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How would you describe your feelings about social media?

Do words like “entertaining” and “connecting” come to mind — but also words like “exhausting” and “polarized”?

You’re not alone if you find social media to be both a space for staying informed and a space full of a lot of venom and disagreement. These days, that’s the landscape we log into and live in.

Here, Dylan Marron — author, podcast host and instructor of the TED Course “How to connect in a divided world” — explains the challenges that complicate our online conversations and how we can overcome them:

Challenge #1: A constant stream of information demands all our attention

Marron calls this the “Everything Storm.” There’s simply too much information being constantly shared for us to be able to absorb and respond to everything — and yet we’re often compelled to try. As a result, “we end up not knowing what to focus on and ultimately just exhaust ourselves,” Marron says in a lesson from his TED Course. And that’s how we may chime in on topics or  issues that we don’t really care about (or know much about) and say something that’s uninformed, inaccurate or just insensitive.

The solution: Realize that you don’t have to have an opinion about everything

It’s OK — and normal — that there are some topics you know more about and others you know absolutely nothing about, and limit your comments to the former. “By focusing on just one or two topics, by leaning on our own personal experience and not vague references to news stories we only half know, we can escape the storm or at the very least grab an umbrella as it wails around us,” says Marron.

Challenge #2: We have little space on social media to fully express ourselves

On many social platforms, conciseness is key. Some enforce strict character limits, while others tend to give more visibility to messages with fewer words. That’s conducive for speed and efficiency, but nuance and complexity end up falling by the wayside. As Marron puts it, “some of our thoughts are too messy, too complicated, too unformed to whittle them down into a bite-size package.”

The solution: Head to a space where there’s room for you to share complete thoughts

Talking on the phone or in person is ideal, but that’s not always possible. So rather than condensing your opinion into a short reply that’s ripe for misinterpretation, try taking a conversation to someone’s DMs. “Move to platforms and modes of communication that allow us to fully express ourselves without limitation,” Marron says.

Challenge #3: Social media has become a spectacle where we all compete for “likes”

Many parts of the internet have become a battleground, turning all — whether we like it or not — into spectators. We use emojis to cheer and boo, and often the supposed winner of a debate is  the one who gets the most “likes.” While this can sometimes be entertaining, it can interfere with forming genuine connections with other people.

The solution: Exit the arena

Again, this is where direct messages can come in handy. “Find a place far from the audience, where clapbacks and disses aren’t rewarded with instant points, and set up your conversation there,” suggests Marron.

You could start a private message with something like “I wanted to take this conversation here because it’s important to me.”

Challenge #4: We see anyone who disagrees with us as a troll

The above challenges are just a few of the structural hurdles that social media presents. But one of its biggest challenges is its impact on how we interact with — and view — other people. It’s sad but true: Many of us act differently online than we would in real life, often in more hurtful ways.

Internet harassers often see the people they harass as less than human, but “we also have to contend with the fact that our coping mechanism is to regard these harassers as inhuman entities themselves,” says Marron.

When both sides see each other this way, it leaves us all dangerously close-minded, each believing that we are inherently better than the other.

The solution: Remove “troll” from your vocabulary

If you truly want to have a meaningful exchange with someone else, you’ll need to have some empathy for them. In this case, that means “an active refusal to dehumanize even the people who dehumanize others,” says Marron. Remember this: You’re speaking with someone who has a depth of feelings and experiences that have shaped their opinions.

Yes, it can be hard to see haters as human, especially if you’ve never met them in real life. But when you make it a point to approach people online with compassion, you’re on your way to having a conversation that may change perspectives and open doors to new understanding.

Love learning from TED speakers? Get a deeper, more interactive experience with them with TED Courses. Each four-week course is led by experts who will teach you skills for improving your life — whether it’s expanding your imagination and revamping your career to strengthening your memory and building healthy relationships as an adult.

