I’ve noticed that I have low priority in at mid-large group conversations. What I mean is that in situations where I’m one of two people talking, I’m (generally) the one who stops and the attention of the “audience” (people-who-aren’t-speaking) is predominantly on the other person even before I stop speaking.
This used to cause me considerable distress, but no longer. I’ve accepted it as a fact of the social universe. But I’m still curious and would like to change it, if possible.
I suspect that this is something that varies by social group, and more strongly suspect that some behavior of mine is key.
I’m interested in (being pointed to) discussion of this type of thing, especially if it contains actionable advice.
I can’t really offer anything more than a personal anecdotes, but here is what I usually do for when I try to grab attention of a group of my peers:
If you are talking to several people gathered in circle, and it is my turn to say something important, I make a small step forward so that I physically place myself in the center of the group.
When I am speaking, I try to mantain eye contact with all people gathered around, If I focus too much only on the person I am speaking to, everyone else turns their attention towards them as well.
I rarely do it myself, as I suppose it is a technique more tailored for public speeches, but conservative use of hand gestures to signify what you are talking about, probably won’t hurt.
I probably sound like a self absorbed jerk writing this, but if I want the attention to focus on myself, and not my interlocutor I often use “me” language. Compare and contrast [“What you say about vegans is true, but you may conisder...”—now everybody looks at the person who said something about vegans] [“I think that I agree with what was said about vegans, but I also think...”—now everybody looks at me as I explain my position].
But those are all just little little tricks, when the surest way of attracting attention of the audience is simply to have something important and interesting to say.
I probably sound like a self absorbed jerk writing this, but if I want the attention to focus on myself, and not my interlocutor I often use “me” language.
While we are at that topic many people use “you” when talking about themselves. They say sentence like: “Yesterday I thought: You should go to gym.”
I once even listened to someone who used “he” to when speaking about himself a few years ago. The language was German and he was an Austrian, but it still signified how little he identified with his self in the past.
After a bit of prodding he changed to “I”. That also changed subtle things about his body language did change. It was interesting to watch the effect. Identifying with oneself helps to be more charismatic.
It’s one of those nontrivial aspects of: “Just be yourself.”
Thanks. These are things I’ve learnt or tried learning in the past. I’d guess there are good odds that I’m reverting to past (shyer) behaviors in some situations.
I’ll make an effort to be aware of my body language and focus next time.
You’re really not giving enough specific information. There are countless reasons why that might happen so any advice you take here could lead to erratic behavior.
In addition to what other people said, this sounds like you might be too verbose or bad at gauging which topics interest other people and to what extent. They might look at the other person because they wish them to interrupt you and move on.
Fair enough. At this stage I’m curious as to which specifics I should be looking at. Or what kinds of things are key (to speaker priority in groups of 5-10).
The various elements of body language given, and your notes on content (I can be too verbose, for sure) have given me what I need to go on for now.
If you start talking loudly, perhaps a little louder than you think you should be talking, attention will usually shift to you. If you say something relatively short and relatively interesting, you gain some credit, and then later people will be more likely to listen to you. This requires some timing—you have to start talking just as the previous speaker is finishing, or even a little before. Mistiming could make you look like (and be) a shouting idiot.
If two or more people use the same strategy (starting off loud), then you can use the opportunity to appear (and be) gracious by telling the other person to go ahead. This also subtly puts you in a position of control; they got to talk, but you decided who should talk.
(This is all based on personal experience, of course; YMMV.)
The first would be that it’s just an issue of perception. There a plenty of people with low self esteem who hold inaccurate beliefs about how much attention other people pay to them.
A second would be generally proxies for low testosterone. If you have a louder and deeper voice people are more likely to listen to you.
There are also body language changes and various other things that are hard to fake.
When someone speaks in a way that strikes you as unusually ambiguous, consider that it may be intentionally so to avoid placing emphasis on irrelevancies.
When someone speaks in a way that strikes you as unusually ambiguous, consider that it may be intentionally so to avoid placing emphasis on irrelevancies.
