We interact with more people as we go back to school, university, and back to the outside world. As we are starting to interact with more people, the important thing is to make conversation and create connections with these people. Making conversation can sometimes be challenging, and there is nothing wrong with that; sometimes, we may not always find a common interest with the other person, or the conversation simply does not flow. Now, have in mind that I am talking about in-person conversations, not texting or chatting, even if that can work for some.
So, as I was saying, a conversation is key to creating relationships - meaningful relationships. Why? Because the main thing about human beings is that we love to talk, communicate, and exchange our ideas with others in various ways. Indeed, conversation is communication. But what can be a simple yet effective way to communicate and get to know someone? First of all, put yourself in a position of being curious. After you start being curious, you begin to question and find interest in things. What you have to do now is to find interest in people, which may be challenging because we have to do two things, ask questions and listen. I say challenging because we are not used to asking questions, but instead being told something, and listening because we like to express our thoughts because we don’t always get the opportunity to do so. However, I have concluded that not asking questions makes you even more ignorant than thinking you know the answers already. And, if I am honest with you, people love it when you ask them things that they can answer or at least try to.
On the other hand, the basis of conversation is dialogue. Nevertheless, we sometimes find ourselves at a dead-end when we don’t know what to respond to a comment or a statement, but we will always find a response to a question, whether we want to or not. An important thing I have found is that when asking a question to somebody else, it does one of two things: opens up a door to a response, and two, it gives the other person the opportunity to talk about themselves, which is something that we all love to do, whether we want to admit it or not.
So, as we are going back into this crazy world and interacting with diverse people, I invite you to try out these two techniques to converse and get to know people: be curious and ask questions. You will discover that it is rather entertaining seeing the world we live in with the eyes of curiosity and questioning.
I would like to thank my Opa for showing me the art of curiosity and observation, which leads me to incredible discoveries and questioning. And my mom for our endless sofa-talks, which we hope someday become a podcast.
Z.
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