What We Haven’t Been Taught…

How are your conversational skills? Do you know? How do you feel after most of your conversations with people? Do you feel seen, heard, and understood? Have you walked away with new information about the person you just shared time with? How well did you understand what they were sharing? Do you even recall what they said?

Let’s be honest, conversations are complex. They house incredible nuance that is layered within an ever-shifting focus, and they require dynamic skills that most of us have never been formally taught.

I’m not going to lie. I might be a little bit obsessed with how we share conversational space with each other. Despite being told technology has us more “connected” than at any other time in history, people are feeling suicidal, homicidal, and estranged. This deeply troubles me, and I want to know what is really happening between us.

Over the last year or so, I find myself compulsively observing people in conversation and feeling both unsettled and frustrated by the ways we “miss” making connection with each other. In my amateur and wholly unscientific research role, I am starting to find a few consistent antagonists to social connection. One of the leading issues is that most of us have never evolved beyond our earliest understanding of communication.

Our earliest lesson in communication was established when we were dependent babies. We learned if we made a sound while experiencing some level of physical discomfort, we could elicit a response from our external environment and our needs would be addressed and our comfort reestablished.

Even as we acquire more mobility and verbal skills, we continue to express needs and wants and expect our external world to respond. As any two-year-old tantrum illustrates, we eventually learn the response may not always meet our specific demand. But essentially, our earliest understanding of communication is that it is one sided expression, emerging from a self-interested motivation that creates a response from our environment.

As our interactions expand to include a larger circle of family and community members, we learn asking for our needs to be met by this subset of people requires a new word, “please.” And if they choose to be equally responsive in meeting our needs, we learn a “thank you” is the polite thing to say. Outside of these “courtesy customs” most of us do not learn much beyond the transactional nature of this early gestalt. And for many of us, if we are being honest, not all that much has changed in how we express ourselves and expect the world to respond.

As we enter school age, the balance of conversational demands starts to shift. For example, our parents may ask us to take the trash out or help rake the lawn and we slowly learn there is a give and take in requests. The classroom setting further disrupts things by shifting the child’s role from primarily the “expresser” to the “listener and responder.”  Here we get practice listening and processing information and responding to it. We also learn new skills like “timing” and how to “take our turn” in expressing our needs and sharing our ideas when the pool of participants is greater than a few. But for the most part, communication remains relatively transactional, information shared, and response given.

But when do we learn our conversational space could and ought to include our inner experience? That it is a place where we get to share our feelings and ideas, not to achieve anything, but because it feels good to be listened to and where connections are made. I suspect some families and cultures do a better job of introducing and planting the seeds for the relational quality of communication. But we function in a culture that values productivity and limits our personal communication to transactional job scripts and efficient performance. With the advent of social media, our interpersonal sharing is now placed in an arena  of one sided declarations that deadens our empathy, requires zero reciprocity and has reduced our interactions to graphics and AI assisted responses. Is it at all surprising we are fighting a loneliness epidemic and feeling so polarized?

There is ample evidence that most of us enter the larger social arena with extremely uncertain footing in conversational skill. And we contend with many social constructs that blunt and confound our continued development. But as social beings, we share a common desire to be known and feel connected and together we can create it. I know because I have found a way to do it. But I was terrible at conversation as I young adult. It was not because I was shy or introverted. I literally did not know what to do.

And although these skills can be learned and practiced, they require diligence, attention, and mindfulness to yourself and others. Most of us will not choose to pick up and sustain these skills unless we see something of distinct value for us to do so. As such I strongly encourage you to find a personal motivation to do so. I am not talking about the gumption to try new skills. I am talking about the important personal reason why you want to.

My reason to learn these skills came while watching Ken, my coworker at the time, interact with customers at the design table. (Yes, we met working together at a custom frame shop) I remember a particular incident when he flung a leg up on the counter in an easy breezy sort of way and started sharing a story that had happened earlier in his day. The clients were riveted. With animated faces and utter silence, they willingly traveled his story with a kind of attention and engagement that I had never experienced in my life. I wanted what he was getting. I wanted people to care about my escapades with the same level of interest that Ken was receiving. I did not have the first clue how to do it, so I studied him…endlessly.

