A Guide to Better Conversations

The one compliment that has so far always succeeded in making me go red with embarrassment each time is when my friends call me a good conversationalist. I have no reply to it. My tongue is so tied that even something as simple as “thanks” is hard to utter. I see the irony here, believe me, but let me also assure you, that I’ve even tried to practice responses, but in vain.
Though it may seem narcissistic, it is hard for me to deny that I’m not. I am known to get along with most people I meet. I like it when I am engaging someone in conversation and I love to hear stories, whether from a person’s own life or of someone they know. It is one of the joys of my life.
This was not always the case. When I was in middle school, I was told I bottled up my feelings, I rarely spoke my mind and I had no idea about how I should speak to guests at my house. I never understood why they said this. All I knew was that it was an impediment of my own personality. It was just how I was and I was utterly useless.
In India, guests are to be treated as part of the family. One ought to show them the same respect and reverence we would show our own parents. Any deviation from this behavior makes people, including your family, term you as arrogant and disrespectful. And that was what I was told, over and over and over till I believed it. When I was at church on Sundays, and never met that one ‘uncle,’ whom I’ve absolutely no interest in, I was asked why I wasn’t paying him the respect he deserved by wishing him a good morning. When I was at school, I was told I must greet every teacher I passed. I never bothered to. It just wasn’t a natural thing for me to do. When I could force myself to do it a few times, the reaction I would get from my opposite was cold nod because, perhaps, I never kept in touch with them as often as I was asked to.
These statements were etched in me and they made me feel like a total loser. It turned into a vicious cycle where I would not want to have conversations with people because I felt I was so bad at them that I never had them at all. I was known to speak only when spoken to, to reply in as few words as possible and to end the conversation as quickly as I could, so that the others would have to suffer as little time with me and can do the other, better things they may have had. All these assumptions would flood my mind whenever I was speaking to someone.
I am sure these feelings are common. Many of my own friends identify themselves as shy in conversations and, by extension, awkward at social interactions. We all dread the small moments of silence that we may go through, especially when we are on a date. It is always about us, isn’t it? We are socially awkward, we are shy and we are introverted.
We are!
But let’s look at these situations by removing ourselves out of the equation.
This is a famous quote by Socrates. When the Oracle of Delphi declared him to be the wisest man, Socrates did not believe it and began to question the statement using his famous method later named after him. Long story short, at the end, he agreed with the Oracle, declaring that he could be the wisest man, as the Oracle said, because,
“I know one thing; that I know nothing.”
To be in a position where one knows nothing may seem counter-productive at first. How can we start a conversation with someone we have no idea about?
But let’s go back a few paragraphs. What happens when we remove ourselves out of the equation? When we approach every person, every group or every topic with a curiosity that a kitten has for a beam of light. What if we approach conversation with the same curiosity that five-year-old children have for the world around them, where everything must be explored, where parents; warnings must never be paid any attention without verifying it for ourselves, even if it means bruising our knees or breaking a finger in the process. What if we look at every conversation with the same level of curiosity?
When we remove ourselves out, we see that the focus now shifts to them from us. We can understand that it is not that we can’t have conversations because we don’t know what to say, it is because we are not curious about the person we are having the conversations with. We are, rather, in our own minds thinking about why we are unable to have this conversation. We don’t even realize that while we are having these thoughts while speaking to someone, they are having the exact same thought while speaking with us. We are self-absorbed instead of being curious.
Curiosity is what drives conversations. Watch any YouTube video about how to have a good conversation, and they will tell you to listen actively, to ask more open ended questions and to pay compliments and take the conversation from there.
How can we listen to someone, ask them questions or pay them compliments if we are not curious about them, if we don’t have a burning desire to know something about them?
What makes that person weird? What is the most noticeable thing about the tone of their voice? What made them the person they are today? What are their strengths? What are their flaws? How do they feel talking about their insecurities? What are your own insecurities and how are they similar to theirs?
Through curiosity, we understand how human feelings are shared, we understand how flawed humanity is. How flawed we are and how similarly flawed everyone else is. To approach conversations with curiosity shows us that all of us are bound together by our vulnerabilities and through curiosity, we can share them, joke about them and learn to cope with them. We can make life a little easier for others and have excellent conversations in the process.
