The Best Topic of Conversation
What if there was one topic of conversation that would make you more interesting, more likable, and more charismatic? What if there was one topic of conversation that if you used it, everyone would enjoy talking with you and would walk away from your chat thinking you were simply the most amazing conversationalist ever? There is one! Unfortunately, many people don’t know what it is and that’s why they come across in their conversations as boring, arrogant, narcissistic and uninteresting.
There is one topic of every conversation that if you use it and stay on it, people will think you are a great listener, a delightful conversationalist, and an overall interesting person. They will think you are charming and conscientious and will look forward with great anticipation to the next time you talk. What is it?? It’s them.
That’s right. The one topic of conversation that will instantly grant you all of these wonderful gifts is them — the other person.
Leverage the Power of Self-Interest
Think about it for a minute. If you’re like most people, what interests you? Usually, it’s the things you’re doing. The things you like. The things you enjoy. In his work Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes put self-interest as the primary human motive. His theory states that people have specific desires and appetites that arise in the human body and are experienced as discomforts or pains that must be satisfied or overcome in order to promote their well-being. In other words, we primarily pursue things in life that will maximize our positive emotions and/or minimize our negative ones.
Several worldviews acknowledge this as a general foundation for human existence. Darwin’s evolutionary theory proposes the survival of the fittest. If only the strong survive, then it is obviously in our best interest to be concerned about the things that will enable us to grow stronger and gain advantages over other people. Theistic worldviews recognize selfishness as the root of sin – that human beings are more concerned with themselves than they are with others. And great teachers from all religious perspectives, in recognizing selfishness as a vice, have proclaimed the Golden Rule or some statement of similar sentiment as the virtue that humans should strive for: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Regardless of your moral perspectives, most people would generally admit that usually, we are more interested in ourselves than we are with other people.
Well, in conversation, we can use this to our advantage. If people are generally interested in themselves, it follows that they will most likely want to talk about themselves and if we can help to fill that basic psychological need in their life, they will really enjoy talking with us and being around us.
The Conversation Killer
If you look at the people you like to talk to in your life, you will probably name off people who have this one thing in common: they are genuinely interested in you. At the same time, if you look at the people in your life who you really don’t like to talk to, they probably all share the characteristic that they only like to talk about themselves. As we just said, we all to a certain extent are interested in ourselves but we have the freedom to suspend that and focus on the other person and wise conversationalists do just that. What you don’t want to do and what will kill your charisma in a conversation is what is known as Conversational Narcissism. Charles Derber wrote about this in The Pursuit of Attention and he calls it the key manifestation of the dominant attention-getting psychology in America. The basic premise is that in face-to-face interactions, people generally seek attention for themselves and in conversations, they repeatedly seek to turn the attention back to themselves. They are Conversational Narcissists. Maybe you’ve experienced a situation where someone asked you a question about you, only so they could talk about themselves. It looks something like this:
Steve: What did you do last week?
Tony: I went to Disney World and it was awesome.
Steve: That’s nice. Guess what I did, I went out to that new show downtown. Let me tell you…
Conversational Narcissism really reflects a fake interest in the other person just so you can turn the conversation back to yourself. We all recognize it and for the most part, we all hate it. Don’t be that person. The topic that will make you more interesting is the other person and people can recognize when you are not really authentic about that. So authentically focus on the other person in your conversations and don’t try to manipulate the conversation to turn the attention back to yourself.
Watch Out For Reporter Syndrome
In making the other person the topic of conversation, it’s important to be careful about reporter syndrome. That is, asking question after question and sounding like a reporter doing an interview. A conversation is a back and forth and it has a natural ebb and flow — a dialogue between the two people that should proceed in a comfortable, natural way. Simply asking question after question can make you come across as being too nosy. So you need to be attentive to the strategic keywords that the other person is giving you when they answer a question. These keywords allow you to broaden the depth of the conversation by asking them exploratory follow-up questions based on what they just told you. If they ask you a question about you, it’s definitely good to give a brief and interesting answer — to share a story. But then ask a question that turns the attention back to them. So instead of being a conversational narcissist who is always trying to turn the attention of the conversation back on themselves, try to be someone who practices conversational charity. Find ways to turn the conversation back to the other person.
Remember the Importance of Body Language
While making the other person the topic of the conversation and asking good questions that allow them to talk about themselves is great, we must remember what our bodies are communicating. People can spot a fake in a second. We all know when someone is inauthentic. That’s because their bodies betray their words. Most communication scholars agree that about 90% of the meaning in our communication comes through non-verbal channels. Things like facial expression, tone of voice, eye contact, and posture all communicate a message more powerful and more believable than what is coming through our words. When what we are communicating through our words doesn’t match up with what our bodies are saying through our nonverbal signals, it produces an incongruous message and causes the other person to question our authenticity.
Maybe you’ve experienced this in a conversation with someone else. They were talking to you, but their body posture was turned away from you. Their eyes were not on you but were scanning the room in search of someone else. Their tone of voice sounded uninterested and their responses were quick and short. Well when this happens, no matter what that person is telling us, we all recognize that they most definitely aren’t very interested in us. Their bodies betray them. An authentic interest in the other person — truly making them the topic of conversation means listening to them with our words in our verbal messages and feedback, but more importantly, listening to them and focusing on them in our nonverbal messages, through our body language.
So, if you find that people don’t really want to talk to you or if you have difficulty engaging people in conversation, the biggest thing you can do to change and get better is to make them the topic of conversation. To focus on them by asking interesting questions, responding to them when they ask you questions, but then turning the topic back to them and listening to them with authentic verbal and nonverbal messages. Do this and you will become a more interesting person and a better conversationalist.
Go Deeper
Want to know how I 10X’ed my productivity in less than 5 minutes a day?
Download this checklist to get started.