We’re going to unpack how to say the right things in a conversation. In particular, I’m going to share 3 key ideas on how to say the right things in a conversation every time. By the end of this, you are going to feel like at the end of every conversation and the people you’re in conversation with are going to feel like you just said the right things at the right time for the right context. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a funny conversation with a friend or a serious conversation with a family member or a really intense conversation with a co-worker. This will share 3 key ideas that will help you say the right things in conversation every time.
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One time I was at a restaurant with my wife and Kate and 2 friends and I got up to go to the bathroom and somehow I bumped into somebody. I don’t remember exactly how this was but it was outside the bathroom. His name was Greg. He was with 3 other people. Their names were Amy, Susan, and Cindy. About an hour later, we had finished our meal and everything was cool. We walked back and I just said, “Hey, Greg. Hey, Susan. Hey, Cindy. Hey, Amy.” And Greg stopped me and was like, “How’d you do that?” then he didn’t wait for me to answer the question. He just started answering his own question and said, “Actually, I know exactly how you remembered our names.” I guess Greg was a construction worker and he went on to tell me this story about a guy named Dominic who he was doing a project on his house for this multi-multi-millionaire. Every single morning when Dominic would leave the house he would say hi to over 20 people who were working on his house. There was even one time where someone was taking out the trash and Dominic said hi by name to every single person as he walked to his car. One day Greg stopped Dominic and asked him and said, “Dude, how in the world? You’ve got to tell me how do you do that?” Dominic looked at him straight in the face and says, “You know why you don’t remember names? Because you don’t care enough.” I was like boom! I think there are other reasons may be that you remember names.
But the point is in order for these 3 key ideas that I’m going to share on how to say the right things in conversation, you have to actually care about the people you’re talking to. You can’t fudge this. You can’t manufacture and just say the right things. Because part of the idea of saying the right things in conversation is being as authentic as possible in that conversation. If you’re putting on some sort of face and trying to be something or trying to do something else, it’s not going to click or resonate with that person. In order for these to work, you’ve got to care as Dominic said he did.
Listen Reflectively
The idea number one is reflectively listen. Reflective listening is an extremely simple and underutilized tool. But it’s phenomenally useful because it allows you to just hold up a mirror to the other person and reflect back what they’re saying. If you want to say the right things in conversation, don’t try to come up with that yourself. Use the person’s words, the person’s sentiment, etc. Just the short bit is hear what somebody’s saying, not just their words but the music behind the words, the sentiment, what you’re noticing, what you’re observing and just reflect that back. You can reflect it back verbatim what they said or simply translate what they said into your own words and feed it back to them. It is a phenomenal what happens in our brains when we’re fed back words or ideas that we shared but didn’t even really process until somebody spoke them back to us. In the same way that you don’t know that you have a booger or a raisin in your tooth until you walk into a mirror and you see that for yourself. When you gain that awareness of what you’re saying and what you’re doing, it’s oftentimes the exact right thing to happen in a conversation.
Turn Assumptions Into Questions
Assumptions are not fundamentally bad. They are so natural. It’s really useful that we make assumptions oftentimes. But the key to saying the right thing in conversation is to not act on those assumptions or speak as if those assumptions were true. To say the right thing in a conversation if you do have an assumption, recognize that an assumption is just a story that you have and then turn that assumption into a question not rooted in any judgment and ask it. Sometimes when you’re trying to figure out the right thing to say in a conversation, it’s a question to unpack and further dive into the conversation. When you’re thinking about how to say the right thing in a conversation, you don’t want to be really concerned with what you’re saying out of this device. You want to be more concerned with how you’re using these 2 appendages on the side of your head and being deliberate in the questions that you’re asking. Because people are rarely asked questions based on what they’ve just said.
Often in conversation, it goes sentence ends in a period; sentence it ends in a period; sentence ends in a period. When we break that mold and somebody says a sentence that ends in a period and we fire back a question, it feels great. I haven’t met a single person on the planet that doesn’t want to be seen heard and understood at some level. It’s really, really phenomenal to be able to be asked about what we’ve just shared.
Master Empathy
The most common metaphor for empathy is standing in somebody else’s shoes. I would say and my co-author Will would also say that empathy is not standing in somebody else’s shoes. Empathy is putting one of your feet into that person’s shoes but keeping one foot grounded in your own reality. Because if you have both of your feet in both of those person’s shoes, I would argue that that is sympathy. You’re totally lost in their reality and you can’t actually know the right things to say in a conversation. That’s what happens when we hear something sad happen for somebody and you get that like that like pitiful, like it doesn’t really make you feel better. It’s kind of it almost just like spirals, the sadness, I would say that that’s sympathy. Whereas if you’re able to be empathetic and have really try to see the world from their perspective. I would say a really practical way to make empathy happen is to describe the world as they see it. When you describe the world as they see it. That might be rooted in some of your assumptions but it also, that person is feeling like you’re attempting to understand them in a really empathetic way as opposed to knowing how they feel because you have both of your feet in their shoes at the exact same time. I exist on the planet to gently eradicate small talk and create conversations that matter.