"So, tell me about yourself"

I sat down for lunch with a person who I had met whilst studying at Grainger Library a while ago. Then, we had shared a few jokes between working, so agreed to meet again for some general conversation. This opportunity to get to know him better doubled as an opportunity for practicing empathetic listening. For politeness, I will not disclose his identity.

In breaking down empathetic listening to its base definition, I set myself an underlying tenure to figure out where he was coming from; not just hearing the words he was saying, interpreting meaning, and extracting information, but trying to understand why he would choose what he shared with me and why he chose to communicate it the way he did. In other words, I was trying to anticipate what he wanted me to think of him; what was the type of personality he was trying to project onto me?

Such listening consumed most of my brain’s processing power, and it was difficult for me to respond with anything beyond generic affirmations and grunts, but I argue that this type of response is a respectable form of response in its own right, and can count as a technique I used in that without these grunts and affirmations, it would seem to him that I was not paying attention. My silence, without explanation, has the same values as a statement of boredom. Thus, though the affirmations were hollow, they still had meaning as it was my only means of communicating continued and unflagging interest in what he was saying. I actively asked him to continue his story.

Asking open questions and building on what he had already said, asking questions to further probe an area that I thought he would like to share in greater expanse or more meticulous detail were both techniques that I also used in order to try to understand him. Formulating these questions were natural as I developed a genuine curiosity for his opinion in the topics we discussed.

I did try to paraphrase some of the things he said, but for a lack of expertise in certain areas of his interest on my part, I failed to correctly acknowledge his story, which cut short conversation on that part. Unfortunately, we did not make much progress with respect to World of Warcraft and Star Wars, which I actually should know more about.

From our lunch, I learned a lot about him, where he was from, what he likes doing, and what type of person he is. When I left I felt like I had a strong understanding of his approach to life. I think I’d have a fair chance at correctly guessing his response to some scenarios.

I also learned that part of listening is also speaking, because when a conversation becomes too lop-sided, where one party does all the talking whilst the other does all the listening (as did happen in our conversation), it becomes onerous for both the speaker and the listener to continue, simply as a result of fatigue. To speak as well as to listen is crucial to the balance of good conversation.

I think that I really did well in probing out some of my friend’s interests, and getting him to tell me more about them. However, I think that my approach for an hour long lunch should have been different; given the relatively short time we had to speak in contrast to the length of time we could have talked about all of our mutual interests, it would have been better to focus on one or two areas of special interest, instead of diverging and skimming such a wide variety of topics.

In future, I would try to better prime some of the thoughts of whoever I’m talking to, as I noted during the talk that I had a solid grip on what he was talking about at the present moment, but found it difficult to predict what he was about to say and things that he perhaps wanted to communicate, but did not want to outright say.

It was an interesting lunch, and it carried on until I was a little late for class. Luckily my next class was a lecture in a big hall, so I don’t think that the professor noticed. Talking with someone with the tools for crucial conversations in mind definitely felt different from other general conversations I have had; it was a lot more directed from the start, and there was always something else I had wanted to say. There was never a moment where I was at a loss for words. I’ll try to keep these thoughts in mind for the future…