Secrets to Mastering Conversations for Success

Life is a series of conversations. You've heard that before, but what does it really mean? Well, step back for a minute and ask yourself. Everything good, meaningful that happened in your life. How much of it was just sitting alone, staring at a computer, staring at a phone, staring in your room alone? Yeah, I enjoy reading alone. Sometimes alone time can be good. But the biggest things that have an impact on your life. The job interview where you get the job. The interview at school that accepts you proposing marriage to someone. Building actual friendships, talking with each other late at night in a dorm room, or over coffee, early morning or lunchtimes. It's conversations that actually create the fundamental building blocks of our lives. So it's critically important that you get good at it. If you want a good life, you actually have to be good at having conversations. I don't mean you have to become Mr. Extrovert, Ms. Extrovert and walk up and down the street and talk to every single person you ever see. No, you don't have to become an extrovert. Nothing wrong with considering yourself to be an introvert. But introverts have to have conversations with human beings. You might enjoy a little more time alone, that's fine. You might enjoy a smaller group of friends. Perfectly okay. You don't have to be the life of every party. In fact, you don't even have to go to parties. But you do have to have conversations with human beings. You can skip the big keg party where there are a thousand other people, but maybe you actually want to spend an hour or two hours with one or two friends from the chess club or the computer AI club. If you're in school, there's no one set size group of people you have to talk to on a regular basis. But if you want to be a successful human being, a happy human being, you're going to have to learn how to have conversations. Now this can be intimidating for a lot of people, especially these days when more and more people are spending hour after hour a day staring at a screen. Because when you stare at a screen, you do not increase your ability to have face to face communication. Now, I'm all in favor of virtual communication. And yes, I like to talk to people on FaceTime and Zoom. And what we're doing right here on social media is great, great when people talk to me, but it's no substitute for actually talking to someone in real life. It's conversations like that that quite often have the biggest impact in the business world. When you land your biggest clients, the six figure, seven figure, maybe even eight Figure clients, it's typically because you met with them face to face. Place. If you're an entrepreneur and you're raising venture capital or even significant angel funds, it's not always, but it's typically because you're in the same room looking at those investors. Those investors are looking you. They want to see that you can look them in the face. They want to see that you can understand them, that you can actually respond to them and address their concerns. It's got to be a two way conversation. Now, it's untrue that nobody knows how to have conversations anymore. That's an exaggeration. And it's also untrue that in the past everyone was great at having conversations and everyone was some great conversationalist sitting around the Algonquin Roundtable discussing witty matters of philosophy and literature. That's a false reading of history. All you have to worry about is you and building your own comfort level in your ability to speak to people. Now, you might not want to speak on the grand stage to 100,000 people or to 50,000 people. That's okay. You might not want to go on the BBC or CNN or some big national international TV network and speak to millions of that's okay. But there are going to be times in your life when you want to speak to one person, two person, sometimes five, sometimes 20 people. And I want to give you the skills you need to come across your very best. For starters, realize that a conversation is actually more about listening than you pushing out an agenda, pushing out a message. Where people go wrong quite often is think, I'm going to wait my turn, ignore everyone else and go through my own mind, everything I want to say and then I'll just push it all out and don't look at me or interrupt me or ask questions because I don't want to forget what I'm going to say. Wrong. Listen to other people, address their concerns first. Ideally, focus on one idea at a time and then ask them, did I address your concerns? This applies in personal conversations. It applies in the business world, for large corporations, for startups. If you're a startup and you're having a conversation with an investor, their first question, their first concern is what does this business do? Their second question is how does it possibly make money? When you are giving a presentation like that, which is a type of conversation, you need to address those concerns right out of the box. That's much more important than getting into all the little details of your technology and all the bells and whistles, gizmos and your Brilliant crafting of software. Nobody cares about that if they don't understand. What does your business do? What problem does your business solve? And how do you make money? Now, you might not be an entrepreneur. That's okay. You might be an administrator at a major hospital, and you're trying to change policies. You're trying to get doctors to wash their hands more or follow some other protocol. You've got to communicate with them on their terms. You've got to speak to them in a way that makes them understand you respect them. You're listening to them. You are concerned with them. You're giving them ample time to respond to you and share their concerns. And together you can figure out something that seems reasonable to everyone. That is the essence of good conversation. Where so many people go wrong is they're too passive. They just sit there and listen, and they expect the other person to do all the heavy lifting. Or they do the opposite. They do all the talking. They don't even give the other person a chance to ask a question. It needs to be balanced. I don't mean 50, 50. I don't mean you sit there with a stopwatch and say, well, you talk for 30 seconds. Now it's my turn to talk. 30 seconds. No, it can't be that tit for tat. It has to be roughly a flow that goes back and forth. And what makes it flow is you actually listening. Someone says something to you, whether it's a friend, a business associate, restate in your own words and then ask them, am I getting it? Did I understand you correctly? If you do, they're going to love you for it. They're going to think, flip. Finally, somebody actually gets me. Somebody's actually listening to me. And that will advance the conversation. It will make them much more open to hearing your views. Now, to take it even deeper, ask a question based on what they just told you so that you can go deeper in your understanding. That's how real conversations progress superficially, is just to listen to them say, okay, you've had your piece, now let me say what I want to say. And you can have people going back and forth for hours. No real exchange of ideas take place because no one's listening to anyone. You don't want to be like that. Get in the habit of having real conversations where you truly listen to someone. Get rid of your own agenda for a few minutes. Listen to them, restate it. Make sure you got it. Ask a question, listen more. But then it is your turn to participate with more than questions. It's your turn to share your ideas, your thoughts, your reflections, your expertise. Even if all you do is ask questions, there's a chance the person feels like you're interviewing them or interrogating them, like they're a criminal and you're the police officer. You don't want that. It needs to be more or less an even exchange. A meeting of minds. If you learn to have conversations like this, it's going to help you in your personal life, it's going to help you in your social life, it's going to help you in your professional life, your business life. Whether you are just beginning and launching a startup, whether you are an 80 year old chairman of a publicly traded company. These conversation skills will make life better for you and everyone you know.