Sign up for Dylan Marron’s TED Course and learn more about bridging gaps and forming meaningful connections. Or, check out our other TED Courses to learn more important skills, from “How to take a life-changing journey” with celebrated travel writer Pico Iyer, to “How to become your best adult self” with educator and author Julie Lythcott-Haims.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hayley Caldwell is a copywriter on the Audience Development team at TED.

This piece was adapted for TED-Ed from this Ideas article.

Raúl Soria

Want an easy way to brighten another person’s day? Offer them specific, heartfelt praise, says educator Cheryl Ferguson.

We’ve all been on the receiving end of a half-hearted compliment, whether it was a generic “nice work” from a colleague or a chirpy “you look nice” from someone who couldn’t pick out our outfit from a police lineup. And being human, we’ve probably handed out our own fair share of faint praise.

But what if we all made a collective vow today and said “No more bland compliments!”

It takes only a tiny bit more effort to turn a vague comment into the kind of praise that will make someone’s day, says Winnipeg, Canada, high school music educator Cheryl Ferguson. Here are the three basic components of an effective compliment.

Use their name.

It sounds simple, but it’s impossible to emphasize how much it means to someone when you call them by their name. “Using a person’s name,” says Ferguson, “tells them they’re worth your time and worth knowing.”

Make your compliment as specific as possible.

As director of a high school band, Ferguson has led countless concerts and heard countless audience members come up to her young musicians at the end of the performance and tell them, “Good job.” She says, “You’d be surprised at the different reaction [you get] from students if you say something like, ‘The way you played that note at the end of the second movement made my heart flutter, and it took me back to the moment I saw my son Nate for the first time.’ Their eyes get wide and they say, ‘Thank you!’”

The next time you’re tempted to settle for a “Good job,” take a moment and either describe the effect that the job had on you (or other people) or name what was so special about what they did. Say something like, “I really appreciated the extra time you spent with that customer — I could tell it made a huge difference to them.”

Instead of “you look nice,” say “That color is great on you — you should wear it more often” or “Your haircut is great — it makes you look so polished.”

Try not to praise and run.

If you have the time and the desire, consider following up your compliment with a question, such as “What made you decide to spend extra time with her?” or “Where did you get that sweater?”

But just as important as asking a question is this: “You have to stick around to hear the answer,” says Ferguson. While it sounds obvious, we’ve all been guilty of throwing out a “Hey, how are you?” and not waiting to find out.

Watch her TEDxWinnipeg talk here:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mary Halton is Assistant Ideas Editor at TED, and a science journalist based in the Pacific Northwest.

This post was originally published on TED Ideas. It’s part of the “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.

Alice Mollon

Casual conversations can sometimes lead us to moments of real connection. News director and radio host Kyle Kellams explains how.

Small talk is seen by many of us as the cotton candy of conversation: artificial, unsubstantial and ultimately unsatisfying.

“How many times have you heard, or maybe you’ve said to yourself, ‘I hate small talk’?” asks Kyle Kellams, a Fayetteville, Arkansas, news director and radio host. But he believes that it can serve as the gateway to real understanding.

One “small talk” question that he frequently asks guests in the KUAF studio is: “What’s the first movie you ever saw in a movie theater?” Part of the reason he poses this particular query is technical — he’s testing the sound level of people’s voices on the microphone — but that’s not all. He says, “Sometimes that question leads to an interesting conversation.”

Here’s an example of what he means. One guest’s answer was Jaws, which surprised him because he guessed she must have been quite young at the time. He recalls, “So I asked her — I had to — ‘Who took you as a kid to see Jaws?’ She was kind of sheepish and finally said, ‘My dad.’ Well, that led us to a brief conversation about sharks, about fear, and about, for her, growing up the kid of divorced parents. Then we went away and had the regular conversation about the topic we were scheduled to, and I think it went slightly better because we had actually made a connection.”

