How To Talk To Humans
How To Talk To Humans
Active Listening to Enhance Gift Giving (Personal & Business) Holiday Special Part 2
Special Holiday episodes Part 1 & 2, all about Gift giviung being enhanced by Active Listening. Great two part episode to improve your Personal and Business life.
Larry Wilson of "The Wilson Method" shares some stories to help teach some important aspects of listening, and to use those listening skills in purchasing the perfect gifts for Personal or Business relationships.
This episode launched early as NO EPISODE will be launched on Christmas Day.
Hosted by Larry Wilson
Produced by: Verbal Ninja Productions
Producer: R. Scott Edwards
Sponsored by: The Wilson Method
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Visit: https://theWilsonMethod.com
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Link: TheWilsonMethod.com
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Hi, this is Larry Wilson and this is How to Talk to Humans. This is the podcast that shows you how to improve your communication skills. Are you looking to get a better job? Are you looking to find a relationship? Are you trying to do things in your life that have frustrated you and eluded you so far? I can show you so easily how to change that. Now, I can only do it with humans. If you're looking to deal with vampires or zombies extraterrestrials, this is not the show for you. But if you're really looking to improve your communication skills, I can show you what I've learned from 40 years in the show business working with the biggest celebrities and superstars in the world, and their secrets are unbelievable. What I'm going to be teaching you during the course of this podcast every week are tools that you can use to communicate toward success. Hi, thanks for joining me again for part two of last week's show. There was so much I wanted to share with you, I didn't want to take up too much of your time. So here's all the good stuff that follows up the good stuff from part one. Hollywood does terrible things to people, and it brings out some of the worst qualities. I say this because I was saying if a gold bar might be a gratefully accepted gift. But there's some people in Hollywood who immediately would be on guard. They'd take it. Oh, don't get me wrong. They wouldn't refuse the gold bar. But in their mind, they might be thinking, okay, this person's working me. They want something from me. Now they're on guard. That's not what we want. We want you to pick a gift. For those of you who are afraid, I'm just dangling some tantalizing fruit that's impossible to achieve. I'm going to explain, as I always do, simple mechanical ways to achieve this. But we want them to be left with that semiotic message conveyed to them. It doesn't matter whether they understand it consciously or not. They might, but I know what they will feel is a good feeling about you. We can't really ask for more than that. I can't, I we don't have time here tonight for me to enumerate all the times that I've had this personal experience from a gift I've selected. It's incredible the effect this will have. Because most people feel from time to time, maybe not all the time, but from time to time they feel invisible. They feel like no one really sees them. Now, it doesn't mean they're invisible like Claude Rains in the Invisible Man, although I guess if it was really bad, they might feel that way. It just means that they don't feel people really care enough to listen to them, to look at them, to pay attention, to see who they really are. If you do, they will fall in love with you. And they will never ever forget you. Ever. I always have to be careful about revealing stuff that's too personal here because it doesn't seem to be the proper form. I have a needlepoint pillow in my bedroom. The bedroom I share with my wife that was made for me when I was 15 years old by a girlfriend I had at that time. And I didn't even really know that she knew how to do needlepoint. But somehow she had created a pattern or something that looked exactly like me. She had needlepointed this pillow so that it it looked like me. And I remember at the time I was struck by how amazing this was. My wife thought she was a lovely person. She really was. She's just a really nice person. But as the years go by, I'm more impressed by this pillow. And at one point I was a little bit embarrassed because you know I was married and everything. And I thought, and my wife said, Well, what is this? And I explained, Oh, that was something. She said, Well, we should, you know, take it to the cleaners, have it dry cleaned, and put it out. She said, That's incredible. I said, Well, yeah, it really is. The more time that goes by, the more incredible I think it is. Now, she wasn't trying to sell me anything. She didn't have a business. But believe me, I didn't understand it consciously. I couldn't have articulated it the way I am here. But what was so clear was she really saw me. She really saw me. She knew who I was. We'll never ever forget her. Never. Of course not. So, this is what I want you to think about in this coming crazy holiday season, because of course it always is. It's uh it's the name of the game. There's some retailers who make 80% of their profits in the month of December. The rest of the year they stay open, they stay in business because they do a little sales, but more than anything, I think it's just to keep people aware of them and let them know they're still in business. I I can think of more than one. I'm not going to name them. I'm not trying to bolster anyone's sales or promote any product here. But this is uh this is their job. And I'm assuming for those of you in this program, in this group, it's your aim. You want to promote your goods or services that you provide. You want people who maybe already use them to know how much you appreciate them. I wasn't going to give all these examples. I'll that's what I was saying, since uh since I know many of you are watching this on reprint. I did a show for a company. You can see me trying to, you know, pixelate this so that it's not completely clear. Uh, a show in Salt Lake City for a big company, holiday party. And everything about it was just really a delight for me. The audience was fantastic. There was a lot of funny byplay with the audience at this late date. I can't remember, I think it was like a year ago, a