Master Communication: 4 Tips For Better Conversations

Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. Today we're going to be talking about how to master communication. I'm going to give you four different tips of how to actually have better conversations. Be a better speaker, but also a better listener so that you can connect with people deeper. Because there's one thing that we cannot run from as a human. If you deal with other people, then communication is something that you're going to have to do. And so for me, I'll just be fully honest with you guys. When I was a kid, I was a very shy kid. Like, if there's a video of me at my fourth birthday party and it was out and all these kids are playing and we're at the park and stuff, and it's all the kids playing, and my mom zooms over and goes over to the left side, and I'm literally by myself in the sandbox playing with my toys. And so for me, I'll be honest, I'm definitely an introvert who can push himself to be an extrovert sometimes. And for me, I didn't have a girlfriend until I was in eighth grade because I was so shy. And. And I realized that if I wanted a girlfriend, I had to figure out how to stop being so shy. And so I started trying to get better at communicating with people. And anytime I was in school, I hated speaking, absolutely hated it. And when I got into the first sales company that I was in, communication was something that they really, really focused on. And they forced me to get on stage and start getting better at speaking to people. It was basically just throw you straight into the fire and figure it out. And so for that job, when I was promoted about six months into the job to being a manager, part of being a manager and then running my own franchise with that company is I had to speak basically on stage every single day to people for six hours plus for every single day for six hours, sometimes even more for five years straight. And so. So what happened was I started to. To realize that I wasn't a really great communicator and. But I could get better at it. So communication is not something that you're just born with. There are some people that are better at communicating than other people are, and that's just natural for them. But really more than anything else is to be a really great communicator with other people. It is a skill set, and it is something that you can learn. And so I started watching videos on it, and I started reading books about it. And I started watching other people when I'd be at a coffee shop. I watch other people communicate and see how they're communicating and go, oh man, I can see what they're doing. Oh, you know, I don't give as much verbal cues, non verbal cues, all that stuff. And so for what I'm going to talk to you about is kind of a process that I went through. And I'm going to go through the four real big pillars that I see in communication. And you can use these to start incorporating them into your daily interactions. And if you do that, you'll start to experience much richer and more meaningful conversations with other people. So let's dive into the four tips. The first one is active listening. And there's that quote that says you're given two ears and one mouth. So that means that you should listen twice as much as you speak. So you should actually try to become a better listener when you're sitting in front of somebody. A lot of times when we're talking with somebody, we're listening, we're there, we're listening, obviously, but we're also thinking of how we're going to respond. And what I would recommend is try to just listen fully and trust that your response, whatever your response will be, will be what it's supposed to be. I don't know if you've ever been in this situation where you've been in a conversation with someone and they're very chatty and they're very talkative, and you sit there and you don't do a whole lot of talking, but you just ask a whole lot of questions and they get done with the conversation. Like, man, that was a great conversation. I'm so glad that I met you. What I have found is that the more somebody talks in a conversation with me, the more they feel like they get out of the conversation. And so really what it comes down to is try to give up being interesting and be more interested in somebody else. Be more interested, ask them questions, have them go deeper into it and just allow the person to express. One of the things that I found with people is that people really just want to be seen and they want to be heard and they want to be understood. And so if we can be in a communication, in a conversation with somebody and allow them to speak more than we speak, they're gonna love you way more. And so that's one really good thing where if you are shy, you don't have to master the art of public speaking to be fully present with someone. And to be asking them questions. Because active listening, really what it requires from you though, is full engagement. And here's how you really want to do it. You want to try to, as much as possible, silence your internal dialogue. Try to keep your focus on the person who's speaking to you and really just allow yourself to know that you're going to reply the way that you're supposed to reply. Another thing that's really important is to acknowledge and to validate them as well. So you want to, and I'll talk about this as I start going into, you know, the next tip. You know, nod your head when you're talking with someone, maintain eye contact, provide small verbal affirmations and you can say stuff like, oh, that's awesome. Oh, I see, I understand. Oh, wow, really? Mm. And those are verbal affirmations that you're listening to that person. Another thing that you wanna do too, if you really want someone to open up more to you, try to be really good at asking better open ended questions. And so instead of saying like, oh, well, did you do that? Or where did you go? Those are closed questions. Did you do that? Yes or no, where did you go? I went to the coffee shop. So it's not really open ended. Open ended would be something like, well, how did that make you feel when he did that? What do you think the next step should be? And allowing them to actually express versus just answer your question with a one word, one sentence response. When you ask open ended questions, it allows a person to elaborate more. People love to talk about themselves. The