What makes you think I didn’t? If he’s in the habit of intentionally sabotaging himself that increases the value of having it being pointed out to him.
I wouldn’t highlite it if he wouldn’t have specifically asked for ways to draw more attention on himself. The more of your attention you concentrate in withholding information the less likely people are going to give you attention.
It’s not like it’s wrong to do so, but you should be aware of the tradeoffs that you are making.
It’s not obvious that attention is being diverted to obscuring information. Maybe “partner” is the lower-effort term. It is for me: “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” have weird connotations and baggage that make me want to pause before using them and wonder if I’m really being accurate.
It’s not obvious that attention is being diverted to obscuring information.
It makes it harder for me to build a mental image of the situation that he’s describing. If it’s harder than I will put less attention on the situation.
Here it’s a subtle choice. But it points to a pattern. A common general piece of advice on telling stories which draw listeners attention is to provide a lot of adjectives to make it more easy for the audience to picture what you are describing.
The kind that most people don’t put to practice when they hear it. Instead of describing the principle abstractly, I pointed to an example.
It takes effort to provide listeners with details. It’s still one of the pure white hat strategies to getting peoples attention when you speak.
As far as the information being relevant, when I give someone recommendation about testosterone, the gender of the person I’m interacting with matters.
I have a good idea that more testosterone in males will help with given attention. I’m less certain, that trying to increase testosterone is a good strategy for females.
I don’t know whether you refer to a business partner, you are male and refer to a girlfriend or you are female and refer to a boyfriend.
You omit at least two possibilities: that he is male and referring to his boyfriend or that she is female and referring to her girlfriend. In these cases, word “boy/girlfriend” would have you interpreting the situation wrongly.
As others have commented, the fact that we do not know these unnecessary details is a feature, not a bug, of ungendered words.
In this case, it’s deliberately non-gendered language. Lower-effort, as kalium says. In my case because I cultivated the habit, in years past.
As both you and Douglas_Knight point out, there are tradeoffs involved. In the case of not gendering pronouns I expect I’ll continue thinking it worthwhile.
But it’s a helpful thing to consider- I’ll bet there are other habits I’ve developed that I’ve never considered if it’s worth the costs. Especially when I contrast my teenaged self – “I don’t care what anyone thinks of me” + “I’ll choose my words for my own aesthetical pleasure” – with the me of today – who does care, and on balance values communication higher than self-expression. I doubt my conversational habits have shifted as far as my preferences have.
I’m also interested by what you say about details. It’s not something I’d’ve thought of, worrying I tend more to being too verbose. But I like to write, and concrete detail / description is the area I’d consider my weakest there. I can think of some ways to practice this (started playing tabletop RPGs recently, for one.)
When it comes to details, the thing that count is whether the details help the person you are talking with to form a picture of the situation that you are describing in their mind.
If you are talking in “I” using colorful language that describes the qualia you perceive is nearly always good. That doesn’t mean that sentences should be long. If you can transform one sentence into two, that’s often good.
If you are talking in “you” it better to be a bit more vague. If you tell someone: “When you go to work on Monday morning at 7 o’clock and drive though rush hour, you know the feeling where you wish, you could just take a day off?”, the might be irritated if they aren’t in the habit of going to work at 7 o’clock or don’t drive.
I”m okay with non-gendered language. In text it’s nearly impossible to see what the words mean for you.
If your teenage self trained a bunch of separate word choices I would look carefully at them and judge whether they are real self-expression or whether they are more of a mask that’s supposed to provide shelter.
Authentic self-expression draws attention, wearing a mask reduces it.
Usually when people intentionally manipulate emphasis like this, they are trying to change relevance, not merely acknowledging existing relevance. Maybe it is worth the personal cost to achieve the political end, but it is not possible to make the tradeoff without being honest about the cost.
I think body language tends to be pretty relevant here; it’s possible you are not noticing the other person’s body language indicating that they’re about to start speaking. (And of course, if you want to have it be your turn to speak, using body language to signal this is also relevant.)
