A Good Conversation Learning How To Be Old

Hello, I'm Rachel McAlpine and I'm learning how to be old.



What makes a good conversation? How does that change as we get older? And why does that matter? I don't want to be the boring old person that nobody wants to talk to. Here to help me are 11 kind strangers and Kirsty Ferguson, who specialises in helping people talk through their own miscommunication. So, listen if you think you might be old one day!



To take the last one first, it matters heaps. Communicating frequently with other human beings is almost a matter of life and death at a certain age. Because a good conversation is an antidote to loneliness, and loneliness is literally a killer.




Antidote to loneliness: 7 real-life conversations a day



Harriet Lerner's Psychology Today blog: The Dance of Connection



What Kirsty Ferguson does






Transcript of this podcast episode: A Good Conversation



[Music] Hello, I'm your host Rachel McAlpine and I'm learning how to be old. And so are you, I think.



What makes a good conversation? And how does that change as we get older, if at all? And why does that matter?



To take the last one first, it matters heaps. Communicating with other human beings on a regular basis is almost a matter of life and death at a certain age. Because a good conversation keeps loneliness at bay and loneliness is a killer, literally.



What people think is a good conversation



Shhh! Listen to the people.




I think a good conversation is one that disarms you and gets you to speak about yourself and learn about another person.



I would say a good conversation is being able to have a good debate about something. So, yeah, listening to someone else's point of view and taking it on board and seeing if you can be swayed.



It should be as much listening as it is talking. [Bell rings]




My guest is Kirsty Ferguson, mediator



R. My guest today is Kirsty Ferguson from Te Whanganui-tara. Kirsty's going to help me look at how we communicate. And especially how we can improve our skills as we get older. She's very good at this personally and it's her job to help people resolve their disputes by talking to each other. Ferguson partners work with all manner of groups and organisations and restorative justice, mediation and dispute resolution. In other words, Kirsty's at the sharp end of communication helping other people.



My own dispute is with myself and my own conversational bad habits as an old person. And Kirsty has kindly agreed to give me a hand. Hello, Kirsty. Thank you for coming along and talking to me.



K. My pleasure. It's very lovely to be here, Rachel.



R. Particularly as you're a bit of an expert on communication, especially in tricky situations. And for this episode, I'm really interested in how we can get a few skills up our sleeve so that it's less likely that when we're old, this is sounding very convoluted, when we're old, when I'm really older than I am, I don't want to be the boring person that nobody wants to talk to. And I'm thinking I might be able to learn a bit in advance. You can help me, right?



K. Very happy to have a conversation and share some of the few things I've learned over the years.



R. I was also thinking about how conversation, how our skills change as we get older, even if we don't learn anything formally. And I remember, since I was one of six girls, so around the dinner table, we had to put our hands up to talk, not because our father was fierce, but because he wanted us all to have turns and we all wanted to talk all the time. Was it like that for you?



"Children should be seen and not heard"



K. Not quite so much for me. My family wasn't quite as compelling or compassionate. We were a little bit more seen and not heard, I think, at the dinner table. As I grew older, I was encouraged to speak and engage, but certainly I think that was the ethos of our family dinners. They weren't fun times, particularly.



R. Certainly my mother used to say, “little birds in their nes