The people of Sweden, by the way, know they have a problem making good conversation, and they don’t mind dealing with it. The only people, they say, worse at talking than Swedes are the neighboring Finns. Both are known to drink rather well.
The legend tells us a Swede and his Finnish friend met in a little hut north of the Arctic Circle one day to engage in a -friendly drinking bout.
Along about halfway through the second quart of pure akvavit, the Swede wobblingly hoisted his glass and said, “Skoal!” (“Cheers”).
Whereupon the Finn slammed his glass down upon the table and said, “Dammit, did you come here to drink or talk?”
Encourage the Talker
Does Scripture really say, “And a little child shall lead them”?
I always suspected the honest translation would read, “And a little child shall teach them”!
Elizabeth was four. Her mother took her off the train in West Palm Beach to scamper around the platform during the generous twenty-minute layover and there she met another girl her age. From inside the train it looked like a comedy sketch in a silent movie. Elizabeth started talking to the other girl, who immediately put index fingers in her ears to shut out whatever Elizabeth was saying.
Elizabeth kept right on talking, with lots of earnestness and energy, until her mother had to hustle her back on the train, whereupon the other girl removed her fingers from her ears and proceeded with her life.
Afterward, I thought I’d try to make Elizabeth feel better. “I’m sorry that little girl was so mean,” I said.
“That’s all right,” Elizabeth replied. “She didn’t know me.”
“Well,” I said, “that didn’t give her the right to stand there with her fingers in her ears.”
“I told you,” Elizabeth said, impatient with grown-ups who never seem to get the point. “She didn’t know me!”
Clearly, Elizabeth was on her side, so I dropped it. Equally clearly, Elizabeth considered the moment not a negative experience in communication, just a neutral one.
Alas, we are all Elizabeth. We communicate with near zero expectation of being heeded, or even heard. And we know this. And we don’t seem to mind.
How else can we explain all the talking that’s going on in the face of so little listening?
Study the speaker the next time one pinwheels off into a “Wait-till-you-hear-what-happened-to-us-in-Acapulco” story. Good story, let’s say. And he’s full of it. He enjoys telling it. You can tell it’s undergone four or five revisions already, and it’s as amusing as a real-life travel story can reasonably be expected to get.
Now study the audience. Only rarely does he “have” them. Usually their attentiveness profile ranges from polite attention to downright rudeness—eyes wandering, yelling for the tray lady to come closer with the olives wrapped in anchovies, interruptions with better stories of what can happen to you in Acapulco, screaming greetings to newcomers to the party they haven’t seen since yesterday, the launching of totally new stories by defecting listeners aimed at available splinter groups, United Nations-style walkouts prior to the punch line—no humiliation remains unvisited upon the speaker.
If a lecturer didn’t hold his crowd any better than that, he’d abdicate the rest of his tour. A comic wouldn’t be asked to come back for the midnight show.
And yet our veteran of all those exciting outrages in Acapulco doesn’t seem to mind. After all, it’s a party.
Deliberately deciding to pay attention to others in a group gives us a chance to get in on the ground floor of what can be a nice business—or at least a nice series of payoffs—for you.
Boy Scouts solemnly endeavor to do a good deed every day. H. L, Mencken lovers “smile at a homely girl.”
The idea here is to pay attention to bores.
Encourage whoever is talking with your attention. You’ll stand out in his mind—and memory—like the Swedish Red Cross after an earthquake. You will not be the first person he or she ever bored. You can easily become the first person who took it so well, and perhaps even appealed to enjoy it.
If you’ve ever wondered how oxygen feels with all that power to make dying flames flare up again, you’re in for your moment. You’ll feel that identical power just by making up your mind you’re going to look attentive. (And there’s a lot more you can do to intensify the effect after that.) Look attentive—that’s all—and you’ll know you’re the cause of that sudden surge of happy energy that overtakes whoever’s speaking.
