(no subject)

[elainegrey]

Have any of you had to change a behavior of yours in your interactions with other people in conversation? I have become (due to stress and the challenge of telephone conversations and probably a few other things) very impatient and cut people off. I don't get the body language feedback that one might in person, so that makes it hard to change my behavior. Pointers to behavioral change suggestions welcome, much along the lines of how do you remind yourself to think before you talk.

Sigh, also, apparently my vocabulary is challenging.

Is "conflate" really simply replaced by "combine"? I guess so (outside of discourse about logical fallacies).

Comments

[sonia]

ooh, ooh, I have opinions about this! (Hope they're helpful to you.) "Cutting people off" is usually a mismatch between the two people's conversational styles, not a flaw in the person doing the cutting off. There are variations in people's expected gap before speaking, and in tolerance for being talked over. (You probably know all that.)

So, I've thought about this because I tend to cut people off. What I do when I realized it happened is stop and say, "You were saying?" It *is* hard on the phone. I have one phone friend in particular where I have to consciously allow long silences, because her sense of an appropriate gap is so much longer than mine. Also, talking across the country on the phone, there's a built-in delay.

I'd say conflate is more to confuse than to combine, like conflating two ideas that aren't actually the same thing.

[snippy]

Yes, I've had to stop talking about myself at all at work, as the "in crowd" kept telling me I was too self-centered while they chattered on about their personal lives for dozens of minutes at the tops of their lungs. I just make polite noises and occasionally say "that's too bad" or the like. I had to go around telling myself under my breath "so-and-so is not my friend, and doesn't want to hear about my life, just wants an audience for theirs" all day at work for a while.