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Most professionals spend 80% of their workday communicating — and almost none have a system for getting better at it. Conversations That Count changes that.
Hosted by David Shaft — President's Club Banker at Rocket Mortgage, Dale Carnegie graduate, and Detroit storyteller — CTC delivers real conversations with executives, industry leaders, and everyday professionals who break down the communication skills that actually move careers forward.
New episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Professional multi-camera video production on YouTube. Full audio on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
What you'll learn:
• Workplace communication: better meetings, tougher feedback, and difficult conversations that don't blow up relationships
• Public speaking and presentations: how to open strong, handle Q&A, and keep any room engaged
• Professional networking: small talk that leads somewhere, LinkedIn outreach that gets replies, follow-up that builds real relationships
• Storytelling: how to tell your story in 60 seconds and communicate with impact in any room
• Leadership communication: negotiation, influence, and the Dale Carnegie principles that still work today
CTC is syndicated on the Mission Matters Network and features professionals across automotive, finance, tech, healthcare, and Detroit's growing entrepreneurship scene — because great communication looks different in every industry.
Whether you're a mid-career professional chasing a promotion, a manager who needs to run better meetings, or anyone who wants to communicate with more confidence, credibility, and impact — this show was built for you.
Free resource: Download the free Communication Playbook — 10 frameworks, scripts, and exercises to help you communicate like a pro. Get it at: https://ctcpodcast.media/free-playbook
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube — and never miss an episode.
Stories That Stick. Skills That Scale.
📍 and it's, if you stay small. Wow. If you stay small enough, long enough, you'll be big enough soon enough. You just have to be there, right?
If you 📍 Number three a day job is a creative weapon, not a creative prison. So Danny actually gave some very honest if you don't cap capture inspiration the moment it hits someone else, will. MJ and Prince, my favorite example Number seven, engineer your vision backwards. Don't just dream forward. Number eight, if you can last long enough, opportunity will meet you where you are.
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Hello everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. Conversations That Count. This is your host once again, David Shaft joining you, so we can go over Tuesday's episode and I think it was a really good one. Now I have another eight piece framework that we're gonna go over together that I think highlight a lot of great takeaways for us to grow with from the episode.
Now, what I took away might not be what you took away. And I love, if that's the case, leave it in the comments, share with us what your takeaways were, what you enjoyed, what you learned, or what we can learn. So otherwise, I look forward to hearing from your comments and what you took away. In the meantime, you get to hear what I learned.
So the first framework that I actually really enjoyed. This might be my favorite. Honestly, balancing is not standing still. It's controlled movement under pressure. This is something he learned from his mom. That balancing isn't just everything being smooth all the time and feeling great, looking great, doing great.
It's actually high pressure. The way Danny compared it that I thought was a great comparison was a trapeze artist. Walking along a tight rope, shifting their weight from side to side, and by the end they're exhausted. Keeping balance. It's trying to accomplish everything you are pursuing at a high level while making all of it really look easy.
So I think we run into that a lot when we're communicating, when we're speaking, when we're working just in our everyday life, we expect. That we're gonna have the super balanced. Everything's great. I'm gonna eat super healthy, have all three meals. I'm going to go to the gym. I'm gonna go to work. I'm gonna do my side business, my side project, going to hang out with my friends, hang out with my family, right?
The list goes on and on. Balance isn't perfect. It is a lot of work, and just don't expect balance to be perfection.
At the end of the day, here's my biggest takeaway from it. People who communicate best feel pressure. They just shift weight and don't fall pressure's good. Framework two, master one skill before you start the next one. So something that Danny talked about is he didn't just try to master music all at once.
He learned how to song write, then he went and performed. And then he went and performed the songs he wrote. He learned guitar, right? He learned it all in steps. He didn't just learn everything at once. It's a really cool concept because once you've mastered that one skill, it makes it a lot easier to work on the next.
And if that one isn't perfect, it's okay. 'cause you can fall back on the skill you mastered. I think a lot of the time we wanna learn how do I become the best public speaker, best salesperson, best communicator? How do I write the best copy? Right? We wanna do it all at once. When in reality, what if you just learned how to write and journal first?
You just learn how to take your thoughts and put them out there. And then after that, you know what? Let's maybe learn a little bit of sales. How do I get someone, how do I serve someone in a way where I can help them? With a product that they need and make it make sense. I don't know why that thought was so hard for me to get out, but I think you get the point right?
At the end of the day, the day's gonna end. Just like what I'm saying is so don't try to fix everything at once. It's okay to learn one skill at a time, and in fact, that's how you should do it. Number three a day job is a creative weapon, not a creative prison. So Danny actually gave some very honest examples of friends he has, and we have them too, where they love music.
Their passion is music. And in a way it's almost become their dead end job where they're doing gigs every night, their teaching music during the day. They're still working 40, 50, 60 hours a week, not making as much as they'd like to. And because they're spending all that time making money doing music, they don't actually get to make money doing the music they want.
They're learning covers of someone else's. They're performing at, you know, dead end bars when Danny instead leverages his job 'cause it pay, because it pays him well, it allows him to use his degree. He got really good at it and then used that as a way to fuel his real passion, which is music. So make sure that you're using your.
