Chad Silverstein explains how asking questions and genuinely listening makes you a better conversationalist. He introduces the practice of 'seven good minutes' as a way to improve how you communicate and connect with others.
Chapters
Seven good minutes. That was always a favorite in practice. You know, you don't usually stop and talk to people and really give them the time that it really does require to make people feel like nothing else exists. I'm listening to whatever you're saying. I'm genuinely curious about learning about what it is that you think about whatever it is we're talking about. And it's hard to say that you always feel that way. But seven good minutes and playing that with a teammate allows us to slow down and get paid to sit there and ask questions to my teammate and learn about that person and see what kind of similarities we have and how distinctly different we are and not focus on me. And I think, you know, when people have such a hard time having conversations and being a good conversationalist, it's because if you watch people talk, they always turn it inward. They start talking about themselves. They relate it to themselves instead of following up and talking about what they heard and asking a follow up question to learn more. And I think there's something real powerful in teaching people how to do that and then practicing it and then the learning that you get and the relationships that you get to build, the things that you find out. You know, the Chet talks about how the average couple in America talks for 14 minutes a day. And a lot of it's transactional, and I can see it. So unless you make time to be deliberate and connect with people that you care about, asking them curious questions, following up and not making it about you, you know, it's hard to improve your relationships. It's hard to build new ones. But if you want to be a good conversationalist, that's all you have to do is become great at asking great questions and tee people up. People do like to talk about themselves, so let them talk about themselves. You'd be surprised. They might think you're the best conversationalist and all you do is ask questions. So seven good minutes. Have fun doing that in practice, and then have fun playing with it out in your life.
