10: Chris Fenning on why the first 20 seconds of a conversation are so important!

In this episode, Chris talks about lessons from his book The First Minute. He talks about how to get people interested in what you have to say to them, and how to keep them interested. To find out more about Chris, or to contact him reach out to him on his

Website or his Linked in page

Some exerpts

Chris Fenning (05:43.997)

to keep people paying attention, keep things short and keep them relevant. And if you can do the relevant bit, the short tends to come with it. Now, most of our communications training focuses on being short. In fact, some of my books are entirely about how to be brief, how to be concise. But to keep somebody's attention after you've got it, your message needs to be relevant.

and relevance can be easily defined in something we can all understand. To make a message relevant, show how it impacts them. Them being the person that you're talking to. Jeremy, if I want to make it relevant to you, I need to talk about my topic not from my perspective, but how does this impact you and the things that you care about?

because I bet you if I tell you something that's going to impact you or something you care a lot about, you're going to pay attention.

Chris Fenning (06:55.941)

Yes, yes, can I give a really specific example? And we'll go with, it could be engineering software, but a very technical topic. This is true for whether it's finance, fishing, engineering, whatever. But let's say I was a software developer and I was talking to my boss about a problem I just discovered. If I want it to be relevant.

I don't say there is this problem with this system and it's causing this in the back end and here's what I'm going to do about it. That's not relevancy. It's all fact. It might all be important, but it's not relevant and it's not showing impact. What I should say instead is, hey boss, I found a bug. Our software is going to stop working tomorrow and customers can't buy our product. My boss is going to care about that.

Chris Fenning (07:45.289)

Not the detail, but the outcome.

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