The 12 most effective conversations of your life

14 years ago I became very interested in sleep as it pertains to human performance and health.

I read a lot. I read research and recommended books and what happen through a process of supporting implementation of the science was that I was able to help my clients to improve their sleep.

Let’s say, a 10% improvement for perhaps 6 hours of conversation. Add to that the trial and error, their workload - let’s say we reach something like 20 hours cost.

Now that might work out to be quite expensive for a 10% improvement but fortunately sleep is of such a high value for health and performance as to mean the money and time is repaid so it definitely worth it.

Now simply by continuing to learn from some very smart people in lots of different areas of health and over a 14 year period this 20 hours is now approximately 1 hour in 99% of case and usually more than 10% improvement.

This simply because I have learn what to look for and what remedies have the biggest impact on them.

I have been on a similar journey with nutrition, health, exercise, and pain and also mental performance.

Now, the areas of nutrition, exercise, pain and sleep its quite measurable as we can do some work towards calculating the time lost in the past or gained in the future. We likely significantly underestimate because it’s hard to see all the ripple effects but we could get something down.

The way I used to think about exponential improvement was in terms of time.

“These things take time”

“Anything worth while takes a long time”

We seem to have created a way of thinking that tells us that time is a more primary part of change than it is.

We might say that it takes a lot of time to build a house or it take a long time to build a business or a relationship or a life.

But really those are all process driven. It takes the time those processes take, the quality of those processed, multiplied by the speed of execution.

It is in this way that I have come to think about coaching and leadership.

Two different leaders have a conversation with one of their team.

Person 1 leaves the conversation unbeknownst to him without full clarity. Passes the information to the team, the team executes as best as they can against that understanding.

The team are uncertain so they act slowly. Their uncertainty shows up as stress (unbeknownst to them). They talk negatively about the management because they are stressed and uninspired and pushing out that discomfort. Chaos is created throughout the business, the relationships and home lives.

THIS is an under-exaggeration but it will do for now.

Person 2 leaves the conversation feeling trusted, taking full ownership and with complete clarity. The team are inspired, they take ownership and work fast. The intrinsic feedback leaves them happy and fulfilled and speaking highly of the company to all who will listen.

This all hinged on the quality of a conversation and understanding what a quality conversation looks like. The quality of our conversations is determined by our own clarity, direction, focus and strategy. ie it is a product of our brain.

Every conversation is time travel towards a better or worse future.

My newest programme is designed to be the 12 most effective conversations of your life while learning to rapidly condense time.

Send me a PM on LinkedIn if you are interested.