心灵鸡汤http://www/uc/myshow/blog/misc/gif/E___6726EN00SIGG.gifHeadlee: 10 ways to have a better conversation" TITLE="Celeste Headlee: 10 ways to have a better conversation" />

从今天开始抄写一些TED演讲稿。学习研究鸡汤，努力做一个大厨http://www/uc/myshow/blog/misc/gif/E___6721EN00SIGG.gifHeadlee: 10 ways to have a better conversation" TITLE="Celeste Headlee: 10 ways to have a better conversation" />

OK, I want to see a show of hands. How many of you have unfriended someone on facebook because he said something about politics, or religions, childcare, food? And how many of you know at least one person that you avoided because you just don’t want to talk to him?

You know it used to be that in order to have a polite conversation, we just have to follow the advice of Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady: Stick to the weather and your health. But these days with climate change and anti-waxing, those subjects are not safe either.

So this world that we live in, this world in which every conversation has the potential to develop into an argument, our politicians can’t speak to one another and where even the most trivial of issues has someone fighting both passionately for it and against it, it’s not normal.

Pew Research did a study of ten thousands of American adults, and they found at this moment we are more polarized and we’re more divided than we even have been in history.

We are less likely to compromise which means we are not listening to each other. And we make decisions about where to live, who to marry and even who our friends are going to be, based on what we already believe. Again that means we are not listening to each other.

A conversation requires the balance between talking and listening and somewhere along the way we lost that balance. Now, part of that is due to technology. The smartphones that you all have in your hands, or close enough that you could grab them really quickly. According to Pew Research, about a third of American teenagers send more than 100 texts a day. And many of them, almost most of them, are more likely to text their friends than they are to talk to them face to face.

There is this great piece in the Atlantic. It was written by a high school teacher named Paul Barnwell. And he gave his kids a communication project. He wanted to teach them how to speak on a specific subject without using a note.

And he said this: “I came to realize that the communicational competence might be the single most overlooked skill we failed to teach. Kids spend hours each day engaging with ideas and each other through screens, but rarely do they have an opportunities to hone their interpersonal communication skills. It might sound like a funny question. But we have to ask ourselves. Is there any 21 centenary kill more important than being able to sustain coherent, confident conversation?”

Now I make my living talking to people. Nobel Prize winners, truck drivers, billionaires, kindergarten teachers, heads of state, plumbers. I talk to people I like, I talk to people I don’t like. I talk to some people I disagree with deeply on a personal level. But I still have a good conversation with them.

So I’d like to spend the next 10 minutes or so teaching you how to talk and how to listen. Many of you have already heard a lot of advice on this, things like look the people in the eye, think of interesting topics to discuss in advance, look, nod and smile, to show you’re paying attention, repeat back what you just heard or summarize it. So I want you forget all of that. It is crap. There is no reason to learn how to show you are paying attention, if you are in fact paying attention.

Now I actually use the exact same skills as a professional interviewer that I do in regular life. So I am going to teach you how to interview people, and that’s actually going to help you learn how to be better conversationalists. Learn to have a conversation, without wasting your time, without getting bored, and please God, without offending anybody.

We all have really great conversations. We’ve had them before. We know what It’s like. The kind of conversation where you walk away feeling engaged and inspired, or where you feel like you’ve made a real connection, or you’ve been perfectly understood. There is no reason why most of your interactions can’t be like that. So I have ten basic rules. And I am going to walk you through all of them. But honestly, if you just choose one of them, and master it, you’ll already enjoy better conversations.

No 1, don’t multitask.

And I don’t mean just you set down your telephone, or your tablet, or your car keys, or whatever in your hand. I mean, be present. Be in that moment. Don’t be thinking about your argument you had with your boss, don’t be thinking about what you are going to have for dinner. If you want to get out of the conversation, get out of the conversation. But don’t be half in it and half out of it.

No 2, don’t pontificate.

If you want to state your option without any opportunity for response, or argument, or pushback, or growth, write a blog. Now there is a real good reason why I don’t allow pundits on my show, because they are really boring. If they are conservative, they are going to hate Obama and food stamps and abortion. If they are liberal, they’re going to hate big banks and oil corporations and Dick Cheney. Totally predictable. And you don’t want to be like that. You need enter every conversation assuming that you have something to learn. The famed therapist M. Scott Peck said that the true listening requires a setting aside of oneself. And sometimes that means setting aside your personal opinion. He said that sensing this acceptance, the speaker will become less and less vulnerable, more and more likely to open up the inner recesses of his or her mind to the listener. Again, assume that you have something to learn. Bill Nye: “Everyone that you ever meet know something that you don’t.” I put it this way: everybody is an expert in something.

