How To Become A Conversation Master

Welcome to Shrink for the shy Guy. This is the show for you. If you are sick and tired of being held back by fear, self doubt, social anxiety, shyness, anything that's stopping you from you being you. I'm going to share the most powerful tools and resources that I've been discovering over the last 15 years on my journey to eradicate social anxiety and instill confidence first in myself and then in every single person that I meet on my journey. You're going to learn these tools and how to apply them in your life now so that you can become the most free, powerful, bold, authentic version of you. Hey, welcome. Today's episode of the show. Today we're going to be talking about conversation mastery. Oh, yes. This is an incredibly important topic, one of my favorites. And in fact, we have an event coming up very soon, just about a month out, a little more, maybe five weeks about this. Exactly. It's called Supremely Confident Conversation Master, where we guide people through teaching exercises, activities, games, to where people really leave that event as a conversation master. So if you're interested in that, I'll talk more about that later in the show. But what I want you to have here today is a pathway, is a map to show you that you can get there now, depending on where you are in your journey. I really started with a lot of social anxiety. Consider myself shy, consider myself very introverted. And if someone told me, like, aziz, do you want to become a conversation master? I would have thought, what the hell are you talking about? That's not possible for me. So obviously, wherever you are in that journey, the first step is going to be seeing that as a possibility for you, and we're going to get into that in a minute as well. But, you know, maybe you are further along than that. Maybe you don't feel, like, completely held back and not able to talk to anybody. But you do want to become more proficient in conversations, more skillful in conversations, more of a conversation master. So no matter where you are on the scale, as it were, you can grow, you can become better, you can become freer. And what I love about the skill of becoming a conversation master is it truly is achievable by anyone. It doesn't require some sort of genetic predisposition. It's not just how you were born. That's the old story. That's the fixed mindset, which we're gonna help you release in this episode. But really it's about knowing and discovering and just figuring out how to do it. And you can trust me, you can do this. And Maybe you already know this and you're just looking for some techniques and tips and strategies. And we'll share that in today's episode too. It's gonna be action packed. So let's start with this. If you were to master conversations, what is that for you? If you saw yourself as a conversation master, highly skilled at it, really good at it, what would you do? Maybe take a moment to really reflect on different areas of your life, how it affects you. I mean, a big area that affects people, obviously is work. How they show up at work, who they interact with, how they interact, I mean, with everyone at work, right? With your team members, with your employers, with your employees, with customers, with clients, with partners. I mean, if our conversation confidence and skills are low, it's hard. We don't make good impressions, we don't move people, we're reactive. And there's so many nuances to these skills, aren't there? And we're going to get into what some of the sub skills are in just a minute. But imagine you really had the conversation confidence that you wanted at work and other areas of your life as well. Maybe in your social life, what could that bring? How much more fun could you have? Going out, interacting, socializing? I mean, for me, I used to hate parties, gatherings, dances, all that stuff. I just feel so awkward. I didn't know how to talk to people. It felt so uncomfortable. I felt like there was this huge barrier between me and the people that I wanted. This started when I was young and I'd be there on the side of a dance or a school function or something like that, and just, oh, look at all those people over there. They're like 10ft away, but they might as well be a million miles away. There was like this invisible wall between me and them that was keeping me on the outside, keeping me separate. Now, for you, it might be socially you feel that it might be with people you're attracted to, someone you want to date. So what's on the other side of that? What is you as a conversation master socially? What do you see for yourself? What do you want for yourself? One client I worked with was shifting his leveling up in his career and he had been an attorney for many years and was going to go be an attorney in Europe somewhere. I think it was in Vienna. And he'll be involved in some sort of world organization. Maybe it was the World Health Organization. I don't know. It's been a while since the details are a little fuzzy for me. But basically he says, you know, I'm going to go from doing a lot of law work, legal work, to a lot of schmoozing with bigwigs, as he called it, with influencers. And he's got to talk to people and interact