/karen/

The art of conversation-making

Thursday, 19 February, 2009

I said in a recent post that I'm rather socially awkward (or, at least, I feel that way, even if I don't come across that way), and that I've picked up a lot of things to do with interpersonal interaction from other people. One of the things I've managed to learn is the skill of being able to make conversation with strangers. I don't find it easy, and sometimes I definitely don't enjoy doing it, but I know how and can perform if the situation so demands it.

What I find surprising is that not many others seem to possess this skill, and furthermore, still less are interested in learning. Sunflower wrote this awesome post on this subject some time last year (which I can no longer find on her blog as she hasn't been able to import her archives, otherwise I'd link to it. Oh, hang on, just found the old link through Bloglines! And it was 25 December 2007. Well, I wasn't too far off!) In the absence of her archives, I hope Sunflower doesn't mind if I reproduce her post here (with some edits; it was in one long paragraph, but I've tried to break it up for ease of reading!):

Socialising

No one else is at home. It's a quiet Christmas Day. Well, not so quiet ... I had lunch with friends, which extended into tea. Now it's 5:30pm and I'm enjoying some time alone. I'm as much a solitary creature as I am a social creature, if not more. People who see me at social events would have a hard time believing that I'm not naturally gregarious. I used to fear such events, abhor crowds and shy away from going to places where I'd be a stranger, and everyone else knew each other. So I developed a strategy to ease my own feelings of awkwardness. Because, you know, there's nothing more awkward than standing around like a lamppost in one corner of the room, not knowing what to do and having no one to talk with. It makes you feel more out of place than ever.

My strategy was simple: I'd let my eyes search out someone who looks as lost as I feel. I'd approach the person, look them in the eye, and introduce myself. “Hi, I'm Sunflower. And you are—?” I would then proceed to ask questions to draw the person out. My reasoning went like this: I don't want to potentially bore the person by talking about myself—I'm not arrogant enough to think I'm such a fascinating character. But most people like talking about themselves, especially to someone who is interested (or appears to be interested). If I could manage to hit on the correct topic—ie., something they are passionate about—they might just end up doing all the talking with very little extra prompting on my part. Viola! Jackpot! No need to try to create conversation anymore. Just sit back and listen, keep eye contact, and respond where necessary.

But you must know what to ask. I usually chose from one of three things. First, the person's occupation: everybody has to work to earn a living, so this is safe. I'd usually follow up by asking if they enjoy what they are doing. Second, the person's hometown: quite a lot of people in the city are migrants from other states. Third, the person's family: parents' occupations, number of siblings, etc.

When I first started using this strategy, sometimes I felt like I was trying a little too hard—that the conversation wasn't natural. Some people also commented that they felt like I was interviewing them, peppering them with questions! (Must've been the journalist in me, ha ha.) Over time, I refined my strategy ... Instead of simply asking questions, I learned to also respond to their answers by sharing my own thoughts or stories. Because, if you want someone to open up to you, you have to open up to them too. Otherwise there is an imbalance and people don't feel comfortable telling so much to someone who tells them nothing in return. It becomes a “Why do you want to know?” situation. So if I were to ask someone how many siblings they had, and they said, “Eight,” I'd go, “Wow! There's only my brother and I, the two of us. My goodness, how did your parents cope?” and this would encourage them to go deeper into the subject. (I know, it sounds so calculated, but this was the only way I knew how to handle the social stuff, and I really did want to find out the answers anyway.)

The other thing about social conversation is that it's not how much you know, it's what you do with what you know. For example, I've never read any of the Harry Potter books. But I know that many fans were disgusted with the ending of the last book, and that many of them sequestered themselves to read the book to the end so that they wouldn't have their enjoyment marred by spoilers from the media and other people. Which means that if I find out that someone is a Harry Potter fan, I can ask, “What did you think of the ending of the last book?” or, “Did you manage to finish the book without getting any spoilers?” This is a win-win situation because fans are naturally passionate about the issue, and will probably end up either ranting or going into detailed raptures for at least 10 minutes .

My “strategy” has almost become second nature to me now. When talking to someone, I do these things automatically without thinking much about them. I think the main thing to keep in mind is that this is not about you; it is about the other person. You are trying to get to know this person. You want to make them comfortable with you, no matter how awkward you yourself might feel. (Bear in mind that they probably feel just as awkward.) You focus on them, not on yourself. If they tell you about a recent achievement or a momentous event—e.g. a birth in the family—you rejoice with them. If they tell you about a failure or a tragedy, you mourn with them, and try to offer comfort where you can. If they tell you about a problem, you commiserate and try to restrain yourself from offering too much advice. No, I'm not a social animal, but I've sort of trained myself so that instead of having to masquerade as one, I can become one on the occasions when I need to be one. I enjoy social events much more now, although given a choice I'd still prefer to be in a small group of friends, or meet one-on-one for quiet conversation. And in between, I need some time alone to recharge. Like I'm doing now

See what I mean? Brilliant!

