Let's be real: sometimes people say stupid things. I mean, we don't, but some people do. In this Superhero Friday episode, Tony joins Brian to talk about some of those situations in which we're confronted with a need to start a conversation in an uncertain environment. Since we live in an uber sensitive environment in which everything we say has the potential to offend someone, how do we go about having small talk with people we just met?
We can't control how other people choose to engage in small talk, but we can manage our own approach. Tony and Brian get heavy into different options for starting up conversations with people we've just met or don't know well, that can help us avoid awkwardness of offense or bringing up sensitive topics, so instead I want to dive into the other side of this.
Since we can only control ourselves, we can make adjustments to handling introductory conversations. We can select questions, take a different approach, try to make people feel at ease. But we cannot control how other people choose to approach small talk. I wrote at the top of the blog that culture, as a whole, has become increasingly sensitive to comments people make, to such a degree that it sometimes seems better not to talk to anyone than to talk to someone and fear saying the wrong thing. The conversations that may seem innocuous to us are sensitive to others, and vice versa. The things we think will be fun will be uninteresting or annoying to someone else. It happens all the time.
There isn't a way to avoid it entirely (unless you become a hermit and only talk to frogs... but even then you'd better be careful, they make look happy but that's only because they eat whatever bugs them). So the best we can do is learn to control our own responses. I can have terrible reactions to things, and the reaction is almost never due to just what was said but of mounting stressors that precede whatever information I just got causing me to react badly. I was reading a little from Jerome Kagan recently, specifically about the three general categories of child temperaments, and I was surprised (and not surprised) to realize that we all tend to revert back to our child-like temperament under stress. Without honing our reactions, we are all a bunch of babies.
Be excellent to one another! My challenge to you, and to me, this next week is to not make anyone feel bad for asking a question that they couldn't possibly know is a sensitive topic to us. Rise above and treat them with respect and kindness. Let's change the way we react, and change the way we converse!