Category: psychology

Conquering Casual Conversation

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“Talk,” is one of the many pieces of advice I would give my younger self if I could go back in time, “and not every conversation has to involve deep, impactful, and important subjects. Some of the times, you just talk for the pure enjoyment of talking to people. Listeners don’t have to be cool or beautiful either. They can be old, young, smart, dumb, boring and fascinating. Talk about matters consequential and inconsequential. If we talk long enough, we might find, we just might find, that the boring are far more interesting than the interesting.”

The musicians told me to avoid the “chitter-chatter, chitter,-chatter, chitter-chatter ‘bout schmatta, schmatta, schmatta”. The movies told me to be the quiet, mysterious type everyone looks to for reaction. They told me if I wanted elusive charisma, I should be silent.

“Don’t listen to them,” The Ghost of Present Rilaly would whisper into my ear. “Silence doesn’t make you look cool. Silence makes you look silent.” Silence lands you in the corner of the room not knowing what to do with your hands. No one remembers you when you are silent.

There’s a reason former athletes and the beautiful are silent. They don’t have a lot to offer.

“How do you know so much about such stupid stuff?” the beautiful might ask. If we’re bold enough to answer, they’ll say, “Huh, well I was much too busy getting busy in high school to learn about such nonsense.” If we’re then bold enough to remind them that high school was a long time ago, we’ll realize that that persona we tried so hard to attain didn’t accomplish half of what we thought it would. “You think everyone is looking at the guy shaking his head in the corner? Nobody remembers that. It might seem so pointless in the beginning, but developing the skills necessary to talk about absolute nonsense actually adds something to life.”

1) Learn how to be superficial. My best friend enjoyed talking to people. I found that so confusing that I was embarrassed to be around him at times. When he talked to a fella, I had no problem with it. When he started up a conversation with a young woman, I kind of envied it, but this guy would talk with old people about old people stuff. Their conversations were absolute nonsense. He didn’t care, and he was having one hell of a good time doing it. I thought he was a fraud, and when I called him out on it, do you want to know what he said? He had the audacity to say, “I was enjoying myself.”

“Where’s your integrity my man?” I asked him.

“I don’t know anything about that,” he said. “I just want to have a good time.”

“It goes against code,” I said, in whatever terminology I used at the time. He didn’t care. He didn’t tell me he didn’t care. He wanted to be cool, like Matt Dillon, and all that, but some part of him enjoyed the art of conversation so much that he couldn’t control himself. When some old man got angry about the cost of a Hershey’s chocolate bar, my friend turned to him and encouraged the rant. What? Why? When an old person starts in you’re supposed to walk away. When he first started doing it, I thought it was a bit. I thought he was trying to pull a thread on the old man to get him going. After numerous interactions of this sort, I realized my best friend was respectful and deferential. He just enjoyed talking to people of all stripes. He wasn’t smarter than me, and he wasn’t one of those types who knows a little bit of something about everything. He just knew how to talk to people. He learned how to put the important, artistic personae aside and tap into the superficial side to just talk to whomever happened to be near him in the moment.

It took me a long time to see that my friend might be onto something. It took a job where my employer forced me to engage with customers that I realized I could and should tap into my superficial side. I got all tied up in the shoe-gazing, grunge virtue that suggested you were all a bunch of fakes, and I was living real. As usual, when you accuse someone else of being fake too often, it’s usually because you are. I was a nice Midwestern kid trying to pretend like I was a Northwestern rock star. At that point in my life, I still believed that the artistic persona was an important one to maintain, but I learned to maintain that persona while tapping into a superficial side. I did that to remain an employee with high scores, but I learned to tap into that persona in my off work hours too, and I found that I had a lot more fun in life doing so.

