Supercommunicating w/ Charles Duhigg #788

going to be discussing today. We're joined by Charles Dohig, the author of new book Super Communicators is coming out next week, where he explores everything from how marriage counselors teach couples to hear what it is that unsaid, to how NASA psychologists look for astronauts who are emotionally intelligent.

He gives some incredible examples in the book, but inter personally, in our lives, deep meaningful connection to other people like it is vital to living a fulfilling life, but practically speaking, it's also really important when it comes to discussing money with a partner, for instance, and so we're gonna get into that as well. Charles, We're excited to have you on the podcast again.

to spend at the risk on the property. And I will say that like it feels like such an indulgence. But when when I wake up and I'm like, you know what, I can go eat breakfast and have whatever I want because it's free.

If we managed to achieve our goals, or we managed to be a lead a happier and a healthier life, it's because we are working with other people, whether they be our spouse or coworkers, in ways that allow us to do that. And at the core of that is communication, right. I mean, we all know people who are masters in wonderful at communication and we see the benefits that they

get from it. And the thing that I learned is, you know, in the last decade we've learned a lot about the science of communication, and anyone can become one of those people. Anyone can become a super communicator. And so I thought that was something important to share with readers.

And we've all met those people before. And what they're doing is they know a couple of skills that are really important. They think a little bit more about communication, and so they've taught themselves a few skills, either through practice or through intuition. But most importantly, super com communicators are people who show others that they want to connect

with them. And it's that demonstration of wanting to connect, wanting to understand that makes us and this is hardwired into your brains, makes us feel closer and more trusting and to like the other person more and ultimately to feel happier. I love that.

they do is they invite us into the conversation. They're showing that this person is listening, they're showing that they want to learn more, they're showing that they're interested in us, and that feels really good. But then The other types of questions that the supercommunicators ask are what's known as deep questions. And deep questions can sound intimidating, But what a deep question is is it simply something that asks someone to talk a little bit about their values, or

their beliefs, or their experiences. And it can be as simple as you know, you bump into someone and you say what do you do for a living and they say, oh, I'm a lawyer? And you say, oh, oh, that's interesting. What made you decide to go to law school?

powerful things to ask someone. And what we know is that if somebody answers those questions, they will expose inevitably a little bit of vulnerability. They'll tell you something meaningful about themselves. And if you reciprocate. If you show something meaningful about yourself, you'll feel close.

they know me at all. So I guess can asking questions ever become can never backfire if you're maybe like me and you're just on the question asking offensive all the time.

And so oftentimes what we find when we ask a deep question is that it's very natural for us to answer the same question even if it's not asked, because some people, some people are not good at asking questions, right, Like, we ask us a couple of questions and then we kind of wait for them to ask us a question back, and they don't. But one of the nice things about deep questions is that we can say, oh, oh, you went to law school because like, you had this experience

as a kid seeing like you know, injustice. It's interesting. I went to medical school for kind of a similar reason. I like saw, you know, parts of my city that we're getting medical care. The thing about deep questions is that they set us up to answer the same question ourselves, even if it hasn't been asked, And that's what gets us out of that interrogation interview format. That's the thing

that allows us to start connecting with each other. Because this our brains are actually hardwired to pay attention to anything that looks like vulnerability. And this actually makes sense, right because in the past, if if an individual was vulnerable, that meant that they were the weakest part of your tribe, or that if you were attacking, that that's the person to attack. And so our brains evolved to pay really close attention to anything that seems like vulnerability. That's the

loudest form of communication possible. Now, vulnerability can be as small as saying, oh, I went to law school because you know, I saw like an uncle of mine get arrested once. And the reason why that's vulnerable is because it opens me up to your judgment. Now, I might not care about your judgment. I might not care at all, but simply opening myself to judgment it triggers those parts of my brain that make me pay close attention to

how you react. And if you react by saying something equally meaningful, something equally vulnerable, then it'll it helps us feel closer to each other. In fact, we're almost powerless not to feel closer and more trusting of each other when someone engages in this reciprocity.

