Filling the Space

I've been facilitating conversation for a few years now. One thing that sticks out across all groups and all cultures, no matter what the make up of the group, there are two outlying extremes of conversational behaviour, that don't mix well.

On the one hand there's the person who needs to every moment to be filled. They have minimal tolerance of silence. And if others are quiet around them, they will keep talking until they are interrupted. It's often associated with extraversion. These people need to have something going on, in the traditional parlance "to give them energy" but also because they don't know they're alive unless there's some stimulus around them. And if sufficient stimulus is lacking, they will provide their own.

On the other hand is the person who patiently waits for a gap in the conversation to have their chance to talk. Likewise this is often associated with introversion. In quiet spaces, they enjoy the silences that periodically descend and recover from the stimulation. In noisy spaces, they can become over-stimulated and shut down. These people can also end up effectively silenced by the people who can only fill the space.

If you're someone who waits for gaps and you're with someone who can't bear a gap, you're going to have a long wait. Likewise if you're someone who abhors "uncomfortable" silences in a group, it might seem like nobody's contributing anything but you.

Not everyone falls into either of these types, but they tend to exist in every group I've met. The people "in the middle" might find that they're equally frustrated by the people who say nothing and the people who dominate everything.

This is why I do the work I do and draw attention to the patterns I observe. I think we're only going to need to get better at talking to each other and it's patterns like this that make face to face conversation so difficult for some people that they avoid it as much as they can.