The secret to better conversations

Hi there, sapiens. A quick thank you to everyone who reached out after last week’s post! I am so grateful for the support, advice, and notes of congratulations on baby #3. It’s a strange and (sometimes) scary thing to share personal stories online, and I’m feeling extra lucky to have this community in my corner. Confirmed once again: techno sapiens are the best sapiens. Thanks for being here!

And now, let’s get to today’s post.

5 min read

One of the things I love about psychology is that it takes familiar experiences and makes them visible.

That feeling where a song grows on us over time? There’s a name for that. Blaming the traffic when we’re late, but our friend’s innate character flaws when they are? Also has a name. Forcing ourselves to finish a loaf of health bread that tastes like sawdust, because we already spent the money?1 Yup, that’s a thing, too.

Psychology really shines when, by making these experiences explicit, it helps us do better. By recognizing that we do not, in fact, have to finish that sawdust-bread and can instead put it directly into the trash.

This is how I felt when I read the book Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves by .2 Conversations feel as though they should be totally natural—we have dozens of them everyday, and we’ve been doing so our whole lives. Sometimes they’re good, sometimes they’re bad, often they’re somewhere in-between, but many of us have given little thought to why that might be.

By getting at the psychology behind conversations, we can recognize what’s often invisible, and do a little better.

Three simple strategies have stuck with me from the book, and I honestly feel that they have made me a better conversationalist.3

So today, I want to share them with all of you.

1. Fail to prepare and prepare to fail

Last time you met up with a friend, or went to a party, or even buckled in for a car ride with your child, how much time did you spend beforehand thinking about what you would talk about?

Not a single second? Yes, me too.

It turns out, this is a mistake. One of the keys to successful conversation is good topic management, or the complex task or choosing and moving between ideas. One way we ...