The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [19]
Its added bonus is the firing neurons and fizzing hormones that come of light stimulation—all of which enhance adaptability, indispensable to social survival in fast-moving, pseudo-egalitarian society, where talent for whisking up intimacy creates leaders among supposed equals. For instance, in ordering staff to “Call me Tony,” ex-Prime Minister Blair astutely claimed friendship’s privilege without conceding authority, making it harder to challenge him. Well, do you fight a mate?
The social instinct that made Blair an alpha operator is hardwired in us primates. Science writer Matt Ridley noted, before resigning as chairman of troubled building society Northern Rock:
The top male chimpanzee in a troop is not necessarily the strongest; instead, it is usually the one best at manipulating social coalitions to his advantage.
We all must build coalitions, but as Ridley’s fate testifies, this is an increasingly unwieldy task. Count the masks we wear, assigned by us, society, other people’s perceptions.... Shifting between roles, projecting different faces, is stressful (tellingly, the financial company directors hated combining small talk and business).
Humans are territorial animals. Exposure threatens us. Understandably, we feel the lack of a social compass. For sure, I dread what Philip Larkin called, explaining his refusal to be Poet Laureate, “Pretending to Be Me.” But to fear small talk is to miss its opportunity. It is the social compass, and with it, we escape self-consciousness.
DISABLING SHYNESS
Would you believe a professional performer finds small talk especially daunting? Ask Judy Finnigan, the chat-show host whose warmth makes her a friend to viewers:
The idea of conversation with strangers fills me with horror. When I’m with friends I’m totally relaxed, but with other people . . . I just don’t like the whole small-talk thing. I even hate going to premieres now. I know that sounds ridiculously spoiled, but there it is.
But her trepidation is reasonable. Famous people suffer the vast disadvantage that strangers imagine they know them intimately, which makes the task of building intimacy rather lopsided, and instant niceness the order of the day. Nonetheless, even for non-celebrities, who before entering a pub endure, like Kitty in Anna Karenina, “a young man’s feelings before a battle,” and who bow down in thanks before the DJs waging war on conversation everywhere—including my hairdresser’s, where it’s being drummed out by the unstoppable march of techno—what makes small talk a tall order is performance pressure.
➺ Rule three: The more engaged we are, the less nervous we feel
Research has found that with a serious topic or a good friend, we measure a conversation’s success by how enthralled we were by what the other person said. Whereas, the less familiar the other person, the more trivial the topic, the likelier we are to rate the experience by our own performance. An exception is between long-term romantic partners, when neither a topic’s gravity nor either party’s performance appears to effect post-conversational satisfaction—the negative interpretation being that they’ve stopped listening, the rose-tinted that they’re so at-one that the relationship is one unending symphony of sensitively cadenced talk. You decide.
Setting lovebirds aside, it seems that if we’re not invested in a discussion, or whom it’s with, we’re self-conscious. Therefore the shortest path to bearable small talk must be to make it more involving—that is, to value it. Emotion inhibits this. However, harnessed by small talk, emotion is also the solution.
➺ Rule four: Convert fear to imagination
Philip Larkin’s friend, novelist Kingsley Amis, suggested that human history is the tale of man, an animal, striving to forget he is