WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU’RE BORING

The other day, I was sharing with someone what I do for a living, and they interrupted me to tell me I was boring.

They didn’t interrupt me verbally. They didn’t actually say anything at all. Their eyes just softly glazed over, and their attention drifted away from me towards our surroundings.

Their responses became social niceties — ersatz active listening cues to let me know they were still listening when actually they stopped.

Just to be really clear, they weren’t doing anything wrong — I’d just lost them in what I was sharing.

Have you ever had this experience?

When confronted with these moments, my tendency to try to amp up what I’m sharing, or become more energized. Maybe if I become more animated and funnier, that will get them back on my side.

I’ll start telling more jokes, or just become outright zany.

It’s all very performative — I’m putting on a performance to try and get them to like me, or find me interesting. It’s not really genuine, it’s all an act to try and grab them.

Once I get hooked by this concern about being boring, I’m on rails. The rest of the conversation is seeded with jokes, sharp comments, and attempts to prove to the person across from me that I’m interesting.

This is an exhausting cycle, and almost all of us have some flavour of this. For me, it’s the story that I’m being boring getting triggered. For you, it might be the story that you’re selfish. Or maybe that you’re close-minded. Or perhaps that you’re dumb.

The content of your story doesn’t matter. Just that being out with other humans means, from time to time, people are going to trigger that internal story.

We’re amazing at adapting to our circumstances, and we can do an awful lot of work to try to fix the problem we’ve concluded we have.

The thing is all of that work is unnecessary.

It’s all designed to fix an interpretation I made up about something that happened.

Sure, I lost this person’s interest while telling them about what I do, but that doesn’t mean that I’m boring. That second part is entirely of my own making.

If you’re spending time with other humans, you’re going to lose people’s interest at some point. You’re probably also going to leave someone wishing you’d left the last slice of pizza (triggering your story about being selfish). And so on.

The thing I find freeing is to accept that I have a story about myself, accept that I’m going to fit the circumstances of my life into the frame of that story, and stop making that so significant.

I don’t even have to try and convince myself that the story isn’t true — because doing so just lends more weight to the story itself. I can let go of gathering up evidence to disprove what my inner critic is telling me.

All I have to do is accept that these stories are going to show up, and then choosing something outside of reacting to them.

Instead of trying to get out in front of my story, I can meet the person across from me. Instead of trying to prove I’m exciting and cool, I can just say “Oh! It looks like I lost you,” and then see how they respond.

If I don’t make it significant that they lost interest, then it becomes okay for us to talk about it, and then we can pick up a thread that would be interesting to both of us.

When I do this, it re-establishes connection and allows us to partner through what has shown up.

The shift here is away from trying to be someone that is never boring, or leaves people uninterested (insert your own story), and towards being someone committed to genuine connection and intimacy, regardless of what that means being with.