Challenge №1

Hey there! I am glad to see you here on my blog. As you know, every week we have to make a challenge from our lists that we created. We need to start from the easiest one and gradually move on to harder tasks. In this post I am going to describe the way I coped with the challenge I established for myself. So, it looks like this:

•   To talk with an acquaintance whom I do not know well about things he/ she likes.

Somebody would say that it is not difficult at all to have a conversation about preferences with a person. However, it requires still confidence, patience and good communicative skills especially if your interlocutor is reserved and shy. To be honest, I am not easy going as well, so it was absolutely challenging for me. Because of the situation with coronavirus I cannot make appointments with friends or just with people I know. That is why I decided to text my acquaintance. I did not talk to him for a quite long time, so it was kind of weird that I all of a sudden offered him to speak on the phone. I said that I felt lonely and I needed someone to talk to. Actually, I hate to show everyone that sometimes I feel lonely because this makes me feel vulnerable. He was not so glad, but due to the fact that he had some spare time, he agreed to do it. 

I did not tell my acquaintance anything about my challenge, because my task would have been much easier if I did it. I just started from a small talk about recent events happened to our lives. For sure, I wondered how he spends the time during quarantine. After that I asked different questions and got to know some information about things he likes. Obviously, I tried my best our conversation not to look like an examination or interrogation. I put effort to find out about his preferences in a smooth way and also I told about my personal stuff to him as well, because I wanted him to trust me. There were moments when my interlocutor was suspicious of some of my questions and I had to be patient and delicate. We talked for more than an hour which is CRAZY!!!(I usually do not spend much time on this) At first, I wanted to stop torturing him and most importantly myself, tell him the truth about my challenge. But I managed to get him to talk. I guess he was bored too at the quarantine, so he was not against communicating with me.  Thus, I learned that he was a huge fan of Harry Potter books and movies, Futurama and the anime film “Spirited away” by Hayao Miyazaki. We discussed the latter film because I like it a lot too. 

Moreover, it turned out that he was fond of watching educational channels about nature, history, life of people of different nationalities, ethnicities. He said that he was keen on playing computer games like “Civilization 4” and “Heroes of Might and Magic 3”. Even though I do not share his interests much it was still interesting to hear about it. I found out that he preferred to listen to audiobooks rather than to read them. Each of us expressed own opinion on this point. Personally, I pointed out the advantages of reading real books, but certainly, I did not try to impose my views on him. His favorite authors are Strugatsky brothers. We also had a little argument over cats and dogs. I like cats more than dogs and he cannot stand cats. Eventually, we had to agree to disagree and stop our meaningless dispute, because tastes differ. But it was cool that I started talking on this topic because I learned the fact that he loved Dobermans. (YAY another piece of information!!! ^_^) However, we did not argue all the time, even if we did, it was not serious. I realized that we had something in common, for example, we both adore ice cream and like fishing in the summer.

Anyway, it was amazing experience even though I felt uncomfortable sometimes. To my mind, this challenge taught me that it is no that frightening to have a conversation with a person who is not close to you and whom you barely know. I suppose now I can be an active listener because I had to respond to his answers for him not to think that I was bored. It was hard enough doing it only with the help of speaking, because he did not see my body language. Besides, I learned to ask good questions which helped me to get the necessary information about the interlocutor. All in all, I can say that I made this challenge successfully. Let see what happens next time together.

Tell me a bit about your first challenge. How did you cope with it? Leave some comments down below, please.