The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [86]
Why not enlist the optimism inherent in making a journey to suggest changes are not only necessary but easy, desirable?
Opportunity: Act normal and conversation may well be. Serious isn’t a synonym for difficult.
Risk: Be unsubtle and the other person may use irritation at your ruse to shunt you off the track—attacking your tactics instead of engaging with the issue.
PLAY GAMES
Broadcaster Evan Davies puzzled over how to come out to his family. Then he turned it into a game, starting with his brother:
“I have something to tell you, can you guess what it is?”
His brother guessed right, then suggested Davies tell their parents in the same way. After Christmas lunch he popped the question. His parents drew a blank, so his brother pretended to guess. Then another brother cracked a joke. No drama, no tears.
Opportunity: Make light of a revelation to dispel an atmosphere of conflict.
Risk: Appropriate?
DIM THE OPPORTUNITY
Why attack a proposition if discreet sabotage can downplay its appeal? Use belittling language, diminutive descriptors (sort of, kind of, stuff); sow each sentence with a negative. Recast the scenario (“You’re absolutely sure you want to spend eight hours a day doing nothing on dirt?”—my take on beach holidays). Infuse fantasy with dreary practical considerations (“If we did this, and A, B, and C, then X happened, then Y, then Zzzzzz . . .”). For more tips, remember how your parents spoke to you in adolescence.
Or emulate Mark Antony in Julius Caesar and use the other side’s weapons against them. Caesar’s assassins tell the mob they are “honest,” then Mark Antony appropriates the word, repeating it in ever-less apposite contexts, making the claim seem progressively ironic, and the assassins, by extension, utterly false.
So take the key word or the emotional tug of a bad argument (“I gambled away our life’s savings for you”), hold it up to an unflattering light, and strip it of value and force.
Opportunity: Depersonalize objections.
Risk: The other person is so attached to his crap idea, he takes the attack personally. Perish the thought....
COURTESY CORRAL
How do you tell a girl her ivory gown makes her look like Cling-Wrapped cottage cheese?
Don’t. Say the plunging damask one shows off her antelope neck instead.
Anna Valentine, the couturier who attired Camilla Parker Bowles for her wedding to Prince Charles, cajoles brides-to-be by swathing them in attention, ushering them toward comely frocks by focusing on their most flatterable bits. Such schmoozing works on babies, business leaders, and the most tyrannosaurus divas. Swarm over every detail, keep each hint soft-focus, gag potential protest, inducing a diabetic coma from all your sweetness. Few illusions are more intoxicating than that we are captivating. Indeed I watched an otherwise talentless woman propel a meteoric career almost entirely by facelift-obviating smiles, emphatic nods, and resourcefulness at telling people they were fabulous.
Opportunity: Get what you want in the guise of providing a service.
Risk: Exhaustion, sustaining disbelief
PEEL AN ONION
Things aren’t going your way? Use emotional levers to jack up your position. Quit the crying and moaning—too near blackmail, as well as liable to make victims fractious. Instead, make feelings instrumental by attaching them to positive arguments for your cause: “I’m so passionate because . . .”
Opportunity: Move the other person to sympathy.
Risk: Seeming out of ideas/unreasonable/nutty
MIND YOUR LANGUAGE
In the seventeenth century Thomas Sprat described how Britain’s first scientific institution, the Royal Society, enacted a purge to win kudos with rich, influential merchants (hitherto science had been the preserve of highfalutin polymaths like Sir Francis Bacon). Members asset-stripped their vocab in favor of a
close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness; bringing all