After the First Hour

One week, I had many one-on-one calls with potential clients. I made an unexpected discovery.

In a one-on-one conversation, there’s often very valuable information that only surfaces between the one-hour and the one-hour-fifteen-minute mark.

If I had scheduled thirty or forty-five minutes, I never would have heard it.

I also learned that it’s really hard to change someone’s mindset in a single call. If they could change it on their own, they probably would have acted a long time ago. And if their mindset doesn’t change, their actions probably won’t either.

But at the very least, I can ask open-ended and follow-up questions that help them think more deeply about why they do what they do. As they gain clarity about their own motivations, they may start to notice blind spots they hadn’t seen before.

Understanding why we do things is often the first step toward changing them.