more that you can allow someone to talk about themselves, the deeper connection that person is going to feel with you. Another thing you're gonna want to do is you're gonna want to, as you're listening to them is to reflect and summarize. So not every single time they say something, you don't repeat that thing back to them. But every so often you just wanna paraphrase what you've heard. It shows that you're engaging with them and you're paying attention. So you could say, oh man, that's nuts. So he said XYZ to her. And then it shows that you're listening to them because you're reflecting back what you had heard to them. One thing that I'll recommend, this is something that's kind of uncomfortable, especially for you people who are always thinking of your next response. My very first coach that I hired when I was 19 years old challenged me to do this. Challenged me, number one, to get into a conversation with somebody and to not say any statements, like, say as few statements as possible and just ask questions. What you'll notice is you will learn more about people than you have ever known. And so just sit there and try to be present with them and then ask them questions back. And then the one that becomes very uncomfortable sometimes is try to not respond. When they're done speaking, try not responding for about three seconds. So someone stops speaking, and in your head, you go, 1, 2, 3. First off, it shows that you're listening to them. It shows that you're contemplating. And a lot of times people will actually start talking again and they will go deeper into their story. Because most of the time, we don't always give everything. The first time we're talking about something, we don't give all the details. We don't give all of what we're thinking about. And so when you're active listening, it really allows someone to feel trust with you and also rapport. And it allows really open and honest exchange between you and someone else. And people tend to trust people who listen to them. Remember this, as I said a minute ago, people want to feel seen, they want. They want to feel heard, and they want to be understood. So that's the first one. Second one is nonverbal communication is to be able to learn how to speak without words. So there's actually studies on this by. It was in the 1960s by a doctor named Dr. Albert Meirabhan. I hope I'm saying that correctly. And he said that if you look at communication and you break it down in your communication with someone else, only 7% of what you say is the words that you use, 38% of what you say is your tonality, and 55% is your body language. And so with nonverbal communication, that's the 55%. It's head nods, it's your shoulders squared up to them, it's your facial expressions. And women just tend to be way better than this at men, obviously. That's a very general statement. I'm saying that men aren't good at this. But as a whole, women tend to be better at nonverbal communication than men. And when I was younger and I was in the company I was telling you about, and I was running my first office, it was really hardcore sales that we were in. So there was. I would say probably. I'd say probably like 80% men, 20% women. And one of my managers, his name was Jeff. Jeff was really good. Even though there were women across the company, he was the number one Developer of female managers. So he would develop from sales rep to managers he had more than anybody else, even the other women managers. And I was like, hey man, like, what do you like? I'm really good at developing males, but like, I want to get better at developing females. What should I do? And he started giving me all these tips of how to actually communicate more effectively with females. First thing he said is, I recommend this book to everybody. If you've never read it before is to read the book Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, so you can start to understand the difference between men and women. And then the other thing he said is, start watching how women communicate and pay attention to how they communicate and then pay attention to how men communicate with each other. And I noticed a lot of differences. Women are really good compared to men. Once again, general statement, but majority of the time, hey, if you're loving this episode on how to be a better communicator, do me a favor. Give me a thumbs up down below like this video for the YouTube algorithm. And if you have topics that you want me to cover in the future, please go ahead and put them down in the comments below so I can see what you guys want me to start talking about. Women are usually really good at verbal cues and nonverbal cues. Head nods, looking in the eye, saying, uh huh, uh huh. Oh, wow, that's amazing. Like giving verbal and nonverbal responses back. But there's actually been studies that have that have been done on boys and girls so like 5, 6 years old, just to see the way that they communicate with each other. And what they found is that boys often engage with each other side by side. They usually get engaged in activities that are side by side, like playing a video game, playing a sport. And their conversations usually happen that way as well. They had a study where they watched children through. It was obviously a glass window and the kids couldn't see that there were people watching them. And what they found with little boys, if they were sitting in a classroom, Little boys tend to sit in their chair and face the front of the room and talk to each other. So they'll have their shoulders squared to the front of the room and they'll turn their heads and they'll talk to each other. Little girls, more often than not, actually move their chairs to face each other face to face. They square up their shoulders and they face each other face to face. So when you look at little boys communicating, it's like, well, why would it kind of be ingrained in most men or most boys to be that way and ingrained in most girls to be that way. And they actually think that it goes back to the hunter gatherer times. When you think of hunting, usually there's no reason why when you're hunting with someone to look at them in the face, right? So you're usually looking in the same direction or if you're standing in a field, you're back to back so that you can get, if you're, you are hunting and your, your friend is hunting with you, you're back to back