Does anyone else here have this communication problem?

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I know what you mean. I tend to get nervous and start talking too fast, and if I try to use long sentences I turn into a stuttering mess. Even after this I don't usually put across everything I wnated to say. I also get the priods of silence when i'm thinking of the right response. A lot of questions seem to catch me off guard, even if they are fairly simple questions. I think its the other persons reaction that makes me nervous the most.

Amazing...Before coming on here, I always thought that this was my problem only. I can talk about my passions or area of expertce with ease, but when it comes to small talk with other than very close friends or trying to get my point across to the boss things always come out garbled. One other thing that I notice that I share. My dad always said that I could write better than I could talk.

I'm very bad at small talk. A trick that I haven't so much learned as just had evolve on me is to "read" off an auto cue in my head. It's almost as though I have a screen scrolling with the words appearing... what the other person is saying, then as I'm replying I can perceive the words written down.

I'm not saying that I literally "see" the words, but I have them in my head in the same way as I have words in my head when I read them.

It's hopelessly impossible to describe, but I'm very grateful for this odd way of thinking about speaking, because it does stop me from completely messing up in conversations. It also helps me remember what was said... I just rescroll the auto cue.

Small talk though never engages my attention, so the auto cue isn't normally working when someone says, "good morning." I used to say things like, "yeah," or "what", though I never was so churlish as to say, "what's good about it." Apparently that's the vibe I gave off though.

This annoys my wife to no end. She finds the long pauses between the end of what she's said and me trying to figure what my I'm going to reply with extremely frustrating.

I call that "52 pick-up". Like when a kid throws a deck of cards into the air.

mgran: The 'ticker tape' effect was really useful for me when I dealt with news reporters. They look for sound bytes, and don't care if they twist things and misrepresent what you mean to say. Since I 'saw' what I was about to say scroll by, I could spot an unfortunate sound byte and wreck it when it was only half said.