some financial goals. It's still pretty early on in the year, so maybe you're like, hey, what if we're able to achieve this we're not talking about just saying yeah, let's achieve that, right, and just being just parroting whatever it is that they maybe your partner's saying, but it might mean Okay, man, that's awesome, Like let me share with you what my hopes and dreams are. Yes, and hope obviously hopefully they align. But there's there's something there that goes beyond just imitation.

you're listening and then build on it. And in fact, when we have conversations in conflict, and oftentimes conversations about money involves some degree of conflict, right because we're might be feeling heated, or we might be feeling scared, or there's just a lot of emotions in conversations that involve just a little bit of conflict or a little bit of tension. There's a technique known as looping for understanding that has been shown to be incredibly powerful that does

exactly what you just said. And what's important is that this technique works because it proves to the other person that you're listening to them, that you want to understand. And there's three steps to it. The first is ask a question, preferably a deep question, if you can. The second step is repeat back in your own words what you just heard them say, right, exactly what you just said.

Don't mimic them, but if you have to take a couple of seconds to think about what you're going to say, that's okay, because what we're doing is we're proving that we're processing, we're proving that we're listening. And then step number three, and this is the one that most people forget but is a particularly important in conflict, ask if you got it right, because it might be that you didn't actually understand what the person was trying to tell you.

But also by asking if you got it right, you give you're asking them for permission to acknowledge that you understand that you're listening closely, and as a result, they're going to want to listen closely back to you and understand what you're saying.

I think one of the things that happened during COVID is that people just fell out of practice of having conversations, right. I remember I was so I live in California now, but I was living in New York at the time, and I would read the subway every single day. So I was around, you know, hundreds to thousands of people, and then COVID happened, and suddenly all of that stuff. In any given day, I might see literally just my family, yeah, for a week or a month, and everyone who's listening,

you've had this experience. And even now that COVID, COVID isn't over. But even now that the pandemic is done, I still see that there's fewer barbecues, there's fewer get togethers. We forgot how to talk to each other in an easy, conversational, fun way for some settings. And so the key there is literally just to practice it. Because our brains are designed to push us to talk to other people. Our brains are designed to push us to connect. That's communication

has been Homo Sapien's superpower. The thing that allows us to succeed far better than any other species is that we can talk to each other. We can share ideas and feelings, and so learning reminding ourselves of the skills of how to do that can be really really valuable because that's where most of us find our meaning and life.

like spa. We were in some resort and for some reason, money came up in our and like and we started arguing about money, like literally in the hallway of the spa, and it just and like we neither of us could let it go like like I was, like, you know, I was, I was. I was telling my wife that we need to budget more, but really I was really really angry. And she would come up with these these solutions. She would say like, look, here's a budgeting way, and

here's a budgeting way. And I would say I say no, no, no, you're not listening to me, like like I don't. I don't want to solve this problem. I want you to understand like what I'm feeling. Yeah, And and like we argued for I don't know, an hour and a half in a spa. It totally it was terrible.

about one thing. Like you thought your discussion was about money, but actually every discussion is made up of different kinds of conversations, and if people aren't having the same kind of conversation at the same moment, they won't really hear

each other. So when you went into that conversation, you were having an emotional conversation and your wife, your wife was responding with a practical conversation, and those actually used different parts of our brains, And if you're not using the same kind of brain at the same moment, you can't really connect with each other. And most conversations fall

into one of three buckets. There's usually practical discussions, which is what my wife was having, Emotional discussions, which which where you want to share how you feel and you don't want the other person to solve your problems, you want them to empathize. And then social conversations where we talk about how we relate to each other into society.

near the beginning of that conversation. Yeah, so that we're not wasting all that energy and you know, creating more relational emotional turmoil.

mean to you. There's a story in the book about this guy, doctor Beifar, a guy who's a surgeon, a cancer surgeon, who kept on telling his patients that they didn't need to get surgery, and they would insist on getting the surgery even though he advised against it. And so he tried to figure out what he was doing wrong, and he talked to these professors at Harvard Business School, and what they said is they said, look, you're going into this conversation assuming you know what the other person

wants that they want your advice. But what if you start by saying, what does this cancer diagnosis mean to you? To find out what they actually want a need out of this conversation. And so that's what he started doing. A patient came in. He said, tell me the first question, like, what does this cancer diagnosis mean to you? And the guy starts talking about how his own father had died when he was young and how that had really impacted him and his mom and he didn't want to do

that to his wife. And Doctor Dy realized, oh, this guy isn't asking for medical advice. He wants to talk about the emotions of being worried for his family, trying to protect his family. So doctor Dye matches him what's known as the matching principle in psychology, and once they have that emotional conversation, then they can move onto practical topics and then they can talk about treatment options together.

