How to Avoid Overtalkers in the Workplace

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

A talkaholic is someone who knows that the thing they're about to say will hurt them and will say it anyway. Talkaholics are often seen as great and you like them at first, but after a while people start to want to escape them. People really start to resent them to the point where here's another interesting thing: If you ask them early on, is that person intelligent? They'll say yeah, highly intelligent. You ask them later about the same person and their estimate of that person's intelligence has actually gone down.

We live in a chatter-filled world. People will talk your ear off when you see them in person and everyone is constantly sharing their thoughts online. But my guest would say that all this chatter may be hurting us more than we know, and it would be better to close our pieholes and sit on our typing fingers a lot more often than we do.

His name is Dan Lyons, and he's the author of STFU: The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut in an Endlessly Noisy World. Today on the show, Dan unpacks how being quiet and speaking with greater intention can improve your life. We discuss why some people tend to overtalk more than others and the six types of overtalkers out there, from the blurter to the most extreme case, the talkaholic, for whom overtalking is practically an addiction. We then discuss not getting sucked into spouting off online, avoiding conversational narcissism, the argument for spending less time working on your personal brand and more time doing quality work, how silence is power, how the best way to deal with issues in a marriage may be by not talking about them, and more.