How you establish the relationship in a conversation determines whether or not someone wants to engage.

The deciding factor that determines if someone will fully engage with you throughout a conversation is flow.

The back-and-forth flow in a conversation must feel easy to relieve tension instead of creating friction.

You create flow with a positive intention and desire to know their views before rushing to give your ideas.

There are two possibilities that can occur in a conversation – they want to listen to you or they don’t. They might hear some of your words, but the deciding factor that determines if someone will fully engage with you is flow. Are you interacting in a way that ensures they feel you are listening and responding to what they say? Or are you jumping to tell your story or explain your beliefs without acknowledging theirs? The back-and-forth flow must feel easy to relieve tension instead of creating friction.

If there isn’t a comfortable flow to the conversation where the people you talk to feel heard, understood, and that their thoughts are important even if you don’t agree, you won’t get the outcome you hope for.

Establish the Relationship With Intention

Author Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, “In most cases of people actually talking to one another, human communication cannot be reduced to information. The message not only involves, it is, a relationship between speaker and hearer.”1 Every conversation is affected by the quality of the relationship in that moment. The way you receive and respond to what is said invites others........

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