On your first step into the company, you were bombarded with unfamiliar faces. Your eagerness to meet new colleagues urged you to say something but you couldn’t find an interesting topic to start with. Anxious about your words. Fear about leaving a boring impression to the others. Palms are sweating. How not to be boring?
Is being boring an inherent quality?
What makes a person interesting? The following qualities may come to your mind: Sense of humor, Extraordinary life experience. However, these qualities do not actually make a person interesting. In fact, it is you that makes yourself an interesting or a boring person. None is born boring, nor is anyone more interesting than the others inherently. A seemingly boring person can become interesting if you know the tricks, being faithful to yourself and avoiding facts.
What do boring persons usually do?
One common talking style among boring persons is that they tend to be objective. They often talk about facts which the others are unable to better understand who they are through their fact-based content. Communication is meant for boosting mutual understanding. Facts in no way can help achieve so. While finding an interesting book to read, you can choose to say, “the book is about the journey of an athlete to become a champion fighter”. You can also say, “I can relate myself a lot to the main character in the book I recently read. His perseverance motivates me a lot!”.
How not to bore others?
Everyone has their own set of knowledge and interest. Sometimes, the others may not be interested by your topic. You can only interest the others if you can connect with them by sharing what you feel. Even if they are not amused by your topic, they can relate to your own feelings and be interested. The most interesting person may not have the most interesting experience, instead they usually talk with rich emotions to catch the attention. Up to this point, you should have grasped the essence of how to be interesting, but how in real life can you practise to be interesting? So now you know you need to talk more about your emotions. However, many have stuck in the process of only uttering a few words. This is a good start but it is far from enough to be interesting. Instead of using some common words for describing your feelings, say “happy”, “upset”, or “furious”, try to be more specific! Why are you “happy”? In what way does it make you “upset”? How “furious” were you in that incident?
Lack of self-understanding as the crux to boredom
If you struggle to do so, this means you may not understand your feelings well enough. Sometimes it is actually your lack of self understanding that makes you appear boring. Here are a few tips which may help you learn to understand yourself better. Keep a journal or jot down your feelings on your smartphones. Write about a major event happened that day. It can be anything that you have a strong emotion with. Talk to your inner self. Then describe clearly in words what and why you have the feeling and how the feeling is like. For example, you can say, “Today I was scared to death because a fierce gigantic dog chased me. Dogs have always been my greatest fear in life. For one moment I thought I would die, either by the dog or by my own fear.” One important note is that: Don’t make up your emotions and be faithful to yourself. You may be frustrated at first if you couldn’t write a lot at the beginning but it is perfectly fine. With frequent practices, you can soon see improvements and progresses and you are now only steps away from being interesting! Lastly, apply the skills on daily conversation and start talking more and deeper about your own feelings. Then, congratulations, you have grown into an interesting person!
