The Art Of Good Conversation
Last week, I wrote about my dad, who’d passed away, and the importance of making the most of life. I finished with a simple suggestion. Put another chair around the table. I was leaning in that direction, and have thought about it a little more.
My father was an extraordinary conversationalist. He could talk to absolutely anyone, from a homeless person outside the theatre to the old colonel at the HAC, and he would find them equally fascinating. He was genuinely interested in people, their experiences and their opinions. It is something I've come to appreciate myself because the people we meet, the conversations we have and the relationships we develop do more than make life enjoyable. They also influence who we become. And sometimes, possibly often, they change the direction of our lives.
The extraordinary value of ordinary conversations
Networking events, conferences, social gatherings, business lunches. These days, we meet a lot of people. We collect contacts. I’ve managed to accrue >17,000 connections on LinkedIn alone! In person, we exchange pleasantries and some will promise to catch up over coffee.
But, and I’ve thought about this a lot while hosting my own networking meetings, how often do we actually get to know someone?
The most interesting conversations don’t follow an agenda. They tend to wander all over the place. One subject leads to another, a casual observation challenges something we've believed for years, and occasionally someone says something that makes us reconsider our entire perspective. The best conversations end up places we never expected.
We tend to gravitate towards people who share our opinions and interests. Understandable of course as agreement is comforting but there's more to discover from someone who sees the world differently than from someone in our little echo chamber. That was something I rather liked about our Halloween episode of TableTalk. The three guests had overlapping but very different outlooks and backgrounds and it gave common ground as well as disagreement and laughter.
Have many of us become so preoccupied with the value of our time that we sometimes overlook the value of giving someone our full attention?
Icons, makers and misfits
We all have people who influence us. Our icons, if you like. And I suspect for many of us, myself included, the most important are those closest to home. My mother was extraordinary in a crisis. Calm, dependable and capable of bringing order to situations that might have sent others into a complete flap. She also gave me my love of music, something that continues to enrich my life immensely. However she was very traditional and though she tried her best, her brother proceeded to offer something quite different. He gave me permission to be eccentric, to question convention, to follow my own path and not worry what others thought of it, or indeed if someone else was inexcusably offended by its pursuit. Together, they taught me that you can be dependable without being conventional, and independent without losing sight of what matters.
Then there are people I've admired from a distance. David Bowie was unashamedly, almost effortlessly creative. He reinvented himself on repeat, apparently unconcerned by the expectation that an artist ought to remain recognisable. Richard Branson embraced adventure, celebrated dyslexia rather than treating it as a limitation, and demonstrated that building businesses could be enormous fun. He's still at it of course, proving that the adventure is at least as much fun as the achievement. And Frank Lloyd Wright both excelled at and challenged architectural convention while recognising something seemingly contradictory yet fundamental. He embraced modernist materials, technologies and thinking, yet insisted that buildings should both respect and belong to their surroundings. Three very different souls with different backgrounds, but each unwilling to accept that the established way is necessarily the best way.
These people were not flawless. Far from it. Nor am I suggesting that we should aspire to become copies of those we admire. But we can borrow something of their imagination, courage and philosophy and use it to discover more of ourselves.
And this brings me to consider the makers and the misfits of this world. I find people who create things, challenge assumptions, pursue peculiar ambitions or simply refuse to follow the crowd endlessly fascinating. Not necessarily because they're successful, although they often stand out as being so, but because they see possibilities that others might overlook. And the world would be a considerably duller place without them in it.
Everyone has something to teach us
There's a rather Zen-like idea I've come to appreciate, largely through my father's example. And it’s that absolutely anyone might have something to teach you about the meaning of life that you’re searching for today. The person doesn’t need to be a philosopher, successful entrepreneur or celebrated intellectual. It might be the person sitting beside you on a train, someone serving your lunch; a complete stranger you happen to encounter.
We can become prisoners of our own thinking. Problems grow enormous because we examine them repeatedly from only our own perspective. And we build cages around our current problem, constructed from assumptions, habits and worries that grow into tall walls beyond which we cannot see. Sometimes all it takes to unlock the door to the outside is a conversation with someone who sees things differently. But, and this is usually where we fail, we have to be prepared to listen.
Incidentally, this is one of the reasons we started, and I am so enjoying making TableTalk.
On the face of it, we're producing just another podcast. We film conversations, we edit episodes, and we publish them, hoping people find them entertaining, thought-provoking and occasionally useful.
