5 tips for great conversations

[beth_leonard]

Sometimes it's easier to write things out than to lie awake thinking about what I'd write. At Peter's parent visiting day, the children were given an optional assignment by the drama teacher to write articles for the newspapers that the kids are going to have printed for the Upper Elementary production of "Newsies." These are filler articles, but

Comments

[elflynn]

This is really good advice!

[beth_leonard]

Thanks!
--Beth

[steuard]

I like this a lot! I wonder if I could use some variation on it to convince myself to be better about joining conversations today. (I feel terribly awkward inserting myself into conversations that other people are already having. This causes me no end of discomfort at, say, physics conferences. I still try, but man, it's hard.)

[beth_leonard]

The tip that I didn't add for good conversations (because this is aimed at 4-6th graders) is the "Car accident" conversation. "I saw a car accident on the way to work and the front was totally smashed up but the people looked fine..." "I was almost in an accident last week when someone...." Car accident conversations also tend to be self sustaining. It's a good one to use when talking about the weather has been used up. I don't tend to start them because you never know when someone has recently lost a loved one to a car accident, I use this conversation only in case of emergencies, but there was a time at an HP social with older pocket-protected engineers that everything else was falling flat and I've certainly seen this one work very well when people who don't know each other are standing around and the situation expects them to socialize

[steuard]

I don't think I'd dare use the "car accident" one. It's innocuous to most people (even to a lot of us who've been in a fairly nasty one), but there are guaranteed to be people for whom the topic is absolutely traumatizing, for a variety of reasons. I'd be hesitant to raise a topic with that sort of associated risk purely for the sake of breaking the ice.

On a more positive note, I thought your "10-hour looks rule" made a lot of sense. Teaching about some sort of buffer like that seems like a really good idea, and this seems like a pretty decent rule of thumb.

But I just now realized that I hadn't quite fully thought about the "clothing" aspect. I don't think that I was transgressing when I said "Awesome shirt" to the student on campus whose T-shirt proclaimed "Neville would have done it in 5 books." And I once had a really nice conversation that started because someone in an elevator noticed my "Large Torso Collider" shirt and exclaimed, "Hey, where'd you get that? I don't think we even have that at the CERN gift shop!" So is there

[beth_leonard]

Clothing is definitely a grey area. On the one hand, there's unwanted lewd whistles or other comments from strangers (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1XGPvbWn0A ), and different people whistle at different thresholds of clothing. The whistling people think they're giving a compliment

[zdashamber]

Bookmarking this because it's useful! And also I'll someday need to teach my kid to converse instead of just throwing her into the wilds and letting her fend for herself

[beth_leonard]

Thanks!

I think I could go up to 10 tips easily. The wh questions a good one but require nuance I think, because it is easy to make them sound like you're grilling the other person. Only ask the question if you are genuinely interested in the answer and can use body language to show that you care. Don't keep asking questions if the other person is giving short answers and doesn't seem interested in talking to you.

--Beth

[beth_leonard]

PS. Kid? Congrats! Clearly we have fallen out of touch. The last LJ post I see was from 2011.

--Beth

[zdashamber]

Yeah, I'm on Twitter and (a bit) FB these days. Kid is a year old, so far so good... :)

Brainstorming more helpful tips

[beth_leonard]

The next set of tips are starting to form in my mind. It's so much easier to think of what not to say than what TO say. When no one has anything to say that is safe and relevant, everyone looks down at their phones and tunes out the strangers in front of them for the friends (electronic and real) in the phone.

6. Car accident conversation: for emergency use only.
7. Invite others to join in!
8. Use questions with appropriate caution.
9. Start with a shared experience.
10. Using Humor: are you funny, annoying, or childish?
11. Mean isn't funny.
12. Pickup lines always sound like pickup lines.

--Beth