Job has fuel to build your assets, to build your future. It's only a dead end place if you make it a dead end place and you're not building something else. Number four, skills you think are unrelated, become your biggest edge. Danny made it very clear that he had no musical talent. He just has imagination and hand eye coordination.
And he took the study of engineering finishing projects, breaking them down into bite-sized pieces, understanding structure, and he's used it to write music and complete his songs and to learn one skill at a time. We all know many musicians wear, they can never finish a song. They'll start it. They have a great idea, they can never get to the end of it because they have no structure.
So learning how to be a great engineer. Actually taught him a lot of structure so that way he could learn how to be a great musician. So don't count yourself out. Oh, actually, I am gonna talk about this point. So something that relates to one of the biggest, best books I've ever read. It's called The Book of the Five Rings by Mia Moto mhi, right?
It's about what's described as the greatest Samurai to ever live. And what he does is he learns a different skill, art or trade. Consistently, he just traveled all through Japan, learning all these different things. But he was a sword master. He was a samurai. He, his favorite thing was Swordsmanship. But he felt that if he learned all these other trades, mastered all these other skills, it would make Kim a better swordman because he would better understand everything.
So taking that and applying it to how Danny described it, I think is right on. A lot of the time we learn something new and we don't understand how it's gonna impact us later. I learned how to be a great communicator, great salesman, great speaker. I've been on stage, heck, I've done all of it around speaking.
I've also learned how lighting works. I've learned how to use cameras. I've learned how to edit videos, and funny enough, the only way I was able to bring any of this to you is by learning the other skills that seem unrelated to communication, but are actually my best method of delivering it. So again, I.
Unrelated skills are always related. Number five, if you don't cap capture inspiration the moment it hits someone else, will. MJ and Prince, my favorite example of this, right? So summarize the story 'cause you likely heard in the last episode. Michael Jackson, if he ever was inspired to do a song, anything, he would immediately get to work.
It didn't matter if it was 3:00 AM he was doing it because in his mind, if he didn't do it, if he didn't take the idea that God had blessed him with and immediately execute on it, prince was gonna steal that idea. And we all know Michael Jackson refused to lose anything to Prince. I still laugh about it because that means that there was one time Michael Jackson was listening to the radio, and Prince had made a song that he had thought of, and he was pissed that he didn't do it himself.
So don't make that mistake.
And of course, Danny used some other examples like Max Barden when it came to hit Me Baby One more time. We almost lost that because if he wouldn't have sat down and wrote it the second he thought of it. You know, wouldn't exist. Who knows where we'd be? So what that means for all of us. Don't miss the encouragement, feedback, a pitch idea.
Capture it now, not later. Say the thing that needs to be said. Write down the idea that needs to be done. Get it done now. Don't wait till later. Number six, anyone can do it. Here are the four things you need in order to do so. So Danny broke down his music career in four places, right? One, create something good, two, protect it.
Three, build a brand and imagine where it can go. Four. Market and sell that brand. That's it. Do you have them all? Ask yourself that question. I ask myself that question every day. Number seven, engineer your vision backwards. Don't just dream forward. He described this. Speech that John Mayer gave at the Berkeley School of Music, and he talked about how you need to define your expectations, right?
He broke down how he knew exactly how many people he needed, how much each ticket needed to be where it needed to be. He knew every single step for his dream to become a reality of retiring. His parents paying off his aunt and uncle's house, paying off him and his brother's student loans. He knows exactly what's needed.
Every single piece. And it's really not that big. He only has to get 10,000 people in one place. There's 300 and, I can't remember, it's either 342 million or 372 million. I think it's 42 million, but that's a lot of millions of people in the country. He needs 10,000 to wanna show up one time to a show for reasonably priced tickets.
That's all he needs. 10,000 people. That's all it takes. So 10,000 people. If you break it down your dream, whatever that is, it actually doesn't take much to accomplish that dream. It doesn't take many people, just takes a few. Number eight, if you can last long enough, opportunity will meet you where you are.
He used the example of Harrison Ford wanting to act. Harrison Ford didn't say, I'm gonna go in, be a waiter, be homeless, and just put it all in an acting. He was like, well, I'm gonna go to la. I'm gonna work on acting, but also gonna work full-time as a carpenter. And just because he was in the right place at the right time, he ended up getting an opportunity to be Harrison Ford.
Right. There's actually a, uh, a quote that, I have a few other examples, but I'm just gonna move on from them. They were in the last episode, but there's a quote that I really like that I heard, and it's, if you stay small. Wow. If you stay small enough, long enough, you'll be big enough soon enough. You just have to be there, right?
If you stay present, if you keep showing up every day, you keep putting in the work, you will win. You stay small enough, long enough, you'll be big enough soon enough, right? Pretty simple. So here's the challenge Danny gave us, and I honestly loved it. If you aspire to something, define it, write it, do it simple.
Define what it looks like for that dream. Do the math. If you can get it clear enough, it starts to become real already. Sometimes we underestimate the power of our imagination, and if we give our imagination something tangible, we write it down, we know it so well, we can feel it. It becomes very, very real.
So complete the challenge. Thank you all for tuning in. Make sure to like, share, subscribe, and follow or on every social media platform that exists and I look forward to hearing from all of you soon. Have a blessed day.