But the key is if you ask a question first and you listen, you figure out what each person actually wants out of that conversation.

more questions for Charles. We want to specifically talk about. Okay, what if we're having a budgeting conversation, how can we make those maybe more effective?

talk about this. And so what happens with money is that oftentimes the thing that's preventing us from having the conversation and the thing that's ruining the conversation is that we have an anxiety about what's going to be said and how it's going to be heard, that we're afraid to voice the anxiety itself, and as a result, the anxiety pushes us to say to say things we might not completely want in the way that we don't want to say them, and it pushes us to hear things

in the way that the other person isn't trying to communicate. So what's the first thing that we should do before we have a conversation about money. We should say, Look, let's have a conversation about money, right, Like, let's find the right time to do this. It's we're not going to do at two o'clock in the morning. We're going to do it at ten after the kids are left

for school. But let's set aside half an hour and let's start by just saying, I want to acknowledge this is a hard conversation and it's going to be awkward. I might say the wrong thing, or say something in a way that I don't intend. You might misunderstand me, or you might say the wrong thing, and I want you to know I am not going to hold that against you, and I want to ask you not to hold my mistakes against me. So let's just acknowledge at

the outset this is potentially an awkward conversation. Then the next thing that we can do is we can decide what kind of a conversation we want to start with. Now. The truth is that most of the time when we're talking about money, we think that we should start with that practical conversation, right. We think we should talk about making plans and creating budgets together and how that's going

to work. But the thing that's happening in money conversation is that emotions are so pitched that they can ruin that conversation because I'm going to react with fear or anger, or I'm gonna hear something you're saying and not understand it because it taps into some anxiety that I have, and so oftentimes after saying this is going to be awkward, the first thing we can do is to say, let's start with an emotional conversation. Tell me, like, how do you feel about the money in our life right now?

Are you worried, are you satisfied, Are you feeling okay? Are you feeling kind of uptight? Just tell me about how you feel, and then I'm going to tell you how I feel, and we're gonna loop each other. I'm gonna repeat back what I hear you saying to show that I'm proved, to prove that I am listening and also to make sure I'm getting it right. And then once we're aligned, once we've sort of gotten this emotional thing on the table, then we can start having a practical conversation.

just dollars and cents in spreadsheet stuff. And when we treat it like that, we're often at the risk of being misunderstood or not having a productive conversation, or maybe like overshooting and not really seeing what our spouse, our partner is going through.

real goal of any conversation is understanding each other. Simply understanding what the other person is trying to say, make sure that they understand you. And if you walk away disagreeing with each other, but you both understand each other, then that conversation is still a success. So this quiet negotiation, instead of trying to negotiate where I win something, my goal is to negotiate to understand what you want a need out of this conversation and to share what I

want to need out of this conversation. That's how we create what's a win win negotiation. Right, whether it's it's a conversational negotiation or if you're trying to close a deal, the best deals are the ones where there is a win win, where everyone walks away happier, than they were before.

