PNTV: The Next Conversation by Jefferson Fisher (in 20 minutes)

This one is phenomenal. You want to improve your relationships? I highly, highly, highly recommend it. First thing we need to do if we want to make the next conversation a good one is we need to align with our values. We need to know who we are when we're at our best. If you respect yourself and not the person you're talking to, you're going to be aggressive. If you respect the other person and not yourself, you're going to be submissive. If you respect yourself and you respect the other person, you'll be assertive. I love that frame. Got a little angry, got a little upset, the breathing pattern started to accelerate, the voice started to get a little bit louder. Oops, I lost control. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes TV. Today we've got another great book, The Next Conversation by Jefferson Fisher, subtitle Argue Less, Talk More. This is one of my all-time favorite books. I've done over 750 Philosopher's Notes at this point. This one is phenomenal. You want to improve your relationships? I highly, highly, highly recommend it. As always, we've got a Philosopher's Note on it. You can get this PDF and MP3. It's like a 20-ish, 25-minute MP3, 7-page PDF by clicking on the link in the show notes. And check that out. As always, what I do is pull out the potentially most life-changing big ideas, help you apply them to your life today so we can move from theory to practice to mastery together today. 5 of the ideas we're gonna talk about today, we're gonna start at the top. You gotta know your values if you wanna have that next conversation be what you hope it could be. Then we're gonna talk about the 3 rules of how to show up. Jefferson is a trial lawyer and just has a ton of experience in communication. He's also just a really good dude. I don't spend any time on social media, but my understanding is he has a huge presence online. Check him out, uh, and you can just feel his goodness, um, uh, in the values he aspires to embody. You can feel the integrity with which he lives. Anyway, we got 3 rules that the book is organized around. We're going to talk about rule number 1, rule number 2, and rule number 3. Top secret ones we'll reveal in a moment. Then we're going to talk about, uh, the entire book distilled into 47 seconds. And then most importantly, we're going to talk about the one thing that you can do today to move from theory to practice. So think about that as you watch this. What's resonating? Um, not everything will, of course, but what's resonating and how can you bring this wisdom into your next conversation? Let's get to work. First thing we need to do if we want to make the next conversation a good one is we need to align with our values. We need to know who we are when we're at our best. Jefferson gives us a number of different questions to reflect on, exercises, etc. One of the most powerful I know of is Stephen Covey inspired. He tells us to begin with the end in mind. In our last PNTV, we talked about Mel Robbins' let them, let them do what they're doing and then let me get clarity on who I aspire to be and what I want to do. I talked about Stephen Covey's habit number 1 of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. You got to be proactive, be response-able to show up as your best, stepping in between stimulus and response, choosing that best possible response. Well, that's habit number 1. Habit Habit number 2 is you gotta begin with the end in mind. Before you do anything, and we'll talk about this too in rule number 3, before you do anything, whether it's the next conversation, whatever, you gotta know what you want. Begin with the end in mind. When we talk about our values, one of the most powerful ways to get clarity on your values that you aspire to live by is to go to the ultimate end. So Covey tells us to imagine walking into a funeral, end-of-life ceremony for an individual, and you realize that that end-of-life ceremony is for you. You are that individual who's being celebrated. And the question is, what do those who loved you have to say about you? What values did you embody? That's one way to begin with the ultimate end in mind. Then the challenge is, today's the day. The next conversation is the one in which you want to be in integrity with those values. For Jefferson, one of his values is kindness. Okay, when you're showing up in the next conversation, are you embodying kindness? Are you embodying, for me, wisdom and discipline and gratitude and love and courage? Are these virtues, um, being expressed in our day-to-day lives? And this is essentially what we do with Heroic. We help you get clarity on who you are at your best. What is your identity? We look at it in the Big Three: energy, work, and love. What we believe constitutes a great life. How— who are you at your best? Energy-wise, work-wise, love-wise. What virtues, what values do you embody? And then what behaviors do you engage in to be in integrity with those values or virtues and with that identity? That's how we begin with the end in mind before we enter our next conversation. Here we go. Then we get to the rules. Rule number 1, say it with. So each of the rules is say it with. So the first one is control. Rule number 1, say it with control. Jefferson goes off. I don't know about you, but you might have had a conversation that didn't quite go the way you want, where you lost control. Got a little angry, got a little upset, the breathing pattern started to accelerate, the voice started to get a little bit louder. Oops, I lost control. If you want to, as per the subtitle, to argue less and talk more, you'd be wise to pay attention to rule number 1: say it with control. Jefferson does a great job of walking us through what happens physiologically when we start losing control. We start entering that fight or flight. He calls it the ignite phase. Raise, right? You can feel it, right? Your heart rate starts going up. Maybe it went up before you even started the conversation. You started getting into that fight or flight mode. Each of us will kind of go in one direction or the other, right? And the way that we create control is through our— principally through our breath. So again, with Heroic, we talk about flipping the switch. So when I train elite performers, whether it's Notre Dame football or the European Ryder Cup team, the first thing I teach them— or all of our coaches that we train on these same ideas is