so that you can get a 360 degree view. I noticed this one time when I was hunting with my friend, we had a full on conversation back to back. Never looks each other in the eye. And that, that just tends to be the way that it's ingrained into men. You know, they can sit down and they can watch a football game and never look at each other in the eyes. But girls on the other hand, they tend to be, they tend to create small intimate groups where they're face to face. And the reason why they think that that is because in the hunter gatherer times, women were more likely to sit around a fire. They would be able to prepare the food, they would be able to, you know, go get the berries and then pluck the berries. And they would be more face to face around a fire and in smaller groups and when they had their babies, they would be face to face with their babies. And so women tend to be better at face to face communication. So if you watch two women communicate and watch two men communicate, it's completely different. Like I want to just challenge you to watch that today as you go off, don't creepily look around somebody in a corner and like watch two women talking to each other. But I'm talking about like watch two women communicate with each other and watch their nonverbal cues and their, their actual verbal cues as well. But, but then also watch men. And this is why every time I say this and I say this in a group, men and women always go, oh, like that makes so much sense. Because I always say women, have you ever complained to your guy that he's not listening? And then he's like, will you talk? I just heard everything that you said. What do you mean? It's not that he didn't hear it. It's a lot of times that the female didn't get the verbal or visual cues that he was listening. And so he probably heard what was being said but didn't give any visual cues. And so, you know, whether you're male, female. No matter what you are, just try to get better at giving the nonverbal cues to somebody as you're listening and also as you're speaking as well. Because the nonverbal cues are the majority of your communication, 55% of it. And so just try to be more conscious of your body language. Maintain an open posture. Uh, try not to cross your arms or cross your legs because that actually subconsciously makes somebody think that the other person is being defensive. So a lot of times if your arms are crossed, arms are crossed just seems a little bit defensive, a little bit closed off. So try to maintain an open posture. Try not to cross your arms, trying to cross your legs. And then if you want to show somebody that you're interested in engaged, you can lean forward slightly to actually convey that and maintain appropriate eye contact with them because that demonstrates that you're, you're, you're listening, you're confident, you're attentive. And then just start watching for nonverbal cues for other people as well. Like recognize if somebody is becoming disinterested, if they start looking at their watch or they're looking into another direction not listening to you, or if they're starting to get uncomfortable based off of what you're saying, they're shifting their weight back and forth. Because really, more than anything else, what we want to do is be able to effectively communicate through body language and notice somebody else's communication to us that they don't even know most of the time that they're actually signaling. And so you want to just be attuned to your nonverbal signals and also somebody else's as well. The third one is your tonality. So As I said, 38% of your communication is the tonality. So you regulate your, your, your pitch, regulate your tone. And you know, if it's a, if something is. If there's a crazy moment, everything's getting escalated and you're trying to de. Escalate tensions around other people. A calm and steady tone helps people regulate themselves and deescalate themselves a little bit more for fun conversations. It should go up and it should go down. You should have varied tonalities in that because this is 38% of your communication. I'm going to show you exactly what I mean by that. Where 30, it's 7% is a word. You might be like, whoa, that's really, really small. But it's actually not when you listen to it. So I'm going to take a sentence, and the sentence is, I didn't say she stole my money. I didn't say she stole my money. And I'm going to emphasize each word separately in this sentence, and I want you to see how the actual sentence will change, the meaning will change. So if I say I didn't say she stole my money, I'm going to emphasize each word, I didn't say she stole my money implying someone else said it, but it wasn't me. I didn't say she stole my money implies that I'm not denying the claim or the accusation that she stole my money. I didn't say she stole my money. You're implying that I might have hinted it or I might have written it, but I didn't actually verbally say it. I didn't say she stole my money. I'm implying that I'm not accusing her specifically, but I'm accusing somebody else possibly. I didn't say she stole my money. That implies maybe she borrowed it from me, maybe she found it, but I didn't say that she stole it. I didn't say she stole my money. That implies that I said she stole money, but I didn't necessarily say that that was my money. And then I could say, I didn't say she stole my money implies that she might have taken something else of mine, but it wasn't my money. And so it's the exact same sentence, but it's a different emphasis on every single word, which changes the actual sentence itself, which is why 7% of what you say is your words, 38% of what you say is your tonality, which is what we're talking about here. And then 55% of what you say is your body language. I had a manager, my very first manager, when I was in that sales company I was telling you about. He's a big guy who was, like, sick. He still is. He's still alive. So he's not was, but he was at the time, 6 foot 2, like 280 pounds. And it's really deep voice, and he's, oh, hey, bro, what's going on, man? How's it going? And what was really funny is that we used to make a lot of cold calls and he would change his tonality depending on who he was talking to. And so, you know, if he was calling a female, he realized that his big deep voice actually just the voice over the phone, was kind of scary. And so he