I love to be interviewed. I love being asked what I think about such-and-such because I love to talk. I even like hearing myself talk. That may be fine for an interview, but that’s about the only time it’s okay. Most every other time, that would not be a good thing. Certainly not a good idea for a relationship.

Marti and I were out to dinner lately in a restaurant with close quarters, so close that we ended up in conversation with two women who sat across from us. I ended up talking to one of them while she ended up talking to the other. I could pick up enough about her conversation that I got an idea about where it was going compared to mine which was going nowhere. That was because the woman I was talking to liked to hear herself talk just about as much as I liked hearing myself talk. So our conversation amounted to basically two monologues. We were both more interested in what we wanted to say than what the other person was saying.

Marti’s conversation was very different. It amounted primarily to Marti interviewing the other woman. She is very good at this. She has a lot of strong opinions. but she keeps them mostly to herself because she doesn’t want anything to get in the way of getting to know the other person. She will feign like she never thought about a certain thing (when I know she has), just to get a chance to hear what someone else thinks. What someone else thinks is more important than what she thinks because she wants to build a real relationship.

There’s an art to this. I’ve listened to myself for so long I’m not very good at it, but I’m learning. I just know it starts with listening over waiting to talk, and making someone else more important than me. Doing interviews for BlogTalkRadio has helped. Maybe we should all think of ourselves more as interviewers than interviewees.

“Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves” (Philippians 2:3).