He’s simply not accustomed to listeners like you.
We begin encouraging the speaker merely by posing convincingly as a listener. Don’t slouch, fix your eyes on the bridge of the speaker’s nose, react appropriately with sighs and chuckles. (Sighs are easier to fake than chuckles, but make sure you’ve got a convincing one before you offer it. A simple “Wow” at the right intersection of the speaker’s tale is preferable to an obviously phony chuckle.)
A fact of life well known to psychologists and performers is that people are much easier to read than they think they are. You may think that stab of boredom, displeasure, disgust, anger, envy bounces harmlessly from your brain off your stomach and dissipates somewhere around your lymph nodes before it can reach and reshape your face. It doesn’t.
Questions are the protein of conversation.
Isn’t there anything you’d like to know about Acapulco? Let’s say you already know it’s in Mexico. You further know it’s on the Pacific coast of Mexico.
Do you know how far down the coast it is? Do you know which airlines provide the best service to Acapulco and how long it takes to fly there from New York and Los Angeles? Do you know anything about its hotels, its restaurants, its social whirl? Do you know of its many attractions? Do you know what’s going on there politically, economically, sociologically, with the condos, with the Communists? Do you know how they like Americans? Do you know what country sends the next largest group of tourists to Acapulco after the Americans?
Assuming you know all the above to the point where you could ad-lib sources, footnotes, and bibliography, is there anything additional you’d like to know about Acapulco?
Let’s suppose your true answer is, “No, not now.”
Fair enough. If convinced it would further your career, could you arrange to pretend to be interested in yet one more aspect of Acapulco?
Where’s the “Gee whiz!” of your childhood? What if the Italians of his day had treated Marco Polo as apathetically as you and the rest of the crowd are treating the speaker? Here’s someone who’s just back from a major city in a foreign country. Furthermore, he’s more than just willing to testify; he’s eager to talk.
Invite him!
Remember now, you’re interested. Let your face, body, mood, manner—everything but your words—say to the speaker, “Now that the hilarity of your opening anecdote has warmed us one and all, let’s not let it end like this. You obviously have much to share from your recent adventure in Acapulco, and I for one don’t want to miss a jot or tittle of it. ”
Would he recommend Acapulco? Would he go again? Would he choose a different time of year? Would he stay at the same hotel? What did he most want to do that he didn’t have time for? Would Acapulco be a sensible destination for a single person?
Are you faking all that interest? I say, even if you think you’re faking, the answer is no. The world may think it’s faking and call it faking, but striving to cultivate the blessing of heightened attentiveness is not faking.
You’re summoning forth an interest in matters your natural, unstimulated galaxy of senses might otherwise lazily overlook.
And if you can “fake” the interest, you can “fake” the questions, too.
Never start a question if you don’t know how it’s going to end. That may seem like frivolous advice, until you think of the many interviewers you’ve seen and heard in the middle of that unfortunate and unnecessary fix. It’s like finding yourself in the middle of a traffic jam of squids. ‘ ‘When you see the mix of
people in Acapulco, at least in the parts where the tourists go—I mean, don’t go—aren’t you … don’t you … in other words, considering everything that’s going on there, don’t you ever get the feeling that… ?”
The broadcaster who flails like that is confessing that the only reason for the question is because the next commercial isn’t quite due yet. In conversation, you’re confessing, “In my heart I really have no further questions, but I nonetheless feel I should try to carry on a conversation with you.”
Ask let’s-look-at-you-type questions and not hey-look-at-me-type questions.
“Do you think … ?” “How did you like… ?” “Would you advise … ?” “Would you recommend … ?” are good conversation stimulants. He is, after all, the world’s fore most authority on what he thinks, likes, advises, and recommends. Hey-look-at-me questions sound like, “Do you agree with The Nation that indigenous Marxists secretly welcome the opulence of Acapulco as a rallying lever for all the Mexicans living in poverty?” “Having seen them close up, do you believe the anthropological land-bridge theory that the Indians of western Mexico came across the Bering Strait from Asia?” “Could you notice the tremendous infiltration of Japanese money in Acapulco despite their efforts to disguise it?” “Would you place the Spanish spoken in Acapulco closer to Iberian Castillian or New York Puerto Rican?”
