I find it most useful to think of conversation as a creative process. Specifically, it's improv without the stage. It is a collaborative performance. A jam like jazz. Because you create an experience, emotional and cognitive, using a communicative medium, a complex blend of words and body language. There's rhythm, and image. Story. You play with social rules like the rules of genre. You are informed by your influences, and the content at play.

In this sense, we are all artists. What applies to art in the general naturally applies to conversation.

Similarly, practicing in another medium yields benefits to be applied in any other.

I spent a couple years learning how to play the guitar, but never with a drummer. One day, a drummer moved in with his drum. So we started jamming... and it sucked lol. But we were down there every other day, honing the process through experiment and experience. We began to understand one another. One day, we felt the music so thoroughly, it hits that sweet spot and it's like magic. The more I practiced, the more I let go, the more I genuinely enjoyed that process -- the easier it was to hit that sweet spot and really make something that pops. It became easy to drop into that mindset of letting go, of trusting the flow, of having fun with the sometimes awkward back and forth of working with another mind.

A jazz musician knows what 'be yourself' means.

I work a customer service gig, for tips. I jam all day using the same process except modified for conversation. I have a lot of fun, and I'm really good at my job. The trick is activating that creative process in people. Everyone knows how to be familiar: Hey how's it going? Good, how are you? I'm good, it's Friday. Oh yeah! Love it. -- it's the accessibility of the conversation, how to get into the groove, establish the meter. But the sooner you introduce a novel element the better, and it needs to be something they can play off of. Every Friday should be a holiday. Why not? Seriously though, why not. And, it's about the way you hold yourself, the subtleties, always. That's something they can play off of too, because style is a type of content, an extension of the subject matter.

There's so much more to say about it, because the complexity of art and the creative process is staggering. I anticipate, "yeah but a work relationship ain't jamming." I tell ya, different genre, different expectations, same process.