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Okay, welcome back. On today’s episode, we’re going be looking at a philosopher called Socrates. Now Socrates was a Greek philosopher who lived from 417 to 399 BC and is widely regarded as being the first moral philosopher as well as the godfather of modern philosophy … of Western philosophy. His teachings, although 2,000 years old, are still relevant today and in this podcast, I’m pleased to be delving into three of his most relevant ideas.
The first one is the Socratic way of speaking, which will allow us to be more agreeable and open-minded in conversation. The second is Socratic questioning, which is a powerful way of asking questions to generate a strong emotional connection with women. And the final one is the Socratic method of questioning assumptions, which is an extremely powerful tool to uncover truths in dialogue.
Now, before I go ahead and discuss these ideas, I’d just like to point out that if you listen to this episode a few times and learn these concepts, they’re actually really good to talk to women about.
If you just learn one of the principles that I’m going to teach you, then on a night out or when you meet women during the day, you can talk about it. And when you do talk about intellectual things like these, they make you come across as super intelligent, really thoughtful and also show that you have real clarity of thinking. And all of these are super attractive to women.
Okay. So let’s start with the first one, and this is known as the Socratic way of thinking. And I first came across this when I read Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, which I must say is a fantastic book and I expect I’ll do an episode covering his teachings in a later episode. Now was, what Socrates found is that when we share our thoughts and ideas we tend to speak from our own perspective, so anyone who speaks in absolute terms tends to be wrong, as our thoughts are only ever our relative ideas.
So his mindset to life was, we don’t know anything. And even went around questioning loads of so-called experts and found that all of them were trying to speak from an absolute, to manipulate situations, and he found them to be wrong. So, Socrates, Socrates believed that the wise man was the one who admits that he knew nothing.
And I found this concept to be fascinating, and it’s really interesting because when I first started coaching people many years ago, I thought that as a coach you need to be definitive, and what you spoke about had to be the absolute truth and that I need to know everything.
And I used to say things like, “Women are attracted to leaders.” And occasionally, I’d meet a girl and she’d disagree with me. Then I’d dig in further and say, “Well, you are biologically, even if you don’t realise it.”
And this just led to so many unnecessary arguments at the time, and I was probably quite naïve in my thinking. And when I came across the Socratic way of communicating, I literally just added to the start of what I was saying, “In my experience, what I found, what I’ve noticed, my research has led me to believe this.” So in, in contrast to what I was saying before, now I would say, “In my experience, women are attracted to leaders.” And you could hear immediately that I come across as way more-open minded and thoughtful.
Since I adopted this approach to all of my communication, I can tell you that I get into fewer arguments, people listen to me more, and I’m also respected more in conversation. The other thing that happened is actually that I became more open-minded. So rather than being a self-proclaimed expert, I actually allowed myself to be wrong, which has been fundamental in allowing myself to develop my ideas further. My mindset now is that these are the types of things which I’ve found to work at this current time; they’re subject to change. And that’s how I feel about everything I’ve learned in my life.
This really is a powerful concept and well worth integrating into our lives.
So on to the next concept, which is called Socratic questioning. And it follows nicely on from the first idea and allows us to ask women a better type of question. Now, most guys tend to ask women typical questions like, you know, “Why do you go to the gym?” Which, in my experience, is a pretty mundane question, and I’m sure she’s been asked it hundreds of times. Now instead, if we’re able to use a Socratic line of questioning, we could ask her something like, “In your experience, why does the gym form an important part of your life?” You can hear immediately that by using Socratic questioning, that we’re allowing women to answer from a more personal perspective, and also delve into who they are as individuals.
It really is similar to speaking in a Socratic way, yet we adopt, we adopt it into our line of questioning. So some more examples being, “Why have you found the gym to be a good part of your life? What have you noticed as a result from training at the gym? From your perspective, why is going to the gym worthwhile?” I can say that I’ve adopted this approach to questioning in people in all the areas of my life, and I found that it, it just helps to form a great connection with people pretty well in every single scenario.
And this brings me nicely on to my final idea which I’d like to discuss, which is known as the Socratic method of questioning assumptions, and I have found this to be an incredible way of getting to truths when you’re talking to people, and I use it a lot when I’m coaching my clients.
So here’s a, a typical example, that something a client might say to me, “Women aren’t attracted to me.” Now in this situation, according to Socrates, we need to challenge the assumption to change their way of looking at the situation. So a great question to question that assumption would be, “Well, what women aren’t attracted to you?” And normally I get a response that the women at work don’t find him attractive, and then with further Socratic questioning, we get down to, “well three women at work, between the ages of 34 to 37 years old don’t find me attractive.”
Now as you can imagine, this is a very different belief to the original one, and when you can question your assumptions it can lead to a profound difference to your life. I found the easiest way to do this is to question the assumptions in statements and under further analysis, typically the truth is very different from the original statement. And by the way, in case you’re wondering, Socrates questioned every single assumption and carried on until he got to his theory that none of us truly know anything.
And that brings a close to this episode. I’m extremely pleased to actually share these three concepts with you. They really have been life-changing for me as a coach, also, you know, as, as an individual and as someone who wants to bring value to the world. So from my experience, if you can integrate any of these into your life, you’re going to be way better at communicating. Fair until tomorrow.
Listen to The Gary Gunn Show Podcast #3 – The Socratic Way To Connect With Women On A Deeper Level
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