Your not sufficiently hidden agenda in asking those questions is not to elicit any of his thoughts, experiences, or richness, but to call attention instead to your own brilliance in matters of hemispheric revolution, anthropology, international finance, and comparative linguistics.
Normal compassion would propel most people to come to the aid of someone trapped naked in a freight elevator. You’d offer your assistance based upon his needs: First, let him know you know he’s in there and you’ve got the building superintendent on the case, toss him a sheet or a towel or something to cover himself with, then pull him out, get him something to drink, and so on.
Normal compassion doesn’t stretch far enough, though, to rescue somebody trapped in the middle of telling a story nobody’s listening to, a story everybody’s walking away from—a story, in fact, nobody cares enough about to know whether the teller’s even finished telling!
Being a good listener is usually a passive deed. You need only be attentive. Sometimes, though, being a good listener forces you to become an activist, even a militant.
When you sense the speaker is losing his audience, when they start fidgeting and talking among themselves, lean in as though you’re disturbed by the commotion and want to hear “ what the speaker is saying. If a friend comes over while the speaker is plodding toward his punch line and starts talking with you as though the speaker is invisible and inaudible, announce with at least some twinkle of enthusiasm, “Harold’s telling us about the new Soviet, Bulgarian, and East German tourists in Acapulco.”
Be sensitive to moments when a speaker is in midpoint and a legitimate interruption occurs—a riptide of new arrivals, a ringing phone, the return of the tray lady with breaded zucchini slivers, the call to dinner, nearby lightning and thunder. Speakers, particularly dull ones, are dumbfounded by the ability of so many listeners to be interrupted in the middle of a story as fascinating as the one he was telling and, after the interruption, numb themselves to the suspense of it all and move into entirely new topics, without even acknowledging their gnawing need to hear how it all ends!
Some speakers rescue themselves from those moments. The instant calm is restored, they’ll say, “As I was telling you . . Others are too proud, too decent to do that. The notion of a poker player needing a pair of jacks or better to open is not just some hasty gimmick grafted into the rules of a card game. It’s a reflection of human nature at its most thoughtful. Some speakers simply won’t bully their way back on to center stage if they’re interrupted in midstream. They’ll wait to be asked, preferably by more than one person.
If nobody asks, they’ll graciously forget the whole thing— and spend the rest of the evening feeling rotten.
If you want to harvest the highest civilian decoration a speaker has ever thought about conferring upon a stranger he just met at a party, you be the one who, after everyone’s seated and the damask napkins and flowers have been duly praised, takes over as master of ceremonies and says, “Now then Please get back to your story.”
That decoration will carry oak-leaf clusters if you prove” you remember exactly where he was in his story—for example, “Now I want to hear the rest about the Bolivian boxer in the hotel lounge who kept putting dirty words to the Mexican national anthem.”
Consider the politics of the typical party conversation. Someone is talking, or trying to. He is thereby nominating himself for the high office of Center of Attraction for an unspecified term.
He wants your support—your appearance of attention, your genuine attention, your display of favorable reaction, your refraining from any display of unfavorable reaction (fidgeting, looking at your watch, yawning, leaving, starting a conversation with someone else while he’s still talking, etc.).
A President is likely to remember and reward someone whose stubborn loyalty kept the Iowa caucus from swinging overwhelmingly to his opponent in his first run for the vice presidency twelve years earlier. Speakers, too, tend to recall those whose body language and animal magnetism supported his bid for attention when challenged. (Speakers also remember who was perfectly willing to stand there unsupportingly and watch that little moment of his turn into a shambles!)
