For Less Boring Conversations, Use Your Vulnerabilities
If you’ve ever felt completely boring , take comfort in this idea the School of Life offers: you are not boring, you are probably just being careful. In this video, they explain how to act less boring in conversation.
We’re not really made to be interesting; we are taught to be normal, appropriate and socially acceptable. Sometimes our innermost thoughts, opinions, fears and desires – the most exciting things in us – are buried in our attempts to fit in with them. The School of Life explains (emphasis added):
Out of humility and habit, we push some of our most interesting notions aside to follow the respected but dead conventions of what might make an impression. When we tell jokes, we focus on external details: who was there, when we walked, what was the temperature, instead of maintaining our composure to communicate what feelings lie under the facts.
In other words, if you want to appear more engaging in conversation, you should focus less on objective, external details and more on your perception – your feelings, opinions, things that you noticed and found interesting, etc. On the other hand, you’ve probably had boring conversations with people who talk about themselves all the time, but that’s not really the idea. Yes, you want to offer your own subjective view of the story, but the overall goal is to make a connection. Here’s how they put it:
The person we call interesting is, in fact, a person living in relation to what we all really want from social contacts, namely: an uncensored look at how a brief waking dream called life looks through the eyes of another person, and reassurance with whom we are not entirely alone. everything that seems to us the most confusing, peculiar and tense.
Overall, it seems like it all comes down to empathy . Nobody’s really boring, but to get people interested, you have to be interesting. To find out more, watch the video in full above or at the link below.
How not to be boring | School of Life