Terry Flanagan: Stop Me If You've Heard This Before

As we get older we tend to repeat ourselves, or so I’m told. Not that it’s ever happened to me. Right. Many of us tend to gather our favorite stories over the years and recount them to our friends and family with great regularity. We may not even be aware of this propensity until our beleaguered listeners lose all patience and inform us that we have, in fact, driven them to the verge of madness with our incessant repetition of a tale.

Generally, though, people listen politely to our stories even as they are feverishly working on a plan to escape. You should be aware of the signs that your audience has lost interest. If the person is rolling his/her eyes, looking about the room for an exit, wearing a smile that looks more like a grimace, or worse yet, mouthing the words to the story you are telling, chances are that you and/or your story are boring and possibly repetitive.

Repetition can be a good thing sometimes. Speakers like to repeat important points because the audience usually forgets most of the speech within a few hours after hearing it. Teachers use repetition to reinforce lessons. But it’s not a good thing in conversation. German philosopher Immanuel Kant is said to have scrawled notes on his tablecloth at dinner to avoid bringing up a topic he had already discussed, lest his guests think him feeble-minded. I use Post-it (R) notes. They’re cheaper than tablecloths and you don’t have to write around gravy stains. So far the Kant method has failed to make my dinner conversation anywhere near as interesting as his must have been.

Repeating ourselves is not just an affliction of the elderly. It may have something to do with what scientists call destination memory. We have a harder time remembering to whom we’ve told our stories and gossip than we do the sources of our information. A study by Gopie and MacLeod done at the University of Waterloo in 2009 demonstrated that students had greater difficulty remembering which photos of celebrities they had read facts aloud to than the faces associated with facts they heard.

There are theories of human behavior that attempt to explain these results, such as self-absorption and limited attention span, but there may be other factors at play. I have a friend, who is an amateur performer. He has a whole repertoire of anecdotes and sayings that he just loves to try out on people he meets. The routine is not part of his act, but it does have some of the same characteristics as a performance. And maybe there’s a little bit of performer in all of us. We like to tell stories, make people laugh, and want others to think us clever. So when we get the positive response we want from our audience, we repeat the act hoping for the same results.

There may be other reasons for repeating stories, too. Some people, typically older people, relive the high points of their lives through retelling stories from their past. Some people try to overcome doubts about a decision they made by talking about the circumstances and continually seeking affirmation from others. Many of us repeat ourselves when we feel awkward and just don’t know what else to say. And too many politicians repeat the same lies because they think that’s what we want to hear.

Some stories, though, have been purposely repeated generation after generation. These were stories people felt were important enough that they had to be remembered and passed on, stories which became part of our lore and legend, and eventually our history. Yet some equally important stories, discovered later by accident, were never handed down, as if there were a conscious effort to suppress them. People usually like to avoid repeating embarrassing, painful, or shameful chapters of their lives, although they don’t seem to mind telling those kinds of stories about other people. But they do love repeating stories of bravado and success.

All of us have stories to tell and all of us want to be heard. Sometimes repetition is the result of frustration caused by feelings of being ignored. No one wants to be ignored and everyone would like to be interesting. So the next time you’re cornered by someone you know is going to tell you the same old story you’ve heard a hundred times, you might try to be a little more patient and understanding and act interested even though you’re not. If that person is me, ask me if I might have dropped a Post-it (R) note somewhere. I’ll get the hint and move on to bore someone else.