2) Be confident. I know this is easier said than done. Most of us are insecure, and we all have moments when we’re not sure of ourselves. If most of us are unsure of ourselves, then most of us are unsure of ourselves. Unless our listener was an athlete or a beautiful woman in high school, chances are they’re as uncomfortable in their skin as we are. The trick is spotting it. I was on a date with an incredibly beautiful woman. I was as nervous and unsure of myself as ever. I pulled out of the parking lot and circled back. I wanted to back out. When I finally stood before her, she blushed. My confidence soared as I realized she was as nervous as I was. It taught me the simple and emboldening fact that most people are as nervous about meeting new people as we are. If we watch them long enough, we’ll spot it. It might be a blush, a stutter, or an uncomfortable look away, but everyone has a tic of some sort. If we’re observant, we’ll see something that informs us that most people are just as inferior as we are. They’re just normal people living normal lives, and they enjoy engaging in casual conversation.

3) Pretend to be interested in what they have to say. How often are we so interested in being interesting that we forget to be interested? Conversations are a two-way street, and if we’re able to convince them that we’re interested in what they have to say, we’ll receive a return on our investment. One of our favorite conversation topics is us, and when we show them we’re interested in them, they are going to be more interested in us. One of the keys to this is to avoid testing it out too early. If we begin speaking too early, their smile fades, they become distracted by anything and everything around them, and the minute we finish speaking, they start in again. Displaying an acute focus in what another person has to say is one key to making friends, but some might find our interest so intoxicating that they’ll want to compound it without a return on our investment. We can deal with that element later, if the two of us develop a sustained friendship, but if our goal is to make more friends, the key is to overwhelm them with interest.

One thing we covet more than being interesting is being funny. Some people aren’t funny, but if we want to be friends with them laughter is the best medicine. No matter how common or dumb their joke is, laugh. Laugh about how dumb their joke is if that’s what it takes. Laugh if they messed the joke up. They won’t know why we’re laughing if we do it right. If we do it right, we’ll find them coming up to us with their jokes over and over again. If we do it right often enough, we could become their go-to person with their jokes.

If you’re anything like me, when you meet someone new for the first time, you’re so insecure and nervous that the go-to is to try to be so over-the-top interesting and funny that you forget to be interested in what they have to say.  I write pretend we’re interested, because if we pretend well enough and long enough we might accidentally convince ourselves that we are interested.

4) Tell self-deprecating humor, but don’t overdo it. If something works, and self-deprecating humor almost always does, we have a tendency to do until it doesn’t. There is a tipping point, however, where we might accidentally affect their impression of us. Everyone loves the “But what do I know, I’m a dummy” conclusion to a provocative thought. If we do that too often, though, they might walk away thinking we’re dumb. Why wouldn’t they, it was the impression we gave them one too many times.

5) Find a Through Line. One of the many reasons the show Seinfeld was so popular is that nonsense is funny and fun. Some of the best friendships I have in life were based on nonsense. Example, Michael had a habit of making a drink face before he even reached for his can of soda. He reached out for the soda with an ‘O’ already on his face. He grabbed the bottle and inserted its contents into the ‘O’. I never knew we had a drink face, until I met Michael. I never thought about the proper timing of a drink face, until I met him.

“Michael, you need to wait until the drink is almost on your face before you make a drink ‘O’,” I said. “You make your drink faces way too early.”

“Women don’t like a man who makes a drink face too early,” Cole added. “It freaks them out.” A lifelong friendship between Cole and I was born that day.

Another friend and I loved the comedic stylings of Don Knotts, and we both hated caramel apples, because we hated the feeling of caramel on our nose. On that note, another bonding agent can be hating the same things. You both might hate beets, accidentally stepping in puddles, or people who make old man sounds when they sit. Whatever the case, there’s always some nonsense you can bond over. It’s your job to find it.

6a) Be a Great Listener. Some suggest that listening is a lost art. I’d argue that it never was. I’d argue that people in Aristotle’s era, Shakespeare’s, and every just about every dot in human history had the same complaint about human nature. “Nobody listens to anybody anymore.” Are you listening to people when you say that? I’ve been called a great listener in enough venues that I’m starting to think it’s true. I am fascinated by the people around me, and why they think what they do, and I have to tell you that it’s a great way to make friends. The one problem with being a great listener is when you’re known as a great listener, people don’t want you to talk. They much prefer that you listen to them, be fascinated with them, and find them funny. As I’ve written throughout this piece, those of us seeking to make friends will have to work through this in their own way, but if we lay the foundation of being a great listener people will be drawn to us.

