The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Gaslighting & Conversation Expert: This Is A Sign You’ll Divorce in 10 Years!
22 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What are the five essential communication skills for success?
What are the five most important things for anyone who's striving to be a masterful communicator to get what they want out of life? The first is authenticity. Presence is the highest form of authenticity. Okay, on that point, I'm going to play this video on the screen that went viral of Miley Cyrus and Naomi Campbell.
I haven't seen this. That's painful to watch. Number two, reduce the amount of distraction. Three, stop over explaining. Number four, know how to deal with their sadness.
Chapter 2: How can you take control of conversations effectively?
And I'll go through all of these in detail. But number five is you have to know how to handle the narcissist and the gaslighter. What do I do?
Chapter 3: What role does body language play in influencing others?
Let me show you. First, you need to time. Yeah, for a lot of people, that kind of blows their mind. Jefferson Fisher is back, and the board-certified trial lawyer is using his expertise in conflict resolution and communication to teach couples, friends, employees, and everyone in between how to master difficult conversations. Here's the truth. You have to invest in your communication.
If I don't say what needs to be said at work, I'll lose that promotion. Same thing in relationships. Most relationships don't fall apart because they fell out of love. They fell out of communication because of a hundred moments where repair could have happened and it didn't.
Chapter 4: How can you identify and deal with gaslighters in conversations?
Because you said, ah, this is so stupid. This is so small. Like there's a recent study showing that the biggest predictor of the child's well-being within the parental relationship is not whether they were married or divorced. It was how they deal with conflict. But people are definitely afraid of the conflict that they're in because they don't know what to say.
And so I want to help them feel controlled enough, feel confident in this. And it's knowing things like being right is overrated. If I respond first with frustration, I'm going to lose every time. Or if you want to know how to handle the insults, the patronizing, the dismissal, the first thing you have to do is... That's the mistake I've made multiple times.
Just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us. And this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place. But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started.
And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. Here's a promise I'm going to make to you. I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future.
We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to, and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show. Thank you. Jefferson Fisher. What you do professionally... How do you sort of characterize your profession? Well, I'm a trial attorney by trade.
What does that mean? That means I help clients with legal needs, board certified and personal injury. So when people get hurt, I have trials. So that means there are other attorneys that don't ever go to a courtroom. I go into a courtroom. And you stand before a judge and a jury? Yeah, you have a judge, you have a jury, you have a court reporter, a bailiff, you have opposing attorneys.
There are people in the room. And you try and convince those people of your point of view to get a particular outcome? I advocate my clients' facts in order to get the result that they want. So why did you think it was important to write a book about conversation, talking, getting what you want from the conversations we have with people we care about?
Because I have seen time and time again that when I am training a client is what I call it, I'm preparing them for cross-examination, for deposition. they really don't know how to engage in conflict. And so I can't think of any other profession that is more entrenched in conflict, maybe outside of a boxer or some UFC something, that deals with actual conflict
and sits there and listens to it all than in the legal world and a trial attorney. And so, yeah, it's my job to advocate based on my client's facts to get them the result that they want.
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Chapter 5: What insights can we gain from childhood experiences about communication?
And it infuriates her because she wouldn't do that. She's going to wait for it to go on sale. She could have something she really wants, and she's just going to track it forever in her mind until it goes on sale. And that gives her satisfaction. Me, I'll just go buy it. And I'm not saying I'm crazy. I'm not like some crazy spender.
But this is an issue that has always bothered her and bothered me. And what we had come to find out, we had actually used this with my AI actually, but what we had come to learn is that The reason why it affected me so much, like, why do you always choose the nice thing? This is related to when I was a kid. As the oldest, I didn't get much of the nice thing.
My stuff was typically, hand me down from a friend or something else, or I didn't get the nice thing. And at some point along the way, you equate that to your sense of worth. And so when I first had the ability to pay for anything for myself, yeah, I bought the on-brand cornflakes. I bought the on-brand medication because to me that was equal to how I wanted others to perceive me.
And so when she realized that, oh, it's not just me wanting to splurge or have some kind of, you know, you just think you, have to buy the best. It was like, no, that's actually, it's a reflection of when you buy me something nice, I feel like you equate that to how much value I hold. I'm not worth buying something nice for. And so it was related a lot to my stuff.
And we got to talk the same about her stuff of why she doesn't want to buy the thing. So it's like that. Having these super conversations with your friend of why does it bother her when she takes forever to get dressed? Well, most likely, it's related to something in his past that's bothered him that he's not seeing yet. Are the conversation worth having?
