Talk to me like your Best Friend
Yesica and I at the Durham Train Museum earlier this year.
The last time I had a conversation with someone was five minutes ago. This is a timeless statement because most people don’t go very long without having a conversation. Whether you live with a roommate, go to class, out to lunch or simply walk the dog, conversation rules our lives in every way but monarchally.
Surprisingly though, many people, especially Gen Z (take a look at this Opinion piece from the San Francisco examiner), find it increasingly difficult to hold a substantive conversation, myself included sometimes. Often what I find difficult about conversations is two-sided, both the mundanity of small talk and the complexity of topics I don’t have anything to add to. I’m working on this everyday and I hope to only improve in the future.
After watching the TED Talk from Celeste Headlee of “10 Ways to Have a Better Conversation,” I gravitated towards the tip of going with the flow. This is difficult for me because I find myself wanting to be able to craft what it is I want to say; perhaps that’s the writer in me. When I have to be quick on my toes and contribute something of meaning quickly, I stumble and then end up saying nothing at all. For those reasons I feel I’m a great listener.
So, the last conversation I had was about five minutes ago with my best friend, Yesica. Yesica and I have known each other since freshman year of high school so our conversations are easy, fun and sometimes insubstantial because we spend so much time together and know so much about each other. However, today, we hadn’t seen each other for about a week so we had some catching up to do.
We employed the skill of not pontifiacting when talking about our skills on the things we are involved in on Creighton’s campus. She is a resident advisor on campus, and my most important role is as Editor in Chief of The Creightonian. We both talked about things that have room for improvement in our roles and things that are going well but we were honest and didn’t embellish.
We could have been better about not multitasking throughout our conversation. For my generation at least, we tend to pick up our phones when there’s a lull in conversation and end up forgetting where it is we left off. This makes the flow of the conversation stop and then start up again, sometimes, in my opinion, awkwardly.
One of Yesica’s main focuses right now is her fairly new boyfriend. While they’ve been hanging out for a while, they only recently started dating. I employ a lot of the listening strategy when she talks about him because things go marginally well between the two of them and I get a peek into what their life together is like in these moments.
Most importantly in this conversation, I felt the flow. The natural progression of the conversation felt easy with my best friend and I know that in the future I can try to take bits and pieces of that and apply them where appropriate.