Small talk, Kellams emphasizes, isn’t about exchanging idle nothings. It’s a way of forging bonds with people who may appear to have little in common with you. “I think that’s what small conversations can do,” he says. “If you get to know someone just a little bit, it’s harder to yell at them or insult them even if you’re politically polar opposites.”

Small talk can also be a gift that we give each other.

While traveling as a play-by-play announcer for the Arkansas women’s basketball team, Kellams found himself at the bar of a hotel restaurant one evening. He says, “This woman comes up and sits down. She sits down heavy, like [she feels] the weight of the world … She looks over at me and says, ‘How you doing?’ What do you say 99 percent of time when you’re asked that? ‘Good.’ Then you say, ‘How you doing?’ and 99 percent of the time the response is that she’s doing fine too. But she said, ‘Not so good.’”

At the moment, Kellams had a choice. He could politely tell her he had something he had to attend to and retreat to his hotel room, or he could engage. He says, “Filled with nothing to do — I’ve seen every Law and Order — I said, ‘Well, what’s the problem?’ She ends up telling me she was there for her mom’s funeral. Her mom and her had been estranged for decades, if not their entire life. The siblings were [also] estranged from the mother … but she was the oldest so she had the chore of coming to take care of the funeral and any probate. She wasn’t happy about it. For about the next 15 or so minutes, she talked about the childhood she never had, the family she would see on television that she didn’t have and she just missed that. It made her angry and made her melancholy, it made her sad, but that’s … the hand that had been given to her.”

When her take-out order was ready and it was time for her to leave, Kellams offered his sincere hopes that things would get better. He recalls, “She said, ‘Well they’re not going to, but the last 20 minutes have meant the world to me,’ and it really made me feel good if it had made her feel good.”

By “small talk,” Kellams adds, “I’m not talking about, ‘Hey, isn’t that strange weather?’ followed by a few moments of awkward silence and scuffling of feet.” You should probably also refrain from asking “What do you do?” since that question tends to keep things at a superficial level. Instead, you can borrow Kellams’ movie-theater question, or come up with your own. Maybe it’s “What’s the first book you remember reading by yourself?” or “What’s your favorite vegetable?” Think about what could elicit vivid memories or fervent opinions or what you’d be genuinely interested in finding out.

But remember, you’re not there to simply collect their answer and depart. You’re there to receive it like the gift that it is, and respond wholeheartedly. As radio host Celeste Headlee likes to say, “A good conversation is like a game of catch.” Just as you wouldn’t interrupt catching and throwing a ball or Frisbee with a friend to check your phone or look for someone more interesting, commit yourself to following the small talk wherever it may lead.

Watch his TEDxFayetteville talk here:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mary Halton is Assistant Ideas Editor at TED, and a science journalist based in the Pacific Northwest.

This post was originally published on TED Ideas. It’s part of the “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.

Melissa McFeeters

What’s your elephant in the room?

Every group — whether it’s a family or a team in the workplace — has one: an uncomfortable, complicated or charged conversation that hasn’t happened but needs to.

Maybe it’s about salary, taking someone’s time or effort for granted, goals, lagging performance, or some other loaded topic. “I want you to think of a tough conversation that people around you need to have — there’s some issue that’s holding them back from accomplishing what they want to accomplish,” says Adar Cohen, a conflict resolution expert based in Illinois and cofounder of the Civic Leadership Foundation, in a TEDxKeene Talk. “I believe they might be one conversation away from accomplishing that thing but they’re not having it … or they’ve tried and it hasn’t gone well.”

It’s human nature to avoid difficult conversations, partly because they’re difficult and partly because we’re worried that having them could make things worse. In his work facilitating negotiations with people from all different kinds of organizations — including companies, political factions, law enforcement, hospitals, gangs — in the US, Northern Ireland and the Middle East, Cohen has seen all the reasons that keep us from saying anything. However, when we continue to dodge these conversations, he says, “frustration sets in, communication constricts, tensions rise, trust evaporates and collaboration is done.”