But we've also created a rather wonderful excuse to spend hours sitting with fascinating makers and misfits, discovering how they think about things and what makes them tick. Sometimes it's one person, sometimes several around a table. We talk about life, ambitions, mistakes, relationships, ridiculous adventures and whatever else emerges. For the Halloween shoot, one of our guests was an old friend I’ve known since we were around 14. And the conversation covered things we hadn’t really discussed before. And that is the pleasure in the whole thing. I research the guests and write the questions the week before, but I never know where we'll end up.
If someone watching discovers an idea, a perspective or simply a person they wouldn't otherwise have encountered, we have earned our keep. Not that we’re making money out of it yet. Do speak to us if you’re interested in talking about sponsorship!
From conversation to collaboration
I've spent a fair bit of my professional life bringing business owners together. Something I've learnt from social and business interactions is that the valuable outcomes are rarely those we could have predicted. And they certainly weren’t arranged in advance. Someone arrives with a problem. Another person recognises something from their own experience. Then a third, who possibly turned up randomly, challenges the assumptions on which the entire discussion was based. Suddenly, the problem looks rather different.
That's part of the thinking behind our Tables at TableNetwork. We don’t allow random gatecrashers, obviously, but we bring small groups of business owners together, not simply to exchange advice but to develop the sort of trust that allows people to question one another, to admit uncertainty and to honestly explore possibilities together.
Connection introduces us to people.
Conversation helps us understand them.
Collaboration allows us to do things together that we might never have attempted alone.
Collaboration doesn’t have to involve a contract or a commercial return. It can simply mean helping someone through a difficult period, introducing two people who become friends, or simply encouraging somebody to pursue an idea they've been sitting on for years.
Sometimes the most valuable outcome is friendship, and that is actually quite enough. Friendship has value beyond measure in my opinion.
Beyond the conference room
There's something else I've noticed about networking over the years. People become a lot more interesting when you remove them from their professional environments and give them the time and space to spread their wings. Take someone out of a meeting room, away from their job title and the expectations attached to it and you frequently discover an entirely different person. Their sense of humour. Their peculiar interests. Their vulnerabilities. The stories they might never tell across a boardroom table. Heaven’s in here. Earlier this week I went to a good event arranged by Bruno Cappellitti and Kamran Rzayev at Lucy Wong’s. The venue, a cocktail bar, allowed everyone to feel like they’d let their hair down a little. A venue like that is a start, but we can definitely go further.
That’s the reason I'm particularly looking forward to TableSki in Chamonix this January. Yes, we'll ski. And we’ll eat rather well. I am cooking some of the meals so I shall see to that. But the good food leads to evenings around the dinner table, sharing experiences and getting to know one another. Without a formal agenda, some business will undoubtedly get discussed. It usually does when you put entrepreneurs together. But we’ll have conversations about music, family, adventures and life's more ridiculous moments. And those will be every bit as valuable, if not more so. And frankly they’ll be considerably more entertaining, and forge some really strong relationships. When it’s good, it’s really good.
Nobody has ever accused a chairlift of being a comfortable mode of transport, let alone a decent conference facility, and yet some remarkably good conversations come to fruition on them at times.
The people we haven't met yet
There are billions of people on this planet. Each with their own experiences, ambitions, memories, contradictions and stories. We'll meet only a tiny fraction of them. And amongst those we haven't yet encountered are people who might become lifelong friends, challenge everything we believe, introduce us to extraordinary opportunities or simply make an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday rather a cool experience.
But…
We have no way of knowing who they are.
My father's death has reminded me to again consider how precious our time is. And remembering the way he engaged with people also reminded me how much of life's richness comes from sharing that time with others. Perhaps we could afford to be a little more curious, a little less judgemental, and a bit more willing to strike up a conversation with… who knows?
Last week I suggested putting another chair around the table. This week I'll add something.
Make sure it's for someone interesting. And that could, absolutely, be the least expected person.
Easter Eggs in this week’s article
“and though she tried her best” – She Came in Through The Bathroom Window, by The Beatles
“friendship” – Friendship, by Pops Staples
“Heaven’s in here” – Heaven’s In Here, by Tin Machine
“When it’s good, it’s really good” – Candidate, by David Bowie
P.S.
Are you connecting with others and putting fun first?
Comments