with them. And he just felt totally uncertain about his ability to do that. And so for him, he had this image of wearing a tuxedo at one of these black tie events and just. Just walking in there, interacting with people and starting conversations, making great impressions, making people laugh. So whatever, no matter where it is, or maybe it's just hanging out with some friends and being comfortable in your own skin. We gotta have a vision for this, and we're spending a little bit of time on this because it's so important. So what do you most want? What does being a Conversation Master look like for you? Now, this is the most important step. Is this possible for you? Can you see this? Because if you have this vision, this fantasy of being this way, and you don't see it as possible, some part of you sees it and another part says, yeah, right, then it is that. Just that it's just a fantasy. And what happens is we don't really take the steps to create it. So my outcome for this episode today is that you really do see how possible it is and how obtainable it is. So just check in with yourself. Right now you have this vision of how you'd be as a Conversation Master. And then on a scale of 0 to 10, how certain do you feel that you could achieve this, you could become this if you really applied yourself. Not just wishful thinking and hoping and fantasizing about it, but actually like you're gonna put some effort in, put some work in, perhaps come to the Conversation Master event that I'm teaching. That might be a great way to accelerate it or go through Confidence University. We have a whole course called Social Mastery. You know, really invest some time, some focus, some energy. Invest in this, in yourself. If you were to do that with me or something else or another book or something, but you were actually to apply yourself and consistently practice, how much do you believe from 0 to 10 that you could become a Conversation Master? This vision you have for yourself, great. Now what is that number, 0 to 10? You got it in your head. Why? Why is it that number? What story is getting in the way for you? Unless it's a 10, then great. But maybe there's a reason why it's lower. There's a story, and usually the stories are like, I don't have what it takes. There's something different about me. There's something wrong with me. It's an identity story. Sometimes, like, I'm not a social person. I'm not skilled at talking to people. I don't have what it takes. I'm missing something. These stories are often vague. There's something wrong with me. I'm defective. I'm less than others. I'm too nervous, too anxious, too awkward. Or I'm not enough. I'm not smart enough, quick enough, I haven't read enough articles, I don't know what's going on in current events enough. I'm not funny enough, I'm not interesting enough. Whatever the stories might be, they all come out of the woodwork. And that's what keeps our number low. And they are 100% BS. Because here's the thing. Success in any area of your life is nothing more than learning and implementing the next skill. Not all the skills at once, just the next one. And conversation mastery. I mean, would you agree with me if I said that conversations, the ability to converse with anyone, is a skill? Do you believe that? Do you think it's something you can get better at? And maybe not you, because you have this story about why you couldn't but say someone else, like outside you just imagine, you know, Jim over there. So does Jim. If Jim wanted to become better at conversations, could he do it? If he really applied himself, probably. You think? Yeah, right. So if that's the case, then how do we do that? And if Jim can do it, maybe you can do it too. And there's a client that came. Actually, he's been a client for several years. I absolutely love him. He's in my Mastermind program and he's made. His life is just radically transformed in so many beautiful ways. But he first came. The first event he came to was a conversation, the supremely confident conversation master event we did a couple years ago. And he came in there and had a super strong story that he was not interesting enough. And so he was spending all his time trying to become more interesting, reading more things online, doing more engaging activities. He's like, I need to travel more so I can have more interesting stories. I need to be a more interesting person. And we started to work with him on this and actually brought him up to the did some one on one hot seat work with him at the event. And what came out of that was the sub skills and the sub skills he was missing. And if you could just learn those skills, he could become a conversation master. And now he's extremely smooth and proficient at conversations it's fun to watch. And I like to tease him about that first meeting that we had. So with this, what are the sub skills? What do you think it is? So any major skill, like if conversations are a skill, what are the sub skills? Same thing with the guitar, right? Let's take something, an example that you might be able to follow along with. So in a guitar, you watch someone just shredding on the guitar, you're like, oh, my God, they. They're amazing, right? Or they can play these beautiful