And if we go into that beginning of the conversation and we say, look, my goal is to figure out what we both want to need and to understand, then what you'll start doing is you'll start doing these little experiments. And most of us do them without even realizing we're doing them. Right, we might we might make a joke, and then we'll look to see if the other person

laughs along or if they're still serious. If this is a formal conversation, we might interrupt each other a few times at the beginning of the conversation to figure out is this a conversation where we pingpong back and forth, or is it one where you talk and then I talk. We conduct these experiments without actually even thinking about them. But super communicators, people who can do this consistently, they pay a little bit more attention to how the other

person reacts. They try a little bit more, they experiment more, and most importantly, if they try something and it doesn't work, they don't see it as a failure. They don't see it as an awkwardness. They see it as a piece of data they can use.

adapt to the situation that we're in. So so one of my favorite examples of this is that when telephones first became popular about one hundred years ago, there were all these articles and studies saying telephones will never be used for meaningful conversations because you can't see each other. So it's basically going to be like the telegraph, where we use it to send you know, short messages or orders to the grocery store. And that was actually true

when they wrote that. They have transcripts of people during that early period, and what you hear is that people have these very stilted conversations. They didn't know how to talk on the phone. Now, by the time you and I and everyone else listening was a teenager, we could talk on the phone for like seven hours in a stretch, right and have these real, meaningful conversations. And it's because we learned how to use the phone the same way that our kids today and ourselves are learning how to

use online communication now. The key, though, is to pay attention to how different channels require have different rules. That when I'm I'm texting you, that's need to I need to communicate differently than when I'm emailing you, than when I call you, than when I see you. And most of us know this intuitively, but then sometimes we forget because everything's so fast moving. We jump online, we type a note to someone, we can hear the sarcasm in our own head of what we're saying, but when they

read it, they don't read it as sarcastic. They read it as serious, and they get upset and so the key is just to remember our brains can adapt to new channels of communication, but we have to remind ourselves that the rules are different from channel to channel.

it's a creative endeavor. Yeah, you use language and similar language to kind of describe that, but basically what you're doing is by having that sort of quiet negotiation by sort of pingponging back and forth, especially when you are talking about something like again when it comes to money, is I think if you can go into something with an open mind, go into a conversation with an open mind and not necessarily having a fixed and goal, you both both partners might end up at a goal or

result that neither one of them could have come to on their own, where there's maybe a little bit less sacrifice than either one of them could have ever imagined. And how that's just such an important part of the communication process.

Do they both do? They both like to save in similar ways? Do they both like to spend in similar ways? Because if you're if you're not aligned on money, it can be hard and not everyone is perfectly aligned, but but you should at least know. And so one of my friends what he does is he try. He says, like, look, I'd like us to talk about money, and I know this is really emotional. It causes a lot of anxiety.

So instead of talking about actual money, I want to talk about like how what we have spent on that has been really meaningful to us and what that says about us.

money is about experiences. Money is about connecting with people that you don't have a lot of time to see otherwise. And that helps me understand how you feel about money in general. And that's really powerful.

beer equivalent is. It's like, let's lean into the things, the positive ways that we think of money making an impact on our happiness and on our relationships, instead of like the shame that comes along with I spent too much on that thing. And we can get to that later on down the road, but let's first think about the way money lights us up and the way that it can actually produce a certain amount of happiness in our lives if we spend it intentionally versus the other side of the equation.

thing that you're saying. And then at some point it's not like you get fluent right away, but at some point you just kind of you know enough of the language that you can fall back on things and you feel a little comfortable with it, and as a result, you feel less anxious going in to talk to a conversation in French. And that's exactly the same thing that I think, and that doesn't and you're gonna make mistakes, you're gonna say things wrong, but the other person's gonna

understand and they're going to forgive you. That's kind of what the conversation with money is like. Is that I want to get to a place where I know that I'm gonna say something wrong and I know I'm this is gonna be kind of awkward, but I know enough to feel confident to try and explain how I feel about money, and I know that you're going to listen to.

were about money, right because they're bankers. And so what these researchers did, they said, look for the next week, before every single meeting, what we want each person to do is write down, on like an index card, one sentence. We want you to write down your goal for this meeting and the mood that you hope to that you hope will be established. And so people did this before every meeting. It would take like ten seconds. They would sit down, they would write this sentence, then they would

stick the card in their pocket. They never showed each other the cards, they never even discussed the cards. But the incidence of conflict in that week went down by eighty percent in those meetings. And the reason why is because once people knew what they wanted to accomplish, and once they had an idea of the mood that they were hoping to establish, it made it much easier for them to communicate that to other people, and those other

people could communicate back. So before we have a conversation about money, the same tactic is really really valuable each person. Just sit down. You don't even have to write it, you can just say it to yourself. What do you want to get out of this conversation? Like, what's the number one most important thing? And then what kind of mood? Do you want this to be light and like joy filled? Do you want this to be serious? Do you want this to be something where like we're getting down to business.

