To put it bluntly, good conversational skills is a matter of life and death – A survival skill.
In what some call the deadliest accident in the aviation industry occurred in 1977 where a KLM flight and Pan Am Flight 1736 collided on the runway, leading to the death of 583 people. The accident is said to have resulted from multiple miscommunications amongst other factors. Although conversations go even deeper than communication, this is to give you a glance of how important or detrimental its implication can be.
One of the major reasons I first got very curious about how to have good conversations was because, at a certain period in my life I was having frequent difficult conversations. And I was not doing well at them at all. I knew something was wrong and I was going to lose another friend/ship unless something was done.
I thought I must be doing something wrong or there must be something I was not doing at all. Perhaps I was not only poor at difficult conversations, maybe I was not good at normal conversations as I thought or believed I was.
So, I began to reflect and think more about my conversations. After a conversation I would ask myself a couple of questions, how did that conversation go? Did I take time to learn something new from the other person, did I really understand them? Did I really listen to what they said and consider it or was I just waiting for my turn to say what I already knew and feel (and wasn’t going to change my mind anyways?) Or was I just there to respond?
It soon became clear that I wasn’t just bad at difficult conversation, but I was poor at normal conversations way more than I thought. This is where my inquiry about what makes a good conversation started. Which is also why this article is focused on conversations – what it is and how to get better at it.
What is a conversation?
A conversation is defined as a talk, especially an informal one between two or more people in which information(s) are exchanged.
A good conversation on the other hand is a mutual exchange of information that requires a balance between talking and listening.
You have to enter every conversation assuming that you have something to learn or something new to hear from the other person. As Celeste Headlee puts it, if people walk away from a conversation and have learned nothing from the other person, then that was not a successful conversation.
What is a conversation really about?
Emotions – Understanding – Empathy.
A good conversation is more about emotions, understanding each other (being understood) and empathy. Our new tech age of texting, tweeting and email preference over voice messages or in-person conversation makes this even more difficult. But often time a good conversation is more about these three elements than it is about logic. This is also why being smart does not make you good at conversations, being smart is said to actually make you more likely to be terrible at good conversations.
Showing emotion is not weakness neither is it unhealthy and the myth that it is both or either is terribly dangerous. Plus, understanding someone does not mean agreeing with them.
Back then, I would leave a conversation that’s gone bad wondering “why couldn’t he get that?” “How can she not see or understand this…?”
Most of the times when I say these, it is me poorly responding with a fact or making a logical argument as a response to what the other person must have said during our conversation (mostly without understanding their view or really listening to their views and considering it). But my logical response (and this is even me assuming they were logical for that matter) always made sense to me. The facts seemed obvious in my eyes forgetting or not knowing that most conversations are not about logic. And that an argument is not a conversation. So can communication be different from a conversation.
It is not clear to most people how bad they are at conversations. A lot of people think they are good at conversations than they are. The other surprising thing about a poor conversation that results from one relying too much on logic is that your facts are obvious to you, but also if you narrate the conversation to a third party wondering what you did or say wrong. It is easy for them to see your logic and the facts you present therefore agreeing with you. This of course is ignoring the fact that the other person’s experience from the conversation is often different from yours.
This idea is better explained by Celeste Headlee in her book, We need to talk
Highly educated people also tend to place a great deal of value on logic and discount the importance of emotion. You can’t win a debate with an emotional argument, of course, but conversation is not debate and human beings are inherently illogical. We are emotional creatures. To remove, or attempt to remove, emotion from your conversation is to extract a great deal of meaning and import.
For example, sometimes we use facts to respond to emotion. A friend starts to talk about his pending divorce, and we console him with, “Don’t feel bad. Almost half of marriages end in divorce anyway,” or we say, “Don’t worry. One psychologist says divorce can actually improve your kids’ chances at a lasting healthy relationship.” Both of those things are true, but they’re completely unhelpful to your friend who needs emotional support. A conversation is not a college lecture course or a TED talk. No matter how awkward it may feel to be on the listening end of someone’s heartbreak, escaping into logic is rarely the right response.
Approaching emotional problems with logic is a strategy that is doomed to failure. Logic attempts to negate emotion, but emotion is not weakness, nor is it unhelpful. Humans are social animals and our emotions are both useful and important. A good conversation requires its participants to use their IQ and their EQ.
Listening
To listen does not mean you have to agree. But to truly listen requires that you consider what the other person has said.
I must admit that listening can be hard. It really is. I also know this from experience because it requires you to be attentive and interested in what someone else is saying. To be focused on that. It often requires us to consider what the other person is saying and to put aside our own opinion at least in that moment.
