How To Deal With Boring Conversations

I grabbed the stranger by her shoulders and she stopped talking, mid-sentence – shocked. 

“Dude,” I lowered my voice, and looked straight in her eyes. “What. Makes you think. That I care this much about you? You called this meeting. I have a lot to do today. I don’t even want to be here. STOP. TALKING. ONLY. ABOUT. YOURSELF. It is SO. BORING.”

Ok, so that didn’t really happen. Or rather, it did – but only in my mind.

Back in reality, she continued extrapolating in great detail about her life and interests, while I did that thing of making my face look as if I was really interested in what she had to say – while my mind imagined the scenario where I stopped her short.

Hilary had emailed me a couple of months before. She’d heard about True Stories Told Live, the storytelling show I started and still run in Toronto, and was interested in doing something similar in her town.

Given the advance warning – and my want for storytelling shows to cover my adopted country and everywhere else – I agreed to meet her for coffee.

As the date crept near, I realised it was going to be a busy week. But it’s always a busy week, and the fact that she’d offered to travel a couple of hours to meet made me feel as if I couldn’t cancel. Maybe it would be interesting. Maybe it would be fun to give advice – it’s always nice to feel like you’ve been of service, like you’ve left the world better off than you found it. And it’s pleasurable to answer questions about what you do, when you love what you do!

Except I wasn’t answering any questions.

I was asking a few, then sitting and listening as she talked and talked and talked about places, people and things I had zero interest in. And I smiled and nodded and raised my eyebrows, while fantasising about telling her how I really felt and growing more and more resentful. I decided I’d suffer ten more minutes – then say I had to go.

Suddenly – I had an epiphany:

Earlier in the week, I’d been watching an interview with a lady – and total badass – called Olivia Fox Cabane. She coaches people (us; CEOs of Fortune 500 companies; sheiks) on how to be more charismatic. Having been terribly shy as a kid, she learned through studying Neurology and Psychology that:

Charisma = Power + Presence + Warmth

That each of these can be learned and tweaked.

That when you increase one of them, it’ll positively affect the person you’re talking to on a subconscious level.

And that – most importantly – every time you’re in a conversation that feels difficult or boring, you should see it as a chance to test out a method of increasing one of those three factors.

Ooh.

Given how detailed my “PLEASE STOP RIGHT NOW JUST STOP” visions were, I figured I needed to increase my presence. Olivia Fox Cabane says that, when you’re not present – even if you think you’re making your face behave as if you are, the other person picks up on your micro-expressions and s-l-i-g-h-t-l-y slower response times – and feels crummy.

She suggests three ways to increase your presence:

The first, is to feel your toes. Just feel them.

I tried it. It stopped my fantasising, but I was still bored of Hilary.

The next is to study the other person’s irises. 

The light was reflecting off Hilary’s glasses, making it quite hard to see hers. Huh.

I dug around my memory for number three. Oh – YES!

OFC’s third suggestion:

Pretend the person you’re talking to is the hero of an indie movie you’re watching. The lead character. The one you really, really care about.

I looked at her. The highlights in her hair, slightly growing out. Her voice – now I was noticing it, I realised it was actually quite musical. There was a real warmth in her smile.

I was fascinated. I was gripped.

Almost immediately, Hilary smiled, shook her head and said,
“Hang on – I came here to ask you questions, and I’ve been doing all the talking! Tell me about you – why did you decide to start True Stories Told Live in the first place? Had you ever been to a storytelling show before?”

I ended up staying for two hours.

Having a boring conversation? Pretend the person you’re talking to is the hero of an indie movie you’re watching.

(TWEET THIS HERE!)

In retrospect, I think it was nerves that had driven her to ramble about herself. The rest of the conversation was delightful – she asked me about my show, I gave her a bunch of advice that she found really useful, so I got to feel helpful.

Once our chat was balanced, I was interested in asking her more about herself – it turned out she’s run a ton of events in the past and had some really useful advice for me.

Clearly my focus on her had shifted not just my own enjoyment of the meeting but, as a result, hers too.

So, next time you find yourself in a conversation you’re bored to tears by: before you start laying all the blame on the other person, see if you can shift something in yourself.
Try one of those tips: feel your toes; study their irises; pretend they’re the hero of an indie movie.

If you want to find out more about Olivia Fox Cabane (which is a really fun name to say out loud – try it!) and her book “The Charisma Myth”, you can find her at foxcabane.com. The interview I watched was part of Ramit Sethi’s (wonderful) Brain Trust (which I’m a paid member of), but you can see a great talk she did at Google, HERE.

Over To You

What was the last hellish conversation you were in? And how did you deal? I’d love to hear your suggestions – or just any thoughts about this – in the comments below.

If you have a friend who gets easily bored with people – or is just quite shy and wants to be a little more charming – please share this post with them using one of the little round buttons under the blog.

Thanks!

You rule,

xx (Yes Yes) Marsha

PS want to know my best-ever client secret – and get even more advice, tips, plus stories that I won’t put on the internet? Come and join the Yes Yes Family – it’s free! Just pop your details in below:

Photo credits: Tambako the Jaguar, Axel Bührmann and Shootingsnow, all via Compfight cc; Jessica Brandi Lifland/Polaris, via Foxcabane.com

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