Many evolutionary
biologists posit that humans developed language for economic reasons. We needed to trade, and we needed to
establish trust in order to trade.
Sherry Turple, MIT
professor and author of Reclaiming Conversation, suggests young people wear
headphones for the same reason adults overuse e-mail: we fear conversation.
Meaningful
conversation requires an investment of time.
A conversation is
not a college lecture course or a TED talk.
No matter how awkward it may feel to be on the listening end of
someone's heartbreak, escaping into logic is rarely the right response.
We bring
expectations to every conversation, no matter how brief.
We can't always
control how a conversation goes, but we can create an environment for open,
authentic communication by sharing our expectations and being aware of our own
thoughts and feelings before we decide to speak.
I've identified five
key strategies that help facilitate a productive dialogue. They are: be curious, check your bias, show
respect, stay the course, and end well.
"Everybody
believes they are the good guy. The only
real way to disarm your enemy is to listen to them. If you hear them out, if you're brave enough
to really listen to their story, you can see that more often than not, you
might have made some of the same choices if you'd lived their life instead of
yours." Amaryllis Fox
Resist the impulse
-- and it is a strong one -- to constantly decide whether you agree with
everyone someone says. Listening to
someone doesn't mean agreeing with them.
The purpose of listening is to understand, not to endorse.
This tendency to
lump people into groups is known as the "halo and horns effect".
Stereotypes change
and evolve over the years, which underscores an important fact about them: they
are not based on fact or truth, but presumption.
Do your best to
listen without judgment and to stop yourself from making minute-by-minute
decisions about what you agree with.
Even if you don’t
believe someone has cause to feel wronged, it doesn't change the intensity of
the emotion in that person's mind. They crave resolution and relief.
It turns out, the
more money you have, the less able you are to correctly identify other people's
emotions. It doesn't matter if you're
looking at photos or interacting with real people, you likely have a harder time
recognizing joy, fear, love, and anxiety in a stranger's face.
Silence wakes up
parts of our brains that may have been sleeping. If you allow space for silence in your
conversations, you may engage more of your own mind and that of the other
person's.
Owning up to a
mistake or a lack of knowledge might feel like admitting weakness, but it can
create a powerful empathetic bond.
Conversations are
the bases of relationships, and relationships are built on trust. You will find that the more open you are
about the limitations of your knowledge, the more weight people will give to
your opinion when you offer it.
Your thoughts can
literally wear you out. In fact, our
brains consume 20 percent of our calories.
Researchers found that exerting self-control actually reduces glucose
levels in the body. Glucose is a simple
sugar that serves as an energy source. Tuning out distractions and narrowing
your focus consumes energy.
Active listening is
defined as hearing, understanding, responding, and retaining.
One Harvard study
even demonstrated that we are more capable of feeling empathy toward others
after experiencing solitude.
Many of us have been
fooled into believing that digital connection is the same as conversation.
Empathy is very
different from compassion. Compassion is
the ability to say, "I feel for you".
Empathy is the ability to say, "I feel with you". Compassion allows
you to remain separate from the other person; it allows you to see them as
"other". It can devolve into
pity. Empathy forces you to feel
connected to that other person and to recognize that we are all human, all
struggling, all linked.
The best
conversations happen between two people who are considering each other.
