Saturday, January 24, 2009
Talk
In sociology, we learnt about communication between people.
What I remembered deeply was that in any social group (either 1-to-1 or many-to-many), there is a need for all parties to be engaged. By being engaged I mean, all are both listeners, and talkers. This is especially so in an 1-to-1 relationship, as there are no free-riders in this configuration of social group, both speaking out and listening are important. Once one party feels that he/she listens too much and share too little or vice versa, the balance is spoilt, and that social 'circle' will not be a continous one.
When one tries too hard to focus everything on himself: attention, jokes, topics, acheivements etc, inevitably, people will feel that they are listening too much, and being listened to too little.
So stop focusing everything on yourself. Don't making every sentence of OTHER PEOPLE'S conversations to link to your OWN experiences.
It's ok to share, it's ok to talk about yourself. But if you do that EVERYTIME, everyone will just get mega-pissed, and stop giving you the attention you crave. Then you'll try harder, and piss more, and get lesser. Then try harder, and.. You get the idea.
Everyone craves for attention, everyone craves for recognition. But the more you share a lack of genuine interest for other's thoughts and experiences, and merely wanting to link to share YOUR views at EVERY SINGLE instance, given EVERY SINGLE opportunity, the less you'll get, trust me.
If you want people to listen to you, learn to listen first. If you want people to be interested to listen to what you say, be interested in listening to what they say first. The more you neglect the latter, the less you'll get in the former.
In this group of people, there are 2 kinds. One is the non-charismatic one, whatever he says, as much as people hope to listen, due to him trying too hard to share and trying too little to listen, people usually don't respond to his comments, and give them the cold treatment. The other one is charismatic enough to make people laugh, to make people listen to him. But once the laughter is gone, so what? Due to the lack of to-and-fro, the relationship becomes superficial, and beyond the laughters, people are usually less interested in the content of the nice 'speeches'.
Why am I saying all these? Because I feel that as wicked as it sounds, these people really make me not want to hear them speak, despite the 'nice' me saying I should.
lowtide blogged @
2:09 am
