde, the artistic director of the Second City improv club to understand how improv comedians listen to one another.
Matt held his arm straight out and asks, “If a story someone is telling you starts at the shoulder and ends at the fingertips, where do we stop listening?”
For most people” It’s somewhere around the elbow when they stop really listening and start thinking about what they will say to respond.
“This is a problem,” Matt shares, “because speaking and listening involve many of the same brain areas, so once you go into response mode, your ability to listen deteriorates.”
What lessons can we learn from the practice of improv to improve our conversations?
“Like a good improv comedian, a good conversationalist controls her impatience and listens to learn, rather than to respond,” David suggests.
“That means she’ll wait for the end of the other person’s comment, and then pause for a few beats to consider how to respond to what’s been said, holding up her hand, to the other person doesn’t just keep on talking.”
Breathing in that extra breath creates time for deeper reflection.
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Which of David’s five “nonobvious ways” to excel at becoming a better conversationalist do I find compelling?
Action: Run an experiment today with at least one of his strategies.
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