People shouldn’t abandon your conversations. Identify and banish your conversation-stopping bad habits, and people won’t run from your words.
Stop It
A single bad communication habit can cause a staggering amount of trouble. Improve your conversations by identifying and eliminating bad communication habits.
Question Suggestion (Part Two): Bad Questions
Bad questions impede understanding, sow confusion, or stifle the flow of information. Even worse, bad questions often lead to conversational escalations that dramatically increase the likelihood of relational damage. Strive to keep your bad questions from seeing the light of day, and respond appropriately when someone asks you a faulty question. Read on for strategies to assist.
Not Punny
Puns and other elaborate wordplays stop conversations cold. Puns seldom add levity to conversations, but they almost always add awkwardness.
Wordplay and puns, like “Shanks for the memories,” “The Big Crapple,” and “To Glee or not to Glee, that is the question” may sound funny in your head, but when wordplay hits a conversation, the result is almost always awkwardness and hesitation—not laughter—for two reasons.
Communicating With a Chatterbox
Some people never stop talking due to constant chatter inside their head. This thicket of noise can make talking (and listening) to them monumentally challenging.
When people carry a lot of chatter in their heads, these unordered, tangential thoughts can leak out all over their conversations in a stream of consciousness style. This makes it almost impossible to figure out what’s meaningful information and what’s just noise.