For Less Boring Conversations, Embrace Your Vulnerabilities

For Less Boring Conversations, Embrace Your Vulnerabilities

If you’ve ever felt like a completely dull person, take solace in this idea the School of Life presents: You’re not boring, you’re probably just guarded. In this video, they explain how to come across as less boring in conversations.

We aren’t exactly conditioned to be exciting; we’re taught to be normal, appropriate and socially acceptable. Sometimes our deepest thoughts, opinions, fears and desires — the most exciting things about us — get buried in our attempts to fit in. The School of Life explains (emphasis ours):

Out of modesty and habit, we push some of our most interesting perceptions to one side in order to follow respectable but dead conventions of what might impress. When we tell anecdotes we throw the emphasis on the outward details: who was there, when we went, what the temperature was like rather than maintaining our nerve to report on the layer of feelings beneath the facts.

In other words, if you want to come across as more exciting in conversation, you have to focus less on the objective, outward details and more on your perceptions — your feelings, opinions, things you noticed and thought were interesting and so on. On the flip side, you’ve probably had boring conversations with people who talk about themselves constantly, but that’s not really the idea here. Yes, you want to offer your subjective perspective on the story, but the overall goal is to build a connection. Here’s how they put it:

The person we call interesting is in essence someone alive to what we all deeply want from social intercourse, which is an uncensored glimpse of what the brief waking dream called life looks like through the eyes of another person, and reassurance we are not entirely alone with all that feels most bewildering, peculiar and intense within us.

Overall, it seems to come down to empathy. No one is really boring, but to engage people you have to be, well, engaging. For more detail, check out the video in full above or at the link below.

[referenced url=”https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2017/02/the-importance-of-empathy-in-everyday-life/” thumb=”http://img.youtube.com/vi/o7AOFUoCX1o/0.jpg” title=”The Importance Of Empathy In Everyday Life” excerpt=”In trying times is more important than ever to consider the feelings of those around you. We are all in our own bubble, with our own unique perspective on the world, and it is crucial for our personal development to understand how other people experience the world.”]

How Not to be Boring [The School of Life]


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