year or two ago. Um, but the audience was really funny, and the things that they threw at me to uh interact with were just like comedy gold. So I had a fantastic experience. And the guy who was the one who found me and uh hired me to do the show could not have been nicer and could not have made the whole experience easier. And talking to him, I heard him talking about, oh yeah, well, somehow something came up about because you know, we're near great ski locations and stuff. I like to ski. And he he said, Well, I'm not really a big ski. He said, I like to snowmobile. And I said, Oh, I've never done that. He said, Oh, it's so great. And he sort of waxed rhapsodic about snowmobiling. And I said, Oh, okay. And I sort of filed that away in my brain. Later, his wife was also there. I said, Tell me, you know, he was talking about snowmobiling. I wondered, does he uh subscribe to any of the snowmobiling magazine? And she said, Well, he did. He really liked it, but he felt it was too expensive, and so he a few years ago he discontinued it. I thought, oh good. Well, of course. When I got home, I purchased a subscription to a Snowmobile magazine in his name with a gift card saying, Thank you so much, make them so great. And I didn't think it was really that expensive. Uh I guess everything is relative in this world, you know. When he got the card, or I guess they sent, I don't know if they actually sent him a physical card or email, he called me immediately and he was over the moon about this. Now, I'll bet he thought he was over the moon because he loved snowmobiles. But I don't think that's why he was over the moon. He was over the moon, his wife knew about him, his wife paid attention to him, but that Larry Wilson, who had no obligation, I was paid to come do a show, I did it, it was a gigantic success, everyone loved it. End of story, it should be done. But a couple weeks later, he receives a gift from me. Now, like I said, I didn't think it was that expensive, but it was not about the expense, not about the cost of it at all. It's something that showed I was listening to him. I saw what was important to him, I saw what he had a passion for, and I wanted to somehow do something for him. So to me, this seems so simple, so obvious. What does it mean? First and foremost, we rely on one of the basic principles of Wilson Method, which is active listening. It's hard. I understand. Uh it's hard for me too. Uh, I just came back from doing a show for um, I was gonna say a Fortune 500 company, Fortune 50 company, and I wanted so much to make it perfect, and it turned out very well, and everyone's very happy. But it made it hard for me to actively listen to the people who had chosen me and were responsible for bringing me to the event. And I had to consciously make myself stop and pay attention. Because that active listening, it's like so many things I teach, it's so deceptively simple. It seems like, well, yeah, you're just sitting there listening. Not exactly. You have to be listening, not waiting for your turn to talk. You have to be listening like these are important things you've never heard before. And hopefully, if you're in conversation with someone, your response indicates I really hear you, and I understand what it means, what you're saying. I'm not just making small talk for those. That's an old-fashioned expression. I don't know if anyone uses that anymore. But of course, small talk, I think, was an expression from the 1950s. And it basically means talk that you could use with anybody anywhere in any circumstance, it means nothing. You know, um, it's about the weather, or how about those Dodgers, or you know, that's very different than somebody who's talking maybe about something that's really important to them, or something new to them, or something, maybe it's something they're agitated, but whatever it is. If your response indicates, oh, I hear you, not by saying, Oh, I hear you, because that's robotic mechanical machine stuff. That's the kind of stuff I expect from AI. No, it's that response where the person clearly understands what you're saying, why you're saying it. They're really listening to you. They're interested in you, they're invested in you, what you feel, what you think that's what active listening can do. And of course, the greatest gift you can give for the holidays is one that shows you really see them. That's all. Doesn't have to be expensive. Now, sometimes you might think of something that's grand, you know, it's a grand gesture, and it might be expensive. Doesn't mean you have to do that. Sometimes there's a way to scale that down. You know, I had a friend who's no longer with us, uh, who's a lovely guy, funny. It was a girl that he was very interested in and was sort of starting to have a relationship with, and you know, then the dreaded holidays come up and he was having a trouble time. Now, I had nothing to do with this, so uh I can't take any credit, but she was always talking about Paris. A girl in Los Angeles, you know, showbiz. She's talking about, you know, how she'd always wanted to go to Paris, and she, you know, had a dream about being in Paris with someone she loved, and blah, blah. And at one point, this friend of mine said, uh, I can't afford that. I said, no, of course not. Are you crazy? You know, to fly two of you to Paris and stay in a hotel and eat at great restaurants. And no, of course you can't. Now it doesn't mean doesn't mean he couldn't now if he were still with us. But this is when we were young and we had no money. Well, he bought her a snow globe that was actually a great-looking snow globe that had the Eiffel Tower in it. And you know, you shake it and it's all glittering snow and tastes. And he wrapped it up in a special wrap. And she loved this freaking snow globe. And he said to her when he gave it her before she opened, he said, I would like to have given you something much more grand, but it it's beyond my ability at the moment. But I want you to have this to keep in mind what I have planned for the future. Can't top that. Can't top it. Right? That's that's a winner. That's a huge, huge winner. And in fact, that's how this girl kept it with her everywhere everywhere she went. She had the snow globe. I mean, everywhere she lived, I don't think she carried it with her. But uh so what I'd like you to do if you have, I mean, we can separate these. There's personal