Question about a low-level social thing:
I’ve noticed that I have low priority in at mid-large group conversations. What I mean is that in situations where I’m one of two people talking, I’m (generally) the one who stops and the attention of the “audience” (people-who-aren’t-speaking) is predominantly on the other person even before I stop speaking.
This used to cause me considerable distress, but no longer. I’ve accepted it as a fact of the social universe. But I’m still curious and would like to change it, if possible.
I suspect that this is something that varies by social group, and more strongly suspect that some behavior of mine is key.
I’m interested in (being pointed to) discussion of this type of thing, especially if it contains actionable advice.
I can’t really offer anything more than a personal anecdotes, but here is what I usually do for when I try to grab attention of a group of my peers:
If you are talking to several people gathered in circle, and it is my turn to say something important, I make a small step forward so that I physically place myself in the center of the group.
When I am speaking, I try to mantain eye contact with all people gathered around, If I focus too much only on the person I am speaking to, everyone else turns their attention towards them as well.
I rarely do it myself, as I suppose it is a technique more tailored for public speeches, but conservative use of hand gestures to signify what you are talking about, probably won’t hurt.
I probably sound like a self absorbed jerk writing this, but if I want the attention to focus on myself, and not my interlocutor I often use “me” language. Compare and contrast [“What you say about vegans is true, but you may conisder...”—now everybody looks at the person who said something about vegans] [“I think that I agree with what was said about vegans, but I also think...”—now everybody looks at me as I explain my position].
But those are all just little little tricks, when the surest way of attracting attention of the audience is simply to have something important and interesting to say.
While we are at that topic many people use “you” when talking about themselves. They say sentence like: “Yesterday I thought: You should go to gym.”
I once even listened to someone who used “he” to when speaking about himself a few years ago. The language was German and he was an Austrian, but it still signified how little he identified with his self in the past.
After a bit of prodding he changed to “I”. That also changed subtle things about his body language did change. It was interesting to watch the effect. Identifying with oneself helps to be more charismatic.
It’s one of those nontrivial aspects of: “Just be yourself.”
Thanks. These are things I’ve learnt or tried learning in the past. I’d guess there are good odds that I’m reverting to past (shyer) behaviors in some situations.
I’ll make an effort to be aware of my body language and focus next time.
You’re really not giving enough specific information. There are countless reasons why that might happen so any advice you take here could lead to erratic behavior.
In addition to what other people said, this sounds like you might be too verbose or bad at gauging which topics interest other people and to what extent. They might look at the other person because they wish them to interrupt you and move on.
Fair enough. At this stage I’m curious as to which specifics I should be looking at. Or what kinds of things are key (to speaker priority in groups of 5-10).
The various elements of body language given, and your notes on content (I can be too verbose, for sure) have given me what I need to go on for now.
If you start talking loudly, perhaps a little louder than you think you should be talking, attention will usually shift to you. If you say something relatively short and relatively interesting, you gain some credit, and then later people will be more likely to listen to you. This requires some timing—you have to start talking just as the previous speaker is finishing, or even a little before. Mistiming could make you look like (and be) a shouting idiot.
If two or more people use the same strategy (starting off loud), then you can use the opportunity to appear (and be) gracious by telling the other person to go ahead. This also subtly puts you in a position of control; they got to talk, but you decided who should talk.
(This is all based on personal experience, of course; YMMV.)
There are a variety of plausible explanation.
The first would be that it’s just an issue of perception. There a plenty of people with low self esteem who hold inaccurate beliefs about how much attention other people pay to them.
A second would be generally proxies for low testosterone. If you have a louder and deeper voice people are more likely to listen to you. There are also body language changes and various other things that are hard to fake.
Thanks. Perception I thought was the main contribution in the past. But after a recent party my partner commented to me about people speaking over me.
And testosterone, that makes me curious. I wonder if I can get levels of that tested without too much hassle...
The interesting thing about this sentence is that you communicate a minimum of information by using the word partner.
As a listener I don’t know whether you refer to a business partner, you are male and refer to a girlfriend or you are female and refer to a boyfriend.
Increasing the amount of details that you communicate can increases the amount of attention that other people pay towards yourself.