After you work up the will and courage to tackle your elephant, there are a few key steps you can take to ensure that your discussion will be productive — often in ways you can’t anticipate or imagine.

Cohen has three rules to help you lead difficult conversations:

1. Move toward — not away from — the conflict.

In his TEDxKeene Talk, Cohen speaks about a gathering he oversaw at Chicago’s Cook County Jail, which has more than 6,500 inmates and is one of the largest jails in the US. Their goal was to discuss how to best support people upon their release from prison and help prevent them from re-entering the criminal justice system again. The group was tremendously varied — former gang members, business leaders, corrections officers, clergy, social workers, sheriff’s deputies, city officials — and also unaccustomed to collaborating with one another. The discussion began, and it was terrible. “Whatever I tried, nothing worked,” says Cohen. “The group wouldn’t sit next to each other, wouldn’t even look at each other … This was the toughest conversation I ever led.”

Cohen was desperate. At their first break, he recalls, ”I approached that corrections officer who hasn’t said a single word all morning, and I just go for it. I charge up to him and I say, ‘Hey buddy, what do I gotta do to get you to pipe down in there?’ … I moved toward the conflict. Miraculously, he doesn’t squish me. He actually laughs.” By acknowledging the awkwardness, he had created a moment, an opening, with one of the participants.

“Conflict is information, and handled well, conflict is opportunity,” says Cohen.

2. Act as if you don’t know anything about the situation, even if you do.

After he got the corrections officer to laugh, Cohen says, “I asked him, ‘What do people get wrong about what you do?’ Which is another way of asking, ‘How are you misunderstood?’ … And his face changes. He looks like a different person, and he says, ‘People think that I feel normal about this, keeping people in cages all day. There’s nothing normal about my job.’”

When the break ended, Cohen asked that same question to the corrections officer — but this time, in front of the entire group. The response to the officer’s frankness was electrifying. “Now others are ready to share and because I don’t know anything, I keep asking questions,” Cohen says. “One by one, they all have their chance to describe everything about their day-to-day, minute-to-minute work, which means everyone’s getting heard by everyone. My naive questions make it possible for them to hear one another.”

“Ask questions about people’s experiences, and listen to what they say,” explains Cohen. “important things will be said because you’re there listening and the better you listen, the better the people having the conversation will listen to each other.” When you speak, stick to sharing your own experiences — resist the urge to offer advice or commentary or to speak on behalf of other people. “Take the long way,” he says.

3. Keep quiet, especially in the beginning.

Silence can be challenging — most of us will jump in to fill in unpleasant gaps or lulls — but it can actually lead people to speak up, especially people who haven’t yet said anything. Learning to be comfortable with silence can prompt deeper, more meaningful interactions. Cohen says, “Some of the best breakthroughs I’ve seen in really difficult conversations have emerged out of a brief period of silence. Don’t rush in to rescue everyone from that awkward moment; it’s your job to show them that moment is okay.”

Cohen shares an anecdote from a conversation he led among people from opposing groups in Northern Ireland:

“In one of these meetings, we suddenly heard from a man who hadn’t spoken. He shared his experience as a newcomer to Belfast, standing on a bus, exhausted after work and suddenly being surrounded by a group of men. They came in really close, whispered horrible threats. They trapped him, and he explained how his heart pounded and he just gripped the railing of the bus and waited until it stopped and he could dash out. He had feared for his life that day, he told the group, and he had hoped that immigrating to Northern Ireland from Somalia would have been the end of having to fear for his life. The room felt totally quiet; everyone heard him — Protestants, Catholics, suddenly it didn’t matter. ‘That’s unacceptable,’ the first said. ‘That’s not Belfast,’ said the second. ‘Not how we want it to be,’ said the third.”

In his work around the world, Cohen has seen that just one conversation can change lives: opening the door to a new way of looking at the world, to collaboration that previously seemed impossible, and to forgiveness, understanding and common ground. Any of us, he says, can change the world in this way. “Conversations create the future. Whether or not we have them and how we have them is up to us.”