melodic chords as they sing, whatever it is. But you're watching them and you're like, man, how do they do that? Well, actually, it's just a series of sub skills. And if you play the guitar, you'll know this. And if not, you can just imagine where first they have to know how to hold the guitar, then they need to know how to make some chords, right? Chords are just when you press down several fingers on the neck of the guitar to hold down different strings, and then do that with your left hand. That's a chord. And there's different chords, right? Like a chord, G chord, C chord, a minor, G7. All these different chords, right? So you have to know the chords, what strings to press, where on, what fret. And you also have to know, you know, what progressions you might do with the chords. You might have to be able. You actually have to physically be able to do it with your fingers. Now, some of those chords, you gotta be able to stretch your hand in all these weird ways, and that comes through practice. So knowing chords, that's a sub skill, right? First, knowing how to hold a guitar, that's an easier one. You can learn that one pretty quick. Knowing chords, well, you can learn some basic chords very quick. Some of the chords just involve pressing down one or two strings really easy. You got that skill. You can learn that. Then there's. You actually have to strum the guitar or pluck the strings. You have to do something with your right hand to actually be able to play the guitar. And that's another skill set. And you can go crazy deep on that. Like flamenco guitarists and stuff, they do some crazy stuff with their strumming hand, and it makes for these amazing things. And I remember there's a short period of time that I was studying flamenco guitar. I mean, I love the guitar. I studied classical guitar for many years, and then there's a short period of time where I wanted to study flamenco. So I did some lessons on it. And, man, they can do stuff with their fingers. That are so fast on the right hand. So that's just a short list. I mean, there's more sub skills, right? There's scales, there's learning actual songs, there's knowing how to solo and knowing how to play by ear. I mean, we could list a million sub skills, but we're not here to learn about guitar mastery. We're learning to hear about conversation mastery. I just want to give you an example so you could see that it maps on in the exact same way. So let's look at conversation mastery. What do you think would be some of the sub skills for conversation mastery? What comes to your mind? Instead of me just telling you, let's actually brainstorm this together. Let's actually get you engaged in active learning. Because if I just tell it, you can be like, oh, neat, neat. But if you think of it, you're like, oh, yeah. And then you can start to think about, well, how proficient am I in that sub skill? Well, here's a basic one. Basic one would be starting a conversation with somebody knowing how to initiate, right? A very important skill. Because otherwise, if you don't have that, then you can only start conversations when someone introduces you or when someone approaches you. And a lot of people that are struggling with conversation confidence and conversation mastery don't have that skill, or they haven't developed it, I should say. And so it's literally off the table. Remember I said earlier how it felt like I'd be at a social gathering, and it felt like people were a million miles away, and it didn't matter if they were right there. I just. I couldn't break through that invisible wall. That invisible wall was. I did not have the skill of initiating conversations. One simple skill. So here's the thing. A lot of these sub skills, if you don't have them, you can't do the major skill. Like, if you don't know how to make chords on the guitar, you can do some other stuff. You can still play the guitar, but you're going to be pretty limited in what you can do. And it's the same thing with that. If you can't initiate conversations, you're going to be pretty limited in what you can do. So what's another major skill of conversation mastery? What comes to your mind? Well, obviously, being able to know what to say next in conversations. That's a big one. People are like, I don't know what to say next. Right? So know what to say next. I'm just gonna start to list them off now. Being able to listen effectively to other People like actually listen and pay attention to what they're saying, not just being up in our own heads thinking about whatever, something else, what we're gonna say next, all that stuff. We also need to know how to have effective communication from our body language. And that's the way you stand, the way you move, how you look at people. I mean, little things like that. Like if someone's talking to you and you're kind of scanning the room, have you ever done that? Have you ever been in a situation where you've been talking to someone and they just keep scanning the room around as you're talking, and instead of looking at you, they're just looking behind you and to the side. Pretty soon you're like, does this person want to be done talking to me? Now what if you have a habit with your eye contact that you don't want