In my last article, I wrote about saying hello and why I believe it should never become one person’s responsibility. Afterwards, I realised I’d only explored half of the conversation. We spend an extraordinary amount of time teaching people how to introduce themselves, how to make a good first impression and how to ask better questions. Yet I can’t remember anyone ever teaching us what our responsibility becomes once somebody has already chosen to say hello to us.
Over the years I met thousands of people while travelling. Most had wonderful stories waiting to be discovered. Every now and then, however, I would leave a conversation feeling as though I’d never really met the person at all. It wasn’t because they lacked experiences or personality. It was because I never seemed to reach the beginning of their story.
I’ve often imagined people as books. Saying hello opens the cover, and the first question simply turns the first page. The more I reflected on this, the more I realised that some people seem to have quietly inserted another twenty pages before their real story begins. Those pages were never meant to become part of the book. They were added over years of rejection, disappointment, embarrassment and learning to protect themselves. Eventually the protection became so familiar that it quietly replaced the introduction, leaving the authentic story waiting somewhere much further on.
The difficulty was that I usually stopped reading around page ten. Not because I wasn’t interested, but because I had no way of knowing the real story hadn’t even started yet.
Perhaps that’s why I’ve never believed there are boring opening questions. By the time somebody asks where you grew up or what you do for work, they aren’t really looking for facts. They’ve already broken the ice by saying hello. What they’re doing now is turning the first page to discover where your story begins.
If someone asks where you grew up, you can simply tell them the name of a town, or you can tell them why that place mattered. Perhaps leaving it changed your life. Perhaps it’s still the place that feels like home. Perhaps it taught you something you’ll never forget. The question isn’t really about geography. It’s simply the first opportunity to let someone discover a genuine part of your story.
The same is true when someone asks what you do. A job title rarely explains who a person is unless they choose to let it. Every ordinary question gives us the chance to move beyond another carefully protected page and reveal something authentic. The questions themselves were never supposed to be the story. They simply give the story somewhere to begin.
Not every hello is a welcome one, and I completely understand why people choose to protect their story. Life has a way of teaching us to be careful, and many of those extra pages exist for very good reasons. The difficulty comes when they quietly become permanent. The safest version of ourselves might also become the hardest version of ourselves to read, not because our story has become less interesting, but because we’ve gradually moved its beginning further and further away.
People often say they struggle to find interesting people. There may be some truth in that, but perhaps it’s also worth asking another question. If somebody opened your book today, what would they discover on the first few pages? Would they begin finding your real story, or would they still be reading pages that were only ever meant to protect it?
Your story belongs to you. That means it’s your responsibility to decide who gets to read it, but it’s also your responsibility to make sure the right readers can actually find it. No one expects to read every chapter the moment they meet you, but they do need to discover enough of the real story to want to keep turning the pages.
Perhaps that’s the real responsibility on the other side of hello. It isn’t simply answering somebody’s questions. It’s recognising that another human being has chosen to know a little more about you and being ready to let the right people discover where your story truly begins. Otherwise, we shouldn’t be surprised if they quietly place the book back on the shelf, never realising the story they were hoping to find had been there all along.
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#HumanConnection #Authenticity #Conversation #Communication #Curiosity #Relationships #PersonalGrowth #LifeLessons #Fakaging #AustralianAuthor #DJGifford