Having good conversations — whether with strangers or with your closest friends — is an art. It requires humility and attention — something that's in high demand these days.
Celeste Headlee has spent her adult life talking. She's a longtime radio and podcast host, and she even did a TED Talk about how to have a good conversation. But she says even she was terrible at talking to people when she was younger.
Here are her biggest pieces of advice:
Be present
People think that "being present" means not looking at your email or texting during the conversation. It also means giving people your entire attention and not thinking about what you're up to later that day. Really focus.
Go with the flow of the conversation
It's easy to stop listening when you're planning what you're going to say next. Think of listening like a river. We dam it up all the time when we stop listening in order to think about what it is that we're going to say next. As soon as those thoughts come into your brain, you need to let them go out of your brain and then return back to the conversation.
Don't pontificate!
Stop lecturing. It might make you feel good, but it only makes you feel good for a very short span of time. And it definitely doesn't make the other person feel good.
Ask open-ended questions
Yes or no questions don't lead the conversation very far. For example, rather than asking, "Are you sitting down?" You might try, "What kind of chair do you like to sit in?"
Stay out of the weeds
If you're getting into too many details, it can be easy to lose focus on the big picture. Nobody cares about the exact date something happened or the last name of your great uncle's cousin.
If you don't know something, just say that
Very few people are willing to admit this, but it's OK not to know something.
Try not to repeat yourself. And be brief
People repeat themselves oftentimes because they think they're drilling information into somebody's head, but that's not really how conversations work. Studies show that our attention spans are short and getting shorter.
Lastly, listen
The other steps are also about listening. But this deserves its own point. Listening is hard. It requires energy and focus. It's also essential — if you're not listening, then you're not really having a conversation.
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