You're listening to the Creating a Brand podcast where we deliver weekly masterclass interviews on topics to help you make your first or next step in business the right one.

I'm your host, Alex San Felipe. Are you intentionally devoting time to learn how to make your conversations more

meaningful? I found that both in the business world and in our personal lives, conversations are

rarely getting past face value anymore. Although our intentions are good because we don't want to

offend anybody or have anyone upset with us, we are missing a huge opportunity to build

stronger, personal, and professional relationships. In today's

episode, I am talking with Fred Dust. Fred is the author of the very timely book titled Making

Conversation, Seven Essential Elements of Meaningful Communication. I consider this to be one of the

most important books of 2020, and it will become even more important in the future. For links

to resources that will be mentioned during this episode,

please visit CreatingAbrand.com slash 076.

And now here is my conversation with my friend Fred Dust.

Fred, I am so looking forward to having a meaningful conversation with you. Welcome to the Creating a Brand podcast. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it, Alex. Yeah, I just finished reading your book, making conversations and just really enjoyed it. You referred to yourself in this book, or maybe it's other people who referred to you as this, but a designer of conversation, which is something I've not heard before. I was not familiar with this

before picking up your book. Can you explain what this means briefly and kind of your past with it?

Yeah. And to be honest, Alex, I'm not convinced. I don't know if I'd heard of it before either,

but it was sort of a realization as I was working on the book, which is that there are lots and

lots of books that are kind of facilitation manuals, right? Which is like, how do you facilitate a conversation? And there are

a lot of people who, like, are expert facilitators. And that's really different than thinking

about yourself as somebody who can be really creative with a conversation. So let's even lose

designer for a moment. Like just like the book really is about how you yourself like Alex or your listeners can actually use creativity to craft the hardest, most complex conversations that they have to have and make them better. And what I realized as I was kind of working at it is that as it happened, that's what I've been doing for almost my entire life.

But the reality is I don't know if I'd quite framed it that way.

But, you know, being a facilitator sounds really daunting.

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