What’s Your Conversational Goal?
If you’re like me, you spend a lot of your time thinking about how to end conversations. Well, that makes me sound like a curmudgeon. Let’s put it this way: I spend a lot of my time thinking about my goal in a conversation. What am I trying to achieve? How will I know the conversation has accomplished its purpose? And not least importantly, how will I know when the conversation is done? Even when writing these articles, I try to think about what I want you the reader to walk away thinking. We’ll get to that specific idea near the end but first, I’d like to go through what I see as some of the most common conversational goals.
Our first category is probably the most common and probably my least favorite. I have little patience for small talk. This might go back to the curmudgeon thing but if we have nothing better to do together than talk about the weather, what are we doing? Small talk is usually about the most abundantly obvious topics as if we are making sure everyone else is seeing the same thing we’re seeing. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll debate the subjective nature of reality ‘til the cows come home, but I somehow doubt that’s the underlying goal of most small talk. I struggle in understanding its purpose.
Many of you, (my Granny specifically,) are going to say “Small talk is about being friendly and polite, Adam. It’s to be social. It’s to engage with people around you.” My response is simply, can’t we socially talk about something substantive? The trials of cat ownership or how crazy the rain has been lately don’t go anywhere. I don’t know what you want me to do as your partner in that conversation. If your goal is to have me confirm your perceived reality, I could be replaced by a computer with a weather app. If conversation is about being social, that shouldn’t be the case.
For many folk, conversation is competition. It’s to see who can dominate or “win” the interaction. The end goal is to outdo the other participants. It’s usually something innocuous like after you talk about your vacation to the lake, they have to bring up their trip to Jamaica. If you had a successful day at work, theirs was always a little more successful. It works in the other direction too. If you had a medical concern, they always had it before and much worse than you.
Conversations based on competition are also the groundwork for debate. I know individuals, as I’m sure you do, who will always be the dissenting voice or unpopular opinion in a conversation. They seem to get a thrill out of seeing everyone else disagree with them. More to the point, the thrill comes from seeing who they can bring around to the other way of thinking. As much as I love a good debate, for many of these conversationalists, their goal trends closer to manipulation than intellectual exploration. As I’ve discussed in previous articles, I have no use for that mentality.
For me personally, more than “you’re so smart,” or “I guess you’re right,” or “yep, that’s what the weather is doing,” or even “wow, you talked for a long time,” when you walk away from a conversation with me, I hope the thought that rests with you is simply, “I never thought of it that way before.” You don’t have to be impressed or even agree with me. (In fact you probably shouldn’t). My conversational goal is to offer a different perspective. What’s yours?
