How To Make Your Holiday Party Merrier

Among the many joys of holiday parties is meeting and greeting old and new friends and engaging them in stimulating conversations. Unfortunately, the opposite often occurs. Andy Kessler described just such a situation in his Wall Street Journal column where he attended a holiday party and “chat[ted] with folks who babble away about how important they are, until I eventually pick a spot on their forehead to stare at and plot my exit.”

I’m sure you can come up with long list of examples of babblers of your own. And not just of holiday parties; the list will surely lengthen to include year-round parties, dinner dialogues, and, yes, business conversations. The pervasiveness and endurance of the problem is evidenced by my decade-old Forbes blog on the subject.

The problem can be defined as “having a ’versation,” or a having a conversation without the “co-” of communication—a one-way street instead of a two-way street. Communication only occurs when messages flow both ways.

David Brooks, the New York Times columnist and bestselling author sees a deeper aspect of the same problem: “All around us are people who feel invisible, unseen, misunderstood.” This is the subject of Brook’s new book, “How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.” The subtitle, by definition, describes Brooks’ two-way street solution as, “If you want to know a person, what kind of attention should you cast on them? What kind of conversations should you have? What parts of a person’s story should you pay attention to?”

Kessler offers a solution, too: break into the ’versation by asking your opposite party questions. He offers two acronymic types of questions:

• FORD: “Ask about family, occupation, recreation and dreams.”
• HILO: “Probe for highs and lows,” or ask about positive and negative experiences.

Asking questions, as both Kessler and Brooks recommend, invites responses, responses require listening, and listening generates new responses—a two-way street, a conversation.

Of course, two-way communication is equally important in business presentations. There the problem occurs when a presentation is nothing more than a laundry list of features. Or, as romance stories define it, “it’s all about you.” The solution is to sell the benefits, to tell the audience why the features are important to them.

The common denominator in all the above scenarios is that, for communication to occur, both sides must reach across the gap between them, to listen, learn and address what is important to each of them.

If nothing else, by reaching across the gap to your old and new friends it’ll make your holiday engagements merrier.