Job interviewers often say, “Tell me about yourself?”
Does this question make you shrivel with fear because you think that you”re a boring person?
In this day and age, social media makes many people feel hopelessly uninteresting.
You may feel like you have nothing interesting or exciting to share online, but everyone else is visiting Costa Rica or rescuing a puppy from a flood.
You don’t have to settle for having a boring personality.
To become a more interesting person, you need to develop new skills and interests and have new experiences.
How Do You Know If You’re Boring?
After fumbling through a conversation, you may feel like smacking your palm against your face and declaring, “I’m boring.” Recognizing the problem is the first step to solving it.
Signs that you are boring include:
- When you talk, the other person does not respond and ends the conversation.
- You do not have hobbies or special interests to talk about.
- You frequently make negative comments.
- You put yourself down.
- You do not laugh much.
- You follow a strict routine without spontaneity.
- You often say “No” to everything.
- You don’t share opinions or don’t have many opinions to share.
If you’re wondering, “Is it OK to be a boring person,” the answer is yes. In the grand scheme of things, a dull personality causes no harm to the world.
However, you may wish that you possessed more sparkle. You probably want to be more exciting but lack the skills or opportunity.
Don’t worry. You can cultivate new interests and give your personality a chance to blossom.
Why Am I Boring?
Insecurity could cause you to be boring. You feel uncertain about letting your true self show through. Instead, you take the safe route and shield yourself in a shell of blandness.
If insecurity is not the culprit, you may possess a naturally reserved personality. This means that you prefer privacy over revealing your experiences and views.
Other answers to the question, “What makes someone boring?” include:
- You’ve lived a sheltered life with limited experiences.
- You aren’t well-read or curious about learning.
- You are self-centered.
- Your fear people’s judgment.
- You never learned how to tell stories about yourself.
- You can’t interpret people’s body language when it shows that they have lost interest in what you’re saying.
- You don’t have any insights to offer.
Sometimes being a boring person happens because you are bored. To address your concerns about being boring, you should figure out whether or not your life is boring.
A chronic lack of stimulation could leave you subdued and uninterested in your surroundings. For example, a dull, repetitive job could numb your mind and exhaust you physically.
You just don’t have the energy to do anything.
On the other hand, a boring life could be the result of being a boring person. Either way, you’ll be happier if you make an effort to jolt your life or personality out of a rut.
Am I Boring? 21 Ways to Be More Exciting and Interesting
Your quest to learn how not to be boring begins with making yourself more interesting. Here are some ways to start padding your personality’s resume.
1. Show Interest in Other People
Whether you’re habitually self-centered or painfully shy, you can sidestep those issues by asking people about their experiences or feelings. Some people appreciate someone ready to listen.
You can come across as exciting to a person who typically walks through life unheard and unnoticed. When someone tells you something, ask a follow-up question.
Keep the conversation going and try to learn more about the person.
2. Acquire New Skills
This one is important. People who cultivate the habit of lifelong learning are rarely bored or boring.
The skills you pursue can be work-related or only crucial to your personal life. From learning how to tune up a lawnmower to acquiring a new professional credential, the pursuit of additional skills will keep you from falling into a rut.
3. Enter a Competition
Entering a competitive event is quite stimulating. There is a competition somewhere for almost anything.
Dog shows, baking competitions, writing contests, photography contests, and amateur athletics are just a few ways you can put yourself into the heart of the action.
Win or lose, you’ll have participated in an exciting experience and met new people.
4. Learn Some Fun Trivia
Read a book or research interesting trivia online. Use what you learn as conversation starters.
If you can tell people something they didn’t know before, they will find you intriguing and memorable.
5. Study Philosophy
You don’t need to pursue a college degree in philosophy, but investigating different life perspectives prepares you to offer deeper insights during conversations.
Reading what famous philosophers have concluded over the centuries helps you form opinions about things that matter to you and others.
6. Be Willing to Share Your Opinions
Opinions are the spice of conversation, but boring people rarely say anything meaningful or enlightening.
Opinions provide clues about how you view the world and what you value.
Try to find a balance between expressing too many opinions (without listening to others) and keeping them bottled up. Be open to the views of others without trying to convince them that you are always right.
7. Be Compassionate
Show people that you care, and they will regard you as a caring and involved person.
A sympathetic word or helping hand goes a long way toward building an emotional connection between two people.
