Conversational Stability

Whenever I find myself in a free-flowing conversation with another (and not with a specific, preset topic established), the conversation tends to flow in one of three directions: about me, about my "co-talker", or about a subject external to both of us.

A conversation, I have found, can be a tricky thing. For what may seem to be a stable topic of discourse for one may be a rather unstable, bothersome area for another. The two sides either must be in sync with each other regarding what is being discussed, or they must somehow negotiate to informally divide the time spent talking between the two parties, to give each a turn being in his or her "comfort zone".

Personally, I feel the most comfortable talking with others about extraneous subjects, like the news, weather, or sports, than I do about myself. To be perfectly honest, I don't particularly care that much about what others outside my family are doing with their lives, and I likewise don't care too much to share what's going on in my life with them. So the folks that I tend to gravitate toward talking with informally are the ones who feel comfortable talking "outside themselves". But I have come to learn that there is an enormous number of people in the world who are utterly incapable of thinking outside themselves, much less talking on that level! To them, everything has to be brought down to their personal level, and if not, then it isn't worthy of consideration. With people like these, I either find myself being probed to irritation about my personal life or bored to death by their incessant chatter about themselves. But if I bring up something to them that happened in the news, it goes through one of their ears and out the other.

I like give-and-take with conversations, with the two sides maturely recognizing the need for giving (speaking) and taking (listening with expressed interest). Often there will be the ideal matchup of a "big talker" who finds a "big listener" to pour his or her heart out to. But I find it demeaning and insulting to be around someone who is only interested in expressing their views and experiences to me while giving me little or no opportunity to inject some of myself into the conversation (other than the mandatory cues "uh-huh","yes", "oh", and the like, to show that I'm still listening). It thus appears that there are quite a few people out there who feel that their lives are the only ones with significance, while people like me are only out there in a "supporting role" to bounce their precious opinions off of.

Dale Carnegie, you may already know, wrote a book several decades ago titled How to Win Friends and Influence People. Well, winning friends and influencing people may seem like an awfully hefty project, but how about me just learning to be a better conversationalist? Some of Carnegie's book goes down that road as well. The most important elements that he emphasizes are to express genuine interest in the other person and to emphasize the positive over the negative. Awfully simple, isn't it? But yet, how many people (including myself) actually apply these self-evident rules?!!