The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [30]
Now picture it as the message iced on a three-tiered cake: the top layer consists of the message’s meaning (what the speaker is saying); the middle, an implied opinion tucked inside; and at bottom, the speaker’s sly conversational purpose.
Icing: “Marie Antoinette has eaten all the cakes.”
Top: Greedy Marie Antoinette looks fat.
Middle: Fat is not a good look.
Bottom: She makes me sick; I wish she made you sick too.
This prompts a final question, the plate: Why is this speaker making this statement?
The answer depends on your view of the context. In this case, I imagine my bony speaker addressing a boyfriend, who, his eyes lost in Marie Antoinette’s creamy cleavage, replies, “Let her eat cake,” wishing she’d let him scoop up the crumbs.
➺ Rule nine: Listen to construct the meaning you want to hear
When the reluctant suitor Ziggy told fellow Big Brother contestant Chanelle that he wanted “to finish this,” she shot back, “This conversation?”
It took him another week to dump her.
Her rat-trap response demonstrates how effectively replies can nail the meaning of a preceding sentence—whether or not this happens to be what a speaker intended. Similarly, paraphrases elucidate speakers’ views, and may sneakily alter them, tossing them back, re-fashioned in so pleasing a style that others happily mistake them for their own—spinning conversation wherever you would go....
For this reason, La Fontaine compared a skilled conversationalist to “the bee who gathers honey alike from every different flower.” He might have been describing Lord Rendel, politician-friend to egotist Gladstone, who could
start a new trend of thought with the most innocent suggestion; some challenging remark, casually interposed. . . . With the gentlest pressure on the rudder, he could give a turn to a conversation, confirm or moderate a trend of policy.
Effective listeners reach inside minds to place a hand on conversation’s controls, an ability that helps avert the danger to every bearer of bad tidings: getting shot. Like business consultant Rick Huttner, who inoculates clients to unpalatable truths by building rapport, using listening and questions to train them to his way of thinking.
I respect all the input they give me. I listen for what they really want from their lives.... [The job] is really listening, listening, listening and at the appropriate time adding something to the conversation, and then change happens.
Thus advice emerges as the product of a joint-thinking venture. Which, of course, it is.
So before saying something challenging, see if skilled midwifery can’t persuade it out of the other person’s mouth:
Listen
Wait to be sure a speaker is finished
Question
Summarize
Empathize
If you must, offer a different view
But you may get further saying nothing at all. Pop artist Andy Warhol might have been a big noise. Still, he understood listening’s craftiness, according to singer Deborah Harry:
“He was a terrific listener, that was his genius really. He just sucked it all in, and made a point of never saying too much. That’s a skill,” she says, and to prove the point, stops and smiles.
Not least of listening’s virtues is that it reminds us to cherish silence.
TYPOLOGY OF BORES, CHORES, AND OTHER CONVERSATIONAL BEASTS
THE APOLOGIST Perfica nervosa
She’s so, so sorry. She’s three minutes late. Her fault: The trains weren’t working. She’s always expecting them to be—silly her—that’s probably why the drivers strike! Has she ruined the meal and everything? And dear me, she’s only brought wine, chocs, flowers, no cheese. Sorry, they were clean out of Lafite ’78, she had to settle for ’75—isn’t it awful how old bottles’ labels peel off, all that nasty dust. And it’s such a pity the roses look as if their petals will drop off next week. If only she’d brought a nice bush....
While having her over for coffee is trying, steel yourself before tea at the Apologist’s glossy-mag-proof home. As she wheels out the feast (only truffled unicorn; the phoenix got burned), pointing out asymmetrical holes in her home-fribbled