conversational volleyball

I was mentioning in yesterday’s post how you can only reach conversational depth if one person monologues for a while.

See the post for the full point, but what I want to say here is that the focus needs to be on one person for a while to achieve depth.

When the ball is on your side of the court, take up space. It’s okay. Catch the person’s questions. Stay with a ball a bit.

But after you hit the ball to their side of the court, don’t let them give you the ball back immediately. Have them hold the ball, and let them bask in the attention.

Psychologists talk about support responses vs. shift responses. There’s good examples online you can go read. But the main idea is that support responses keep the conversation in the speaker’s world while shift responses subtly shift the attention back to the listener.

If the goal is charisma, it’s really important that you are able to stay in the speaker’s world using support responses. (Conversely though IMO if the point is vulnerability and connection you gotta be in your world also.)

And yeah, it’s definitely useful in a dating context to make sure you’re not accidentally shifting the focus back to yourself all the time.

I started really paying attention to this and you’d be surprised - people really tend to accidentally shift the focus back to themselves all the time. e.g. the speaker shares a story, and then you share your own related story instead of staying in the speaker’s world, by either asking a question, saying tell me more, or making a statement that is still mostly in their world.

A friend at party mentioned once that the best thing to do on a date is to ask a question and shut the fuck up, which is definitely related to this.

The other really crazy thing I realized is that in practice, people often shift the attention back to you too quickly. E.g. you ask them a question, and they’ll answer really quickly then ask, what about you or some other question. That’s an L for both parties bc then you’re just having a shallow conversation. The move is actually to ignore their question (or best is to postpone it to a later point in the conversation) and dwell in their world a little bit more, maybe ask a question. Then when you‘ve had some depth, you can shift back to yourself and share your answer/story or whatever, which ofc is also important for connection.