new feed updates notifications Home 2 2 new network updates notifications My Network Jobs Messaging 6 6 new notifications Notifications Advertise How to Connect with People Chris Hanley Chris Hanley OAM, Principal of First National Byron, Founder of Byron Writers Festival, Keynote Speaker. Chris is also chair of Rise a joint Australia New Zealand initiative around Mental Health in the Real Estate profession. January 20, 2025 We spend around 11,000 hours at school, yet no one teaches us how to talk to each other. 1. The most liberating and empowering principle of conversation is that your message is always your responsibility, not theirs. Keep chipping away until your real message—the words and ideas you really want to convey—are fully ingested and understood by your audience. 2. Undivided attention means undivided attention. We all own our attention. It is everyone’s biggest challenge today and attention is now the world’s most valuable resource. Your message might be brilliant and timely, but if they are not listening, really listening, then all your words are wasted. 3. There are 180,000 words in the English language. Most of us have a vocabulary of 20,000 – 30,000 words and stop adding words by our middle years. Never stop collecting new words. Life is one long language game. 4. Dialogue means dialogue. It’s an interchange, not one-way traffic. Don’t make speeches, soliloquys, or rants. 5. The terrible problem with communication today is the illusion that it has taken place. 6. Nobody’s thinking about you—really—including the person you are talking to. 7. You don’t win a conversation. Some peoples’ conversations are like hand-to-hand combat; think “karate”. Conversations should not be a contest, they should be more like a slow dance, a waltz. And don’t yell. 8. If you want to tell someone they are wrong, first tell them they are right. If you want to be critical of someone, first be complimentary. 9. Self-awareness is your most important personal attribute in a conversation. Without it, you are forever flying blind and bruising others. 10. Conversations have tells and turns. Tells are the often-small, non-verbal signs people make in a conversation or in a game. Years of playing cards taught me that we all have tells. The turn is the place in a conversation when a change, like a wind change, comes along, and you feel that the discussion has turned an important corner. 11. Never assume anything in a conversation, and always ask yourself, “what am I missing here?” Undiscussables need to be discussed, and we need to ask stuff we don’t think we should ask. Here’s the thing, in talking and interviewing hundreds upon hundreds of people over many years, I cannot ever remember anyone saying, “I won’t answer that question.” The only questions you will regret are the ones you have not asked. 12. “No.” is a complete sentence. Be ok with people telling you “No”. It’s an invitation, not the cessation of a conversation, and it’s also an opportunity. I have had a long career in “no”. People often don’t mean “no”, really, they just mean “no now, but maybe not no later”.