Each time he met with a client, I tuned in and paid attention to everything he did, said, and how he was responded to. In fact, one of my first introductions to Conversational Prospecting came from watching Ken. A gentleman walked into the store and announced he “just had a question.”  Ken met him where he stood, not positioning himself behind the counter, which felt important. He listened and provided an efficient but thorough answer. Then unexpectedly he moved towards the counter and slung his thigh up on the edge. Using his own tape measure to point, Ken said to the gentleman, “I see your tape measure, what do you do?”  Twenty minutes later they each walked away smiling, a lilt in their step after establishing their new “craftsman camaraderie. “I knew the man would be back with his project and he would want to collaborate with his newest best friend. I also knew I wanted to be able to do this.

I knew I needed to practice asking questions that went beyond just job function. That required courage because I was not sure people wanted to share more information with me than what was required to get their project completed. I also learned closed ended questions, ones that can be answered with “yes” or “no” did not give me the same results Ken got. The world of open-ended questions felt like the wild west to me. I did not know what to ask, or what would happen once I did. Once I got skillful in eliciting a more generous sharing from the client. I discovered I had to work on my responses to the information they were sharing. “Huh” and “Interesting” were not cutting it! In fact, it seemed to slam the door.

I tried sharing personal information, but I did not believe people would be interested, so I threw things out in very noncommittal and almost disposable ways. And not particularly surprising, people responded in kind. They would skim over what I shared and bring it back to something more interesting to them…usually something about themselves. That was fine. At this stage, I did not feel at ease giving access to my inner environment. I feared judgement and dismissal and settled into a comfortable pattern of just asking more questions.

I remember the first time I tried sharing a piece of personal information with some clients. Our interaction was winding down and the woman turned to her husband and said, “We’ve got one more errand and then I have to get home and start baking the cookies before the grandkids get dropped off.”  Something about our time together felt lighter and friendlier than my typical interaction so I took the leap of faith and offered, “My favorite cookie is the snickerdoodle.”  (Ugh!) The lovely couple looked at me with kind, if not merely polite smiles, and then the gentleman said in a rather matter of fact tone, “Nothing wrong with a snickerdoodle.”  With that, they packed up and I slinked into the backroom feeling the weight of my epic fail in small talk.  

Aside from the fully engaged response Ken was able to elicit, another early observation was that Ken had an open and extremely relaxed body language that accompanied both his story telling and question asking. It was something Ken did effortlessly. I did not.

Initially, I had to just pay attention to what I was doing with my body and how I moved it. I was an extremely attentive and diligent listener and could parrot back every word my clients used. But, while listening this way, every muscle in my body was tight, rigid, and conveyed all the self-doubt and uncertainty I felt in providing for their needs.

In contrast, Ken was pliable and loose. He used the furniture in ways that felt irreverent but conveyed a sense of self possession that people responded to. I knew my customer service was good, but there was a reason people moved through their interaction with me differently than with Ken. And, in large measure, it had to do with the fact that I continued to believe communication was solely transactional. Find out what they need, learn the skills to meet that need and put a period at the end of the interaction. I am sure I felt as “walled off” as my body conveyed. There was no permeability. No space for anything more than “service provision”  

In large part this transactional quality is our conversational Achilles heel. We continue to enter our social interactions with the same self-interested motivation our earliest lessons taught us. We think our best communication has occurred when what we express has elicited our preferred response from the external environment. The problem is people are complicated and messy and NOT our primary caregiver. They also have entered the social interaction with the same misguided assumptions and underdeveloped skills as we have.

We learn a lot in a lifetime and have unprecedented access to information. But it seems we often leave our most important lessons to chance. Our communities are divided. People are feeling disconnected and we need to find our way back to each other. I don’t know the answers to most of the big problems our world faces. But I do know how to help people feel understood. If that is my only circle of influence…I trust in its ripple effect.

Learning better communication skills takes practice and courage and I am living proof it can be achieved. If you choose to join me, Conversational Prospecting and Kaleidoscope Listening are skills that guide us toward relational communication and will lead us to small but mighty changes within ourselves and others.