conversations
A few reflections on good conversations
What do we mean by good conversation?
It’s analogous to dancing. It flows. It leaves both parties changed. It involves leading and following - vice versa. You don’t know where you might end up, where the music will take you.
Bad conversation - well we’ve all been in it, either on the receiving end or the speaking end. It feels forced, uninspiring or drawn out. But it’s always a dynamic, and you are one part of it.
Three levels of conversation
First, recognise that there are three levels of conversation. This is from ‘authentic relating’ :
- Informational
- Personal
- Relational
Informational : Exchanging bits of information (what’s your name, what do you do, how was your weekend). What we think of small talk. This is safe and necessary, and usually the starting point of conversations; the doorway.
Personal : how do you feel about that information? ‘How do you feel about your job, how did you feel about this event’. This involves revealing values, preferences, emotional states, meaning. You can decide to take conversations into this space from the informational, simply by asking people how they feel about ‘X’.
Relational : noticing how you both feel about the conversation, or describing your present moment experience. It’s inviting a person into the present moment experience occurring in our mind; without masking or filtering. Dropping any barriers. This is very much in tune with ‘authentic relating’ or ’non violent communication’. The relational level is where you ‘feel seen’, ‘known’, ‘understood’.
You can go up and down these levels of conversation.
The context and purpose of the conversation matters - if you’re in a business meeting, it is not necessarily the best thing to spend time in the relational level letting down your barriers, but instead spending more time in information and a little bit in personal realms.
But if you’re with a friend, or a partner, then moving into that personal-relational level is where you explore meaning, feelings and reveal your ‘mind’.
Doorknobs
This idea is stolen from this fantastic essay : ‘Good conversations have lots of doorknobs’.
The basic idea is that you drop in bits of information (in that first informational realm), that invite your conversation partner, if they are receptive, to open those doors and take the conversation into the ‘personal or relational’ realms.
If you think of conversations as ‘giving and taking’ (leading and following if we use dancing), then good conversations have a balance between giving out information/feeling (creating doorknobs) and exploring information/feeling (opening doors).
Giving means creating ‘big graspable doorknobs’ that the other person can seize upon. Taking means being willing to open those doors that your partner may have offered.
Good conversations have a landscape abundant with these doorknobs - ‘conversional affordances’.
A few biases that Mastrionni mentions is :
- People rarely want to hear about exciting stuff we did without them - they would rather hear about a time we were together, even if mundane.
- We ‘overestimate the awkwardness of deep talk’, so we tend to stay in the ‘shallows’ - superficial conversation. This is like spending all your time in the informational realm, rather than being willing to take it into the personal/relational levels. This is often due to a ‘fear of being seen or judged’.
- Egocentricism : when the conversation is all about ‘I’, we don’t create a giving/taking dynamic, we don’t allow our partner to create any doorknobs. It’s like a forceful lead dragging their partner around a dance floor. (“Enough of me talking about stuff I like. Time for you to talk about stuff I like!”). Mastrionni says that if you find yourself in conversation with someone like this, the best you can do is give them all sorts of doorknobs “ornate french door handles, commercial grade pushbars, ADA compliant auto-open buttons, and listen closely for any that they might give us in return”.
People tend to fall into the camp of ‘givers’ or ’takers’.
Mastrionni says that a giver meeting a giver is fine (they both offer a series of doorknobs, statements, invitations and they conversation can proceed). Takers and takers are fine as they both just make series of statements - this does tend to lead to neutral and forgettable conversations, no exploration into the personal or relational realms.
But when a giver and a taker meet - the giver gives, the taker takes, and this can lead to bad conversations. An example :
A: I went to visit my sister this weekend (giving - a doorknob appears)
Takers I think can be divided into ‘closed’ and ‘overtalking’. Closed - they refuse to actual open the door. Overtalkative - they use openings to pivot back to themselves
B: Oh cool (no opening or curiosity)
B: Oh yeah I have a sister too — she lives in Berlin and last year we did this cycling trip and I nearly died on a hill climb and anyway Berlin coffee is so overrated, like everyone thinks it’s cool but actually— (Goes on for 4 minutes.)
A : … (resentful ‘why won’t he ask me a single question!’ )
People tend to fall into camps of givers or takers. But the meta is realising that you have to flit between those two roles. It’s a dynamic.
What does it mean to get better at conversations?
Is it about you being authentic? About being able to communicate your mind to another? About manipulation or rhetoric?
I don’t think there is a right or a wrong here at least objectively - hence it’s sometimes called the ‘art of conversation’. It’s very much context dependent.
I would list a few goals of conversation
- Exchange information / memes / ideas
- Understand world views
- Mutually explore feelings or ideas
- Persuade
Whatever your goal (or non-goal) getting better at conversations requires going back and actively reflecting on what went well, what went wrong, and how you can improve. Like any ‘deliberate practice’.