Yeah, I think it's absolutely worth having. If it's bothering you that much, yeah. If it's hysterical, it's historical.
I think that's a really good point, which is we're all just dealing with other people's inner child. Like we're all dealing with, it's just like me as a child facing you as a child. I know we look like adults now. I have grey hair, but it's really still us just playing out the stories and narratives from our childhood oftentimes.
You're exactly right. They say in therapy, the worst thing about parents is that they had parents. I mean, it's so easy for me just to look at my mom and me forget that she had parents, what they did to her, rather than me just looking at what my parents have done to me. And that's the definition of the generational cycle, and it's choosing to do something different.
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Chapter 6: How can we effectively deal with difficult conversations?
with who you are and who you want to be and how you want to raise the next generation. But it's all survival skills. It's all childhood trauma that's related. And when people, I have a section in my book of having people define out their own The communication skills they saw growing up.
Because most of the time, if you feel like arguments have to be this big shouting match and everybody's yelling, and it's also typically cultural, you know, of how certain cultures, how they argue and how loud it is. And if everybody versus there's some cultures and families that it's very different. quiet.
I'll never forget going to a friend's house when I was about seven, and his parents, while we're eating cereal, just had at it. And I was mortified. Arguing. Arguing. Arguing. And I mean, yelling at each other And I am like bowling hand mortified. And my friend is just eating cereal like I am, bothering him whatsoever.
Chapter 7: What role does authenticity play in communication?
That's just another Tuesday. And whereas I grew up with, if my parents argued, it was going to be in their bedroom. You know, I knew if they were going to, they went to close the door and they were going to have a conversation that they didn't want us to hear.
And so everybody has been modeled something different where, like there's, I've seen it on the negative side where people feel like, you don't really love me unless you want to fight with me. It's because that's all they've been modeled, fights. They have to say the most hurtful thing. They need to be in tears. They need to be saying horrible things to each other for them to feel any kind of love.
And I've also seen it where people are a wallflower. They don't want to say anything. They want to be really hesitant because bad things happen when they spoke out at home. They realize that telling the truth wasn't good for them. They learned that lies protected them.
It's interesting when you have one parent that conducted themselves in a certain way and the other parent was the opposite. What then happens to you? Like which communication style you then adopt?
Which parent takes more of an interest in you is where it typically goes. The one you're most of the time with. And see, I know people who their parents are kind of absent, but they spend a lot of time with their grandmother. And so I know a guy who he sounds just like his southern grandmother from Kentucky, you know, because that's who he spent most of his time with.
And so it's who takes the most interest in you. It's where the parents... What I find so interesting in communication, we talk everything is learned from how we were raised, is at one point in time there was utility to what you were doing. There was a utility to lying. It protected you. It protected maybe your mom. It protected maybe your dad. There's utility to it.
There's a utility to manipulating, to be able to say things weren't this way in order to keep the family together. So there is a utility to the very skill that you still have, and eventually it catches up with you.
What is it about our communication do you think that makes us accidentally disliked by other people? It sounds fake. It sounds fake. And how does it sound fake? Give me some color.
If you want to know the secret, if somebody's being fake with you, there's really three things that you got to know. Number one, it's what I call bestie bombing.
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Chapter 8: How can we support someone who is grieving?
And you can find that link to Whisper Flow in the description below.
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so that was number three yeah stop over explaining yourself yeah the second one was reducing distractions and the first was authenticity number four know how to deal with their sadness a lot of people are hurting that you don't know are hurting and a lot of people are grieving that you don't know are grieving whether it's the holidays whether it's a
an important date or event that you don't know about in their life, and they're hurting and grieving. If you really want to be a top-level communicator, you need to know not to say not only when the times are good, but also when the times are bad.
And how does one be there for someone when they're going through their moments of sadness? Is there any principles that one should think about?
Yeah, when somebody is grieving, what you do not do is begin with, let me know if. If what you are about to say begins with let me know if, it's the wrong thing to say. Let me know if you need anything. Let me know if I can do anything for you. Just let me know. Anything you need, let me know. All you're doing is giving them a chore. This person's already grieving at this moment.
They're going through something you don't even know how to feel, and you're now giving them a chore of they're supposed to be on their own to have the ability to pull out their phone, text their need to you. That's never going to happen. Have you ever had somebody say, let me know if you need anything, actually let you know that they needed something? Never.
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