to be talking to someone else, you don't want to end the conversation, but you get uncomfortable and you have a hard time holding eye contact. And sometimes you might be aware of this, and sometimes people aren't aware of this. They break eye contact when they start sharing about themselves or when the other person says something that makes them feel uncomfortable or inferior in some way. And then the person you're speaking is like, oh, maybe you don't want to talk to me. But that's not the case. You just maybe haven't developed the skill of the non verbals or the eye contact. So these sub skills are absolutely essential to, to mastering conversations. And that's what we go in depth into in the conversation master event where we will help you identify these skills and then practice them one by one to where you get proficient at them. And here's the beautiful thing. What I love about conversation mastery is it doesn't take long to master these skills. It doesn't take long to get proficient at these skills. And if you combine a lot of these skills together, you become better than average at conversations extremely quickly. And here's the biggest thing, the biggest obstacle with this stuff is actually not even our skills. It's our confidence. Because a lot of this stuff you already naturally do. When you're feeling comfortable, when you're feeling relaxed, when you're not worried about someone judging you or if you're enough or not, you naturally make good eye contact. You know how to start a conversation, you know what to say next, you know how to listen. So you can actually do all these things when you're in the right emotional state, or I like to think of it as when you're right on the right channel. You're on the confidence channel. You're being on your own side, you're relaxed in your body, Boom. All of a sudden, this stuff becomes accessible. And then, of course, yeah, there's another level of skill that you could learn, you can master. And we teach some of that, too, at the event where we go into, say, being able to identify keywords. So I'm going to share a little bit, just give you a little taste of it right now, which is when someone's talking and you're wondering to know what to say next. And this one comes up a lot. It's like, I don't know what to say next. And then sometimes we don't want to initiate a conversation with somebody. We don't want to apply that skill, not because we don't know how, but because we're scared. And we're scared of what? If I get into a conversation and then I don't know what to say next and just sort of pause for dramatic, deathlike awkwardness right here. And so let's address that right now. So how do we know what to say next? Well, one thing we want to do is want to be able to identify key words. So when someone is sharing, and this is where you want to actually pay attention when they're talking, as opposed to thinking, I don't say next, I don't know what to say next, I better say something good. But instead, just actually listen to them. And what they're going to do is they're going to provide you all the different directions that you want to go in that conversation. So you ask them about their day, or they're talking about something they did over the weekend, or they're talking about something related to their family or whatever, and they're sharing about themselves. Then you listen, and let me just give you a little sampler. So someone says, well, yeah, I had a great Sunday. I spent the day with my two kids. Their mom had a break, and I just took the kids and we went to a baseball game. It was such a delight to be out there on the field. And oh, man, what a fun day it was. Most of the person said that, okay, were you paying attention or did you gloss over? Like, man, this is a really long story. One time I was at a tent at a festival with Candace, and we were just laying in the tent. I think it was late morning, and there was a bunch of people in other tents nearby, and there was these two little kids that were some friends of ours, kids. And those kids were Walking around, and you could hear them talking outside of the tent. And so we're just lounging in the tent, having a great time. Man, I love those days. Pre kids, we were going to different festivals, like Burning man, and we had this beloved festival in Oregon. We just sleep in our sleeping bags in the tent after staying up to whatever in the morning and just sleeping naked next to each other. It was beautiful. So we're in the tent and we're just lounging in the morning, and we hear one kid say, yeah, we were looking for you when we were coming in from camping on Thursday and we didn't find you. And then it turned out that your tent was only 3/10 away from us. And then the other kid said, wow, that was a really long story. We just both absolutely cracked up. First of all, that wasn't really that long of a story. Second of all, what an awesome thing to say to somebody when they're telling you a story. You're just like, wow, that was a really long story. Anyway, so. So use that if you ever want to tell someone that their story was too long. So when I was sharing, though, earlier, now that I put that story in there to distract you, let's see how good your memory really