It was a conference networking reception and I had already had one glass of wine…

You don’t always recognize when you are sabotaging your own future.

Conversations happen every day. All over the world, at your workplace, in your home. We think about them. Complain about those that have happened. Obsess over those discussions that may never happen at all. Write notes to ourselves about the perfect thing to say the next time a certain topic comes up at a key moment.

That raise.
The proposal.
The gig.

The power of a conversation is unquestionable. But we don’t always pay enough attention to the conversations we have because, truth be told, along with the most important discussions we have, there are plenty of boring, unimportant, meaningless conversations a person has in their life. It can seem like there aren’t enough “important” talks to warrant any additional energies spent in the study and preparation for better conversation.

But what if the study of becoming a better conversationalist led to better conversations, more opportunity, and a deeper appreciation of the finer things in life? Would it be worth the time then? How much would you pay to know exactly what to say to have the best outcome when that pivotal moment arrived?

“A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That’s why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.” – Truman Capote

The conversations that haunt us

It is truly unfortunate that for many of us it is easier to remember the times when we said the wrong thing rather than the moments when we shined. It was one of these flailings, a discussion that was heading in a promising direction at a networking reception, that haunts me now.

It was a conference networking reception and I had already had one glass of wine. This was back in 2014 when I still drank alcohol. I gave that up a couple of years ago (1 year, 7 months, and 20 days ago according to the app I use for tracking things), which I’ll leave for discussion in another post on another day. For now, I mention the wine only because I do believe that even small amounts of alcohol could sometimes short circuit my thinking process and cause me to react in unanticipated and unfortunate ways.

I was talking with a peer, a colleague in my industry, about my latest focus in my business – I had added search engine optimization to my social media strategy services and he was interested in hearing more. He’d studied a little bit about SEO and as we chatted and the reception grew louder and busier with more people filling in, he was saying I should come by and talk to some people back at his headquarters because he thought they could use my help.

BINGO!

It was already sounding like the conference was going to pay off for me and this was only the opening reception! Internally I was already thinking of what kind of offer I could pitch them when we got back. We continued to talk as we approached another area to stand in the reception, which was by now teeming with loud conversation and laughter all around us.

Then he said something not quite discernable to me because the environment was too loud with background noise. It could have also been that the wine was causing me to have difficulty separating his words from the distraction of the conversations around us, but whatever the particular alchemy of the moment, I missed what he said and stared at him blankly.

I asked him to repeat himself. He did. But I still had difficulty hearing him. But here is where I made yet another fatal mistake. I faked hearing him, pretended I had heard what he said and guessed – GUESSED – at what he’d said.

I laughed and shook my head hoping that if it was just small chit chat or a joke we’d move on to the next thing. But his smile diminished and he said, “oh yeah, well that’s a great way to check a website’s traffic quickly” and then said he needed to break away to check in with someone who had just shown up on the periphery.

Not BINGO.

I’d obviously not passed some kind of test and we never had a follow-up discussion. I can try to imagine now at what he’d initially said, but I will never know for sure (unless I ask him).

There are a number of ways that I could have handled that opportunity differently. But the point is this: If I had understood that conversations like that were a likelihood, I could have (and should have) prepared better, understood my own behavior and body better, and interacted authentically so that I could set myself up for success.

Lest you think, dear Reader, that I have found my better self washed of all the sins of ill-preparedness for conversation, please understand that I have not.

But I might argue that I am often better prepared than I used to be.

Question: If conversations can change the world, or at least change our individual part of the world, how might we improve our chances of those changes having a positive impact rather than a negative one?

In upcoming posts, I will attempt to explore conversations that changed the world; their turning points when they could have changed paths; and how we might learn from those dialogues. I will also examine the keys to success for those interlocutors who prevailed.

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Want to start having better conversations? Grab this list of some great conversation starters.