I only skimmed the comments (I generally don't have time to read the comments on most people's blogs), but what surprised me was the number of people who said that Sunflower's post was a mini-revelation to them—that they had never thought about it before or that she had made it so much clearer for them, etc. (I'm working from memory so this may not be right, but I do remember that was the impression I gleaned when I read them!) Why do most of us have so much trouble talking to strangers?

I think it's partly because we have less opportunities to encounter strangers. Sure, there are people all around us (especially in the big cities), but you get conditioned to ignore them most of the time (especially if they're encroaching on your personal space). You learn to tune out the guy yapping loudly on his mobile, or the couple having a domestic in the corner of the train. You have a natural distrust for strangers carried over from childhood when your parents warned you not to talk to them, or else bad things might happen to you. When you do meet strangers, it's usually in small pockets of time—brief encounters like when you purchase your morning coffee or when you accidentally bump someone in the lift and apologise. They say that modern life is giving rise to a return to village mentality, but it's not quite a traditional village. Sure, in old villages, you knew everyone because you lived among them in season and out of season, but in these contemporary virtual villages, the people you “dwell” among are your chosen company. I may choose to follow a stranger on Twitter, but my decision is usually based on whether or not I think she is interesting, or whether his interests dovetail to mine. Often we don't get the true stranger experience unless we do something fairly drastic like change jobs, move countries or take up a team sport.

Having moved in Christian circles for close to 16 years now, one thing I've noticed is that there are far more opportunities to talk to strangers because you just end up meeting them all the time. You meet them in church and at church events, you meet them on mission, you meet them at conferences, you meet them as friends of friends, and so on. Others are often astonished that Ben and I have a large network of friends; it's mostly because of that.

Moving in Christian circles wasn't the thing that got me started in talking to strangers though. It was going to Canada the year I turned 15. It was one of the only times we've been to Canada in the summer, and it was blazing hot (we were in Toronto, which is rich smack bang in the middle). Somehow during that holiday I ended up hanging out with lots of strangers, or pseudo-strangers (the children of friends of my parents who I barely remembered from before we migrated to Australia). I remember going to strawberry picking with one girl's youth group (not a church youth group; just a social club, I think), and sitting on a grassy hill, talking to some boy a couple of years older than me about university and accents and whether koalas fell out of the trees in my backyard. This was unheard for me; I am naturally shy. But because I was continually thrown into situations where I didn't know people, I learned to loosen up and open up, and actually talk for once.

Anyway, I digress. I want to end this post with a few additions to what Sunflower said:

• Being interested in the other person comes from being other-person-centred (to borrow the term from Broughton Knox. [For non-Sydney-siders, “other-person-centredness” is what Knox called that thing you do when you put the other person's needs before your own because that is what God does in relationship to himself. Okay, I probably summarised that pretty badly, but you get the gist ...]). It's not about me wanting to talk about myself, but about me wanting to find out more about another person in order to love and serve them better. It's about “love thy neighbour”.
• Sunflower makes a good point about volunteering information about yourself. Personally I find this extremely difficult to do; somehow I've been conditioned to think that if someone doesn't ask, they're not interested. I think I'm going to have to work on that one.
• A fourth bow to Sunflower's strategy is finding out a little more about their life story—e.g. where they were born, where they grew up, what they did at Uni (if they went to Uni) or what they did instead of Uni, how they met their spouse (if they have a spouse), if they've travelled or worked overseas, and so on. You can put together quite a good picture of someone from this.
• A fifth bow is to ask what they like to do in their spare time for fun or leisure. You get some interesting answers sometimes, and it enables you to find points of commonalities so you can move off the “interrogation” and onto common interests (after all, C.S. Lewis said that common interests lie at the heart of all friendships:

  The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends. Where the truthful answer to the question Do you see the same truth? would be “I see nothing and I don't care about the truth; I only want a Friend”, no Friendship can arise—though Affection of course may. There would be nothing for the Friendship to be about; and Friendship must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice. Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travellers. (The Four Loves, HarperCollins, London, 1977 [1960] p. 63.)

• Sometimes if the other person exhibits little or no interest in you and does not reciprocate by asking you questions of your own, the conversation will naturally peter out. That's okay; there's no use in flogging a dead horse (the dead horse being the conversation, not the other person), and there will be some people with whom you juse don't click. Find a way to exit the conversation gracefully. Don't take it personally. At least you've learned something about that person—whether it be that they are bad a conversation-making or they're completely self-centred or they're just darn rude. These things are helpful to keep in mind the next time you encounter them.
• I can only manage one or two conversations like these in any one session. After that, I've had my fill, and that's fine. I know it's not my mission to talk to every single stranger who turns up to church on a Sunday evening. If I can talk to one and make him/her feel welcome, I'm doing well. I'm the sort of person who needs to go slowly with relationships, so one at a time is good.

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