One Reason Many of Us Have A Hard Time Connecting

I was driving home from grabbing coffee a few weeks ago when I heard a quick radio promo on 650AM-WSM—the station many people know as the home of The Grand Ole Opry.

Photo Credit: Joe St. Pierre, Creative Commons

It is also the station I listen to the most here in Nashville, since they play a lot of good old country songs.

It’s their 90th anniversary this year, and they were playing a short recording of one of their DJs talking about what it meant to work at the station.

In the part I caught, he said, “…when you get into the radio business, they tell you not to try and sound like you’re talking to a thousand people, but to talk like you’re talking to just one person.”

I recognized something of myself in this little piece of broadcasting advice.

When the DJ said the words “not to try and sound like you’re talking to a thousand people,” he temporarily swung out his voice into this syncopated, baritone bravado that made him sound like the ringmaster at an old-timey circus.

His listeners were sure to understand what he meant when he moved back into his natural tone, revealing that a glimpse of the circus-ring voice sounded big and important, maybe, but in contrast to real life it also sounded a little forced and far away.

In about seven split seconds, the DJ named that oh-so-human tendency I have to try to look big and important in order to feel confident or qualified to connect with others.

In the same moment, he illustrated that doing so is exactly what actually prevents my connecting with those around me in any real way.

Those few seconds of the big circus voice stuck with me.

Mostly, I think, because they are representative of the many ways we can be tempted to feel like we need to be officially official.

The impression encompasses all the subtle (or so they seem to me) ways I try and put a little sheen on things so that those things feel as legitimate as I don’t: acting like sure I’ve totally heard of that band/philosophical stance/rock-climbing method at a party where I’m positive everyone is cooler than me, for example.

Using some fancy terminology when I’m hoping to look a smidge more experienced than I am in the workplace. Or trying hard to sound particularly eloquent and savvy say, in a blog post for a website that a lot of people read.

Here’s the tricky part.

Whenever I start trying to prove how fill-in-the-blank-with-something-cool I am, to show you how good my circus voice sounds from the center ring, I feel less and less like myself and more like I’m standing alone on a pedestal in a top hat and tails (which, for the record, I’m viewing as a negative thing).

For whatever reason, that DJ’s description of imagining one so he can speak meaningfully to many helps me clarify what happens when I slip from worrying about being myself and doing a good job into worrying about being impressive enough.

So now I’m trying to be quicker to catch myself before I start talking in my big circus voice, and to remember instead that whether it’s from a podium, in a post, or over the punchbowl at a Christmas party, my responsibility isn’t to be impressive or wildly entertaining or even particularly enlightening to some anonymous everybody.

It’s to be honest and kind, like I would be to one person.