Selfish Talking

Selfish talking is a pretty straightforward and recognisable concept. The most basic form is that conversation where two parties are each talking AT each other, where there is no space between each person finishing for the other to have possibly digested what they've said and where each small gap in someone's speech is punctuated by the other starting their side of the conversation. If you're lucky, you might observe both parties repeatedly starting their sentences together until the loudest person wins and the other person sullenly backs down, defeated but at least grateful to have more time to think more about how best to phrase their own incongruous contribution as soon as they find a gap.

So that's the obvious form. Another common and obvious form is the listener who'll let you finish your piece and digest it and listen and such, but whose own contribution will still be subtly about them and nothing to do with you. There are a few tell-tale verbal indicators with this kind of conversational input:

"I know! The same thing happened to me when..." followed by an inappropriate and irrelevant personal anecdote.

"Yeah, it's like the time that..." followed by an inappropriate and irrelevant personal anecdote.

"Well it's just like I was saying when..." followed by an inappropriate and irrelevant personal anecdote.

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Yeah, there's a bit of a pattern there. It's all about control, and shifting the train tracks of a conversation until it rolls into a station of your choice, from where a person can be the focal point and assert their own dominance. And virtually everyone does it, (needless to add for those who know me) myself included.

I don't say this to sound profound, because there's nothing profound about what I'm saying, and everyone is already aware of how nearly everyone will, at some point, try and dominate/hijack a conversation. I only mention it because I recently had a wonderful conversation with a genuinely selfless talker and their influence gradually made me less and less selfish until we were both swimming in a sea of ecstatic no-you-go-firsts and wow-that's-interesting-tell-me-mores that glided by with no self-conscious effort on either side. I made a post a while ago about how exhausting small talk is. But it doesn't have to be. Find those people who make it easy and selfless, and treasure them.