gifts and there's business gifts. In a strange way, uh I think the business gifts may be harder because uh we don't always know about people personally in a business situation, but you have these devices at your fingertips to make this so simple for you. The first thing I always think of is Facebook. People have a tendency to be very revelatory on Facebook, they sometimes say things that I would never share on Facebook, but of course, also LinkedIn, because some very professional people uh sometimes will surprise you. I just saw one just recently, uh I won't say again, this is no one's business who it was, but it was a woman who um well I had looked up some stuff because I wanted to make a presentation to her company, and she revealed a lot of interesting stuff about herself, how she was sort of a maverick, and how she would always do whatever was the most difficult, and she and then she gave some examples that I'm excising here, but she gave some examples of things that were meaningful to her, and I thought, oh, well, I made some notes. You know, there's no reason you can't have a little file someplace that's gifts for special people. You don't have to buy them, maybe you can't, but sometimes I make notes. You know, you might in April be thinking, oh, you know what? This would be a perfect holiday gift for so-and-so. So I made that note with this woman in a customer relations management piece of software, because if I wind up doing business with them, I'm not gonna send it to her when I don't know her and don't have any kind of contact or relation. That seems like a bribe. Now, I've had enough of that from Hollywood. I don't need any more of that in my life. But if I do work with her, a very nice thank you gift, very simple, very inexpensive. I'll here I'll give you a good one. There's a man, a really great scientist, who's at a Ivy League school on the East Coast, and was very impressed by Wilson Method. Spent a lot of time talking with him about it and doing a deep dive with some stuff there, and had me do some things at this Ivy League school from Wilson Method. And I try to think, oh, we stopped at his apartment to get something he'd forgotten or left order. Now, this is in the dead of winter on the east coast of the United States, and there were a number of avocados in a bowl. I said, Oh, it's kind of interesting. He said, Oh, yeah. He said, I love those avocados. He said, you know, it's impossible to get them here. But I was in Florida a week ago and I brought those back, and I'm parceling them out. I'm, you know, trying to make them last as long as possible. And in my brain, I just went, avocados. So when I returned to California. When I lived in Los Angeles, I sent a case of avocados out to him. And you know, everything now seems to cost the moon. But in those days, it wasn't that expensive, a case of avocados. California, they're growing all over the place. I have friends who have avocados growing in their yard. But you would have thought I had picked the stars from the sky and sent them to the sky. And it really was the foundation of a long-term friendship that continues to this day with that particular scientist. And nobody had to explain it. Nobody, but oh my god, he's loved avocados. Kind of simple. So are you listening? As always, the clock is my enemy here. I see it sifting away. I want you to uh divide, uh and this, you know, you can do this in a hard copy or you can do it on the computer, but don't just think about it. Actually, make a list of people you have to get gifts for who are in business, and maybe family people too, and write their names down, and then don't make yourself crazy. No one's ever gonna see this. This is just for you. But to start with, just jot down the you know, with your family, of course, much easier. You know, but it's not about, and this I think is an important thing. Sometimes people say, Oh, I would love, you know, if someone would get me blah, blah, blah. What they mean is, yeah, they like this, and it's an easy gift for someone to understand. And they might like it, but I don't think they'll love it as much as something that carries that semiotic message. So think about, think about something that when they see it, there may be a moment of the shock of recognition of them realizing, oh, oh my god, I didn't think anyone was paying attention when I said blah, blah, blah, whatever. Whether that's that's what that gift means. When it shows that, oh yeah, I was paying attention, I was listening, I see you. That's what that means. But I'd like you to make that list of family, then make that list of business people. And with the business people, don't be afraid to go on social media and dig around a little. And don't, you don't have to stop with the first thing you find. You may be surprised. Someone at some point may tell a story about going to the zoo and thinking the greatest animals would be the monkeys or the elephants, or the, and then they were surprised that their favorite, this is maybe a childhood memory. I'm just making this up. They might say, but then it turned out the lemurs were the most fantastic. Well, something as small as a stuffed lemur, or I don't mean a real lemur stuffed. I meant like a plush toy, um, or maybe a little sculpture of a lemur, maybe a little painting that you see someplace, or a graphic of, you know. It doesn't have to be expensive. Without me hitting this too hard, I hope that you're seeing that it's not the actual thing itself that is preeminent here. It is the semiotic message that it carries. This is what stays with people forever. Forever. And as always, I hope that those of you who have a breakthrough of any kind, who have a eureka moment of any kind, will email me and share it with me. Once again, I'm so pleased to be able to share this information with you. The question is, who's paying attention? I hope it's you. Thanks. This has been Larry Wilson. I want to thank you for spending this time with me, and I hope you found this information useful. If you're looking for more, you can find it at thewilsonmethod.com. There's a ton of stuff there. In fact, if you want, you can even speak to me because I'm human. Send me an email at info at wilsonmethod.com because I read every single one. I hope that you'll join us next week in this continuing journey. And you'll be with me for the next episode of How to Talk to Humans.
