Recipe of Fruitful Conversations!

I am fortunate enough to have a very good sounding and counseling board. And one of the best advice I recently received is that "When you talk about things you both agree upon, you are likely to have more fruitful conversations with people ( if you do care about the relationship you share) you come across in your day to day life."

This does not mean that one should not share his/her point of view, or come up with a justification (justification helps to give somebody enough reasons to let them understand your side of the story or why you hold a certain belief). Justification is completely ok if, number 1, you are putting it across in a non persuasive tone and number 2, if you are sure that the other person is receptive enough and does not fall in the category indicated very well by Stephen Covey through the following words:

"Most people do not listen with the intent to understand, they listen with the intent to reply."

So, when you feel that either one or both of the two aforementioned conditions are not met at any point of time, then to be at the safe side, try talking about the things falling in the green area, the things you have in common, with the other person in question. I am not asking you to pretend that you don't have topics you don't agree upon but then talking about them is not going to do any good to either of you.

Like for instance, if I take into consideration what happened yesterday, when me and two of my flatmates started discussing a topic, somewhere at the onset of midnight and over the course of time, I started speaking less or almost stopped (not with anger, resentment, disappointment or any other negative feeling but with the sole purpose of being able to observe the other two) and started paying heed to what they were trying to tell, verbally as well as non-verbally and then thought about this venn diagram, I could imagine how much time & energy we all would have saved, or how much more time we all would have got to sleep, considering the fact that we finally went to sleep at 4:30 am in the morning, I could understand that keeping this simple thing in mind could be very helpful at times. Not that I did not like the conversation but just that I am one of those "early to bed and early to rise types", except a few weekends here and there. :-)