All right, I want to see a show of hands: how many of you unfriended someone on face-book, because they said something offensive about politics or region, childcare, food? And how many of you know at least one person that you avoid because you just don’t want to talk to them? You know, it used to be that in order to have a polite conversation, we just had to follow the advice of Henry in “fairy lady”: Stick to the weather and your health. But these days, with climate change and anti-vaxxing, those subjects are not safe either. So this world that we live in, this world in which every conversation has the potential to devolve into an argument, where our politicians can’t speak to one another and where even the most trivial of issues have someone fighting both passionately for it and against it, it’s not normal.
Pew Research did a study of 10,000 American adults, and they found that at this moment, we are more polarized, we are more divided than we ever have been in history. We’re less likely to compromise which means we’re not listening to each other. And we make decisions about where to live, who to marry and even who our friends are going to be, based on what we already believe. Again, that means we are not listening to each other. A conversation requires a balance between talking and listening, and some where along the way, we lost that balance. Now part of that is due to technology. The smartphones that you all either have in your hands or close enough that you could grab them really quickly.
According to Pew Research, about a third of American teenagers send more than 1 hundred texts a day. And many of them, almost most of them, are more likely to text their friends than they are to talk to them face to face. There’s great piece in The Atlantic. It was written by a high school teacher named Paul Barnwell. And he gave his kids a communication project. He wanted to teach them how to speak on a specific project without using notes. And he said this’ I came to realize that conversational competence might be the single most overlooked skill we fail to teach. ’ Kids spend hours each day engaging with ideas and each other through screens but rarely do they have an opportunity to hone their interpersonal communication skills. It might sound like a funny question but we have to ask ourselves: Is there any 21st -century skill more important than being able to sustain coherent, confident conversation? Now I make my living talking to people. Nobel prize winners, truck drivers, billionaires, kindergarten teachers, heads of state, plumbers. I talk to people that I like, I talk to people that I don’t like. I talk to some people that I disagree with deeply on a personal level. But I still have a great conversation with them. So I’d like to spend the next 10 minutes or so teaching you how to talk and how to listen. Many of you have already heard a lot of advice on this, things like look the person in the eye, think of interesting topics to discuss in advance, look nod and smile to show that you are paying attention, repeat back what you just heard or summarize it.
So I want you to forget all of that. It is crap. There is no reason to learn how to show you are paying attention if you are in fact paying attention. Now I actually use the exact same skills as a professional interviewer that I do in regular life. So, I’m going to teach you how to interview people, and that’s actually going to help learn how to be better conversationalists. Learn to have a conversation without wasting your time, without getting bored, and please God without offending anybody. We’ve all had really great conversations. We’ve had them before. We know what it’s like. The kind of conversation where you walk away feeling engaged and inspired, or where you feel like you’ve made a real connection, or you’ve been perfectly understood. There is no reason why most of your interactions can’t be like that. So I have 10 basic rules, I’m going to walk you though all of them, but honestly, if you just choose one of them and master it, you’ll already enjoy better conversations.
Number one: Don’t multitask. And I don’t mean just set down your cell phone or your tablet or your car keys or whatever is in your hands, I mean, be present. Be in that moment. Don’t think about your argument you had with your boss. Don’t think about what are you doing to have in dinner. If you want to get out of the conversation, get out of the conversation, but don’t be half in it and half out it.
Number two: don’t pontificate. If you want to state your opinion without opportunity to response or argument or pushback or growth, write a blog. Now, there is really good reason why I don’t allow pundits on my show. Because they are really boring. If they are conservative, they are going to hate Obama, and food stamps and abortion. If they are liberal, they are going to hate big banks and oil corporations and Dick Cheney. Totally predictable. And you don’t want to be like that. You need to enter every conversation assuming that you have something to learn. The famed therapist M. Scott Peck said that true listening requires a setting aside of oneself. And sometimes that means setting aside your personal opinion. He said that sensing this acceptance the speaker will become less and less vulnerable and more and more likely to open up the inner recesses. Of his or her mind to the listener. Again assume that you have something to learn. Bill Nye” Everyone you will ever meet knows something that you don’t.” I put it this way: Everybody is an expert in something.
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