Tactics to Build Your Conversational Skills
00:00:00.000 | What about when you, when you don't know someone, you know, there's, there's practicing for
00:00:10.300 | a conversation, you know, you're going to have, and then there's, I'm going to a cocktail
00:00:13.440 | party.
00:00:14.440 | I'm going to a conference.
00:00:15.440 | I don't know who I'm going to meet or who they're going to be.
00:00:17.360 | Is there a way to just build repetition or, or get your reps in for practicing conversational
00:00:22.940 | skills without any person that you know, you're talking to that makes sense?
00:00:28.160 | I absolutely do practice my question techniques in private.
00:00:32.040 | When there's somebody that I meet and I don't think I'm ever going to meet them again.
00:00:35.760 | I just throw out a question approach to see how will they respond?
00:00:38.760 | I try to direct them, tell me what you were doing this weekend instead of, so what were
00:00:42.240 | you doing this weekend?
00:00:43.240 | I try it and see what happens.
00:00:44.600 | If I try it on someone in person and it doesn't feel awkward and I don't see a distance in
00:00:48.560 | the conversation, I think it's a good technique.
00:00:51.920 | Keep it in my, in my Google doc full of techniques for having better conversations.
00:00:55.840 | Tell me what else is in the Google doc, right?
00:00:58.480 | You've got starting with, tell me you use pausing and interrupting people saying, because
00:01:02.840 | let them continue.
00:01:04.760 | What other tactics work really well in this conversational flow?
00:01:09.040 | The one that started the whole thing for me was I, for years felt really bad because I
00:01:16.440 | asked Jason free, the founder of base camp, how, how he failed when he failed.
00:01:24.080 | And he just kind of looked away.
00:01:25.680 | I still see him right now, as we're talking in my head, looking way and going, well, sometimes
00:01:29.960 | we just don't have any setbacks.
00:01:31.800 | Some things just don't have that.
00:01:33.200 | And then the more I push, the more he just acted, or I felt that he acted like I was
00:01:39.520 | an idiot who always failed and couldn't understand that sometimes people don't just, you know,
00:01:46.720 | fall on their face when they're just trying to walk to the other end of the room.
00:01:49.680 | Anyway, that ate it ate away at me that I asked him about his setback and he didn't
00:01:53.560 | give me an example and I kept pushing.
00:01:56.160 | And the more I pushed, the more he resisted.
00:01:58.720 | So I hired an interview coach and I gave him that specific example.
00:02:02.920 | I said, look, Jeremy, before we talk about anything else, I have to tell you about this
00:02:07.040 | one problem.
00:02:08.040 | And I told him, and he goes, Oh, my therapist had a situation like that, but tell me, goes
00:02:14.640 | my therapist had a technique called join the resistance says my therapist would have these
00:02:19.360 | men who would come into her office and she would say, Okay, tell me about the problem
00:02:23.400 | you and your wife are facing.
00:02:24.800 | And the husband would go, I don't have any problems, but you're clearly in here because
00:02:29.560 | you have a problem.
00:02:30.720 | There's an issue in the relationship.
00:02:32.760 | It's not me, it's her, I don't have any problem goes in.
00:02:35.960 | What are we doing here?
00:02:37.280 | I don't know.
00:02:38.280 | She made me come.
00:02:39.480 | And the more the therapist pushed, the more the person put up a resistance and then like
00:02:44.240 | sidestepped the whole problem.
00:02:46.560 | So Jeremy's therapist said she decided to join the resistance.
00:02:52.560 | If she said, tell me about the problem you and your wife are having and the person said,
00:02:55.720 | I'm not having any problem, you would say, Oh, must be good.
00:03:00.560 | You know what?
00:03:01.600 | All I hear that people have problems must be good for you to just have an easygoing
00:03:05.560 | life without any problems.
00:03:07.200 | Congratulations.
00:03:08.200 | And then the person will go easy.
00:03:10.760 | All she does is she keeps complaining to me and I don't know when we could spend time
00:03:14.040 | together because my work is now taking up a whole lot of time and I've never had to
00:03:17.680 | work this many hours, let alone this late in my career.
00:03:20.200 | Now they were off on a conversation that mattered.
00:03:23.880 | And so Jeremy, my interview coach said, join the resistance.
00:03:30.560 | Whenever you put, whenever you ask a guest a question and they resist, stop fighting
00:03:35.640 | with them.