is. What did that person share with you in this case? This hypothetical person who did what. What did he do on a. What day of the week was. Was a Sunday. And what did he do? He went to a baseball game. And who did he go with? His kids. Okay, so what are the keywords? And then really think about this like you're doing a search on the Internet, going to Google or something. Like, what are the key words that this person just shared? What are the ones that come to your mind? All right, well, I just basically gave them to you. Sunday time with kids as a dad and baseball game. So now you've identified the key words. Now you have so many different directions you can go, right? Like, you could talk about the weekend itself. You could talk about baseball, you could talk about his experience with his kids, right? And what do you do when you talk about it? You could ask a question. Oh, that sounds great. What? You know, obviously, if he's local in your city, then you might know that you already know the baseball team, right? But it's like, oh, who do they play? Who did we play? Or who was in the game? How was the game? You could just ask that question. Or you could ask something about the kids. Oh, that sounds great. What did you guys do together? Or what was it like at the game? So actually, what I'm holding myself back from is I was trying to think of a really basic question you could ask. But where my mind instantly starts to go is into the levels of connection. And this is another aspect of conversation mastery where you can ask more engaging. This is how to create your conversations and make them way more engaging, which is to be able to ask deeper questions that really draw people out. So how was the game? You know, you're gonna get some information about that, but where is the juice, do you think, for this person in this conversation, just based upon what I shared earlier, you could hear it in his voice tone. The juice was being with his kids, right? Because he said, oh, man, it just feels so great to be with them. Right? So you could say, oh, great. How was the game? What was the score? What player had the highest, you know, batting rate? I don't even know baseball statistics, Right. But, you know, what was the highest hit rate ratio? Batting ratio. Oh, God. Batting average. Is that the. My baseball knowledge is terrible in any case. So you could go that route. But maybe that's not where the juice is for him. So you might want to. You'll get a much more engaging conversation if you feel. You get a sense like, oh, wow, he's really into his kids. Okay, well, let me ask about that. And you can say, wow, it sounds like it was such a great time with your kids. And you'd just be like, yeah, oh, man. What's fun about it? What do you love about taking your kids to baseball games? What's something fun that you did there? And then you could even add even more, which is like, did you guys get any food at the game? Right? Cause that's a big part of baseball, especially with kids. I remember I've only been to a couple baseball games my whole life, and they were all as kids. Cause once I got. No, I went to one as an adult. And then I was like, what am I doing here? I don't even like baseball. But as a kid, we went a couple of times. We lived a couple hours south of San Francisco in Santa Cruz. And so we would, you know, this big trek up to San Francisco to watch the San Francisco Giants play. And honestly, I didn't even care about the game. I was all about the food, baby. They had these hot dogs could get. And then after the hot dog, you get this ice cream. And the ice cream came in this, like, big cup. It was big. It was like a cup of noodles kind of cup. And then maybe not Styrofoam, maybe paper and it came with this wooden spoon, this wooden flat spoon. It was chocolate. And I would just like dig into this thing and I couldn't even eat the whole thing. It was probably one time, a few times in my life where there was so much dessert there. After eating a big hot dog, I could barely finish it. Now looking back, I'm like, holy cow, that's a lot of food for like an eight year old kid. Obviously you could tell what excited me about it. And so this is one other technique that we teach at the conversation mastery and help you really get is what I call follow the fascination. So if you really want to bond with people and have just a great connection with them, instead of just asking them about their kids and how great to connect with them, you could do what I just did there. You could be like, oh, I remember when I was a kid and I went to baseball games and blah, blah, blah, and I had this ice cream and it was so good. Did you get food with your kids? So now you're sharing this story that lights you up. It's going to probably light him up too, because it's going to help him feel more connected to you and connected to his kids. And he's like, oh my gosh, we have these shared experiences and then he's going to want to tell you about it and you guys start to springboard off of each other and it becomes this whole engaging experience. So as you can see, we're just scratching the surface. And what I really want to show you here in this episode is that you can learn this skill now. Can I teach