Often we’re negative in conversation without realising it. There’s a couple of ways this can manifest. One way is that someone says something factually incorrect you feel a need to correct them. The other way is you pre-reject conversation topics and limit the potential of your conversation.

Factual in-correctness

This can be particularly bad if you’re logic driven person who happens to be smarter than everyone else.

Someone says 1 + 1 = 3. You say no it’s not, you idiot, 1 + 1 = 2. The other person says “Are you blind? 1 + 1 = 3″. You get into an argument. Arguing is not good conversation.

How could you handle this differently?

Someone says 1 + 1 = 3. You know it’s wrong but you let it slide. Without further input, the conversation will move on to something else. 1 + 1 = 3 isn’t exactly a highlight of the conversation, but importantly it’s not a low point either.

This is based on the assumption that what you’re talking about isn’t really that important and has no bearing on your life outside of the next few minutes. Talking with someone you just met about the exact year the Battle of Britain was waged really will not effect your ability to materialize food and shelter.

However, for stuff that does effect you then you should be assertive and being right takes priority of getting along. Any miscommunication and bad decisions will have a negative effect outside the conversation so you should stop them from happening.

But 99% of your conversations really have no bearing on anything. Virtually all the time it’s just better to get along than to be right

Pre-rejection of topics

A lot of the time people will have ideas that you automatically reject because they don’t meet a set of criteria. The ideas doesn’t agree with how you see yourself, or with your previously exhibited behaviour so it’s rejected without much thought. This is a mental solution to prevent your mind from getting overloaded with too much stuff.

Usually I agree with the idea of saying ‘No’ to a variety of things because it allows you to concentrate of what’s high value and important to you. However conversation is generally for pleasure rather than anything important, so you’re much better off adopting a spirit of play rather than being all serious. It all flows much better when you latch on to whatever ideas are floating around, including ones you don’t even agree with.

The duration of the topic is usually measured in minutes, so it’s not as if by talking about something you’re suddently committing yourself to doing something later which you don’t actually want to do.  Talking about boat building does not mean you actually have to now go and build a boat.

Let’s someone is talking about X and you don’t like X. In your head your automatically think no, X is dumb. But this attitude is limiting the potential of the conversation. It doesn’t matter what your personal feelings towards X is, because it’s important to the other person. So open your mind and delve deeper into X by asking questions and generating possibilities. Ask why it’s important to them, ask them how they got into X, etc. Generate possbilities by bridging X to Y and see where that goes. You’ll probably start talking about Y which then goes on to Z. And you like Z

Generating possibilities is a playful method where you’re really not serious. You make up lighthearted situations which no one takes seriously though people generally find funny.

For instance, someone could start talking about a story they read online about how the city council wants to make downtown more pedestrian friendly at the expense of people driving cars, and they’ll do this by reducing the speed limit to 20mph. Your personal feelings are that it’s a good thing because you prefer bicycles to cars.

What generally happens though is people will start moaning “oh woe, 20mph is so slow”. Moaning is not good conversation, especially when you actually like the idea. You should step in and raise the quality. “Cars only going at 20mph, gee that’s slow. We need teleporters. Or flying cars. Weren’t we supposed to have cities in the sky and flying cars by the year 2000?”. Conversation now moves to the Jetsons. Job done.

(And what would happen when a flying car breaks down?)

Seriousness of conversation = 0. But so what?  Most conversation’s aren’t supposed to be intelligent, there’s supposed to be fun. Moaning about how slow cars go or talking about the Jetsons will have any bearing on what actually happens with the speed limit around town. It’s out of your control.  But what you do possess is a large influence over the quality of the conversations that you engage in.

If you’re a naturally introverted person who values your time alone, you may have difficulty with socialising in group settings. You may not like parties finding them pointless, painful and boring while other people seem to be having loads of fun.

It may feel like there’s something wrong with you. Why is it other people find it so easy while you do not?

Actually there’s nothing wrong with you, about half the planet are naturally introverted at that’s cool, I am myself. It’s just you don’t see notice all the cool introverted people because they keep such a low profile and you only really notice the loud extraverts out in the world.

You may actually have really good social skills in a one-to-one setting, or with a few close friends who you’re totally comfortable with. It’s just you’re frustrated that you’re unable to translate this to larger group settings.

I had this problem until I realised that social situations with close friends are very different from group setting with loose aquintances. They require a totally different set of skills.

Close relationships getting better when you focus on the idea of depth. You want to deepen the connection by opening up and interacting at a more substantial level, to understand and to be understood. You want your friend to feel comfortable enough to be themselves without their social mask. The two key skills are listening and asking the right questions. When you do this it creates a dialouge where the two of you go back and forth, going to deeper and deeper levels of understanding. Most people are unable to properly express how they feel without someone there asking the right questions. When they’re finally able to express themselves properly they feel really good.

Group setting are completely different. Here the focus is on breadth, as it communicating your message to as many people as possible. It’s about creating an appearance and putting on a show. It is superficial, but this is not a bad thing. You want to express yourself in a way that makes other people happy. You want to be a center of attention. It’s about having as much fun as possible. It’s like using a megaphone instead of a stethoscope.

An extreme example of this would be standing on a stage delivering a speech. Here you are the total centre of attention. No one else is talking and everyone is listening to you. You are not asking questions. You are not listening (that would just create an awkward silence). Instead you are up there and the entire quality of the ‘conversation’ is totally dependant on your ability to tell a good story. This is the polar opposite of a one-to-one situation.

There are many naturally extroverted people who are good group settings yet horribly bad in close settings. The problem is that they mistakeny apply the group setting skills where it’s inapproaite. This manifests itself as people who just won’t shut and and are terrible listeners. They’re bores. They’ll sit there yabbering on about themselves, not noticing that the other person has no interest and wants to escape.

How do you become someone who is good in a social group situation if it’s not something you’re naturally good at? First of all lower your expecations about how ‘intelligent’ the conversations will be. The smarter you are, the lower they’ll have to go. Talking about the nuances of programming languages like C# is usually going to be a pretty horrible topic since no one will have a clue about what you’re on about. If you want intelligence, then you’ll find it in static content on the web. Forget about things being logical. Logic can go out the window.

What’s more important is the ‘vibration’ of the conversation. Things don’t need to make sense, they only need to be fun. You want to have happy and you want to have smily. You want feeling. If someone says something factually wrong, DO NOT tell them they’re wrong and get into some stupid argument. Be cool. Let them have their turn, and once it’s been ridden out start talking about someting else which is more fun.

Aim to become more confident. If you’re not confident, just act as if you are confident, people won’t know any better. After a bit of practice you’ll get better and then you really will be confident. Be the loud the person. Have a couple of glasses of wine to loosen yourself up. The funny thing is that success snowballs really quickly. At any parties there are those who are the centres of attention and there are those on the sidelines. When you move off the sidelines and become the centre of attention yourself, something funny happens. You attract other people as if you have this magical graviational field.

It’s lot easier to have something interesting to say when you’ve had a lot of wordly experiences. Once again it’s about bredth of experience, not depth. You’ll see a lot more of the world the more you move around it. If you’re not a person of the world the you should seriously think about expanding your horizons because you open yourself up to a whole bunch of new experiences as well as becoming a more intersting person who other people want to be around.