No 3, use an open-ended questions.

In this case, take a clue in journalists. Start your questions with who, what, when, why and how. If you put in a complicated question, you’re going to get a simple answer out. If I ask you, “were you terrified?” You’re going to respond to the most powerful word in that sentence which is “terrified” and the answer is “yes, I was” or “no, I wasn’t.” “Were you angry?” “Yes, I was very angry.” Let them describe it. They are the ones that know. Try asking things like “what was that like?” “How did that feel?” Because they might have to stop for a moment and think about it. And you’re going to get a much more interesting response.

No 4. Go with the flow.

That means thoughts will come into your mind, and you need to let them go out of your mind. We heard interviews often in which a guest is talking for several minutes and the host comes back asking a question which seems he comes out of nowhere or it’s already been answered. That means the host probably stop listening two minutes ago, because he thought of this really clever question and he was bound determined to say that. And we do the exact same thing. We sit there having a conversation with someone, and them we remember that time that we met Hugh Jackman in a coffee shop. And we stop listening. Stories and ideas are going to come to you. You need let them come and let them go.

No 5. If you don’t know, say that you don’t know.

Now, people on the radio, especially on NPR are much more aware that they’re going on the record, so they’re more careful about what they claim to be an expert in and what they claim to know for sure. Do that. Err on the side of caution. Talk should not be cheap.

No 6. Don’t equate your experience with theirs.

If they are talking about having lost a family member, don’t start talking about the time you lost a family member. If they are talking their trouble they are having at work, don’t tell them how much you hate your job. It’s not the same. It is never the same. All experiences are individual. And more importantly, it is not about you. You don’t need to take that moment to prove how amazing you are, or how much you have suffered. Someone asked Stephen Hawking once what his IQ was, and he said, “I have no idea. People who brag about their IQs are losers.” Conversations are not a promotional opportunity.

No 7. Try not to repeat yourself.

It’s condescending and it’s really boring, and we tend to do it a lot. Especially in work conversations or in a conversations with our kids, we have point to make, so we keep rephrasing them over and over. Don’t do that.

No 8. Stay out of the weeds.

Frankly, people don’t care about the years, the names, the dates, all those details that you are struggling to come up with in your mind. They don’t care. What they care about is you. They care about what’s your life, what’s you have in common. So forget the details. Leave them out.

No 9. This is not the last one, but it is the most important one. Listen.

I can’t tell you how many really important people have said that listening is perhaps the most, the no 1 most important skill that you could develop. Buddha said, and I’m paraphrasing, “If your mouth is open, you are not listening.” And Calvin Coolidge said, “No man ever listened his way out of job.” Why do we not listen to each other? No 1, we’d rather talk. When I am talking, I’m in control.

I don’t have to hear anything I’m not interested in. I’m the center of attention. I can bolster my own identity. But there is another reason. We got distracted. The average person talks about 225 words per minute, but we can listen at up to 500 words per minute. So our minds are filling in those other 275 words. And look, I know, it takes effort and energy to actually pay attention to someone, but if you can’t do that, you’re not in a conversation. You’re just two people shouting out barely related sentences in the same place. You have to listen to another. Stephen Covey said it very beautifully. He said, “Most of us don’t listen with intent to understand. We listen with intent to reply.”

One more rule, No 10, and it’s this one: be brief.

All of this boils down to the same basic concept, and it is this one: be interested in other people. You know, I grew up with a very famous grandfather, and there was kind of a ritual in my home. People would come over to talk to my grandparents, and after they would leave, my mother would come over to us, and she’d say, “Do you know who that was? She was the runner-up to Miss America. She was the mayor of Sacramento. She won a Pulitzer Prize. He’s a Russian ballet dancer.” And I kind of grew up assuming everyone has some hidden, amazing thing about them. And honestly I think it’s what makes me a better host. I keep my mouth shut as often as I possibly can. I keep my mind open, and I’m always prepared to be amazed. And I’m not disappointed. You do the same thing. Go out, talk to people, listen to people. And most importantly, be prepared to be amazed.

Thanks.