We Need To Talk:

We Need To Talk: How to Have Conversations That Matter by Celeste Headlee             Audio Book: 5 hours, 10 mins    Hardback Book:  272 pages          

Celeste Headlee makes her living by speaking on Public Radio.   She has learned to be an excellent communicator and listener in order to get the best out of conversations whether they be interviews on her radio show or in day to day life with family, friends and strangers she meets.   The author feels conversation is becoming a lost art in this age of instant messaging via technology instead of face to face encounters and should be encouraged and learned as part of everyone’s skillset.   She discusses how often when engaged in conversation each participant is simply waiting for their turn to talk and sometimes begin to talk over one another to express their opinion.    Celeste admits to  the light going out of her eyes many times in the early part of her career when someone she was interviewing started droning on until she finally phased out all together, that is until the day she stopped someone she was interviewing to ask them another question only to be told, “As I just said…” that is when she knew she had been zoning out because the conversation was boring her and she missed some key points her interviewee had just brought up.    After a couple of mishaps like that she decided she needed to check her communication skills and work on getting them honed.    She researched the ways people communicate, consulted with several experts on the ways our brain works in staying focused while conversing and waiting our turn to speak.   She decided that while we tend to communicate most often these days from behind an electronic device it is time people returned to verbal talk not texting.     She says we need to mindfully work toward returning to a society that looks each other in the eye when we communicate not at each other’s social media preference.    She feels that humans aren’t really able to multitask successfully as we may be doing more at once but we are not putting our full attention to either of the tasks we think we are handling and this leads to potential errors either in social faux pas or what could hold serious even fatal consequences – she cites texting while driving.   She has observed how people with cellphones on their persons tend to constantly be checking them.   A study she mentioned said that people tend to check their cellphones 114 times a day.   And that may be a low estimate.    She suggests not just putting your phone down but putting it away so you don’t get distracted by it.    We are all on sensory overload and she is calling for a moratorium on communication devices and going back to our original one, our mouths and the conversations that come out of it.   She mentions how satisfying one on one conversations can be and how humans are alienating themselves from one another – people even text one another in the same house rather than walk over and ask each other what they want to know.   Celeste calls for a return to eye to eye contact, reading each other’s cues and learning to converse with our voices again not just our thumbs.   Good book.   She had a lot of good things to say here and given her career she does come as an expert.