Two conversationalist tips for introverts

Two of the biggest mistakes that I used to make that made me a poor conversationalist:

1. Thinking too much about what I was going to say next. If another person is speaking, don’t think about anything else, where “anything else” includes your next words. Instead, just focus on what they’re saying, and the next thing to say will come to mind naturally. If it doesn’t, a brief silence before you say something is not the end of the world. Let your mind wander until it comes up with something.

2. Asking myself questions like “is X interesting / relevant / intelligent-sounding enough to say here”, and trying to figure out whether the thing on my mind was relevant to the purpose of the conversation. Some conversations have an explicit purpose, but most don’t. They’re just the participants saying whatever random thing comes to their mind as a result of what the other person last said. Obviously you’ll want to put a bit of effort to screening off any potentially offensive or inappropriate comments, but for the most part you’re better off just saying whatever random thing comes to your mind.

Relatedly, I suspect that these kinds of tendencies are what make introverts experience social fatigue. Social fatigue seems [in some people’s anecdotal experience; don’t have any studies to back me up here] to be associated with mental inhibition: the more you have to spend mental resources on holding yourself back, the more exhausted you will be afterwards. My experience suggests that if you can reduce the amount of filters on what you say, then this reduces mental inhibition, and correspondingly reduces the extent to which socializing causes you fatigue.

Peter McCluskey reports of a similar experience; other people mention varying degrees of agreement or disagreement.