00:03:36.640 | Join the resistance.
00:03:37.640 | Say something like, well, it must be great to have an easy, easy business.
00:03:42.820 | Everyone else is struggling.
00:03:43.820 | It must be great to have an easy time building your company when the rest of us are working
00:03:47.840 | really hard.
00:03:49.000 | When I say that the person will immediately lash out at me and go hard.
00:03:52.120 | I mean, you think this is easy.
00:03:53.640 | You don't know.
00:03:54.640 | Last night we were up because the servers were down and then somebody a week ago was
00:03:57.600 | complaining to me about the way that we are interacting at work and I, I'm trying to get
00:04:02.280 | work done, not talk about what their, what their interpersonal issues are.
00:04:06.420 | Now we've got a real problem we can talk about.
00:04:08.240 | So anyway, because the coach said, join the resistance and he gave me that phrase, I wrote
00:04:13.120 | it down in a, in a Google doc with that phrase and I said, Oh, I'm going to remember this
00:04:18.580 | because it has a name.
00:04:19.580 | And so I started to, whenever I would have a new technique, I would give it a name and
00:04:23.420 | I'd add that technique to a Google doc.
00:04:26.340 | I saw the list in the book where there's like a flow charts, the wrong word.
00:04:30.360 | It's like a directory of tactics.
00:04:32.520 | So there are plenty more for anyone listening who wants more than we'll get to today.
00:04:37.840 | But how do you think those techniques work when you're, you know, you talk about building
00:04:42.880 | yourself up, not making yourself seem needy and asking questions when you're interviewing
00:04:46.980 | for a job, or maybe you're doing references with someone's previous manager.
00:04:51.080 | Can you still use those techniques to get people who are kind of more guarded with information
00:04:55.500 | to share?
00:04:56.500 | I use it with people all the time.
00:04:58.400 | I think sometimes people are guarded because they're modest because they're not jerks.
00:05:03.400 | So one technique that I had, I shared this when I had a, I used to in San Francisco have
00:05:08.460 | entrepreneurs come over for scotch at my office and they would just ask me all these questions
00:05:12.780 | and someone say, how do you get people to give you their numbers?
00:05:15.800 | And I said, well, what I do is I give them a dramatic low ball.
00:05:17.840 | I said, what do you mean dramatic low ball?
00:05:19.420 | I said, I had this woman on, she wouldn't give me her, her revenue number.
00:05:24.260 | So I said to her, and I knew that it was in, it was at least 10 million.
00:05:29.820 | I said to her, do you think you'll hit a million soon?
00:05:33.900 | She goes a million, we're doing at least 10, 20 times that we're not trying to reach a
00:05:38.060 | million.
00:05:39.060 | So anyway, I said that at scotch night and the guy goes, oh, that's such a good technique.
00:05:43.420 | If you go dramatic, low ball, people feel insulted enough that they have to come back
00:05:46.520 | at you.
00:05:47.520 | Anyway, we started talking about other things and one where it's scotch night at my office,
00:05:51.260 | we're tasting different scotches, talking about what we're into.
00:05:54.340 | And then at one point we got into running and the guy said, so how much do you run?
00:05:59.140 | I said, yeah, I run as much as I can here and there.
00:06:03.220 | And the guy goes, Andrew, do you think you'll get to run a marathon sometime?
00:06:07.260 | He, and I go a marathon sometime.
00:06:09.460 | I've run more marathons than I can count.
00:06:11.260 | Literally.
00:06:12.260 | There was one time in Washington DC, my wife left me at the top of rock Creek park and
00:06:15.340 | I just ran all the way down.
00:06:16.700 | That was over 30 miles and there was no other way for me to get home except to run back
00:06:20.780 | to the house.
00:06:21.780 | So a marathon is nothing for me.
00:06:24.300 | And then he was smiling and others around the scotch table were smiling too.
00:06:29.220 | And I couldn't understand why they were laughing at me.
00:06:31.740 | At first I thought maybe they were laughing at me because that's not that much to run.
00:06:35.940 | And then I realized he used dramatic low ball on me.
00:06:39.820 | And so this works everywhere.
00:06:41.780 | Yes.
00:06:42.780 | It works in interviews.
00:06:43.780 | Yes.
00:06:44.780 | It works in private conversations.