Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

I’ve never met anyone who’s told me they’re super into having shallow, boring, run-of-the-mill conversations. Maybe I run in the wrong crowds, I guess. I’d be happy to have an introduction to that person if you know them, but we probably wouldn’t end up hanging out for very long.

I do', however, very frequently hear people saying that they want interesting, generative, deep, compelling conversations and everyone else wants something shallow, safe, rote, familiar.

I’ve heard this too many times, now, to believe it. It seems suspicious that there are all of these people seeking genuine connection, deep conversation, interesting explorations, compelling dialogue - and that they all just keep running into a type of person I actually haven’t ever met.

I say this as a person who’s spent significant time being frustrated and feeling isolated because I want deep, interesting conversation and I can’t find it. I say this as a person who still struggles, frequently, to reliably create depth and interest in conversations - especially with people who are new to me.

But I also say this as a person who’s developed an interest in relationships and conversational skill and has started paying attention to what happens in interaction. I say this as a person who, just today, saw someone lamenting how difficult it is to find interesting conversation - and then deflected and disengaged when I asked a question about what they’d said. I say this as a person who recently came across this facebook post and recognized the feeling, wanted to reach out…

but simultaneously felt alienated, pushed away, told that I was other. I worried that even if I tried to engage, I wouldn’t meet their standards for conversation. I felt trapped in a story about how “people” behave that didn’t describe me. I was confused about whether I was even invited to the conversation - and if I was, which conversation I was invited to.

I had a private conversation with her, about how I felt, about skillful conversation participation, about social scripts and neurodivergence. She was so much more welcoming and interesting once we were actually in dialogue, once it seemed like I’d managed to escape from the “people” category and enter a “possibly interesting person” category in her mind.

There are so many pieces of conversational skill. There’s massive amounts of content about it, and (at least for how the algorithms have come to conclusions about my interest) it’s hard to be on the internet without tripping over some of it.

But for today - the question I offer for you to ask yourself is “How can I lower the barrier to believing that they’re an interesting person and I’ll enjoy an interaction with them? How can I lower the barrier to believing that I am an interesting person, with whom it’s easy to enjoy an interaction?”

Because I honestly believe that everyone’s looking for interaction and connection - we’ve just all been convinced that we’re the only ones who are looking for it and that we have none to offer anyone else. Which creates this weird desert where everyone’s starving for something that would be abundant, if only more of the starving people thought that they deserved to eat.

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If you’re in that desert and want to offer human connection from generosity, confidence, and skill - with the possible side effects of getting more of the connection you want in return, I’d love for you to apply for my 1:1 coaching and talk about how I might be able to help, because we can work together to create a world of abundance, where loneliness is the exception and not the rule.

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(P.S. - I asked before using that facebook post as an example. Consent matters.)