Have you ever had a friend suddenly get mad at you? It used to happen to me every once in a while. I’d be fully comfortable, just yapping away, and they would suddenly blow up at me. Out of the blue. For no reason.
For no reason I could see, anyway.
I’ll give you an example. I was at a student bar, drinking and talking shit with a housemate and close friend of mine. We were talking about our parents and our financial dependance on them. As I saw it, we were joking about how, while we both worked hard at our studies, we still relied on our parents for financial support. I genuinely felt that our situations – undergraduate students with relatively well-off parents, both doing literature-related degrees – were very similar.
You can imagine my surprise when she suddenly got angry and defensive. I was baffled when I realised that she had taken the last fifteen minutes of playful conversation literally, and that she thought I had been insulting her work ethic and family. Instead of light-hearted banter between friends, where I was reflecting on my own situation as much as on hers, she had experienced a thorough roast of her morals and lifestyle.
I was shocked that my longtime friend, someone I lived in the same house with, someone I admired, thought I could be so judgmental about her – especially since my own situation was so similar. Of course, we’d both been drinking, which can’t have helped. But I was still very upset.
I did learn something from it, though. We all live in our own realities. A conversation can feel like a bonding moment to one participant, and like an insult to the other. It’s so important to check in with others, to really listen. There’s lots of ways to make sure that your intentions – especially loving intentions! – really land with the other person. And conversely, it can be just as important to clearly communicate a negative message. For instance, if you want to safely and respectfully break contact with someone. All of these interactions can prove very challenging for someone who, like me, gets too much in their own head.
In short, good communication skills are essential to success in many areas of your life. This is why I am so pleased that SG is working with Hii to offer a Good Conversations workshop. Our previous collaborative workshop was a huge success. It was eye-opening and very enjoyable at the same time. So I look forward to welcoming you this Thursday at 6pm at the TU Delft Library. The session is free and concludes with an opportunity to chat over drinks and pizza, so it really is the ideal opportunity to work on yourself, meet new people, and have some fun.