When a yacht capsizes, the Coast Guard doesn’t evaluate the character of the individual passengers floundering in the water yelling for help. They save them all.
That’s just as sensible and humane a policy in the parlor. Rescue the speaker whether he deserves it or not.
Be “glue.” Be part of the “center” that holds and helps the speaker out.
Why? Two reasons.
Humanity demands it. If defeated boxers are helped out of the ring, then defeated conversationalists should not be left to die there.
Then, too, apart from humanitarian considerations, that conversational strikeout you just helped rescue may be able to do a great deal for you.
What if he can’t hold a crowd, delight with an anecdote, sting with a quip, pierce with wit, and cause everybody to rebel with impatience and beg for more if he shows signs of shutting up! He may still be able to fulfill all of your needs, most of your ambitions, and even a few of your fantasies by dictating one (dull) interoffice memo.
There’s nothing immoral about keeping evidence of your boredom hidden from the one who bores you. Every rule of politics dictates you let that man remember you as one of his rescuers.
We never liked the kid in school who hung around the teacher’s desk after the bell to ask some trumped-up follow-up question about the subject matter and maybe zing in a compliment on the teacher’s knack of teaching.
None of us seems to mind, however, when, long after the subjects been forgotten someone at the party comes over and asks a follow-up question with perhaps some kind of compliment to our spellbinding abilities woven in. Do it, and you may be sure the speaker will not go storming over to the host and report you as a nag who won’t let well enough alone!
You may have some off-the-menu asset you’re not fully aware of that could encourage the speaker. Prominent media consultant Jack Hilton has the ability to hear the same joke a hundred times, appear to be absolutely imprisoned with interest during each retelling, and then erupt into the most genuine-sounding laughter at the punch line—every time.
That’s encouraging!
Some people have a laugh that’s so infectious they never have to venture any narratives of their own to win at parties. All they have to do is release a peal or two of that laughter at whatever or whoever entertains them. They’re encouraging. And beloved.
Some people may, as speakers, be unable to hold a crowd through an unembellished rendition of the correct time, but as listeners they domina
te the room. Whoever they deem worth listening to automatically gets the crowd’s attention.
Exceptionally beautiful women have power to encourage male speakers just by not falling asleep or walking away while they’re talking. (Exceptionally smart men already know that such women do not sit comparing the oratory skills of various men before deciding which one to fall in love with.)
Anyone who has obviously more prominence than the rest of the group also has tremendous power to encourage just by appearing attentive. Whoever “has the ear” of the visiting celebrity likes to imagine that celebrity as silently saying, “I may be high and mighty, but if it weren’t for people like you giving me information like this, I’d be nowhere.”
Everybody, some more acutely than others, feels the dreary inevitability of the opening moments of acquaintanceship. “What is your name?”
“Where are you from?”
“What do you do?”
“How long have you been in town?”
Just as modem medical technology can get an accurate evaluation of your blood with one drop under a microscope, if we hitched you up to the right kind of machine we could get an accurate reading of your overall sophistication level by measuring your emotional pulsations just from looking at those questions in print. The more you chafe, the higher you rate!
Worthwhile people are not all that “encouraged” when subjected to that lackluster litany, no matter how eagerly and intently you seem to fixate upon their answers. Go for the early knockout.
• I knew nobody there. It was a breakfast meeting and I was to give a speech later on. I was hastily introduced to him, plunked down beside him, and there we were—both nice people, both desirous of doing our part to nurture our ad-hoc relationship for the eighteen to twenty-six minutes of its expected existence, but neither of us knowing what to say, where to start.
Nonsophisticates have no problem at moments like that.
They leap for the “What do you do’s?” and “Where are you from’s?” like seals after flying fish. Sophisticates pay for their higher altitude with some initial discomfort. They like to leave those details for later, for after it’s clearly established that this acquaintanceship is, indeed, sanctioned and valid and should proceed.
Making People Talk Page 6