Watch his TEDxKeene Talk here:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adar Cohen is cofounder and executive director of the Civic Leadership Foundation in Illinois. He is responsible for all aspects of CLF’s efforts to empower young people for success in school, work and civic life. Working with Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, with gang leaders and correctional officers in Chicago, and with Jews and Muslims in the Middle East, Dr. Cohen has led dynamic change processes in settings defined by conflict and uncertainty. He has investigated human rights abuses at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp; led nonviolence trainings in church basements and community centers across the US; and, at the invitation of the King of Bhutan, lectured and designed curriculum at Sherubtse University, Bhutan’s first institution for higher education.

This post was originally published on TED Ideas. It’s part of the “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.

Capt. Lisa Klekowski

I love asking questions. As a journalist, I don’t just ask people what they do — I interrogate them, be they scientists or teachers or sculptors, to find out the terminology of their field, the kinds of characters that populate it, and the questions they think about that might never even occur to someone outside their orbit.

That is: until I dated an Army reservist who, just about a year before we met, had returned from a tour of duty in Iraq.

When it came to the topic of his service, my normally inquisitive nature seemed to dry up and shrivel, like a time-lapse video of a decaying plant. It wasn’t that I had questions that I held back from surfacing; I simply didn’t know what to ask. Still, years later, I’m not sure what the block was about. Was it that going to war in Iraq feels so drastically different from my experience as a writer in New York City that I couldn’t find the common ground from which good questions stem? Or was it the opposite: that I’d seen enough war movies to feel like I had a reasonable idea of what it was like and, especially after The Hurt Locker, was scared to have my suspicions confirmed? Maybe it’s that I’d heard so much about how difficult returning to everyday life can be for veterans that I wanted to give him the space to inhabit a new life. Or maybe it was that the fast and furious coverage on CNN and other 24-hour news outlets somehow managed to make the Iraq War and War in Afghanistan seem especially remote and far away, since despite regular reports of bombing and armed conflicts, day-to-day life for me didn’t seem to change that much.

In his TED Talk, Wes Moore, author of The Other Wes Moore and a paratrooper and Army captain in Afghanistan, shares the lone two comments he gets from civilians when he tells them he served: “Thank you for your service” and “Did you shoot anyone?” The first seems kind enough, but Moore sees it as a brush-off, an opportunity for the conversation to move on before venturing anywhere uncomfortable. As for the second, he says, at least it shows some type of curiosity.

It did, of course, occur to me to ask my then-boyfriend, “Did you kill anyone?” But it also felt hugely insensitive, and if the answer were yes, what would I have done with that information? John Ismay reflects on this question in a lovely essay for PolicyMic: “The question isn’t about that vet. It’s about you, and your own morbid curiosity about an experience outside your own life’s script.”

For veterans, could this division of scripts lead to a heightened sense of alienation? Sebastian Junger — a longtime war reporter who embedded in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, which saw a high percentage of fighting in the country — notes in his TED Talk that soldiers often miss war because of the incredible sense of brotherhood and connection that develops in combat situations, where each individual cares more about the well-being of others than their own. Returning home to find so many people unwilling to ask simple questions must certainly further an in-group, out-group feeling.

Moore suggests a few simple questions to start surfacing the stories of veterans:

“What did you do there?”
“What was the food like?”
“What was the experience like?”

Meanwhile, The Public Insight Network put together this list of questions veterans themselves wished people would ask them. A few especially stuck out:

“How did your military service shape the person you are today?”

Another is stunningly simple:

“How are you doing?”

I know that next time I meet a veteran, I will definitely ask these questions and many others as well. My curiosity is reignited to hear how the experience of war feels to individuals in uniform, and how the real thing differs from Hollywood versions of it. I encourage others to ask these questions too. And for veterans, please know: Our silence isn’t because we don’t care or want to know more. We just might not be sure of how to start the conversation.