Hello Readers,
How many of you have experienced a situation that once the initial ‘hello’ greeting has been exchanged between you and another person, that its only within the first few seconds of smiling and nodding that you realise you have already run out of things to say and you are anxiously looking for your escape route because your survival instincts have suddenly kicked in?
Boring people come in all shapes and sizes and you can find them just about anywhere. It’s when people go on and on in monotone, mundane tones about stuff that you have no idea what they are talking about or even interested in. It can be an associate who insists on relating every detail of their travel adventures, insisting that you spend hours admiring their holiday photos or lengthy expositions of someone’s medical problems. You may feel as though you should appear interested, but this could only lead to even more of your time wasted listening to these people droning on and on about themselves, but never asking you anything about yourself. Have you ever received an e mail or text message where someone has written only a couple of lines telling you that nothing much is going on in their world and that nothing has changed? They then expect you to show an interest in their uneventful world because they see you as their entertainment value. Yes, they want you to cheer them up, make them feel better whilst offering absolutely nothing in return. Even if you choose to ignore them and not reply immediately, you can guarantee that they will soon be back in touch again because by now they will have also successfully driven everyone else away with their boringness. In many cases, you may notice that people who have had very easy lives are the ones who are often the most boring of all because they have not learned important, life lessons to make them speak of interesting things and neither do they display much understanding or empathy because they believe that everything is about them, not you.
Getting out of a boring situation whilst still remaining polite is easy. All you have to do is find an excuse to cut the conversation short or give your apologies and do a disappearing act. You are responsible for putting down your own boundaries and drawing a line under anything or anyone that sucks the life blood out of you because if you don’t, you will find yourself stuck for hours and hours dancing to someone else’s tune. A good example of this situation is when someone told me that a neighbour had popped in unexpectedly for coffee and a chat, but stayed for a good eight hours, rambling on about themselves without any consideration for anyone else or what time it was on the clock. I asked the question as to why the hostess didn’t take control and find a way of politely ushering the neighbour out of the door using the excuse that there were ‘pressing engagements and appointments that could not possibly be cancelled’ as a way of escaping? Her response was, ‘because she didn’t want to upset her neighbour because it would look bad on her and she dint want gossip to spread that she had asked her neighbour to leave because everyone else would get to hear about it. She was more concerned with what other people thought than taking control the situation by valuing her own time. I never forgot this conversation and It taught me a great deal about how important it is to be selective about whom we choose to spend our time with. Its vitally important that you learn when and where to draw a line in the sand and say ‘no’ and mean it.
If you end up with a boring, miserable life because you always listened to what other people tell you to do, then perhaps you deserve it. Life is always boring for boring people and the only boring people you will ever know are bored people.
I always think it’s better to be thought of as slightly weird than to be described as being boring.
Until Next Week,
Love and Light,
Linda and The Lulas xxx