to flip the switch. If you want to say it with control, if you want to maintain control in your life, you want to do 3 things. I believe you want to get your physical posture right, right? So stand right now. If you're standing, if you're sitting, assume the posture of you at your best. There's a certain version of you that has a— there's a— the best version of you values-wise holds itself. You hold yourself in a certain way when you're at your best. Shake out any tension, and assume that dignified, poised, calm, confident posture. Then, and what Jefferson emphasizes throughout the book in this section, is your breath. The fastest way to slow down your, uh, thinking, to slow down your heart rate, is to control your breath and to slow down your breath. So we teach this in through your nose, down into your diaphragm, the most underutilized muscle in your body, and then exhale slightly longer than your inhale. That is the fastest way to get out of your fight-or-flight sympathetic response and flip the switch on your rest-and-digest calm parasympathetic expression through your breath. So again, you get your physical posture right, shake out any tension, you bring a smile to your face. For me, it's chest up, chin down, and then relaxed, calm, confident. Bring that breath rate down. Exhaling slightly longer than your inhale, fastest way to flip that switch. And then get your mental focus on something positive. How about your values? Think about the one value you want to engage in in that conversation. Again, for me, it's often wisdom, discipline, love, courage. Kindness was the example I used for Jefferson. But again, the breath is one powerful way to make sure you say it with control. You feel yourself getting out of control, boom, bring yourself back, breathe deeply. And then Jefferson has something he calls a conversational breath. So when it's your turn to speak, and make sure you wait for your turn to speak, don't interrupt, right? Make your first word be your breath. So literally allow a little bit more silence to come in. Don't need to get creepy about it, but allow a little more silence to come in. But silence is confidence, which we'll talk about in the next rule. Through that breath, a conversational breath, take a breath. Before you potentially ignite, explode, etc. Say it with control. That is rule number 1. Rule number 2 is to say it with confidence. This is a really, really cool idea. Now I got confidence tattooed on my arm underneath antifragile. Antifragile confidence. This is another thing that, um, We teach with Heroic, that I do when I do my work with elite performers, antifragile confidence. How do you move from being fragile to being antifragile, where life's challenges make you stronger? Longer chat, we'll save for another time. Confidence. Confidence means intense trust. Con-fidere, two little Latin words. With intense trust. If you want to communicate well, you need to trust yourself, right? And then Jefferson has a great model. He says you want to be assertive. One way that you can articulate what it means to be confident is to be assertive. And he says that assertiveness is essentially the virtuous mean— Aristotle would call it the virtuous mean— between being submissive and being aggressive. So, if I'm submissive, we enter a conversation, and Jefferson says you can map this out over who you respect. If you respect yourself and not the person you're talking to, you're going to be aggressive. If you respect the other person and not yourself, you're going to be submissive. If you respect yourself and you respect the other person, you'll be assertive. I love that frame. Now, again, if I'm submissive and I overly defer to someone else, I don't trust myself enough and respect myself enough, then I'm gonna give in to whatever they say. If I'm aggressive and I have the vice of excess perhaps of, um, that wouldn't be confidence then, but the vice of excess of I'm not respecting the other person, then I'm gonna be aggressive. We want to find that balance where we're assertive, we respect ourselves and communicate that, we also respect that other really, really smart people can hold opinions that are very, very different than ours. Let's allow that to be the case. Then we can be expressive and assertive rather than either submissive or aggressive. Where do you tend to show up? I unquestionably tend to be aggressive, right? I can put— he calls it porcupine quills up and just kind of get aggressive and attack, right? But I can also go the other way and then submit too easily. We all have in our less than enlightened moments a tendency. What are yours? Think about it. Remember rule number 1, say it with control, deep breath, physiological control, and then confidence, assertiveness is the main thing we want to talk about or think about there. Rule number 3 is say it— I guess this would be say it to— connect. So why do— why are we conversing with the individual to begin with? And you should know that the more meaning you put into the conversation and the relationship, the more stress you're gonna feel. Stress goes with meaning. So the fact that you're feeling any anxiety or stress regarding conversations coming up, that's correlated to how much you care. If you didn't care about the person or the conversation, you wouldn't have stress. So your stress goes with meaning, but ultimately we want to have the conversation and we want it to go well because we wanna connect with the individual. Then we do the hard work to develop our ability to say it with control, to say it with confidence, and to say it to connect. And Fisher's main point, among some other great points here— and he gives us 10 other tips, by the way, on how to say it with confidence— you need to know what you want. So you need to know what you want before you enter a conversation. That's pretty obvious, but how often have you just had the conversation and you didn't actually slow down and figure out what do you want. So one of the things that I do that I talk about in the notes is something called the WOOP process. It's a scientifically grounded and validated process developed by Gabriel Oettingen, who wrote a book called Rethinking Positive Thinking. Check out the Philosopher's Notes and the Philosopher's Notes TV episode on that. One of my absolute favorite teachers who basically says you can't just visualize something going well. She studied this rigorously. Like, Secret-like stuff where you just have a vision board, "Oh