used to this thing that would crack us up. He'd be like, all right, everybody, watch, watch. I'm going to go ahead. I'm going to do this call. Is everybody ready? Okay, here. Here we go. And then you go, ringer, ring. Hey, is this Sally? Hey, Sally, this is Matt. How are you? And we're like, where in the hell did his voice just change? Like, where did that come from? And so he was really sure how to use tonality. And also when he would talk to us about closing and he would talk about, you know, going through the closing process of presenting the price to somebody, his tonality would be up and it would be down, and it was. It would. It was just amazing how this guy with this really deep voice could pay attention to his tonality and make you feel different based off the way that he spoke. And so tonality is number three and something that you definitely want to pay attention to. And then the last one, which is really important, but I don't think a lot of people actually know this is the clarity of what you say and the conciseness of what you say. We're bombarded with information. And so when you can be really clear and really concise with your information, people actually appreciate it. And there's an interesting study that found that big words and complex thoughts actually make you seem less intelligent to a listener. So if you're somebody who wants to use big words and you're trying to seem impressive by using these big words and having really complex thoughts, the person who's listening to you actually views that as less intelligent. If it goes back to what Einstein said, he said, if you can't explain it simply, you. You don't understand it well enough. And I remember I had a conversation with one of my friends about three years ago now, and I was like, man, like, can I give you a tip on just speaking? And he's like, yeah, absolutely. And I was like, you use really big words. I'm being honest with you. I don't understand some of the words that you use. And you also say things in a very complex way. It's kind of like you're beating around the bush, like you're dancing around the bush, but you never actually get to the bush. And he's like, oh, man. Well, I can't change that. He was trying to get better at public speaking. He was like, I can't change that. That's just how I speak. And I said. And we had a conversation about it. And I said a question to him that he made him completely change the way he communicates. And over the past three years, he's gotten really good at communicating. And I asked him a question. Are you Speaking from the stage so that the audience can hear how smart you are or so that the audience can understand. He was like, oh shit, yeah, that makes sense because I said the more concise and the more simply you can put something, the more likely you are to have everybody understand you. I remember reading an article, I think that the average person In America, like 60% of people in America read below a 9th grade reading level. So if you're speaking, not saying that you shouldn't be intelligent, if you like words and you think that they can, I'm not saying completely change the way that you speak, but, but if you're trying to have other people understand and effectively know exactly what you're talking about, the, the more concise and the more simple your words, the better. And this was actually found out by a study by Daniel Oppenheimer and it's, it's funny the title because he literally makes a joke in the title. This is the actual title of, of the article itself. Daniel Oppenheimer's study said that. It's called Consequences if I Don't Even Know how to Pronounce a Damn word, I'm trying to Consequences of erudite vernacular. Utilize introspective of ness of necessity, problems with using long words needlessly. And obviously the title is humorously reflecting the study's theme. But in his research, Oppenheimer found that when, when content of how someone is speaking, whether that be on paper or whether that be actually verbally to somebody else, when they make it more complex than necessary, readers or listeners rate the author or the speaker as less intelligent. On the other side of that though, when the content is clear and straightforward, the communicator is often rated as more intelligent. So try not to use big words. Try to convey your message as simply as possible so that people can understand. Because effectively, if we're trying to communicate with people, we want them to understand what we're saying. We don't want to try to talk over someone else and be that type of person. So being clear and concise really helps the listener's understanding. And so these are the four tips I really want you to try to master and try to actually start to use today and see if you can start to notice other people's body language, your body language, other people's tonality, your tonality, the words that you use. If it takes you a long time to get to the point. And this, this is the, the four steps one more time is, is actively listening and being present when someone's speaking to you. Number two, is nonverbal communication, which is the 55% of communication. Number three is the tonality with that you use, which is 38% of your communication and number four, which is the words that you use being very clear, concise and conscious of the other person who's on the other side listening to you. So if you want to master your communication, try to master the those four tips. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories and tag me obdialjr. R O B D I A L J R and if you love this podcast, you'll probably love my new book that just came out. It is called Level up How to get focused, stop procrastinating and upgrade your life. If you want to get it, you can go to robdial.com book if you buy before October 3rd, you will get it on pre order which means it should be delivered to your house the day it comes out. And when you go to robdahl.com book and prove that you actually bought it, send a screenshot receipt, whatever it might be. You will actually get a free mini course on how to stop procrastinating and you'll be entered into a drawing with over $25,000 in cash and prizes that we're giving out. So if you want it, once Again, it is robdile.com book and with that I'm going to leave you the same way leave you every single episode. Make it your mission. Make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.