Conversationally Speaking Page 5

  ME: No, I really don’t care much for baseball. Do you jog?

  NEIGHBOR: No, but I work out with weights.

  ME: Well, I’d like to do that sometime, but I’m afraid it might not go well with yoga. You don’t practice yoga, do you?

  NEIGHBOR: No.

  And so forth. After a while, we smiled and parted with a ritual “See you soon.” Having found so little to exchange, it’s little wonder that neither of us has made any effort to see the other again.

  3. Opinions:

  “I prefer living in a small town where I know everybody.”

  “You should invest in silver if you’re really interested in making money.”

  “I want to date a lot before I get serious about anyone.”

  Opinions give others a more personal view of you than do facts or clichés. Someone who wants to know what you’re really like will come a lot closer knowing your views on politics, money, and love than merely knowing you grew up in Florida and are a librarian.

  If you express them in a somewhat open-minded manner, your opinions can also provide others with material on which to base interesting conversation. On the other hand, if you express your opinions as fact, you will not, as Will Rogers said, “be leaving a doubt to hang a conversation on.” Everyone approaches reality from a slightly different perspective, and exploring those differences can be both enlightening and exciting.

  4. Feelings: Feelings differ from facts and opinions in that they go beyond describing what happened and how you view what happened and convey your emotional reaction to what happened. For that reason, your expressions of feeling will generally be considered to give the closest possible insight into who you are. The following examples will help make the distinction clear:

  a. FACT: Women are discriminated against in hiring.

  OPINION: Women should be hired on the same basis as men.

  FEELING: I felt angry and frustrated when Jake Roberts got hired instead of me.

  b. FACT: I’ve been asking at least five open-ended questions a day.

  OPINION: Asking open-ended questions has been worth the effort.

  FEELING: I’m thrilled by the way people have been turning on to me since I’ve been asking open-ended questions.

  Disclosing facts and opinions is important, but if you don’t disclose your feelings, people will probably begin considering you cold and shallow and uninterested in getting close to them. Also, if you keep your emotions bottled up inside of you, you are far more likely to develop a wide variety of physical and emotional illnesses.

  Everyone has experienced the sorrow of losing a friend, the excitement of winning, the exhaustion that comes from wrestling with a difficult problem, the soothing warmth of a summer’s day, and the pain of being alone in a crowd. Everyone hopes to find love, joy, and acceptance in her or his life. When you disclose feelings like these to others, you encourage them to identify with you and to share their feelings in turn. Further, by self-disclosing, you avoid the frustrating and self-defeating strategy of hoping others will be considerate of your feelings even though you have never told them what your feelings are.

  HOW TO INTEREST OTHERS IN YOUR SELF-DISCLOSURE

  Sharing yourself interestingly requires not only that you list facts but that you tell how you relate to those facts. Max, a mid-town Los Angeles banker in his late forties, complained to me before one workshop that no one seemed to be very attentive to anything he had to say about himself. I suggested we role-play a simple situation and see what might be the problem.

  “What,” I asked him, “did you do on your last vacation?”

  He replied, “My wife and I drove to Vegas and stayed at the Union Plaza and spent a full day gambling. We lost $50 or so between us and had a good time.”

  I suggested to Max that although he had indeed recited the facts of his trip, he hadn’t done a good job of self-disclosing. He had talked about the situation, but hadn’t talked about himself in the situation. And that’s where personal contact comes in! Max tried again, this time in writing, with this result:

  Grace and I drove to Vegas for a taste of big-time gambling. I started out on the nickel slot machines, figuring I’d lose $2—$3 and then quit. After a few minutes, I pulled the lever and became a star! The buzzer went off, red lights flashed, and everyone looked at me and smiled. I got so excited, I started clapping my hands and calling out to my wife. I was a winner! Granted, it was only $7.50, but I was so thrilled it might as well have been a million bucks! I liked the feeling so much that I spent five hours and $32 making it happen again!

  An older woman named Matty in Houston also had difficulty interesting others in what she had to disclose. Here is how she originally described her job: “I’m a bookkeeper for several small companies. I put all their records in order and make sure they pay their taxes correctly.”

  After putting herself in the situation, she came up with this description:

  I’m a bookkeeper for several small companies. Sometimes when I’m casually writing down figures, I’ll start thinking about the thousands of dollars they represent and I’ll get nervous, afraid I’ve made a mistake. When I start feeling like that I go over it one more time, just to make sure.

  Sometimes the books I get are totally confused—numbers all over the place. Though I grumble a lot, I like the challenge of straightening it all out and getting the final figures to match.

  COMMON PROBLEMS WITH SELF-DISCLOSURE

  Projecting a False Image

  If you exaggerate your virtues, conceal your faults, or try to portray your idea of what the other person wants, you may think you wisely increase your chances for social success. But in reality, you only cause yourself more problems.

