What do you do when a convo drags on too long? 24 Feb 23

I was just on the edge of a conversation and I started to feel that I needed oxygen The speaker was very excited and was enthusing about something and I found myself starting to switch off. I quietly slipped out of the conversation that was going on too long for me and I needed to take a breather.

As a coach one of the skills I teach is noticing when the room needs to take a breather and I've just done it for myself by slipping away.

I wonder, Have you ever found yourself engaged in a conversation with someone, only to realize that it's dragging on for way longer than you would have liked? Maybe you've even been the one who wanted to wrap it up but didn't know how to politely end the chat. A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences sheds some light on this phenomenon.

The study assigned 252 people into pairs of strangers and allowed them to talk about anything they wanted for a duration ranging from one to 45 minutes. The researchers then conducted exit interviews with each participant to determine when they would have preferred the conversation to end. What they found was surprising, to say the least.

Only two percent of conversations ended at the time both people wanted them to end. Thirty percent of conversations finished when one person wanted it to end, and more than half of the time, both people wanted the conversation to be shorter. Only ten percent of the time did both parties want the conversation to continue longer.

In essence, the study found that people are terrible at reading their conversational partner's level of interest in what they have to say. When asked to guess when their partner wanted to stop, participants were off by an average of 64 percent of the length of the conversation.

What does this mean for us? First it means it's likely that we're not nearly as entertaining, engaging, or interesting as we think we are. What can we do about it? Well we can pass the conversational ball earlier in a conversation, gently wrap a conversation up earlier or perhaps tell great stories that keep your conversational partners engaged.

Storytelling is one of the Life Model's relationship skills and I will be blogging about that over the next few posts.