How to even talk to people?

What I do in my life has changed so much in the last 5 years. I don’t know if I ever imagined that I would be communicating with people I don’t know or barely know on such a regular basis. I’m in a constant state of being self-conscious of first-impressions. I need to convince them that I’m smart, sincere, competent, and that we can mutually benefit each other. It doesn’t matter if it’s in person or through email. I’m still anxious enough about using the phone that I avoid cold calling.

In person interactions and written emails each have their own unique situations. Because it happens so frequently these days, I have to limit the amount of time I spend crafting each email I make. I can’t be a perfectionist about it. I have to ignore the self esteem issues and insecurities, in fact I have to spend time at the other end of the spectrum trusting in myself and that my experience will allow me to write something perfectly servicable. That’s not to say I don’t still get analysis paralysis when having to write emails. It’s just much easier these days - I’m not hovering over the send button for 4 hours.

Meeting people in person is something I actually prefer these days. Now THAT, I don’t think I ever imagined. It’s real time, you can’t carefully form a thought without that factoring into the other person’s impression of you. What changed? I think it’s just having more experience talking to people and thinking on my feet. Especially people who are kind and patient, who I could learn to interact with in a safe space without judgement. I’ve also actively observed and identified ways in which other people interact that address the fears that I have. Need a second to form your thoughts? Say so. People don’t really judge that. Listen and don’t speak over others. Respond to what they’re saying in a way that is contributory instead of using it as an opportunity to talk about yourself. Find something interesting in what they’re talking about, and express that interest in a sincere way. Constantly adjust… you’re getting continuous feedback from the other person’s expressions and body language. Iterate on your communication strategy in real time.

One thing I didn’t anticipate about all this communication is how tiring it is. I used to see it as a linear process. Conversations, at least as reflected in an instant messaging type conversation, are linear in that only one person or the other is speaking at a time. Theoretically, the conversation topic matter also follows that one topic at a time thread. But when communicating with people, the things that require mental notetaking and eventual follow through are like a tree layout. One conversation leads to many threads, each which can lead to many sub-threads. Some require one party or the other to follow up on through actions. Some need to be held in memory because so you can connect this person with another person that you had a matching sub-thread conversation with.

A lot of what I do these days is connecting these people, those sub-threads. That’s a lot of work because it’s not a one person to one sub-thread framework we’re dealing with here. It’s one person to many sub-threads, making for many-to-many connections that need to be identified. And all this is kept in my head. Is there any good reason this isn’t sitting in a database? Probably not, except for the time and effort spent creating this tool that I then have to maek sure I actually use. That would be an interesting thing to do… and I suppose it would work kind of like the failed Google Circles, or like Twitter Lists, except from the perspective of tagging an individual with all the subjects I associate them with. I think I’d need a separate set of relationships for subjects that are related so I can visualize potential connections that don’t have directly related subjects. For example, people working on LA County’s Vision Zero initiative and people involved with BikeSGV.