  Your actions will have one of two results:

  1. The other person will reject you because he or she is not attracted to the “perfect” self you are portraying (leading you to wish you had tried to find acceptance as yourself).

  2. The other person will be attracted to your loveable act. If this occurs, you won’t be able to really experience as your own the warmth and acceptance that will be given. The character you’re portraying will be receiving it, not you. What’s more, you will never be able to just relax and be yourself for fear of having the charade uncovered. Almost certainly, the best that can come from this is that you will have to undo your lies. Consider, for example, Charlene and Zach’s experiences:

  CHARLENE: Shortly after I met Donny, we talked about children. He said he really got off on kids and wanted to have a whole slew of them. I agreed, just because I thought that’s what he wanted to hear, but the truth is that there’s no way I’d put up with some little brat for twenty years. I’m just not the motherly type.

  We got really close and the next thing I knew, he wanted me to marry him and become the mother of his children. Well, at that point, I just had to set him straight. He started crying terribly and ran away. I felt miserable about the whole thing and I still do. I see Donny now and then at Safeway, but he won’t talk to me.

  ZACHARY: I challenged George to a game of tennis and introduced myself as a lawyer—it sounds crummy to say I collect money from candy machines for a living. We exchanged phone numbers and got together to hit a few quite often over the next several weeks. He even said he was going to introduce me to a gorgeous secretary at the office where he worked. One day, George called from jail to say he needed a lawyer and that I was the one he wanted. What could I do? And that, as they say, was that. I’ve never heard from him again.

  When I meet new people socially, I consider it wise to be honest and accurate. If a man or woman prefers to be friends with someone richer or more conservative or more interested in stamps or antique cars than I am, that’s fine. It’s certainly not my fault that I don’t fill their bill.

  Think of some people you admire and would like to talk to if you could: Perhaps Samantha Bee, Kathy Griffin, Bill Maher, Hillary Clinton, Mark Cuban, Sarah Silverman, Sean Hannity, Joy Behar, or Whoopi Goldberg. They are am
ong the most popular men and women in America, yet none of them comes even remotely close to achieving unanimous approval. Now, if none of them can do it, how can you expect everyone to like you? You can’t. In my judgment, it’s far wiser to express who you are honestly and let those people who like you become your friends.

  Not Being Believed

  Self-disclosure will usually help you to have rewarding and intimate relationships but only if the people you disclose to believe you are being truthful. There are several ways you can increase the chances of having that happen:

  Be specific: Add names, dates, and places to your disclosures. For example the statement, “I worked in Europe in 1994,” is less likely to be believed than is the more specific, “I taught English in Malmö, Sweden, during the summer of 1994.”

  Instead of describing yourself using general terms like “fired,” “happy,” and “upset,” show how you were feeling by painting word pictures. For example, “My hands were shaking, my knees were knocking. I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing came out,” is a lot more believable (and a lot more interesting) than, “I was afraid.”

  Reveal Some Negatives: If you present a balanced picture of yourself, you are more likely to be believed than if you portray yourself in a completely positive light. Your triumphs at work or on the tennis court, for example, will become more plausible if you also relate one or two problems you’ve encountered.

  Not Owning Your Statements

  Many people camouflage their expressions of opinion. For example, a student of mine once disclosed to me after class, “You go through day after day at work feeling miserable and you wonder, ‘Why should you break your back when a big fat nothing is all it gets you?’ So before long, you find yourself not really trying. And then they can you.”

  It was hard responding to what he had said. He appeared to be talking about himself, but his “you” statements made it seem that he was talking about me. See how much clearer he would have been had he owned his statements by beginning each with “I”: “I went through day after day at work feeling miserable and I wondered, ‘Why should I break my back when a big fat nothing is all it gets me.’ So before long, I found myself not really trying. And then they canned me.”

  Another related problem of ownership which is particularly common among females is expressing opinions or feelings as questions. If you disguise your beliefs and feelings in questions like, “Don’t you think it’s getting a little late?” and “Isn’t that awfully expensive?” it’s easy for others to dismiss them with such answers as, “No, we haven’t begun to party yet!” and “We can afford it.” If you want to be taken seriously, make direct statements and show that you own those statements by using the pronoun “I,” as in “I’m tired and I want to go now” and “I don’t think we can afford that.”

  Holding Back for Fear of Boring the Other Person

  If someone is just interested in being amused, kitty videos on YouTube or a Jimmy Fallon monologue will do. If someone only wants suspense, a Stephen King novel will do. If someone just wants to hear heartwarming stories, James Herriot’s All Things Bright and Beautiful will do.

  But people want more than that, and you have a gift to bestow which is far more valuable to them than anything they can get from kitty videos, Jimmy Fallon, Stephen King, or James Herriot.

  You can give them the gift of personal contact.

  Almost everyone in modern society is troubled by the lack of personal contact. Most people have few close friends and many have none at all. Lots of people feel as if they’re just being processed all day by teachers or employers, fellow students or workers, gas station attendants or supermarket clerks—often even by the people they live with.