Simply deciding what we want and what mood we want. That helps us communicate to the other person what we need. That helps us match each other and have the same kind of conversation. And again it only takes ten seconds, but it can be transformative.

to what it is that you want to accomplish. And I think that can keep keep couples in particular from getting sucked into some of these small fights that they might find themselves and as they start bickering over sort of the just the hard numbers and be like, well, all of a sudden, we're arguing over how much you pay to go to the gym, And really what this is about is just maybe about a conversation about health and yeah.

And does that feel fair? You know, there's a story in the book about About You mentioned this about how NASA chooses its astronauts, and one of the big changes is that they started paying attention to how the candidates to be astronauts would do things like laugh, because what they found is that the best, the people who ended up being the best astronauts, the ones who had the most emotional intelligence. If I laughed really big and loudly,

they would laugh back at the same volume. And then there were other people though, who would basically would kind of politely chuckle. Like I would be like ah, they'd be like hah, that's funny, because you know you're supposed to respond right you know you're supposed to right back. But there was something about matching the other person, about matching their intensity, about showing them that you want to connect.

And laughter is about showing we want to connect. Eighty percent of the time when we laugh, it's not in response to something funny. It's because we want to show the other person that we like them, that we want to connect with them, and when they laugh back, they're showing us the same thing. And the reason why I mentioned this is because think about in conversations about money, how often someone might tell a joke or might make a little side comment and then smile and laugh a

little bit. That's an invitation, that's an invitation for us to connect with each other. That's saying like, look, this is a tough conversation, but we can still kind of like take a little break. And if we ignore that, if we say, oh yeah, that's funny. Let's get down

to the budget. Then, what we're really doing is we're preventing that opportunity for connection, and so listening for these small emotional signals, whether they be light and happy or something unexpectedly serious, or something where someone says, I'm worried about this and you don't understand why they're worried. Those signals help us figure out what we ought to actually be discussing.

too much of it you're not being serious enough. But it is like salt to a dish, where it's a necessity. And if you avoid it altogether, you can't maybe kind of come up for air with a little joke now and then then I don't know. And it depends on the conversation too. So how does humor maybe fit into having a productive, helpful, good conversation.

they might make a small joke. And usually it's not very funny joke, right, usually hit something where like they're just they're just acknowledging something or they're just making some wry comment. But it gives everyone else a chance to take a break. But most importantly, the other thing that they do is they pay attention to how people react and then they match them. So Let's say that I tell a joke and you you don't respond by laughing,

but you get really really well. At that point, I can either insist on being jovial, right or or I can say to you, or I can say to myself like, oh this.

to say paying attention to the other person. And this is what supercommunicators do. They just pay half an inch more attention. They think half an inch about what they're about to say before they say it. That paying attention to the other person allows us to figure out what kind of conversation they are looking for, whether it's emotional or practical or social, and then to join them there and invite and invite them to join up.

don't really watch football. But it's something about that conversation and the laughter and the kind of mutual enjoyment of each other that people are attracted to. It's not even just like, oh, give me all the breakdown analytics of the game that's coming up. So much is about how they relate to one another, and we find that enjoyable watching it as humans.

the conversation to another level. Think about how good it feels when the other person matches you, meets you there when they say, oh I hear what you're saying, Like Yep. When my dad passed away, I felt the same thing. And I totally understand how this has influenced everything you've done since then. It feels like we're heard and understood.

And what's important is, again I mentioned that our brains have evolved to communicate, when when we were evolving, a part the way that communication was reinforced was that anytime we connected with other people, it felt wonderful. In fact, our brains are hardwired to feel good when we connect, because that's what led us to build families and then communities, and then villages and eventually cities and countries. Right, these things that helped make humans more successful, and so we

all have this need inside of us. It's craving to connect with other people, to feel like we're understood, to let them know that we understand them. And when we listen to that craving, that's when we start to really communicate.

being vulnerable. But I'm not gonna lie. Like by the end of that story, like I was almost tearing up myself because they like, seriously, these individuals were able to connect in such a short amount of time to each other. It just shows you how much of a need there is for some of this deeper connection. And I mean, I guess it leads me to wonder, like, do you think that we keep conversations just to surface too much

of the time? Right, Like do you think that a lot of folks are afraid to get real and raw and emotional and that too much weather talk, that we're all just missing out.

