When I was living in Nepal many years ago, someone at the organization I worked with joked, “In the US, what’s the opposite of talking?”
The punchline quickly followed: “Waiting to talk.”
The sharp bite of humor has a way of punctuating the truth.
I have definitely been guilty of spending more time thinking about what I’m going to say and waiting to say it than listening to what other people are saying. And I think that’s only human. We want to impress so we wait for a gap in the conversation to inject our own interesting tidbit. We want to display our competence so we wait for opportunities to share information. We want to belong so we wait for our turn to talk about our own related experience (a similar thing happened to me while traveling!). We want to stand out so we wait for a chance to one-up the previous speaker (I got Covid too, but my case was so much worse than yours!).
This ping-pong conversational style of information sharing and anecdote exchange has its place – I do want to hear about your vacation and tell you about mine. But so many of my conversations these days stay within this structure and overall, I am feeling unsatisfied.
Maybe our default way of conversing has changed as social media has made sharing information the main goal and engagement something you do simply to amplify your message. Or maybe my tolerance has simply decreased.
Whatever the cause, I find myself wondering: Is our need to share drowning out our need to be understood and to understand others? Is our default conversational style making us inadvertently miss out on opportunities for deeper connection and growth?
The art of talk, big and small
In his essay Ode to Small Talk in The Atlantic, James Parker writes about the magic of small moments of conversation where “…the merest everyday speech-morsel can tip you headfirst into the blazing void of his or her soul.” As he describes it, the purpose of small talk isn’t just about exchanging pleasantries – it’s about engaging in an exploratory search for connection and mutual interest.
Exploration is also a useful way to think about the “big talk” of deeper conversation. At its most meaningful, communication is not simply about delivering information. It’s more about collaboratively constructing meaning and understanding through a curiosity-fueled exploration of ideas.
Reframing conversation as a process of exploring and building meaning rather than a back-and-forth transmission of information can change how we engage with others.
As a speaker, it means that I can’t simply share my thoughts and expect that others will receive them. Instead, my job is to help listeners construct their own understanding of what I’m trying to say. I need to focus more on them than on myself.
Effective speaking starts with being sensitive to what listeners bring to the table – their own knowledge, opinions, and interests. It requires organizing one’s thoughts to make them digestible and relatable. And it calls for being wary of oversharing lest we drown our listeners with a firehose of information.
As a listener, I need to accept that building understanding requires engagement. I recently listened to several communication experts on Stanford lecturer Matt Abrahams’ podcast Think Fast Talk Smart, and they all agreed on the most important part of communication – active listening.
Active listening doesn’t just mean keeping your attention on the speaker rather than what you are going to say next. It’s about actively trying to make sense of what is being said by processing, asking questions, and testing to see if you have understood.
As important as speaking and listening are, the most nourishing conversations for me transcend these acts. They are not just about understanding and being understood, but about creating something new – new connections, a new perspective, a new collaboratively constructed shared reality. As I participate in playing with ideas – interpreting, testing, relating – I come away changed. And in the process, I build community and deepen connections.
Small experiments for meaningful conversation
There’s a lot to think about when working to create meaningful conversations and it’s easy to fall back into old conversational habits. It might help to approach conversations with some small experiments to strengthen conversational muscles.
These are three things that I will be trying as my conversation opportunities ramp up with back-to-school interactions.
1. Choose curiosity and exploration. Rachel Greenwald – a communication expert who works as both a business consultant and a matchmaker – gives the same advice to all her clients: Be more interested than interesting. This stance sparks curiosity and puts the focus on the conversation rather than on yourself.
2. Ask quality questions. Questions go hand in hand with curiosity and are heavy lifters in building understanding and sparking collaborative search for new meaning. Ask follow-up questions to learn more. Ask clarifying questions to circumvent misunderstanding. Ask sparking questions – I wonder if, I wonder how, what might that mean for – to power joint exploration of ideas.
3. Listen to learn. Questions are only as useful as the quality of listening that follows them. Put effort into engaging with what people are saying. Try to listen without planning your next response. Ask a follow-up question instead of shifting the focus back on yourself.
The importance of keeping a clear head
People often talk about keeping a cool head during a conversation, but keeping a clear head is just as important. Clear-headedness means having the mental bandwidth to do the hard conscious and subconscious work of conversation – formulating thoughts, actively listening, remembering and building on ideas, following and managing topics, keeping your mind from wandering, and resisting unhelpful reactions if the conversation becomes difficult.
You can take steps to preserve and restore your own mental bandwidth before a conversation even begins. And for important conversations, you can support clear-headedness in yourself and others by setting the stage to minimize distractions and support the brain. Converse while taking a walk. Take breaks from deep thinking. And if the conversation is happening within an uneven power dynamic, find ways to make people feel comfortable and safe – both in their physical surroundings and in their ability to speak their mind.
Conversation is connection
At the end of the day, conversation is all about connection – connecting up neurons in your head, connecting ideas, connecting with other people through building a shared understanding or simply through sharing a moment in time.
Not all of these connections need to be particularly meaningful or deep, but wouldn’t it be nice if more of them were?
What would it feel like if we spent less time simply sharing information and more time exploring ideas?