Jefferson Fisher

If I'm in an argument, let's say, and let's say it's me who gets frustrated.

I'm going to get frustrated really quickly, right out of the gate.

And you know what?

That's going to color the whole rest of the conversation for me.

And I'm going to have to be doing the mental work to try and dig myself out of that situation.

you know that mindset same for somebody else if they're trying to deliver something to you and you're not being receptive of it the good communicators say i can tell that this is not going where we need to go i'm going to restart it or let's push it for another time so to me the the first seven seconds of the conversation is sort of like the tail wagging the dog

I know if those first seven seconds aren't going well, it is rare that the rest of the conversation will somehow turn by itself naturally and improve.

What I typically like to do and what I'm going to encourage you to do is reset it.

So how do you do that?

If you find that the first seven seconds are not going well, the good communicators will reset it.

They'll say phrases like,

I need to redo, I need to restart this.

It's not asking, you could ask if you wanted, hey, can I try that again?

Somebody's gonna say, yeah, of course.

They don't ever say no, but yeah, of course.

Or what I like to do is say, can I say that differently?

I need to say this differently.

And I restart it because most likely if I'm asking that, the other person's lost.

They're like, yeah, please restart it differently because I didn't prepare.

I didn't do the mental gymnastics of making sure that I'm in the right mindset before we go into this conversation because that's normal and what happens.