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A conversation is a pretty unique thing. An interview gets all the attention, and even requires formal training, but I believe a conversation can offer far more insight.
Can you imagine a conversation with someone like Robin Williams? It would be far different from any one of the hundreds of interviews he did. Especially if it wasn’t with a direct peer.
An interview is much like a Saturday night Instagram photo. It’s great to look at, it’s exciting, and often well planned. It also provides some sort of false expectation or false hope that this is what the person is like every moment of the week.
A conversation, a true conversation, if the guard is down, can be deep, it can be ugly, dark, snappy, kind or happy, raw, uplifting and insightful, controversial, even inspirational. It’s the every other moment after the show or after the Instagram moment is over. It can offer a substantial difference derived from the same person. Which as I see it should be the person you actually want to get to know.
One of the things I like to do when on a holiday is head straight out to the inner-city suburbs of the location I am in. While it’s great to see the tourist attractions, stop for a minute and think about that very collective of words …. tourist attraction.
It in no way refers or offers any insight into the local lifestyle of the area its located in. It’s day to day real existence. I want to know what it’s like to live where I’m on holiday, not what it’s like to visit. Because I feel like I can take a lot more away with me once I have left if I understood how it operates.
An interview then is your tourist attraction. It highlights what everyone expects to see, what the person in it believes others want to see. A conversation is, the stuck in traffic, the frustrated, the nervous, the happy or sad moments that make up the back end to run the tourist attraction. The reality is that far fewer people will travel thousands of kilometres to see the day to day running of an inner city suburb compared to the city centre or coast line beaches, but for me and for what I’m trying to achieve here, the heart of the matter is in the conversation and how those people live in their environment day by day.
An interview takes you to the surface, and that’s where you can apply makeup. A conversation takes you under that and can reveal the trueness, not just for better or worse. But for realness, for substance, for the person that is, when the lights are off, and no one is looking. That’s the one I wanted to speak to. You can keep your red carpet, I want the front lawn.
Francis @ Bumping Into Podcast.
