Every good conversation starts with good listening.

Can you remember the greatest conversation you ever had? Who did you talk with? What was the conversation about?

A good conversation can change someone’s life. It can have such an effect on all the people partaking, that transforms them for good.

A conversation is meant to be an act of exchanging ideas and information. But not a lot of people know how to be good conversationalists.

A great conversationalist, however, can make you fall in love with them just by speaking with you. They will make you crave a conversation with them.

Great conversationalists respect the act of conversing. These steps will help you become a great conversationalist, someone others love speaking to.

5 Steps How To Be A Great Conversationalist:

1. Listen more than you speak.

Most people don’t know how to listen. They listen with an intent to reply or do not listen at all.

Everybody wants to be heard and understood by someone, but it seems that nobody wants to be the one who understands.

That’s why most people are impatient to reply. They don’t even hear the other person, what they say, where it comes from.

In order to be a great conversationalist you should learn how to listen to what others are saying. Forget about replying, and listen.

Hear the words they speak, the emotion behind them, the context, the mindset, the front and the persona of the other person. Get to know the real them and their role play.

2. Make the other person feel comfortable.

How often do you speak with someone that you are truly comfortable sharing almost anything?

Not often probably. This is because most people don’t know how to create a safe environment. They don’t know how to be trustworthy and non judgmental.

There are people, and you might have just met them, but you feel like you can open yourself up to them about anything. There’s something about them.

Well, this something is the non judgmental vibe they give out. They vibe this way because they allow you to be yourself. It’s normal if you’ve just met.

When you speak with others try to recreate this safe environment. Let them be yourself without judging them. Let them see you are also vulnerable by sharing something honest.

3. Let the conversation flow freely.

When you speak with others and when the conversation steers to a topic you are passionate about, you don’t want to move on from it.

You can speak about it all day. And if the conversation starts to slide off slightly into another topic, you would bring up the old topic.

Most people try to control the conversation. But even though a topic might be exciting at first, bringing it back once it’s gone might become conversational block.

You can feel when a conversation is not flowing smoothly and it often makes people uncomfortable. Everybody want to speak with people who make things easier.

Make a conversation flow smoothly by letting the topics come and go without trying to control the flow.

4. Speak when you are inspired to speak.

Instead of trying to bring back old topics because you didn’t say something you really wanted to, speak about things the moment you get inspired to do so.

That’s the only right moment to speak about a subject or an idea, the moment you are inspired.

When this inspiration fades and you are left with just the information, what you wanted to talk about will not have its substance. And the substance is what mattered.

When you speak the moment you are inspired about a topic your words will have a different tone. The energy behind them will inspire the other people to share.

This is how a conversation grows and becomes a platform for exciting topics, an accelerator for brilliant ideas.

5. Stop seeking for approval.

Speaking with others should come from a place of wanting to get to know them better, or to merge different ideas and different opinions.

However, most people use the act of conversing with an intent to create a certain persona in other people’s minds.

That’s why people often do not speak about their honest opinions. They speak about topics that will make them look good in the eyes of others.

Most people lack realness and honesty because they are seeking approval. They customize how they appear to get that approval from others. These types of conversations are lame.

All great conversationalists detach from seeking approval. The point of a conversation is bigger than the egos of those who talk. It’s how great conversations happen.