Yesterday I was feeling tremendously bored while conversing with a friend. I wondered to myself: what is making the conversation boring? She had been on a recent business trip, and I asked if she had travelled back with their co-workers. The answer I expected was yes or no and the follow-up was why. Instead, I got a no, followed by the schedules of each and every one of their co-workers and the reasons they had to leave at specific times, going on for perhaps ten minutes. My eyes glazed over and I yawned involuntarily. My interlocutor asked if I was tired, and I said yes, and I used the interlude to change the topic.

The same pattern repeated several times and I would involuntarily zone out at the same time my irritation was growing. I left just in time not to say “could you please stop driveling absolutely meaningless details into our conversation?”. As I made my way back home I reflected if there was not a better way to handle it.

I once saw a video of Robert Glover (author of “No more Mr. Nice Guy”) in which he explained this is the feminine way of being. When his wife goes on to explain things in the “feminine” way (more relationship focused) he says “honey, can I get the guy version?” meaning: just get to the facts. This would be convenient but only if there’s previous context, you must first explain that the irrelevant details make it difficult for you to pick up what’s important about the conversation, agree that it’s not the “wrong way of conversing” but that you prefer a different type of communication and that it will help you both listen to and remember the conversation better.

Sometimes I attempt to skip the boring parts, so in the previous example I might interrupt saying “ok so everyone left at different times and you came back alone, do you prefer it this way or would you have preferred to travel with your co-workers?” but in my experience this seems to irk my interlocutors, they might even say “let me finish” and double down on their mind-numbing conversation. “You are going off branches” te estás yendo por las ramas is something they especially dislike, saying that I’m impatient and they will come back to the trunk when they’ve made their point, which could have amounted to a phrase instead of a diatribe of meaningless blabbering (if I am acid it’s because I’m still recovering from enduring the conversation rather than steering is skillfully, and writing it is a way of both working the emotion out and finding alternatives for future conversations).

There was one part of the conversation which I think was applied skillfully in which I interrupted a long running monologue with a “I’ll just be very brief with something I experienced yesterday, this and this happened and this and this is what I did. This is how it’s related how what you are telling me. Now you were telling me about this, carry on”. I saw how this interaction was not only welcome, but animated the conversation.

The informal way of judging a conversation is two-way good, one-way bad. I don’t think this is correct. It’s the circumstance what dictates if one or two-way conversation is merited, and the quality of the conversation stands on its own. It’s only when you just meet a new person that a two-way conversation is the default.

What makes a good conversation? It can all be reduced to attention, when there’s attention, no recipes or prescriptions are required. If you experience your attention lagging due to the content of the conversation, then can steer it. I still don’t have a good answer on how to do this, but it’s time for lunch with my co-workers at a restaurant. One of them always orders beer, the other a coke-zero, Luis usually gets potatoes with pork…