When someone speaks in a way that strikes you as unusually ambiguous, consider that it may be intentionally so to avoid placing emphasis on irrelevancies.
What makes you think I didn’t? If he’s in the habit of intentionally sabotaging himself that increases the value of having it being pointed out to him.
I wouldn’t highlite it if he wouldn’t have specifically asked for ways to draw more attention on himself. The more of your attention you concentrate in withholding information the less likely people are going to give you attention.
It’s not like it’s wrong to do so, but you should be aware of the tradeoffs that you are making.
It’s not obvious that attention is being diverted to obscuring information. Maybe “partner” is the lower-effort term. It is for me: “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” have weird connotations and baggage that make me want to pause before using them and wonder if I’m really being accurate.
It makes it harder for me to build a mental image of the situation that he’s describing. If it’s harder than I will put less attention on the situation.
Here it’s a subtle choice. But it points to a pattern. A common general piece of advice on telling stories which draw listeners attention is to provide a lot of adjectives to make it more easy for the audience to picture what you are describing.
The kind that most people don’t put to practice when they hear it. Instead of describing the principle abstractly, I pointed to an example.
It takes effort to provide listeners with details. It’s still one of the pure white hat strategies to getting peoples attention when you speak.
As far as the information being relevant, when I give someone recommendation about testosterone, the gender of the person I’m interacting with matters.
I have a good idea that more testosterone in males will help with given attention. I’m less certain, that trying to increase testosterone is a good strategy for females.
You omit at least two possibilities: that he is male and referring to his boyfriend or that she is female and referring to her girlfriend. In these cases, word “boy/girlfriend” would have you interpreting the situation wrongly.
As others have commented, the fact that we do not know these unnecessary details is a feature, not a bug, of ungendered words.
In this case, it’s deliberately non-gendered language. Lower-effort, as kalium says. In my case because I cultivated the habit, in years past.
As both you and Douglas_Knight point out, there are tradeoffs involved. In the case of not gendering pronouns I expect I’ll continue thinking it worthwhile.
But it’s a helpful thing to consider- I’ll bet there are other habits I’ve developed that I’ve never considered if it’s worth the costs. Especially when I contrast my teenaged self – “I don’t care what anyone thinks of me” + “I’ll choose my words for my own aesthetical pleasure” – with the me of today – who does care, and on balance values communication higher than self-expression. I doubt my conversational habits have shifted as far as my preferences have.
I’m also interested by what you say about details. It’s not something I’d’ve thought of, worrying I tend more to being too verbose. But I like to write, and concrete detail / description is the area I’d consider my weakest there. I can think of some ways to practice this (started playing tabletop RPGs recently, for one.)
When it comes to details, the thing that count is whether the details help the person you are talking with to form a picture of the situation that you are describing in their mind.
If you are talking in “I” using colorful language that describes the qualia you perceive is nearly always good. That doesn’t mean that sentences should be long. If you can transform one sentence into two, that’s often good.
If you are talking in “you” it better to be a bit more vague. If you tell someone: “When you go to work on Monday morning at 7 o’clock and drive though rush hour, you know the feeling where you wish, you could just take a day off?”, the might be irritated if they aren’t in the habit of going to work at 7 o’clock or don’t drive.
I”m okay with non-gendered language. In text it’s nearly impossible to see what the words mean for you.
If your teenage self trained a bunch of separate word choices I would look carefully at them and judge whether they are real self-expression or whether they are more of a mask that’s supposed to provide shelter.
Authentic self-expression draws attention, wearing a mask reduces it.
May I suggest that you not consider, but just experiment?
Usually when people intentionally manipulate emphasis like this, they are trying to change relevance, not merely acknowledging existing relevance. Maybe it is worth the personal cost to achieve the political end, but it is not possible to make the tradeoff without being honest about the cost.
I think body language tends to be pretty relevant here; it’s possible you are not noticing the other person’s body language indicating that they’re about to start speaking. (And of course, if you want to have it be your turn to speak, using body language to signal this is also relevant.)