15 habits of extremely boring people
Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design/flickr
Pretty much everyone's gotten themselves into that awkward situation where you and your conversation partner run out of things to say to each other.
It's usually followed by some confusion: Am I less interesting than I thought? Am I (gasp) boring?
We're not trying to make you paranoid — absolutely everyone has the capacity to be interesting. But if being boring is a persistent fear of yours, you might want to check out the tips below, culled from a Quora thread titled, "What makes a person boring?"
Read on for the social behaviors to avoid at all costs and you'll be on your way to life-of-the-party status.
Boring people have unbalanced conversations
Instead of finding a rhythm between talking and listening, boring people are on either conversational extreme.
Quora user Jack Bennett calls it an "asymmetry in the conversational 'give and take' — e.g. all listening and no talking, or all talking and no listening."
Boring people can't tell if others are engaged in the conversation
If you're emphatically boring, you're probably missing the other person's body language.
Garrick Saito argues that what makes a person boring is the "continual blathering and ignoring of signals and body language that say (perhaps not loudly enough) 'I'm not interested in what you're saying, but am nodding every few seconds only to be polite.'"
Lucky you — we've rounded up a bunch of tricks for reading nonverbal cues.
Boring people can't make others laugh
Humor shows "cognitive flexibility": the ability to assess an idea or an event from a variety of perspectives, and then, naturally, make light of it. Boring people lack it.
"I'm an easy sell," admits Will Wister. "I mean come on let's face it — it's not that hard."
Bonus: If you can make people laugh, you'll probably have an easier time picking up a date.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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