How to Have Great Conversations to Grow Your Holistic Business

Sales conversations are something many holistic practitioners struggle with. They often feel sleazy and uncomfortable about them, but they don’t have to. Go back to basics and learn to have great conversations first to build relationships.

Listening with the intent to talk

Have you noticed how often people speak across each other? Most of the time, we’re busy thinking about what we’re going to say next instead of fully participating in the conversation.

And as a race, we’re more divided than ever - every topic has the potential to be controversial and spark an argument. We’ve sadly reached a place where people talk to be heard and are rarely willing to listen or be open to others’ views and opinions.

Learning to have better conversations generally, will help you build better connections and relationships for your business too. It will take the pressure off selling and attract people who want to work with you because they already know, like and trust you.

Rules for better conversations

There’s a brilliant TedX Talk by Celeste Headless about how to have better conversations. She’s a radio host, an expert interviewer and skilled in having great conversations. She suggests the key ingredients are honesty, brevity, clarity, and most importantly, listening.

Celeste tells us to ignore what we’ve been taught to demonstrate we’re listening to someone such as looking them in the eye, nodding and smiling. There is absolutely no reason to show you are paying attention - if you are paying attention!

Instead, she suggests entering every conversation assuming you have something to learn and prepared to be amazed – that way, you’ll never be disappointed. She has created 10 rules to have better conversations:

1. Be present and entirely in the moment giving the other person your full attention.
2. Don’t preach without wanting people to interact with you. Always assume you have something to learn too.
3. Ask open-ended questions and invite people to share their experiences. Use questions starting with who, what, why, why or how.
4. Go with the flow and let go of thoughts that come into your mind. You will automatically stop listening if you want to talk, so wait and see where the conversation goes.
5. If you don’t know something, be honest and say you don’t know.
6. Don’t equate your experience to someone else’s, all experiences are individual. Allow people space to share their stories without jumping in or comparing it with yours.
7. Try not to repeat yourself.
8. Don’t include every minute detail, people don’t care about them.
9. LISTEN! This is the most important skill to develop.
10. Be brief!

Here is the talk.

Pause and breathe

Next time you find yourself jumping into a conversation, desperate to put your point across, take a second to pause and take a breath. Interrupting your automatic response will take practice, but it will give you the opportunity to return to being present in the conversation. You’ll soon get the hang of it and enjoy having deeper, more meaningful conversations.

Using conversations in your marketing

Whilst when working with your clients, you must listen to understand their needs to be able to help them. The art of listening and having conversations are great skills to develop for your marketing too.

Conversations with clients are a great way to understand their experiences, in their words. This information is priceless for your marketing as it will help you to communicate directly by using their language in your marketing.

The art of great conversations will also help you with all sorts of marketing activities from successful networking to doing interviews.

Need help?

Let's talk if you’re struggling with your marketing and finding clients. Book a free discovery call with me and find out how I can help you.