I was recently at a week-long day party/conference after almost a year of not being at parties. I had forgotten how to be charming, how to catch up with people I sort of knew. After bopping around confusedly I articulated specific guidelines for myself.
How to join a conversation
- Lurk 20-120 seconds to acquire context
- Say 1 thing (2-3 sentences)
- Listen to the response
- Make a physical bid to sit
How to catch up with someone
- Say 1 surprising “entertainer mode” thing (claim spotlight and inject energy)
- Mine their reaction (put spotlight on them) until the conversation is low energy
- Repeat
The rest of this is commentary on the second thing, where I sketch out a sort of “metabolic model of party conversation”.
I have an in-law who initially charmed me but wore on me quickly. He was in town recently and I introduced him to some friends. He told the same stories I’d tired of, but everyone else enjoyed.
This relative travels a lot. His conversational style is well adapted to his lifestyle where he meets new people all the time and has relatively few people he interacts repeatedly with across years. He loves the spotlight and is a good entertainer, but he’s not very sensitive to when people are bored or offended. He is not “attuned”.
But in the first few days of knowing him, his lack of attunement does not matter. He is injecting energy into the system, and energy is the bottleneck in the conversation of a new acquaintanceship.
I found circling impactful in my twenties when I was catching up on social skills. But the first 45 minutes of circling are boring – the rules are that you cannot bring outside context into the circle, and you only speak of or react to things that happened within the circle. So when a circle begins, everyone is just sitting around waiting to react, so there isn’t anything interesting to react to until enough interaction has crystallized around a random seed.
But once there’s enough to work with, circling gets interesting, because you can metabolize the energy that has finally built up. People start having judgments and feelings and takes about the shared context. There’s a disequilibrium, an energy gradient – we all saw the same thing happen, but we don’t know what the other people think about it. Now we equilibriate. And in the process of equilibriating, someone might say something sufficiently unpredictable that it brings us into disequilibrium once more…
So there are two activities that go hand in hand:
- Injecting energy: saying surprising things that people (1) find interesting, (2) can’t strongly predict how everyone else is reacting to it
- Metabolizing the energy: bringing the group in sync again – passively by simply giving other people the space to emit their reactions, or actively by asking them questions
People who do much more injecting than metabolizing are easy to talk to initially because they inject a lot of energy, but I don’t enjoy talking to them for long. They hog the spotlight and often seem uninterested in other people’s point of view.
People who do much more metabolizing than injecting are more restful for long periods of time, but I feel the strain of having to bring most of the initial energy to the table. If there’s a long silence, they’re not going to be the one that volunteers their thought to break it.
Making good conversation at a party is therefore a matter of:
- Being good at injecting
- Being good at metabolizing
- Moment to moment, having a sense of which is more lacking, and supplying it
The first is the hardest, and the people who do it most prominently and skillfully over-rely on it. Insofar as I do this well, I developed this by posting a lot online, and honing a sense of what people find entertaining.
It is easy to be good at the second, but I think it’s a little hard to be great at it. It requires curiosity, and willingness to be a little nosy. Insofar as I do this well, I developed this by noticing and chasing internal confusion as my interlocutor speaks. It is hard to be curious on purpose, but easier to be confused, and they lead to similar behavior.
I think it easy to be good at the third once you have the framing at all. To pose the question is very nearly to know the answer.