Alison Wood Brooks

Thank you so much for having me back.

The mood elevator is this idea that you, throughout a conversation, are moving up and down in terms of mood.

As a scholar, we think about emotions actually as more complex than just good or bad or moving up and down.

But it is a really nice idea to keep in mind what the sort of temperature or emotional timbre of the conversation is as it proceeds.

And good conversationalists are good at sort of keeping their hand on the steering wheel, realizing when things have gotten too boring and dull, and also realizing when maybe things are getting too heated, too angry, too hostile, and actually making moves to try and keep the mood elevator moving in the right direction.

That's right.

The very meaning of what success is in conversation depends on what the speakers want to get out of it, what their goals are, what their sincere desires are.

And so often, most of the time, we go into conversations not having a clue what our goals are.

Maybe you loosely know, oh, I want to spend time with someone and I don't want it to be awkward.

But having just a little bit more clarity about what you want out of the conversation and maybe even more importantly, what your partner wants out of the conversation is the key to figuring out what success even looks like.

For example, if you need to learn something about the other person or about a specific topic, you better ask and move to that topic.

And if you don't, that's a signal of sort of conversational failure in a way.

Our goals are not always serious and sort of productivity driven.

Often our goals are just to have fun together or fill time, learn about each other.

But those are important motives.

And so even knowing that, hey, I just want to spend these 30 minutes with this person and I want to laugh.

Knowing that should guide what choices you make during that interaction.

I think the clearer we can be with others about what we care about and what we want, the more likely those people are to actually fulfill those needs.

We know that people aren't, we're not that great at guessing what other people want.

And you see this happen a lot with like married couples who get mad at each other because they're like, you know, I don't need you to solve my problem.