I think you’re right, but suspect I will have more difficulty with the first than with the second. I am honestly curious about almost everything, which is a decent stand-in for spinning lack of knowledge as a personal deficit, but I am very bad at not speaking. I work at it, but I remain someone whose default setting is to babble at random people on the street. I’m better at “tactfully noncommittal” than I used to be, but I’m still pretty bad at it.
(nod) I used to be really bad at it; I’m now only mildly bad at it. As I say, it’s a learnable skill. Training the habit of substituting questions for assertions—genuine questions, ones that don’t presuppose a specific answer—has worked pretty well for me.
I think you’re right, but suspect I will have more difficulty with the first than with the second. I am honestly curious about almost everything, which is a decent stand-in for spinning lack of knowledge as a personal deficit, but I am very bad at not speaking. I work at it, but I remain someone whose default setting is to babble at random people on the street. I’m better at “tactfully noncommittal” than I used to be, but I’m still pretty bad at it.
(nod) I used to be really bad at it; I’m now only mildly bad at it. As I say, it’s a learnable skill. Training the habit of substituting questions for assertions—genuine questions, ones that don’t presuppose a specific answer—has worked pretty well for me.