But there are all these opportunities that we could miss where and it doesn't have to be deep, it doesn't have to be meaningful. It can just be a connection that like feels good because we both discovered that we went to the same high school and we you know, some people in common, and then we talk about like what we loved about high school and what was like less great about high school. Right, just connecting with another

person just feels good. In fact, there's study after study that shows that people who connect with others, who have deep, meaningful relationships with it with at least two or three people at age sixty five, they are healthier than everyone else, They are more successful than everyone else, and they are happier than everyone else. Connections are what make our life rich. And so it's not like that you have to do it all the time. It shouldn't feel like a chore.

But we should be able to recognize that opportunity and seize it when we're ready for it.

you're still talking. Yeah, hey, Bud, what you going about? And I'm not picking up that cue that they want to read their book and not talk to me. But so talk to me about introverts and then just tell me too, Charles, like, what has the act of writing this book? What does it meant to you? And how has it changed your ability to communicate effectively? How's it impacted your life?

in their life had trouble connecting with other people. Maybe they they they never found their friend group in high school, or their parents got divorced and they had to be the peacemaker, and as a result, that's what helped them think a little bit more about communication. And it's that thinking a little bit more about communication, about thinking about how to how to connect that makes them into a supercommunicator. So for someone who's an introvert, if you're not comfortable,

you should definitely not do anything that feels uncomfortable. If you're on a bus, you shouldn't app you. I half the time I'm on the bus, I don't I mean most of the time I'm on the bus, I don't talk to the person next to me. I want to read my book. But the point is that anyone can become a supercommunicator. Anyone can learn these skills, and it's just it's just a set of simple skills that allow us to recognize what kind of conversation is happening to

connect with other people. Anyone can learn those skills, whether you're an introvert or extrovert, and then you don't have to use them, but at least then you have them in your back pocket. For when you want to use them and to answer your question about how this has influenced me. You know. So, my wife and I do this thing where when we start a conversation, we will very often say you do you want me to do you want me to help you solve this problem? Or

do you want do you just need to vent? Like do you want me just to listen because you want to get this off your chest? And like that is made things so much better now when I'm talking to my kids, instead of asking them about the facts of their life, these shallow questions like you know what you do in school today? Who did you have lunch with? Now, I try and ask just a slightly deeper question, like what was the best part of today? Like I you know, I know that most of the time you have lunch

with Jasper? What do you like about Jasper? Like what do you admire about them? And those questions they are more real my kids. When I ask them fact takes questions, they say fine, nod, yes, no. When I ask them how they instead of asking them about the facts of their life, when I ask them how they feel about their life, they tend to tell me this incredibly rich tapestry and I learned things about my kids I wouldn't learn otherwise. I love that.

email I get. I feel like I feel like connecting with other people and communicating with them. If somebody takes the time to write me, I owe it to them to write back. And so if you if you have thoughts on communication, I would love to hear them, and I promise you I'll be back in touch.

for us to achieve our end goal. And it makes it sound super formal, right, and obviously there are times when we're just hanging out with the buddy.

He says, like Charles said, we're going for connection, and it takes wanting to connect, and I think oftentimes we're trying to get the conversation going somewhere to where it lands in our favor, or we're getting the desired outcome, but oftentimes, like yeah, you even mentioned this, like we're missing out on potentially better outcomes than we could have predicted, trying to push things, force things in the direction of our choosing instead of like desiring that connection with somebody else.

And I think when we're having those money combos, man, there might be some like some goal line underneath the conversation we're trying to force to happen. And so maybe before like a little more interested in what our significant other or what a friend is trying to tell us, then we might unearth some cool combos that we otherwise wouldn't have.