Last week I met up with a friend I hadn’t seen in several months. We were fifteen minutes into our conversation when it dawned on me that I was doing almost all of the talking. In my defense, my friend was asking lots of good questions about what I’d been up to, which is probably why the conversational imbalance snuck up on me. Still, the lopsided discussion was starting to take a toll—my friend’s attention was wandering and I hadn’t even heard any of her updates yet—so I stopped talking and started asking questions of my own to get her back into the conversation.
Although I didn’t mean to dominate the discussion, that’s what happened when I stopped paying attention to my responses. Three tips will help you avoid inadvertently hogging a conversation:
1. Mind your turns. Most two-person conversations proceed with a fairly even back-and-forth, and each time someone talks is called a conversational turn. Pay attention to how long you are talking and avoid lengthy responses. Long turns are counterproductive because they shut out your conversational partner and because there’s only so much that people can absorb in a single response anyway.
2. Monitor attention and interruptions. The easiest way to hold someone’s attention is to let him talk. Conversely, attention quickly wanders when someone finds that she has a hard time participating in the conversation. Although turns don’t have to be identical in length for a conversation to be productive, once you lose the other person’s attention, the conversation is effectively over. Also take note of interruptions because they usually mean that you are either talking too much or that the other person really wants to say something. In either case, let the other person talk so you can integrate his participation—and his attention—back into the conversation.
3. Use questions to reengage your conversational partner. As soon as I realized I was inadvertently dominating the conversation in the example above, I got my friend back in the discussion by asking for her work and home updates. It usually doesn’t take much to get someone back into a conversation; simply asking for an opinion (“What do you think?”) and then using nudges (“Um-hmm” “Tell me more”) are often enough get someone talking again.
Don’t let a lopsided conversation sneak up on you. Monitor your responses and pay attention to your conversational partner to prevent an discussion from turning into a lecture.
Question: What strategies do you use to rebalance the conversation when someone is talking too much? Please leave a comment to continue the discussion.
Originally posted on mouthpeaceconsulting.com.