6b) Ask Active Listening Questions. Asking active listening questions not only prompts the speaker to launch or continue, it makes them feel interesting. There are few things people enjoy more than an active listening question about the story they’re telling. The questions we ask are relative to their conversation, but some of the times, a simple “Why did you do that again?” can do wonders to show we’re not just following along and that we’re interested, but that we want to hear more. Some listening prompts might feel so obvious to be almost stupid, but soon after we drop them, the speaker picks the ball up and eagerly runs with it. As I wrote earlier, people love it when we make them feel interesting, and they might love being funny more, but the final leg of my version of making friends and influencing people might endear the speaker to you more than any other. If we phrase our question just so, it makes them feel like your resident expert on the subject in question. Active listening prompts not only shows that you’re listening it suggests that you trust that they know the truth of the matter.

These little tidbits seem so simple that they couldn’t possibly work, and they may not. As someone who has, at times, suffered from situational stage fright, because I wanted to be more entertaining, funnier than everyone else in the room, and so over-the-top everything else, I realized that I had a tendency to lock myself up by over-complicating the situation before me. Some of the times, these situations are complicated and tough to read, but some of the times they’re relatively simple. Getting a read on conversations can be similar to making reads in sports. Some of the times, depending on the level of competition, we can win a game all by ourselves, but most of the time, we damage our team’s chance of victory by trying to do too much. When we experience the latter, we learn to let the game come to us. It’s all confusing and situational, and the best advice, for anyone who asks the five questions regarding how to implement them, comes from the immortal lyrics from You’re the One that I Want by John Farrar, for the movie Grease: “Feel your way.”

Fighting Coyotes

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“I had a mean case of the coyotes,” Riley Frandsen said to explain his unorthodox, yet natural means of protecting his property. I didn’t need a guide or interpreter to tell me what that meant, but Riley was so stacked with anger and frustration that I felt compelled to provide him a launching point:

“What does that mean?”  

“They were going to the bathroom in my yard, all over my yard. It was so disgusting. They ripped my garbage apart and threw it everywhere, and they were scaring the hell out of Murphy,” Riley said, stressing the latter point as if it was the most important. “Murphy, here, was afraid of going out in the backyard,” he added patting his nearly 100lb. setter while holding my gaze. “I’m serious. When he left this little patio, he did so only to go to the bathroom, and then he wanted back in quick. He got to the point that he was going on the patio, because, I think, he didn’t want to leave the lighted area. He used to love the backyard, staying out for hours, running around, barking at non-existent matters, like any good dog will. Then it was, one to two minutes, and he’s scratching at the door to get back in. It’s sad is what it was.”       

I wasn’t paying too much attention. I’m normally a pretty decent listener, but a story about a man living in a relatively remote location, having problems with coyotes, didn’t captivate my attention. I had a whopper of an unrelated story all locked and loaded, and I couldn’t wait to start it. As such, I was committing the mortal sin of all good listeners: I was waiting for him to finish his story, so I could start mine. 

“What does a man do when coyotes start peeing all over his land?” Riley asked himself when I forgot to ask. “You pee right back is what you do. You reclaim your land.” If I was rudely half-listening up to that point, those lines brought me back in. My story was gone.

“You pee right back?” I asked, guessing where he was headed, but I wanted to hear him say it. “What does that mean?”

“How does a dog mark their territory?” Riley asked. “They urinate on it, right? They were marking my territory as their own, and I didn’t know where they were marking, of course, but they obviously did such a thorough job on my lawn that my buddy, Murphy, was afraid to leave the patio after a while. So, I started urinating back, around the perimeter of my land, as a way of taking my land back.

“So, anytime you have to pee, you run out here and do it on your lawn?”I asked

“I started out doing that,” he said, “but I did some research on it, and experts say that morning urine is the most concentrated and potent.” 

“I’ve also heard that beer urine is some of the most concentrated and potent,” I said. “Is that true?” 

