COMM 101: How to Not Suck at Conversation

There is no area of education that travel has taught me more about than communication. I have gone from shy and quiet, to occasionally being called extroverted and assertive. I can link all of this change back to traveling. Before I dive into the changes that happen while traveling, let’s rewind all the way back to the start.

I grew up in a very small town in British Columbia, Canada. A town with a population of about 2000 people, most of which were old retirees. There was only elementary school so kids bus into Penticton, a city 15km away with about 35,000 people. I took a bus to school every morning for the final five years of my schooling.

Since I was going to school in Penticton, all of my friends lived at least 10 miles away. I was out in Naramata, dependent on the bus to get to and from school, so whenever would be friends asked me to do something I had to say no. I was already shy, but while the other kids my age were starting to go to party’s and become more social, I was sitting in a basement playing video games by myself.

When I got to university, I was living on campus surrounded by people of the same age and with similar backgrounds. Through the anxiety-reducing effects of alcohol, I was able to bond with a few people who would remain my core group of friends throughout my time at university.

I met lots of other people, but they were usually friends of friends. I didn’t take any initiative in meeting new people, and when I joined a group conversation, or even one on one with someone I didn’t know, I would be terribly quiet. I would look around at all the people talking and feel so isolated and confused. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to communicate, I didn’t have social skills.

It is called social skill for a reason. Being able to talk to people, to hear what they are meaning, to ask probing questions, to feel comfortable being yourself around someone new, these are all skills and there is no place better to practice them than while you are traveling. Especially in the hostel dorm room.

After spending about 300 nights in dorm rooms around the world, I’ve probably had more than a thousand introductory small talk conversations.

All the time spent alone in high-school left me behind other people my age who had been out socializing. The label of being shy and quiet stuck with me and I avoided opportunities to practice, falling further and further behind my peers. But it is very hard to avoid conversations in dorm rooms and on tours while you are traveling.

I had made it a goal to improve my communication skills while traveling, but even on days when I felt tired and was avoiding being assertive people would approach me and start talking.

When you travel, you are exposed to all kinds of people who natively speak a bunch of different languages, and speak English with all sorts of accents. You will be sitting at a kitchen table in a hostel with people from Ireland, Germany, France, and Brazil. You’ll be bombarded with all sorts of accents in varying levels of English. You will learn to be patient, to clarify when you don’t understand, to speak clearer, to ask other people if they understand what you are saying. These skills are necessary for non-native speakers, but they will become habits that improve your speech with people once you come back home.

Traveling provides a way more diverse environment than the average university student experiences. You are encountering people who usually range from 19-29, of many different ethnicities, and all sorts of nationalities (on a recent one month trip to Central Europe I met people from more than 30 countries) and with all types of different interests.

The diversity of the people you meet traveling helps you learn how poor your snap judgments of people are. You make judgments about people based on how they look, how they talk, or where they are from, but once you get talking you realize and are surprised again and again how much your judgments are wrong.

Travel pushes you to learn a new language. When you learn a second language, you end up learning a ton about your first language. As I was learning Spanish, I saw how passively I was communicating in English. In Spanish, I didn’t know how to say things in any way, but assertively, so I just had to be assertive. Learning a new language is as much about overcoming the fear of what other people think of you as it is memorizing new words. When you get past the point of fear of the judgments someone is making about you, that improves your communication in your native language because you naturally become more vulnerable. You share more of your opinions, thoughts, aspirations, regrets, and you communicate who you are, and you can build a connection based off of more than what sports team you cheer for, what province or state you are from, and what political party you support.

Through our family life, our experience K-12, and then university, we are conditioned to censor ourselves in some ways. Instead of saying what we truly think, we are given incentives to tell people what they want to hear. We do it to avoid arguments with our parents, to fit in with a group in high school, and to sound smart in university. Going traveling takes away a lot of the pressure to be someone that you are not, you learn how to communicate, and then you start to express yourself more and more.

Spending 6 months or a year moving around allows you to meet a TON of people. Every day you will meet new people and this gives you a chance to experiment and to learn. It allows you to learn about what you truly value in friends.

Instead of the supposed diversity of a university, where you are hanging around with people your age from the same region of the country, with very similar core beliefs and experiences, you are introduced to people from a wide range of countries, life stages, and backgrounds. You learn how to get along with people who don’t agree with you, and how to converse in all types of situations. You will go into to travel a social anxious introvert and come out an engaging conversationalist, comfortable in all sorts of situations.