You might not be listening because you did not come to the conversation with an open mind, you did not come with the intention to learn something new or it could be because you are distracted. Distracted trying to show you are listening. If you are truly listening, you should have no need showing that you are. Ironically as it may sound, nodding your head, humming in agreement mostly shows how truly inattentive you are at that point.
Listening is also difficult because we would rather talk about ourselves. We enjoy talking about ourselves and there is even a research that backs this up.
Why we enjoy talking about ourselves.
In 2012, Researchers from Harvard published a research where they took study participants and attached them to a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine (fMRI) and then asked them to talk about themselves, including their opinion, personality traits and were also later asked to talk about the opinions and traits of other people they knew. The researchers observed that parts of the mesolimbic dopamine system became active when participants were talking about themselves. This is also the part of the brain that is activated during sex, cocaine, sugar, and pleasure.
The mesolimbic dopamine system is often referred to as the reward pathway associated with reward, desire, and placebo effect. They concluded from their findings that talking about yourself maybe inherently pleasurable.
Conversations – How we have been doing it wrong.
Interrupting and Shutting people down.
We interrupt people during conversations by finishing their sentences or saying something else while they are halfway into making their point. This is mostly because we were not completely listening to them but listening to respond. The other subtle way we interrupt people is by shutting them out. You help them conclude whatever they are saying or by reducing their explanation to one single sentence or phrase. There is an example of this that I see common among Christians which is often ignored. And I am saying this with the risk of being misunderstood.
Let’s say Mike was recently diagnosed with cancer and he is narrating the story to his friend, half way into his explanation his friend goes “I will pray for you” or goes “Hmm, it is well” more often than not this is because his friend has become uncomfortable with the story of mike or perhaps he really doesn’t know what to say as a response. In the worst-case scenario, after Mike mentions his diagnosis of cancer his friend interrupts by responding “Mike you don’t have cancer in Jesus name!” if you have Christian folks around you I want to bet you must have heard a version of this before.
I will not spend more time on this example but to be clear the point is not to undermine the importance of prayer or to even say that that it is something Mike doesn’t need in his situation but interrupting him with one of these even before he finishes his story is shutting him down and often unhelpful.
“I know how you feel”
That is one thing you should never tell someone in a conversation, ever! Says Celeste
In the example where Mike talks about his diagnosis of cancer, the worst way of shutting him down would be to immediately interrupt him and say something like “Oh sorry, I know exactly how you feel. I was diagnosed with cancer last year too…” (Maybe you’re thinking, but that sounds like a good thing to say)
Celeste Headlee in her interview with Shane Parish goes further to explain why it’s the worst thing to tell anyone is such a situation. When we experience any kind of pain or travail, your brain immediately works on softening that memory literarily right after it happed and there is a good reason because if we actually remembered pain to its full extent, exactly the way it was when we first felt it, we will be dysfunctional, we won’t be able to function in life if we remember the actual pain of a leg brake, for example. Your brain softens that memory. So, you literarily do not remember what it is like to lose your job or dog, get a cancer diagnosis or whatever it is you are talking about. You need them to tell you because you do not know how they feel.
They are many times where I’ve told someone “I know how you feel” and I’ve also heard it from others a couple of times. But you really should never say it because it doesn’t help the other person as you may think. I could give multiple examples of conversations that goes wrong pretty fast with this statement but there is one in Celeste’s book that I like a lot.
A good friend of mine lost her dad some years back. I found her sitting alone on a bench outside our workplace, not moving, just staring at the horizon. She was absolutely distraught and I didn’t know what to say to her. It’s so easy to say the wrong thing to someone who is grieving and vulnerable. So, I started talking about how I grew up without a father. I told her that my dad had drowned in a submarine when I was only nine months old and I’d always mourned his loss, even though I’d never known him. I just wanted her to realize that she wasn’t alone, that I’d been through something similar and could understand how she felt.
But after I related this story, my friend looked at me and snapped, “Okay, Celeste, you win. You never had a dad and I at least got to spend thirty years with mine. You had it worse. I guess I shouldn’t be so upset that my dad just died.”
I was stunned and mortified. My immediate reaction was to plead my case. “No, no, no,” I said, “that’s not what I’m saying at all. I just meant that I know how you feel.” And she answered, “No, Celeste, you don’t. You have no idea how I feel.”
She walked away and I stood there helplessly, watching her go and feeling like a jerk. I had totally failed my friend. I had wanted to comfort her and, instead, I’d made her feel worse. At that point, I still felt she misunderstood me. I thought she was in a fragile state and had lashed out at me unfairly when I was only trying to help. But the truth is, she didn’t misunderstand me at all. She understood what was happening perhaps better than I did. When she began to share her raw emotions, I felt uncomfortable. I didn’t know what to say, so I defaulted to a subject with which I was comfortable: myself.
I may have been trying to empathize, at least on a conscious level, but what I really did was draw focus away from her anguish and turn the attention to me.