“I wouldn’t know, because I have no control group … My morning urine has had at least some beer in it since I was fifteen. And to answer the question every one else asks, I have to do it again after every rain.” As Riley and I went silent, with a beer in hand, looking out at Riley’s backyard, I broke:

“I am sorry. I know this isn’t funny, but it kind of is.”

“Oh, I know it is,” he admitted with a smile. “I’ve taken this story into town, and they laugh just as hard as you do, because it’s funny, but I’ve tried everything as you can see. I put up that privacy fence, an eight-foot privacy fence, and I saw one jump it one night, scared the hell out of me. I grabbed my rifle and scared it off, and guess what he did. He jumped it again a couple nights later. They’re not scared off by gunshot, not long-term anyway. They’ve not afraid of motion detection lights, and the name brand coyote repellents don’t scare them off either, not long-term. Nothing did, until I began marking my territory. I have to protect my dog, and my property right? I see it as marking my territory in the way any other animal would. I see it as informing them that this is my land in their language, and they respond better to that message than any of the other ones I tried. I don’t know why it works so well, but I think it has something to do with their fear of humans. Our urine is also very high in ammonia, which most animals hate. I still hear them, off in the distance, but I haven’t seen them once since I started doing this. They appear to consider the smell unbearable. It is an olfactory repellent to most mid-level predators. It can also be used as a pesticide. The scent of human urine can be used to confuse and deter rabbits, squirrels, and unintelligent people.

“Not all predators are repelled by the scent of human urine however,” he continued in a matter-of-fact manner, as we sipped on his beer. “The debate on whether bears are detracted or attracted to human urine is ongoing. Some say larger bears, like grizzlies, might actually approach a camp lined with pee that campers put there to detract bears. They say that bears now so associate humans with food that any sign of humans will attract desperately hungry bears, and they know the scent of our urine. Others claim that bears are naturally curious creatures, and the smell is so foreign to them that they investigate. They’re just in our campsite to see what the smell is, in other words, but when we start screaming and running away, their other instincts and impulses cause them to do the things they do to us. 

“Reindeer, apparently, go nuts for our pee,” he continued. “And yes, I did some research on that too. I didn’t specifically search this out, but it was an offshoot of an offshoot, a rabbit hole that I followed, until I ended up learning that reindeer have a natural salt-deficiency, and our urine is high in salt, so they crave it, like we do Ruffles. The Inupiat people of Alaska found that all they have to do is pee in a reindeer trap, and they’ll have a nice meal at the end of the night. Imagine all of the trial and error that went into that finding. The Tozhu people of Tuva in Russia like to keep reindeer around for whatever reason. I assume they occasionally kill and eat them, but they’ve found that if they offer a reindeer a bowl of urine every once in a while, the reindeer will hang around their homes, waiting for the next bowl to arrive. The Tozhu say that the salt-deficient reindeer crave our urine so much that they’ve learned our patterns, and when they see a man who they think is about to pee they will all rush up on him and jockey for pole position, for lack of a better term.

“I know it’s funny,” he said. “I knew that before I told my neighbor, who was trying everything he could think up to free his home from the coyote invasion. He thought it was hilarious, and he told everyone he knows, and I know they were all laughing their heads off, but you know what happened don’t you? You know the end of this story don’t you? You can see it coming. That’s right, they kept laughing at the image of me peeing around my property line while they went through all of the prescribed fixes, and now everyone in town is peeing out their own property line. It’s funny, and it’s the only thing that works.” 

Race Potty: The 4th Stage of Potty Training

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First Rule of Race Potty: Don’t talk about Race Potty. Don’t sit your son down and tell him the pros and cons of doing it. Don’t analyze it with him in anyway. Second Rule of Race Potty: Don’t talk about Race Potty. If you decide to try it, just do it. Third Rule of Race Potty: Don’t talk about Race Potty. Just announce that it’s on. Say, “Race Potty!”, jump out of your couch and race him to the bathroom.  

