Hello friends! Today’s post is a quick one as my drafts lay in various states of disrepair, half-completion and mid-ripening. Tonight I’m thinking a lot about conversations.
As I mentioned earlier this month, my goal this year is to try to have better conversations. I’ve been trying a lot of techniques outside my comfort zone and (unsurprisingly) there’s a lot of great content out there with various ideas, tips and suggestions amassed over the decades/centuries. It’s amazing what you get if you do a bit of googling, youtubeing and amazoning for very specific topics.
Overall, the past few weeks have been a shocking amount of fun. It’s amazing how much more I’ve enjoyed the world around me by forcing myself to meet strangers. I was just in San Diego last week and every day I met many wonderful, nice new people. The best side effect is that by looking at strangers as people that I can learn from and talk to, the world feels less lonely. A beach, a restaurant, a coffee shop, a street - they’re full of people that have discovered something about the world that I haven’t. For example, yesterday I chatted for 90 minutes with the guy next to me on the airplane - he was fascinating: he’d traveled the world, started various businesses globally, and really had figured out how to game life in ways I’d never imagined. I learned so much and I simply never would have had that experience a month ago… The difference a new mindset can make!
Looking back over this month, I think there is one big realization I’ve had from trying to improve and that is that I usually change conversational topics way too often.
A good conversation, as the experts will tell you, is like a game of ball. You take a topic and pass it back and forth. You explore how it grows and evolves as the tale unfolds. One of the tricks is to really listen to your conversational partner and treat them like someone you are engaging with in a collaborative art form. However, if instead of a slow unfolding you keep switching balls faster than your partner can keep up, the conversation can spin out of control and sputter. The ball basically falls on the floor and the game ends…
Perhaps a better analogy than playing ball is spinning clay: when you sit down to make a new piece of pottery, you need to make sure you don’t turn the wheel too fast. If you spins the wheel too quickly the clay splatters all over the place. Instead, to make a good clay bowl you need to shape the mud little by little. You need to spin the wheel slowly and let the shape come to be. By ensuring the walls are sturdy and the foundation is strong, you can then build in details and eventually have it be a lasting, valuable part of your life.
That’s not to say one shouldn’t always skip from topic to topic. Sometimes, you have just the right conversational partner for you - there are times when you have the right person you see eye to eye with, and can almost finish each other’s sentences. That’s a wonderful feeling but in reality it’s more the exception than the rule… Quickly jumping around is not really the best approach for most first conversations with strangers. It’s better to spend time building the foundation.
And so I need to remember to slow down. It all keeps coming back to this.
I need to slow down to listen. I need to slow down to enjoy. And I need to slow down to be truly present and let the magic of a good conversation unfold.