  In light of this, if you can make an honest attempt to establish contact on a personal one-to-one basis, to really touch the other person, your efforts are very likely to be welcomed.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Starting Conversations

  . . . I decided to marry her. Courtship would be a mere formality. But what to say to begin the courtship? “Would you like some of my gum?” seemed too low-class. “Hello,” was too trite a greeting for my future bride. “I love you! I am hot with passion!” was too forward. “I want to make you the mother of my children,” seemed a bit premature.

  Nothing. That’s right, I said nothing, And after a while, the bus reached her stop, she got off, and I never saw her again.

  End of story.

  —Alan (your author)

  Many a friendship is lost for lack of speaking.

  —Aristotle

  Starting conversations with strangers is easy—if you know how to go about it. Here are a few simple strategies which have been found useful:

  First, seek out people who are likely to be open to talking with you. Most people are delighted to have the opportunity to meet someone new, and you may consider anyone who’s alone and not heavily engrossed in activity to be a good prospect.

  Especially good prospects may display their interest by smiling at you, looking at you more than once, or having their arms and legs uncrossed or their legs crossed toward you.

  Members of the opposite sex who are attracted to you may show you in several additional ways, such as combing their hair, straightening their clothes, rubbing some part of their bodies or an object like a cup or a chair, or letting you catch them looking at you and then holding their gaze an extra second before shifting it away.

  Once you’ve decided who you’re going to meet, the next step is to smile, make eye contact, and speak. (If you are especially anxious meeting strangers, turn to chapter 12 on reducing anxiety at this point.)

  Although many people sit around groping for the “perfect” opener, research has shown that what you say is relatively insignificant. (Negative openers, however, won’t generally encourage others to talk to you and will probably set a depressed tone for the relationship. I remember once coming up to a woman in a nightclub in Wheeling, West Virginia, and saying by way of introduction, “Boy, I can’t stand all this loud music.” She replied “Well then, why don’t you get out.”)

  What you say doesn’t have to be wonderfully clever or dripping with meaning; ordinary comments are just fine. What is important is that you take advantage of opportunities to make contact and get things going. If the other person is interested, he’ll probably give you some free information which will help the two of you to find common interests and get more personal.

  Thinking up openers is simple. You basically have only three topics to choose from:

  the situation

  the other person

  yourself

  and only three ways to begin:

  asking a question

  voicing an opinion

  stating a fact

  Your major goal in the beginning is just to show interest or involve the other person, so the best way to start is usually by asking a question. (Closed-ended questions are fine, so long as you don’t pose too many of them in a row.) Stating an opinion also works well, and certainly works better than just stating a fact. When you recite facts like, “The bus is late today,” or “Apples went up 5 cents a pound,” you haven’t involved the other person and so she is left to try to involve you by asking a question or voicing an opinion—which she may well not do.

  TALKING ABOUT THE SITUATION

  Starting a conversation by talking about the situation you are both in is usually the best of your three options. It’s less likely to provoke anxiety than is talking about the other person and more likely to promote involvement than is talking about yourself.

  To begin a conversation about the situation, look around and find things that interest or puzzle you. Use dual perspective: find something to say that the other person is also likely to want to talk about. This is especially easy to do if you’re together in class, on the job, or in a special-interest group such as Parents Without Partners, the PTA, the Sierra Club, or the Young Democrats or Republicans.

  After you have asked your q
uestion or make your statement, listen carefully for the response, especially noting any free information you may want to follow up. Here are some examples of openers. Bear in mind that they are no better than anything you are likely to come up with and that saying anything is better than saying nothing:

  In a classroom: “What do you know about the teacher?” “I was absent yesterday. What did we talk about?” “What do you think will be on the exam?”

  In a sauna: “Boy, they really stirred up the coals in here! Tell me, what good is this supposed to do?”

  At a horse race: “Who do you think will win? Why do you say that?”

  At an art museum: “What do you suppose the artist wanted to say?” (I once spent an hour asking this question in front of a Picasso and go so involved in so many discussions that I accidentally asked someone who came back for a second look the same question. His second reply: “To tell you the truth, I don’t think Picasso has had a whole lot new to say in the past twenty-five minutes.”

  In line for a movie: “What have you heard about this movie?” “What made you decide to see it?”

  At a market: “I notice you’re buying artichokes. I’ve always been curious . . . how do you prepare them?”

  To a neighbor: “Your lawn is so green. What’s your secret?” “What’s that you’re working on?”

  At a laundromat: “Where do I put the detergent in?” (The woman I asked this of hilariously described the time she added too much and returned later to find an avalanche of suds all over the place! We then discussed how many people assume that more is better when it comes to vitamins, which led to our discussing our own experiences with vitamins.) “Excuse me, where do I put the detergent in?”