you everything in this skill in this episode? No, there's too much. We got to go in depth into these things. You got to practice these things. So I would say, what are you going to do to master this skill and why is it a must for you? In fact, let's actually answer that in your action step right now. Time for action. Action, action. Why would you want to master conversations? That's your action step right now. Why is it worth it to become a conversation master? Putting in that effort, putting in that time, like, why would you want to do that? What will it bring to your life? Think about that. Whatever drives you, right? What kind of connection could it bring to your life to feel more connected? I mean, here's the thing. What really lit me up about this is when I discovered this, it wasn't just about making deeper friendships, which was awesome. I got that. And it wasn't just about dating, which made my dating life much better. And it Also helped me a lot in my career, even at that stage when I didn't have much of a career going. And now it's extremely useful. I can talk to people, network, connect people like me. So it's extremely valuable in that way and always. But, you know, the thing that really lights me up the most is this sense of I can connect with anyone anywhere. And coming from a guy who was just super socially anxious and thought of myself as awkward and people don't like me and I'm on the outside and having lived that way for so many years, to really be like, oh, you can drop me in any environment, a party, a conference, a networking event, a dinner gathering, a wedding, anywhere a friend brings me somewhere and I don't know anybody, just plop me into an environment and boom, I can connect with people and have fun. And not just chit chat, because good God, superficial conversations, barf. Like, no one likes those. But to actually be able to get into conversations and then steer them into moments of connection, moments of where we light up, where we have fun, where we're laughing, where we feel connected, where we talk about meaningful stuff, I mean that to be able to do that and really connect with anyone, that's an extraordinary gift and I'd love for you to be able to experience that. So if you want to take it further, to really learn this stuff, I think there's the best pathway. The fastest way is immersion, and that's going to be to come to the supremely confident Conversation Master event. We have a few tickets left still that you can get in there on and you can click down below on this episode@drinkforthshyguy.com and we'll have a link to join us for that. And we will have a super special bonus discount code just for you guys. And we'll put it up there temporarily on the site. So go to shrinkforthshyguy.com, click on this episode and then there'll be a special code there and you'll want to enter that code in as you get your ticket for the conversation. This is just a gift for my podcast listeners. So if you've been listening to the show for a while and you really want to come, and what we'll do is that'll take 50% off of the ticket. So that's going to be an incredible opportunity to make it easier to get out here. And I would love, love, love to spend that time with you. It's one of my favorite events. We just have so much fun. People are laughing so much at that event as we learn these skills, because it's about learning and having fun and really just activating that most confident version of you that already knows how to do all this stuff. So that's the best way. Second best way, if you're not going to come out here for the event, is to get yourself a copy of Confidence University and go through the Social Mastery course. And on the way, you're going to need to go through the ultimate Confidence foundation, which is everyone that goes into Confidence University has got to go through the foundation because it helps you really get into that place of fearless, bold, being on your own side, liking who you are, knowing your value, being able to take action. Because if you can't do that, you can't learn any skill. And then we get into more of the Social Mastery in the next course that you can take in there. So you can also have a link down below for Confidence University so you can check that out. So regardless of which way you go, do something, take action on this and you can learn this, you can master this. If I could do it from the place I was and that level of social anxiety, you absolutely can too. And we've seen this with the case with thousands of people at this point. So it is formulaic. If you put in the work and study these materials, you will get these results. So I'd love to learn more about your confidence journey and hear and see you mastering conversations. By all means, share with me. You can do that@drinkforthshyguy.com and until we speak again, may you have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome. Thanks for listening to Shrink for the shy guy with Dr. Aziz. If you know anyone who can benefit from what you've just heard, please let them know and send them a link to shrinkforthshyguy.com for free vlogs, ebooks and training videos related to overcoming shyness and increasing confidence, go to socialconfidencecenter.com.