She wanted to talk to me about her father, to tell me about the kind of man he was. She wanted to share her cherished memories of him so I could fully appreciate the magnitude of her loss. Instead, I asked her to stop for a moment and listen to my story about my dad’s tragic death.
I chose this example because it also reminded me of some years back when my friend lost his Dad. Someone (Lets call him Bob) came by to extend his condolence to my friend in good faith I suppose, and he said “I am so sorry for your loss, I know exactly how you feel” Meanwhile both of Bob’s parents were still alive and healthy. How could he possibly know how my friend feels I thought. And he confirmed this when he later told me “Can you imagine Bob saying he knew how I felt, how could he know what it means to lose a parent, How?”
Again, Celeste has an interesting explanation for why she thinks we do this.
When we do this
- It feels like we are expressing empathy. We tell ourselves that what we are doing is saying “You are not alone. I’ve been through this too. You’re going to survive” but that is not what we are expressing, we may think it is but it’s not.
- The second reason is that when someone is telling us about their own pain it can feel awkward and we feel uncomfortable. Other times we just do not know what to say so we default to a subject we are most comfortable with: ourselves. We may not know what to tell someone whose husband just died or who just failed an important exam, but you are totally comfortable talking about when you had it rough and tough. We default to talking about ourselves because it is more comfortable and actually pleasurable. Again, going back to the research from Harvard. It is very pleasurable to talk about ourselves.
She goes further to add that this explanation is often the hardest for people to accept or understand because we think by sharing our similar story, we are showing empathy but in reality, it does the opposite. Of course, there are exception to rules but more often than not, it’s not the thing you should tell someone in such situation.
Conversational Narcissism
This is the desire to take over a conversation, to do most of the talking, and to turn the focus of the exchange to yourself. It is often subtle and unconscious.
-Charles Derber
Derber describes two kinds of responses in conversations: a shift response and a support response. The first shifts attention back to yourself and the second supports the other person’s comment. Here is a simple illustration:
Shift Response
MARY: I’m so busy right now.
TIM: Me, too. I’m totally overwhelmed.
Support Response
MARY: I’m so busy right now.
TIM: Why? What do you have to get done?
Here’s another example:
Shift Response
KAREN: I need new shoes.
MARK: Me, too. These things are falling apart.
Support Response
KAREN: I need new shoes.
MARK: Oh yeah? What kind are you thinking about?
I added these examples to show how very often we do this because I want to believe you recognize most of them and because it’s easy for us to overestimate how good our conversational skills are. And while it is not a bad thing in itself, we enjoy talking about ourselves more than we realize.
Guidelines to have better conversations.
I cannot overstate the fact that good conversational skills can be hard to master. But in my opinion if you remember any two things from this post, they should be these:
- Know that a good conversation is an exchange where the people involved takes turn to talk and to listen.
- The second thing would be, learn to listen and to listen means you have to consider what is being said. It does not necessarily mean you have to agree, but to truly listen requires that you consider what the other person has said.
It can also be helpful to make clear (to yourself) what the goal of your conversation is. Do you want your friend to hear you out or you want them to hear your story and help with solving an issue? Setting the goal of a conversation may not be natural to us but you’d be surprised the wonders it does.
As suggested in the introduction be interested in the other person and ask open ended questions. If for some reason you will not be fully present, you may be tired or not in the right state of mind to hear their story, politely say it and excuse yourself. It is either you are in or out. Be there or be gone.
Keep the conversation brief and stay with the details that matter. It’s easy for everyone to get tired of a long-winded conversation that goes nowhere. Furthermore, people are often more interested in you than the little details like the dates, year, height, and dimensions that you struggle to recall for your story.
I think it is ironic that I’ve spent a dozen paragraphs only to tell you to make your conversations brief. But in my defense since this is a blog post I guess I can live with it.
A good conversation is like a miniskirt, short enough to retain interest, but long enough to cover the subject.
-unknown
Sources and credits:
As mentioned in the introduction, I started looking at how to get better at conversations because of some of my experiences and the realization that I wasn’t good at conversations as I thought I was.
As such this article has been inspired by the lessons I learned in that search. To put it another way, it’s my summary of Celeste’s teaching on how to have good conversations. I have also written this article as a self-reminder, as it turns out mastering these skills is something that takes time and lots of practice. All credit goes to Celeste Headlee whose book we need to talk about, her TED talk and interviews have provided the most valuable insights on this topic. Below are the links to all the sources whose insights has helped to make this article.
We need to talk By Celeste Headlee. (in the Netherlands? you can get the book here)
How to have conversations that matter – Celeste Headlee (Talks at Google)
Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation (Knowledge project)
10 ways to have a better conversation – Celeste Headlee (TED talk)