8. Embrace the Lighter Side
Your personality may be more serious than boring. However, your humorless style could cause people to call you boring.
Humans love to laugh together. It’s a mechanism for smoothing over embarrassing situations or bad luck.
Some things in life are serious as a heart attack, but most situations benefit from a willingness to joke and laugh.
9. Pursue a Hobby
A boring person has few hobbies or interests (beyond watching TV and scrolling through their phone).
Just as you should expand your skills, you should engage in a hobby. A hobby could also build your skills or simply be enjoyable.
Your hobby gives you something to talk about. When you meet someone who shares your hobby, you gain a chance to have an exciting conversation.
10. Learn How to Tell a Story
People can come across as boring because they botch telling what would otherwise be an exciting story.
Organize your story by starting with a startling fact that will get people’s attention. Then present the setting and situation and explain the points in a logical order.
Be sure to end with a bang that leaves listeners satisfied.
11. Memorize Some Stories to Tell
Spontaneity may not be your strong suit. When put on the spot, your thoughts can abandon your brain.
To prepare for those times when you want to hold people’s attention, memorize some stories to tell.
Relate a weird experience from your life or something shocking that happened in your home town.
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12. Travel Frequently
Exposure to foreign countries automatically provides you with stories that others will find fascinating. Simply having direct experience with another place where the other person hasn’t been will excite interest.
Of course, not everyone can afford to go someplace exotic, but the point is to get off the couch and go somewhere.
Many nearby destinations can enrich your life. It could be a local museum, state park, or whale watching tour.
13. Have a Positive Attitude
Teach yourself to show some positivity when appropriate. Interesting people are generally positive.
If you complain about everything, people will label you as dull. Maybe your complaints are legitimate, but no one wants to hear the downside of everything.
14. Have an Open Mind
Having an open mind means that you’ll have more exposure to different points of view.
You don’t have to agree with everything you hear, but the new information enriches your knowledge anyway.
You’ll learn to understand people better and have more meaningful conversations as a result.
15. Set Goals for Yourself
Goals orient your life around new challenges. When you accomplish a goal, you automatically have something new and exciting to talk about.
Even if you fail at a goal, you probably learned quite a bit along the way. Believe it or not, some people will be interested to hear what went wrong for you.
16. Control Your Fear of Being Authentic
All of us wear masks of some type around other people. To some extent, it is a normal function of social activity.
But just how different is your act from the real you?
You don’t want to hide everything because this leaves a dull blank of a person. Let people see some authenticity to make you more relatable as a person.
17. Learn to Judge Your Audience
Sharing opinions and telling stories makes you more interesting, but be sure to consider your audience.
If you share the wrong information with certain people, you might offend them. For example, a hunting story could upset a vegan.
Try to match your conversation topics to the people listening to you. This skill makes you more attractive to your audience and spares you from hurting feelings.
18. Don’t Let Yourself Ramble
You’ve overcome your insecurity, told an interesting story, but now you’re babbling on and on.
Part of being interesting is grabbing the spotlight, but you don’t want to hog it.
Quit while you’re ahead and let someone else speak. Don’t turn your good story into a boring one.
If you catch yourself rambling, ask the listener a question to shift the conversation.
19. Consume a Variety of Media
Interesting people constantly fill their heads with new information. Find some fascinating websites and people to follow online.
You can make a point to read different genres of books to expand your knowledge.
Listen to your local radio station and follow the local, national, and international news. This way, you’ll often have something interesting to share in conversations.
20. Join a Group
Isolation can turn you into a boring person. Adults often struggle to maintain their social lives, but groups are out there that you could join.
They can revolve around investing, cosplay, gardening, saving stray cats, or volunteering to clean a riverbank.
Participation in a group could be just what you need to shake off the label of boring.
21. Don’t Hide Your Quirks
Quirks can range from annoying to endearing, but they are usually interesting.
If you have to arrive early for everything or hate to ride in elevators, you don’t have to keep these quirks secret. Mention them freely to explain your behavior.
These distinct aspects of your personality are part of what makes you attractive.
Self-Improvement Beats Feeling Like You’re Boring
The realization that you might be a little boring has probably taken your confidence down a notch.
However, you can congratulate yourself for choosing to become a more interesting and exciting person.
Maybe a boring life is dragging you down, or you never took the time to cultivate your personality. Whatever the cause, you can break free from the cycle of nothingness.
Pick something new to do and go out there and have some new experiences.