yeah, I'm gonna go manifest my life," it doesn't work. You're less likely to do the things you need to do if that's all you do is imagine things going great. She says you need to imagine the challenges you're going to face. If I want to lose weight and I'm thinking about the challenges I'm going to face versus just how great I'm going to feel when I lose weight, for example— she's done this research— you will lose more weight if you imagine the challenges you're going to face. Why? Because you can make a plan for it. So she has a process called WOOP. It's W-O-O-P. You start with a wish, then you imagine the outcome you want— positive— then you rub it up against reality. You imagine the obstacles you'll face and the plan you will engage in in order to meet those obstacles. WOOP: wish, outcome, obstacles, plan. I have used that tool hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times. I whoop everything in my life. So if I'm going to have a tough conversation, what's my wish? My number one wish— I didn't use this word that Jefferson uses, but it's to connect. That's what we want. We want to connect. We want to use this challenging conversation as an opportunity to deepen our relationship. Intimacy is forged through challenges. Just like going to the gym, you lift weights in order to get stronger. Well, hard conversations a relationship gym work, right? You're entering the gym, you're doing the hard work, you're lifting heavy weights. That makes you stronger when you do it right and you have that orientation. So my wish is that we're able to talk about these conversations, deepen our relationship, and make progress on XYZ. Wish and outcome kind of go together. What do you want out of this conversation? Then what are your obstacles? What might get in the way of that happening? For me, I might get aggressive. I might get a little bit prickly and porcupiney. Okay, cool. Well, what's my plan? My plan is to take a deep breath. Remember, breath, right? My plan is if— and she has something called if-then implementation intentions that her husband Peter Golwitzer actually created. If this, then that. It's a hugely effective way to navigate life. If I find myself getting a little bit heated, then I'll step back and take a deep breath. Wow, that's cool. And I also want to— my intention, my wish, my outcome would be to live my values. I always write down the virtues I want to embody. I want to embody wisdom and discipline and love and courage in this conversation, and gratitude and hope and curiosity and zest. For me, those are my values. So writing down your values as part of your intention as you aspire to connect Knowing what the obstacles are, knowing what your plan is in the event that you hit those obstacles, is a really, really powerful way to ensure that your next conversation is, uh, involves less arguing and more talking. So we got the values, rule number 1, 2, 3. Now we're going to have the 47-second recap, and I'm going to open the Philosopher's Note in which I pull out this 47-second version. As I mentioned, Jefferson is, um, has a Extraordinary Online Presence, he says this. Final big idea in the Philosopher's Note. In the spirit of how I got here, which is through the short-form social content, if I had to condense these pages to a 47-second— did I say— yeah, I did. 47-second video to post on social media for you, it would sound something like this. Number 1, never win an argument or you'll lose a lot more than you gain. When you regulate your reactions before responding, you keep a clear head and a calm mind. Here's a great line that you don't need to accept every invitation to an argument you receive. You just don't, right? Never win an argument. Number 2: Confidence isn't an act, it's an outcome. Use words and short phrases that assert your need and protect your values without fear of disappointment. When you embrace your assertive voice, you make a pathway for more positive change in your life. Number 3: Don't worry yourself over how to change the entire relationship. Focus on changing the next conversation. When you frame a conversation as something to learn rather than something to prove, you take out the difficulty in building connections. So try that. And he says, "Follow me." On line, let's go. There you go. The next conversation. We talked about your values. Take the time. If you haven't done the eulogy exercise, imagine that end-of-life ceremony. Think about about. Right now you can do it. You don't need to go somewhere else. Right now, spend a moment, take a deep breath. Think about the qualities you hope your loved ones remember you by, that they, they're going to share at your end-of-life ceremony. Think about that. What are your values? And then think about— none of us are perfect, period. There are no perfect human beings. But are you living in integrity with those values? Is it likely that they're going to say that at the end of your life? And we all know those end-of-life ceremonies where people are saying nice things, and we know that it wasn't actually how that person showed up. We don't want to be that guy. Who are you at your best? Think of those values. Live your life today in integrity with those values. Rule number 1, 2, 3. Do you remember them? Pop quiz, don't look. Rule number 1: Say it with control. Our tool there was our breath. Rule number 2: Say it with confidence. We're gonna strive to be assertive rather than submissive or aggressive. Rule number 3, we're gonna say it to connect. We're gonna do the hard work to think about what we want our outcome to be. We're gonna look at what obstacles might get in the way, and we're gonna have a plan to deal with those such that we can live in integrity with our values, all of which leads us to the most important part of our time together. What jumped out and landed most for you? How can you bring this wisdom to your life? I say it over and over again, moving from theory to practice to mastery together today so you can show up as that best, most heroic version of yourself. Not someday, but today. If we aggregate and compound all these little distinctions we make together, we can fundamentally and permanently change our lives and make a positive difference in our family, communities, and world. That's why I do what I do. It's an honor to spend time with you. Again, you can get the note for free. Check out the show notes, subscribe if you enjoyed, and I look forward to sharing more with you soon. See ya!