As with all parents, we started with The Potty Chair and all the prescriptions laid out in parent guides to help us through the 1-3 stages of potty training. His mom had some experience with potty training, but she forgot most of it over the course of decades. So, we read some books on the subject, watched some YouTube videos, and sought advice from friends, family, and his physician. Their advice progressed us to stage four, an arbitrary description we’ve developed to describe the luxury boys have of urinating in the toilet while standing up. By completing the first three stages, our son was completely potty trained, except he preferred to sit. While standing to urinate is not a mandatory stage of child development, in general, or potty training, every man wants his son to take advantage of the biological luxury of standing while peeing. As such, the focus of this article will be limited to the fourth stage of potty training procedures for males.

The three of us found ourselves so mired in this agonizingly repetitious stage that we felt helpless. Our son knew what to do, how to do it, and when, but he just couldn’t put them altogether. 

One of the best ways to teach a two-to-three-year-old anything complex is to talk to them. The more we talk to them, the more they understand. They probably won’t understand 3/4ths of what we’re saying, but it might be a tone that suggests that there are reasons for everything we do, and it might help lay the foundation with them. Regardless our approach, parents are going to make a ton of mistakes, and the best antidote to making mistakes is time. If we spend enough time with your child, and talk to them while we’re there, we’ll round off the corners of any mistakes we make. In these areas, it doesn’t hurt to try to sympathize with our child. We might try to empathize, but we can’t remember how difficult it was to learn all of this at once. If we take a step back and think about how overwhelming learning this overflow of information must be, in such a small space, it might help us relate to them better and focus our lesson plans. My lesson plan has always been to KISS (Keep It Simple and Silly) it. I probably overestimate and underestimate him, alternately, three times a day, but I don’t obsess about that near as much as other parents do. I correct myself accordingly, and I try to keep his learning grade gradual.  

We don’t need to talk about everything though. Some matters require tactical maneuvers through the maze of their limited psychology, and any discussion of such tactics only undermines whatever results they might achieve. Even when they get disappointed by losing the
Potty Race, don’t say, “I’m only doing this because we are desperate to find something to aid you in this stage of potty training.” By keeping my intentions unspoken, I might have overestimated my two-to-three-year-old, but I thought if I discussed it, he might see Race Potty as the tactic it was. 

After we successfully completed those mandatory stages, we began whooping and hollering, and plying him with the treats experts prescribe. Our enthusiasm was genuine, because it was exciting to watch the learning process. He wanted to learn, he wanted to succeed, and he showed how much it meant to him by celebrating his accomplishment with us. A problem arose in stage four. He stood once, and a microscopic amount fell out. When he was done he was done, he thought he was done. It was one of the best days of his young life, and he hadn’t heard such praise since he first learned how to talk and walk.   

“What an accomplishment, am I right?” his beaming-with-pride expression said. “I’ll be honest with you guys, I’m glad that’s over, so I can go back to the more comfortable routine of sitting down when I go.” 

If you have a child, you know this reaction well. You spend countless hours repeating the process in the hopes that you might eventually help him establish some sort of routine. You don’t expect instant success, and you learn how vital patience is in stage four, but at some point you reach the “He isn’t getting it, and I’m not sure he ever will” level of frustration. You don’t show your disappointment to him, and you don’t say it to anyone but your spouse, but you feel it. The repetition becomes second nature to him, but he has his fallbacks. Those stuck in this stage also know the shrug you get from friends, family, and physicians when their advice doesn’t work, “Every kid is different. What do you want me to say?”   

I don’t know how to potty train your child, and you don’t know how to potty train mine. No one knows. It’s a guessing game. Did my guess work, or did I use it at a time when he was finally ready to learn and anything would’ve worked at that point? I don’t know, you don’t know. So the next time an author writes a piece, such as this one, and they suggest they’ve discovered the foolproof, take it to the bank, works every time method of potty training, symbolically place it in the trash bin right next to the heaping pile of diapers you’ve accrued since you started employing their method.

Is it about stubbornness, intelligence, or some sort of behavioral issue? We don’t know, because every kid is different. Every complex, little brain full of mush tackles complex tasks in such unique, individualistic ways that one of the best methods involves learning what makes your child tick. What makes him smile with pride? My little fella showed an ambitious nature pretty early on, and to try to turn the repetition into routine, I keyed in on my son’s competitive nature. I found a trick that might only apply to my son, but it worked so well for us that my wife began dropping it at work to parents who were having their own trouble with their kids in stage four. 

