I don’t know about you, but I find listening in on other people’s conversations interesting - intriguing even. A few days ago I witnessed one of these conversations (sort of a conversation!) during a train journey. It was a table of four and the guy sitting directly opposite me was buried in a door-stopper of a novel.

Sitting next to the novel-reading passenger was a business type whose fellow traveller sat next to me. The one next to me made a lethal mistake; he asked the other guy how things were going. The response was a range of almost involuntary statements and explanations which altogether lasted for nearly ninety minutes. Had this been a telephone conversation, the listener (hostage really!) could conceivably have gone away to do some gardening and then rejoined the pretend dialogue.

If I could have talked to the out-of-control speaker, I might have suggested ‘Always stop speaking before you feel ready’. To keep it really practical and measurable, I might have added some wise advice given to me many years ago. The person said,

“Try to double your impact by: (a) reducing your interventions by two thirds and then (b) reducing the duration of each ’speech’ or intervention by two thirds”.

What practical advice have you come across for passing on to someone like the ‘talker’ on the train?