The Path To Better Conversations

Vance Crowe [00:00:06] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here today. I'm gonna do a solo episode. This is for a couple of reasons, one of which is I had a really profound insight into communication last week, and it's been on my mind so much that I think I wanna share it with you. It's something that I think not only helped me think about how I communicate with others, but I think this is something that I can hand to you that will categorically change the way that you interact with your spouse, with your friends, with your employees, with your boss, with all of the people that you encounter. This is something that I think I've known intuitively, but until I said it out loud, I didn't really know it. So I wanna share that with you because I think it's valuable. And if there's one thing over the last year that I have realized it is that when I share my communications insights with you, you really respond. I get all kinds of likes on the videos. We get more subscribers, which is a great thing. If you're not a subscriber, definitely subscribe. But we also get people reaching out to me saying, I'd like you to do more of that. Can you help me? I sent this to my daughter, I sent this to my friend, and I think it really helped them. So I wanna be responsive to that, and I'm gonna go into that insight in just a moment. But I also wanna have kind of a candid discussion with you in the last few weeks, the Ag Tribes report, where I come on each week with a different guest co-host, and we talk about the news that's going on right now, and I both live stream it and then air it the next day.

Vance Crowe [00:01:38] This podcast is exploding in growth. It is absolutely shocking. It's definitely doing well. And the Vance Crowe podcast has continued to deliver about the same number of listeners every week for more than a year. And while I love doing the Vance Crowe Podcast, it gives me a chance to meet really interesting people. I get to share my ideas. I get to explore things, and I love all the comments that people send me and the emails and the interactions. I also have to be real, and I have to say, Hey, this is a lot of time and effort you're putting into the Vance Crowe podcast. Are you sure this is the right place You should be putting it. As Legacy Interviews has grown, we have started a wait list. So anytime I'm doing a Vance Crowe podcast, I'm not doing a legacy interview, and I am right on the edges of how much time I can spend away from my children, which is the reason that I'm doing all of this. The reason all of us are working is to be able to provide for our families, and I think be able to influence them. And the only way to influence them is to spend time with them. So if I'm taking time away from them, I need it to be for something that's really valuable. So I'm torn about the Vance Crowe Podcast, and I'd really like to get your thoughts on it. If this is something that you think I should continue, I'd really like your insight in how can I grow this? What could I do that would allow it to grow in the same way that the Ag Tribes report is? And is there something I need to change to make this thing more valuable to a wider audience?

Vance Crowe [00:03:11] I have loved doing this. This is what brings me most of the Legacy Interviews, and so I'm very reluctant to let it go. But when I sit down and I have a very deep and honest conversation with myself, I have to admit that I don't know how to make this thing grow. And if you're not growing, are you dying? So definitely send me your thoughts. You can send them to Vance at Legacy Interviews dot com. Let me know if you think I should keep this going and if I am gonna keep it going, what do I need to change in order to grow and make this better? Until then, I wanna talk about that insight I was telling you about last week. I had a conversation with my former business partner, Benjamin Anderson. Now Benjamin and I, while we parted ways as businessmen, we have become very close friends. In fact, even closer friends I think, than we were working together when we parted ways, it was an incredibly good relationship. There was no problems at all. I just knew that Ben Deeply wanted to be and needed to be working on biotech. And so after I bought him out, he went on to go raise a huge amount of money for his biotech firm. People really believe in what he's doing, and it's so great to see him be successful. After he raised money, he was able to make some hires of some really incredible scientists and prompt them to come to St. Louis, he is single-handedly doing what all these large corporations and organizations try and do from a top down strategy of, oh, we need better PR and news.