Prior to Race Potty, we tried everything. We went nuts on the microscopic dribbles that fell into the water. We tried standing him in front of the toilet for an extended period of time. We tried having him watch me so often that we hoped something might click. It didn’t. A friend of ours suggested putting Froot Loops in the water and telling him to sink them. That seemed like a fantastic idea. It sounded fun. I showed him how. He cheered me on. He told me what colors he wanted me to sink. “Why don’t you try to sink a few?” I asked him. He gave me a devilish grin that led me to believe he was in on my dastardly plan. He wasn’t. Nothing worked, until I developed Race Potty.

It plays out like this. It’s potty time. You know it, and he knows it, but he doesn’t know what to do with it. “Potty time!” you yell spontaneously, the more spontaneous the better, and you race him to the bathroom. He’s running with you, but he doesn’t know why. The only thing he knows is he wants to do is win. Some parents might not want to do this, because they fear instilling or fostering a competitive nature in their son, but as I said my son was very competitive early on, and I encouraged that in every way I could. 

Race Potty is not a mean method, as you’ll read, but you do have to move past the nice stage. Being supportive and whooping and hollering work great in stages 1-3, but their effectiveness begins to wane in stage four. There are, however, some details of Potty Race that might make some parents squeamish. 

Once at the toilet, you have him whip it out with you, as we’ve done probably a hundred times before at this point. This time, however, you issue a challenge: “Let’s see who can hit the water first.” 

This is the point where some fathers might grow squeamish, for I prescribe a touchdown dance once victory is secured. The more obnoxious the better. Which touchdown dance is appropriate? For that answer, we might want to consult NFL rules. We should not get in the face of our child, for that might draw a taunting penalty, and we shouldn’t celebrate in groups. We also shouldn’t engage in a lewd dance, otherwise known as twerking. Most fathers don’t want to do a touchdown dance after beating their two-to-three-year-old son at anything. It feels weird, and you’re sure that some pointy-headed child psychologist will frown at you for doing such a thing, but there’s a reason you’re desperately stuck in stage four, and it has everything to do with that frustrating “Every kid is different” phrase. The touchdown celebration stokes the fire. 

He almost beat me on a Tuesday, but I refrained from celebrating his accomplishment. I celebrated mine instead. He was frustrated. It stoked his fire. It stoked his ire. On Wednesday, he came closer, and he was frustrated that I no longer celebrated him hitting the water.

When the pain of his disappointment hits us, our inclination is to soothe him. We might want to tell him that it’s just a game, or that you’re just joking around. My advice, change the subject. Don’t let him grow despondent, wallow in the misery of his frustration, or let him cry. Change the subject to something he beats you in. Do whatever you can to avoid negative connotations and build up his pride, but don’t give up the game, and don’t talk about Potty Race. Just do it. 

My patience and diligence paid off on Thursday, when he beat me, and it was glorious … for him. I feigned the agony of defeat. My inclination was to share the victory with him, but I refrained from doing so, knowing that I had to stoke that competitive fire to keep it bright orange. I was inconsolable in defeat, and he loved every minute of it. 

He was almost undefeated from that point forward, and whatever wounds he experienced in the early stages of Potty Race were healed. To show how healed they were, he would shout, “Potty Race!” and I would have to chase him down the hall to pointlessly try to defeat him.

He still sat to pee, particularly when I wasn’t around to race him, but the repetition of potty race eventually established the routine in ways my wife couldn’t believe.

She didn’t care for potty race when it began, of course, and she all but bit her tongue as I continued to employ it. She didn’t appreciate the philosophy behind it, the methodology, or the lack of results. She had particular disdain for the touchdown dances, as she didn’t see them as constructive. Potty Race did not work in the beginning, but what does with a two-to-three-year-old? “We’ve tried everything else,” I said. “I say we try something else.” She conceded the point, but I could tell she didn’t think my idea would ever work, until it did. She’s such a convert now that she’s spreading the gospel even though I told her you don’t talk about Potty Race.