“How do I keep a conversation going?”: Why ‘conversation’ is showing up in coaching
Read our latest blog by LifeCycle Coach and Programme Manager, Lou Quenzer. A fascinating delve into conversation.
“How do I keep a conversation going and know what to say?”
It’s a question that has come up repeatedly in my coaching conversations with young people at CoachBright, and it made me curious.
I’ve had young people talk about wanting to feel more confident starting conversations, not knowing what to say. But, more particularly, about what happens after that. How do I keep it going? What do I ask next? What if I can’t think of anything to say?
Sometimes there’s a real desire to prepare, and to have conversational dialogue ready and a few questions to fall back on. Things they can practise beforehand so they feel more confident when they’re actually in the moment.
None of this is particularly unusual. I think most of us have had conversations where we’ve scrambled around in our heads for something to say next.
But hearing it come up more than once in coaching made me wonder:
Has the way we communicate changed?
What’s changed? Has anything in particular evolved or devolved since I was at school or university? It would be easy to blame social media.
Young people today have grown up communicating in ways that simply weren’t part of my own experience growing up. Messaging, social media, gaming and online communities are all part of how people connect now.
A lot of digital communication gives us something face-to-face conversation doesn’t: time. There’s time to think about what we want to say, rewrite something that doesn’t sound quite right, delete it altogether or decide whether to respond now, later or not at all. There can be a protective element to that too. Communicating through a screen gives us some distance from another person’s immediate reaction. And, in many cases, more control over how and when we respond.
Face-to-face conversation removes some of that protective layer. We listen, take something in and respond in the moment, without the option to edit the sentence that came out slightly wrong. We see the other person’s reaction as it happens, and they see ours. Sometimes there’s simply silence and we don’t immediately know what to say next.
It raises an interesting question about the communication environments we become accustomed to. If much of our communication happens in spaces that give us more time, distance and control, what happens when we move into one that doesn’t? Could spontaneous conversation naturally feel a little more exposing?
But it’s important not to reduce this to a simple “young people are always on their phones” argument. Ofcom’s research into how children and young people use the internet shows a much more mixed picture. In 2025, 72% of 13 to 17-year-olds who used social media and messaging platforms said they helped them feel closer to their friends.
So online communication clearly isn’t just replacing “real” relationships. For many young people, it is part of those relationships. Perhaps the more pressing question is what happens when we move between different communication environments, and whether we’ve had enough opportunity to become comfortable in both.
Is this actually about communication skills?
When someone says, “I don’t know what to say”, it can sound like a skills problem. But stay with it a little longer and broader fears begin to emerge. Fears of awkward silences, saying the wrong thing, running out of questions, or coming across poorly to others.
Suddenly, we’re not really talking about whether someone can communicate. We’re talking about how confident they feel when they don’t know exactly what is going to happen next.
There’s a big difference between “I don’t know how to have a conversation” and “I don’t trust myself to handle a conversation I haven’t prepared for.” That distinction feels important, because once conversation starts to feel like something we need to do well, preparing for it makes perfect sense.
We learn conversation by having conversations
Communication often gets described as a “soft skill”, which can feel slightly odd when you consider just how much is happening in one ordinary conversation. We’re listening while working out what someone means, reading their tone and body language, thinking about how to respond and judging when to talk and when to listen. We’re asking questions, noticing misunderstandings, navigating pauses and, sometimes, saying the wrong thing and having to find our way back.
And we learn most of this by doing it. It reinforces something that feels quite obvious when you stop and think about it: we get better at talking to people by talking to people.
Which leads to another question:
Who gets the chance to practise?
It’s important to remember that not everyone starts from the same place. This is where communication becomes particularly relevant when we talk about social mobility. As young people move through education and into the workplace, we expect them to speak up in seminars, network, contribute in meetings, navigate interviews, and build relationships with colleagues and senior professionals.
And often, the advice is simply to “put yourself out there”.
But there’s a lot hidden inside that advice. How do you introduce yourself to someone more senior than you? What do you actually say at a networking event? How do you join a group conversation, know what to ask next or end an interaction without it feeling awkward? And what happens when something you say just doesn’t land?
For some young people, these situations are already fairly familiar. For others, they’re completely new. Sometimes what looks like natural confidence may simply be the result of having had more opportunities to practise.
So perhaps we need to be careful about asking why a young person isn’t confident enough to put themselves forward without also asking what opportunities they’ve had to build that confidence in the first place.
Navigating high-stakes workplace expectations
As young people enter professional environments, the stakes around these communication expectations naturally become much higher.
These aren’t just nice-to-have skills. Communication and other interpersonal skills continue to be valued by employers. The Skills England Annual Skills Report 2026 also highlights a gap between education and employment, with practical skills such as networking and interview preparation often left for young people to develop independently.
That’s where the tension is.
Yet we often expect young people to handle these interactions smoothly and feel surprised when they lack confidence doing so.
If communication confidence comes through experience and practice, perhaps we need to ask not just whether a young person is ready to do these things, but where they’ve had the opportunity to learn how.
So, what can coaching offer?
There are practical things we can do.
Preparing a few open questions can help.
Thinking about conversation starters can help.
Practising how to introduce yourself can help.
Sometimes that little bit of preparation is exactly what someone needs to walk into a situation that feels unfamiliar. But coaching can also help us go underneath it:
What underlying expectations are you holding for this conversation?
What does a successful, natural exchange look like to you?
What do you think a pause means?
Who do you find easiest to talk to, and why?
What responsibility are you taking for keeping the conversation going?
What would happen if you didn’t say the perfect thing?
That’s where the conversation can start to shift. Someone might begin by wanting to know exactly what they should say, but over time the focus can become less about having the right words ready and more about trusting themselves to handle the conversation, even when they don’t know exactly what they’re going to say.
That feels bigger than learning a few communication techniques. It’s about building confidence and, perhaps, a little more self-trust too.
Making room for imperfect conversation
There’s no need to panic that young people have forgotten how to talk to each other. But when they tell us communication feels difficult, it’s worth getting curious about what might be making it feel that way rather than jumping straight to how they can do it “better”.
Conversation is messy. We pause, stumble over words, misunderstand each other and think of the perfect response ten minutes after it has ended. That doesn’t mean we’ve communicated badly. It means we’re human.
So perhaps the question for coaches, educators and employers is how we give more young people opportunities to practise, get things wrong and try again. Not knowing what to say straight away doesn’t mean something has gone wrong. The more opportunities young people have to experience that, the less pressure there might be to get every conversation “right”.
After all, the goal of a conversation isn’t perfection; it’s connection. Because when we teach young people that imperfect conversations are still valuable ones, we aren't just teaching them how to talk, we’re teaching them that their voice belongs in the room.