Vance Crowe [00:04:43] Well, what Ben is doing is he's creating an opportunity for them to do great science, and he is Bri offering them a place to live. And so they're coming here and it is really neat to see my business partner and his network of friends grow out this community. Well, Ben, a few months ago, before Legacy Interviews had a wait list, came to me and said, I really would like your help training my scientists how to communicate the way that you help me learn how to communicate. The way you help me learn how to communicate, helped me raise money. It helped me find a way to negotiate with people that thought St. Louis was not a great place to live, or that this project that I've don't have any evidence that I can do it, that I can get them on board with me. All of the things that we, that I learned by working with you Vance, I want you to find a way to teach them. Would you be willing to do it? Now, this was in the middle of summer, and just like any good entrepreneur knows, there are ups and downs to your business. And at the time, I wasn't getting very many calls for Legacy Interviews. There wasn't a wait list, and I was not beared down with so many things to do. So I said, sure, how hard could it be to take some of my ideas, many of which I've either talked about on this podcast, or I've given speeches on? Why don't I try and put that into

Vance Crowe [00:05:57] A class? This actually felt like a really good opportunity because most of the time when I try and teach somebody about communications, the challenge is any one individual skill doesn't amount to somebody having a, an ability to radically change the way they communicate with people. And so the reality is, if you wanna become a better communicator, you have to stack a whole bunch of skills on top of one another and then collectively use what is authentic for you and be able to engage with people in a different way. So I thought this was a great opportunity and I created a class called Interest-Based Communication. The class was set up as first a negotiations class. If you can understand interest based negotiations, then that helps you think about what is it that other people need when I'm communicating with them so that they wanna open up and share with me and, and what is the value of this communication? So I did this in a little bit of an inverted way because normally people set up communications classes and they have the introduction first. But I knew that introductions are actually only valuable if you understand what is it that the other person needs to know or understand about what I'm talking about or what I'm interested in and what I se I'm selling in order that I can set up my introduction to meet those needs. So we started with the interest based negotiations, then we went to introductions, then we went to the inner workings of conversation, and how do you demonstrate to somebody that you're really listening to them and making sure that they feel like you, they you can, they can open up to you and that you're responding to it.

Vance Crowe [00:07:35] Then we had a fourth session on conflict and alignment, and what can you do when two people are seemingly not getting along? How can you break down those challenges to be able to find a way to align yourselves to be able to get past problems and challenges? And then finally, the last session, which I'm actually teaching today, is on negotiating in complex situations. So what happens when the person you're negotiating with isn't the decision maker? How do decisions get made inside of a bureaucracy? These are all things that all of us need to know. And it was really fun to put together this class. I did it for five people, and I have since been offered to do this class for several other organizations in the St. Louis area. And I'm not sure if I'm gonna do it right. I love doing this class. It's been really great for me. But I don't know if this fits in. What I really care about is Legacy Interviews. But I have really enjoyed teaching this class. So back to my conversation with Benjamin, we were sitting together doing our weekly meeting, and he said, what have you learned by doing this class for other people? Ben intuitively knows that if you teach something, you often learn it in a deeper, more important way. And as soon as he asked me that question, I was like, oh man, I feel like I've learned a lot by doing this class, but let me think and try and really answer this. And slowly an idea started to build in my mind. And the idea wasn't natural at first. It didn't seem like it fit, but I started to realize that the thing that I had learned was that great conversations are like a meditation.

Vance Crowe [00:09:16] Now, if you've never meditated before, the hardest part about meditation is that as soon as you start getting into meditation, the the point of it is to be present. It is not to allow the emotions that you have to either push you into the past or force you into the future, which is what's going on most of the time in our minds, most of the time we are feeling things. We're either anxious about the future, so we're thinking about that. We're dreading it, we're worried about it, or we're replaying moments from the past. And so those moments from the past we're either feeling regret about them or we're wondering, should we have done something differently? And so most of our existence is spent either thinking about the future or living in the past, but not being in the present. And even when we are in the present, oftentimes we are now distracted by our phones, by some podcast, by things that are catching our eye and our attention. And what I realized is that the meditations that I do in the morning, just 10 minutes of breathing in and breathing out often require me to notice that I'm getting off the path. What do I mean by that? Well, I mean, normally when I'm having a meditation, I'm breathing in and I'm breathing out, and I'm in this present moment for about 15 seconds. And then a thought Remi pops into my mind like something I need to do this afternoon or something. I wanna make sure that I tell my wife before we go to work this morning.

