Conversate but be real
I’ve been hearing more often than ever, people saying it’s hard to have a conversation with anyone these days. Are we surprised? Do we know when that fateful moment happened? We all know when it did.
There was a time of formal, “Hello, how are you…” with a beginning, middle and end back-and-forth exchange of words. This was how we learned to talk to others, just from watching our parents and our parents-parents.
Enter technology. And now a younger generation is brought up on text messaging and 30-second TikToks, with very little beginning, middle, and end. It’s a different world. Luckily, their parents have likely still retained their roots of being able to conversate; however, the young ones… well, their skills are less, which means their children will have even less. Maybe there will be a day people don’t talk, just nod and give each other symbolic thumbs up.
No one probably predicted we’d have to teach how to have a conversation. We didn’t anticipate technology shortening everything or doing all the work (AI for example). We didn’t even anticipate the outcome of that, but most of us know how it feels to talk to someone who truly has no skills in a conversation. Not only is it frustrating but it can be downright off-putting. It becomes a one-sided… You realize to keep alive a banter, you have to keep asking questions or trying to add feedback about yourself that may go just completely ignored. And I’ll bet when you walk away from that person, you are not feeling very happy.
If you remember the quote by Maya Angelou, “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” So unless you are really good at body language… you may want to know what to say at times.
The next biggest challenge is how to do teach real conversation… not just how to have it, not just the logistics of it or the plan of how to do it… but how to be real. Being real relies on embracing your feelings during a conversation, allowing yourself to be open, to not fear making mistakes or blunders. The real is the core of the conversation. That is ultimately how you are going to make them feel. So while it’s a skill, it’s also an art. The real teaching has to be in how to teach people how to get in touch with their thoughts and feelings and how to share these. That is the conversation.