“Kindly put yourselves on mute”

Anyone who’s worked in the corporate world has probably been coerced into attending workshops about ‘the art of conversation’.

We all know by now that a conversation involves at least two people speaking and listening in turn. But why art? Conversations become art when the two are genuinely interested in what the other has to say and come away enriched.

While speaking and listening are two integral parts of a conversation, listening somehow takes precedence for a conversation to be truly enjoyable. More than a skill, it is, in fact, an art honed with time. We live in times when all of us want to become performers, vying for those few seconds of attention. So, no one quite notices what the listener is doing there.

This scarcity of listeners perhaps stems from the fact that many of us are lonely, stuck in a hamster wheel of routines. As a thinking, talking species, we have so much to say, and barely anyone seems interested in listening. Usually, this isn’t with the intention of hogging the limelight. The hunger to be heard produces the ‘speed talker’. A speed talker, as only a patient listener would know, is in a hurry, anxious to say it all before the listener loses attention. They know how to tug a thread out of the listener’s muslin-thoughts and weave the conversation around their own. The listener quietly folds their thoughts many times over and tucks them away. Eventually, the listener sits back and gives up participating in this phantom conversation—sometimes out of genuine interest in the speaker and sometimes out of weariness. Some listeners even start to believe their thoughts and ideas can never be as important or colourful as the speaker’s.

The speakers, be it the boastful or the mournful kind, always have a way to make the conversation about themselves. Picture this: A group of friends meets up after years, each carrying years of lived experience and stories of their own. But one of them becomes the self-appointed narrator and makes it all about who they are, how life has shaped them, and their opinions about everything under the sun, basically a dinnertime TED talk, now available as a podcast. By the end of it, the listeners leave feeling oddly empty and spent after all those “Ohs” and “Ahs”, wondering what their role was in this monologue.

If putting oneself on mute feels too drastic, pauses might do—long enough for the speaker to catch their breath, notice the room and hopefully realise that the others might want to say something too.

When we listen with patience and speak with care, conversation becomes more than just an exchange. It becomes time well spent. Silence isn’t awkward, and no one is secretly rehearsing their next line.