Vance Crowe [00:10:48] And so my mind starts wandering off the path. Now, when you first start meditating, what happens is you get mad at yourself. You're like, ah, I'm not thinking about the present moment. Or, I'm so bad at this meditation. And then you're thinking about how you're bad at meditation and you're not doing it well, and you're never gonna get it. And then you have this little idea that pops in your head, let's just go back. Let's just get present again. So you then breathe in and then breathe out. And the value of the meditation is not that you go without interruption. It's not that you go without falling off the path, it's that you become conscious of the fact that you're not being present and you bring yourself back there. And that's what I realized while I was talking with Benjamin, that great communication is all about being present. It's about making it so you are not thinking about yourself, your anxieties, your depressions, your fears, comparison, all of those things that what I was teaching this class throughout, interest based negotiations, introductions, conversations, conflicts, all of these things are about making sure that the person in front of you is the focus of what you're thinking about. And the very act of finding a way to focus on them and what they are saying and receiving it is really all you're doing when you're teaching a communications class. You're giving people tools or I'm giving people tools to be able to say, oh, I'm off the path.

Vance Crowe [00:12:25] I want to get back on here. So during the class, we talked about things like body language. You know how nodding your head or raising your eyebrows or having your mouth demonstrate, ah, I'm surprised by this thing, actually tells the other person, Hey, they're right here with me. And it doesn't really matter how good you are at body language, if what you're doing is focused on expressing that you understand what they're saying. This other person feels like they're being heard. Now, you've probably heard me say hundreds of times that most people go most of their lives never having anybody really listen to them. So if you can be the kind of person that is present with another person, you will notice that they unlock, they open up. I was just recently on a podcast with a guy named Jack Milliken who has a podcast called Noble Lore, and he's an extraordinary interviewer. He has a great way of being completely present with a person. And I noticed when I was listening back to the interview that actually shared with him more than I normally do. And I think that's because he is so good at being present. He also is taking the Interest-Based Communication class. And I think a lot of the things that we talked about in there, I notice he's using, you know, we've talked in past episodes about the tiniest choices people make in a conversation. If you're really listening to somebody and you don't get caught up in thinking about what is the next question I'm gonna ask them? Or can I remember all of the things that they're telling me?

Vance Crowe [00:13:57] If instead you're just listening intensely to what they're saying and you notice something that floats past, and then you ask about that thing that floats past, they are going to feel like you are really listening to them. And that, again, will bring them to the present, make them feel comfortable and make them open up. So this Interest-Based Communication class, I don't know if I'm gonna do it again. What I'm gonna do is put a signup on the website. If you go to vancecrowe.com/ Interest-Based Communication, you will find a little signup sheet. And if there are people that wanna do it, I'll do it. I'm, I've done it in St. Louis and Jack of All People really wants me to create an online class and be able to make it so people anywhere could take this. As I said in the beginning, I have such limited time. I'm not sure if I'm gonna do it, but I can tell you that just thinking about it because of Benjamin's question, what did you learn by teaching this class? That's gonna help me because if I'm aware that what I need to be doing is being present with people, even if that's what I intuitively did, it makes me that much more aware of it. And if I can teach you how to do that, I think that that will make your conversations be better. It'll be more interesting. You will get more out of people, you'll create deeper connections, you will get past conflicts, and all of these things are wonderful things that I would love to add into the world. Alright, I am going to wrap up. If you have been thinking about doing a legacy interview, I would love for you to go to Legacy Interviews dot com and put your name on our waiting list.

Vance Crowe [00:15:33] When you do that, I will line up a phone call with you. We'll talk about who you want to do an interview and what is the timeframe you're looking to get this done in. We will do everything we can to make that work. This has been a very exciting time of growth and it's been really a wonderful thing to be able to use a lot of the skills that I'm teaching in these Legacy Interviews. And also, don't forget, if you have an opinion about doing the Vance Crowe podcast and what I can do to grow it, send me an email Vance at Legacy Interviews dot com. Alright, well, I'm gonna hop on outta here and get back to work. Thank you so much for being here for my little thoughts on how to become a better communicator by being present. Ah.