The Way we Talk – or Don’t

I was reading an article last week that reported that Gen Z do not answer their phones.  I have heard also on Oliver Burkeman’s Inconvenient Truth series on Radio 4 that Gen Zs find it stressful to pick up the telephone to order a pizza, and now I read that they don’t want to talk to waiters in restaurants and would rather order via a QR code (anathema to me!).

All this takes me back to 1968 and being 17 years old, in my first job at Bodley Head publishers. My kind boss, Guido Waldman, would ask me to make a telephone call for him to a literary agent or maybe an author, or simply to book a restaurant for him.  Was I stressed? Absolutely! In fact, as it was the 1960s and everyone smoked, I would light a cigarette before making that call (not something I recommend!). Somehow it gave me the courage to pick up the phone.

Am I glad he pressed me to make these calls? Absolutely, as each time I made a call it became easier to make the next and eventually I could make those calls without lighting a cigarette, and in fact quite enjoy the conversations I might end up having with an agent or author.  What else did it do for me?  Hone my social skills, build my network of contacts, discover that people I imagined might be terrifying were actually incredibly easy and friendly.  And, as life and my career moved on from place to place, I came to realize that all those contacts were invaluable and, who knows, the person I was speaking to might one day become my next boss or my client when I set up my business.

So when I read that an employer, when interviewed, said that he felt he should adapt his own expectations that his employees should answer his phone calls I thought no, absolutely not. He is their boss.  He is there to encourage them, to demonstrate to them that it is polite to answer a phone call, that it isn’t necessarily scary and that in fact it is their responsibility, in working for him, to answer his calls and make calls if necessary.

What we don’t do we lose, or never gain, the ability to do.  If we don’t drive on a motorway for a long period we find it far more stressful the next time we do it.  The brain is a ‘use it or lose it’ machine and has the capacity to adapt right until the day we die but we have to prompt it to do so. 

It is natural to feel shy in company when one is young (and later too sometimes).  It is natural to find making or answering a call stressful when one does it for the first time, but we can learn, step by step, to master this art, just as we learn to master a new app on our mobile phone.

I think it was on Oliver Burkeman’s programme that I heard a young person say that they did not think they should feel uncomfortable in situations they face.  Yet life is endlessly uncomfortable and this self-made rule is impossible to achieve. We must help young people realize that life is about learning to manage challenges and that self-confidence as well as competence is gained by pushing one to do what is uncomfortable – provided, of course, the task is legitimate and achievable. A useful phrase in such a circumstance can be “I would rather I didn’t have to do this but I can manage it if I do…!”

The change in how young people communicate was brought home to me again recently when on a writing holiday in Crete.  We were sitting in quite an upmarket bar in Chania and these three beautiful young girls, probably around the age of 19, came in.  They sat down and ordered their cocktails and then rather than chatting to one another, each one of them was on their phone, raising a glass to their followers on Facebook or Tiktok or whatever.  Hardly a word was exchanged between them as they were too busy interacting with their screens.

Perhaps we need to help them develop the art of conversation.  This is surely possible.  My older sister was very shy when young and my mother helped her to learn to ask questions so that the other person did most of the talking.  When business coaching clients of mine were shy about going to client meetings or business conferences, we worked out topics of conversation together, as well as questions they might ask and pieces of information they were happy to share, so as to boost their confidence when they walked into the room and were faced with a crowd of strangers.

In thinking about all this I came to realize that the loss of the landline has also made the randomness of who one speaks to nearly extinct.  The landline used to sit in our hallway, as it did for most people, and so anyone who was passing by would answer it.  The person calling might not be seeking to speak to the person who picked up the call but it meant that one had random short conversations with many different people – a mother or father-in-law, an uncle or aunt, a brother or sister, the husband of a friend, a child or teenager, a boss or client, etc.  It taught one to respond to many different types of people.  Today, one phones direct, on one’s mobile phone, to the person one wants to talk to, on their mobile phone, and so we miss out on those incidental conversations we might have.  It has changed the family dynamic radically.  We end up with one-to-one relationships with our sons or daughters or friends and lose those incidental conversations with others in the extended family circle.

As I am a worrywart it then got me thinking that without a landline how does a child phone 999 if something goes wrong, should their parent’s mobile be nowhere to be seen or they don’t know how to use it?  Hey ho, but that’s just typical anxious me.

Learning to converse can be unnerving at any time of life.  Sitting at table over a meal and experimenting with topics of conversation can certainly help young people develop the flexibility to talk to different people in different situations. We shall never get this perfectly right, but we do get better at it, though I still, aged 74, get shy in certain situations and I think that is quite natural, not something that requires a label. Nor do I think others should adapt to make me feel ok – it’s my issue, not theirs, and I continue to work on it. 

I empathise, therefore, with the anxiety Gen Zs might feel about answering a phone call but I encourage them to do it as often as they can and they will discover that their brain will adapt to help them manage these random conversations and, who knows, they might just thoroughly enjoy talking to someone who has phoned them. Or that call might even open up an opportunity for them that they had never dreamed possible.