The Mindset Mentor - Master Communication: 4 Tips For Better Conversations

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so that you never miss another podcast episode. And if you're out there and you love this podcast, do me a favor, give us a rating and review, however you listen to us. The reason why is because the more that you go and actually get positive reviews to a platform, the more those platforms actually show this podcast and make people aware of it who have never listened to it before, which then allows us to grow and also affect more people's lives. So if you do that, I would greatly, greatly appreciate it. Today, we're going to be talking about how to master communication. I'm going

Starting point is 00:00:42 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 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

Starting point is 00:01:20 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 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

Starting point is 00:01:51 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 what happened was I started to realize that I wasn't a really great communicator, 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

Starting point is 00:02:29 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 would 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, nonverbal 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

Starting point is 00:03:10 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

Starting point is 00:03:50 in a 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 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

Starting point is 00:04:26 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 going to 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

Starting point is 00:05:10 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 and those are verbal affirmations that you're listening to that person another thing that you want to 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 close 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,

Starting point is 00:06:03 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 going to want to do is you're going to 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 want to paraphrase what you've heard. It shows that

Starting point is 00:06:40 you're engaging with them and you're paying attention. So you could say, oh man, that's nuts. So he said X, Y, Z 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 had 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

Starting point is 00:07:11 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, one, two, three. two, three. 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.

Starting point is 00:08:02 We don't give all the details. We don't give all of what we're thinking about. 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 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.

Starting point is 00:08:34 It was in the 1960s by a doctor named Dr. Albert May Rabban. 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 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.

Starting point is 00:09:15 And when I was younger and I was in the company I was telling you about, I was running my first office. It was really hardcore sales that we were in. So there was, I would say, probably, 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

Starting point is 00:09:56 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 he said is 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 women are usually really

Starting point is 00:10:25 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 been done on boys and girls. So like five, six 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

Starting point is 00:11:05 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,

Starting point is 00:11:34 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 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 are hunting and 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,

Starting point is 00:12:09 back to back, never looked each other in the eye. And 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 set, 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 there would be more face to face around a fire and in smaller groups. And when they have 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

Starting point is 00:12:53 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 then also watch men. And this is why I've, I've, every time I say this and I say this in a group, men and women always go, Oh, like that makes so much sense. Cause I would say women, have you ever complained to your guy that he's not listening? And then he's like, well, what are you talking? 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

Starting point is 00:13:40 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, 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,

Starting point is 00:14:13 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, try not to cross your legs. And then if you want to show somebody that you're interested and engaged, you can lean forward slightly to actually convey that and maintain appropriate eye contact with them, because that demonstrates that you're listening, you're confident, you're attentive. And then just

Starting point is 00:14:35 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 pitch, regulate your tone. And if there's

Starting point is 00:15:18 a crazy moment, everything's getting escalated and you're trying to deescalate tensions around other people, a calm and steady tone helps people regulate trying to deescalate 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 it's 7% is a word. You might be like, well, 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 that the

Starting point is 00:16:00 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.

Starting point is 00:16:41 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.

Starting point is 00:17:21 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. He was like, he still is, he's still alive. So he's not was, but he was at the time. Six foot two, like 280 pounds. He has really deep voice. And he's all, 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 you see this thing that would crack us up. He'd be like, all right, everybody watch,

Starting point is 00:18:03 watch. I'm going to go ahead. I'm going to do this call. Is everybody ready? Okay, here we go. And then you go ringer game. Hey, is this Sally? Hey, Sally, this is Matt. How are you? And we're like, where the hell did his voice just change? Like, where did that come from?

Starting point is 00:18:17 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 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.

Starting point is 00:18:43 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 information, people actually appreciate it. 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. It goes back to what Einstein said. He said, if you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. And I remember I had a conversation with one of

Starting point is 00:19:31 my friends about three years ago now. And I was like, man, can I give you a tip on just speaking? 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, you're, 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, I can't change that. That's just, he was trying to get better at public speaking. He's 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.

Starting point is 00:20:06 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? And 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 ninth grade reading level. So if you're speaking, not saying that you shouldn't

Starting point is 00:20:41 be intelligent, if you like words and you think that they can, I'm not saying completely change the way that you speak, but if you're trying to have other people understand and effectively know exactly what you're talking about, 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 funny, the title, because he literally makes a joke in the title. This is the actual title of the article itself. Daniel Oppenheimer's study said that it's called Consequences of... I don't even know how to pronounce the damn word I'm trying to. Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Introspective of Necessity with using long words needlessly. And obviously the title is humorously reflecting the study's theme. But in his research, Oppenheimer found that when

Starting point is 00:21:32 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 listeners understanding and so these are the four tips i really want you to try

Starting point is 00:22:19 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 is the four steps one more time, is actively listening and being present

Starting point is 00:22:38 when someone's speaking to you. Number two is nonverbal communication, which is the 55% of communication. Number three is the tonality 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 those four tips. So that's what I got for you for today's episode.

Starting point is 00:23:03 If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories and tag me at Rob Dial Jr. 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 robdial.com book and prove that you actually

Starting point is 00:23:29 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's robdial.com book. And with that, I'm gonna leave it the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you

Starting point is 00:23:50 and I hope that you have an amazing day.

The Mindset Mentor - Master Communication: 4 Tips For Better Conversations

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