I have always wanted to be a little bit more popular. I've always wanted people to like me. I hope that people who chat with me come away of a good impression. But to be honest, I'm not a great communicator. During conversations I stumble, I lose interest, and I think I ask the wrong questions. So, to help, I spoke with an expert. I have better conversations. And on today's episode of Nudge, I put his tactics to the test on four strangers.
So, my name is Hugo Masido. Hello, my name is Karen Turner. Hello, I'm Kevin. I am Tom. I spoke to half of them normally, but for the other half, I applied Charles Duhigg's fantastic tactics. Did they work? Did they make me more popular? Keep listening to find out. The podcast I'd like to recommend today is The Next Wave. Hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan Lans, the show is brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals.
On the next wave, you'll hear from leading AI creators who explain how AI is evolving and how that will affect you. If you want to learn how to use AI in your business, check out the next wave. It is one of the leading podcasts on AI technology. So, go and listen to The Next Wave, wherever you get your podcasts. To help me on my popularity quest, I've listed a world leading expert on communication.
My name is Charles Duhigg. I'm the author of a couple of books, The Power of Habit. And my latest is named Super Communicators, which is about the science of connection. Charles Duhigg was happy to help me. He knows how important good communication is. In fact, he says it's a superpower. The thing that's interesting is that if you think about it, communication is homo sapiens superpower. It's a thing that allows humans to be so much more successful than every other species.
And yet, just like me, Charles has struggled with his communication. And I'm technically a professional communicator as a journalist, but I kept noticing these moments in my life when I was bad at communication. And this really came into relief. I got into this pattern with my wife where I would come home from work and start complaining about my day. And she would give me this really good advice. Why don't you take your boss out to lunch and you guys can get to know each other.
And instead of being able to hear what she was saying, I would get even more upset. And I would say, you know, why aren't you supporting me? You're supposed to be on my side and be outraged on my behalf. And tell me how smart I am and how my boss is a moron. And she would get upset because I was attacking her for giving me good advice and acting irrationally.
And this would happen again and again, right? Anyone in a relationship knows this pattern where one person brings up an emotional problem and the other person tries to solve it for them. And it doesn't work very well.
And so I went to researchers and I said, look, why does this happen all the time? Like, like, why do I fall into this even though I know better? And they said, well, first of all, we're glad you came by because we're actually living through this golden age of understanding communication for really the first time because of advances in neural imaging and data collection.
And one of the big things that we've discovered is that when you're having a discussion with someone, you assume that that discussion is about one thing, right? That discussion is about your day or where you should go on vacation next year or the kids grades. But actually every discussion is made up of different kinds of conversations.
And in general, these kinds of conversations, they tend to fall into one to three buckets. There are these practical conversations where we're making plans together, we're solving problems. But then there are emotional conversations where I tell you what I'm feeling and I don't want you to solve my feelings. I want you to empathize and I want you to relate. And then there are social conversations, which is about how we relate to each other in society and the identities that are important to us.
And they said, the thing that we figured out is if you're having two or more people are having different kinds of conversations at the same moment, it's really hard for them to hear each other and it's really hard for them to connect, which of course is exactly what was happening with me and my wife. I was having an emotional conversation. She was responding to the practical conversation.
They're both totally legitimate kinds of conversations, but because they were different, we couldn't hear each other. And within psychology, this has become known as the matching principle. And what the matching principle says is you only really are able to connect with someone else to communicate with someone else to really understand each other when you're having the same kind of conversation at the same moment.
And then you can move from type of conversation to type of conversation together, but it's that alignment that is critical. The problem Charles had with his wife wasn't that he was a lousy communicator. It was that he didn't know what type of conversation they were having. He thought the conversation was his chance to vent while his wife thought he wanted a solution to his problems.
All of us end up in bad conversations like this because we make the same mistake. But Charles says there's a simple technique we can all use to avoid this. There's actually in schools in the US, they teach this technique to teachers where they say if a student comes up to you and they want to talk about something important, start the conversation by asking them, do you want to be helped? Do you want to be hugged or do you want to be heard?
Which of course are the three kinds of conversations, right? The practical, the emotional and the social. And students almost immediately know what they want, right? They'll say like, no, no, I don't need you to help me. I just need a hug or no, like I don't need a hug, but I need you to hear what's happening here, because I think this is something that like is bothering me and I need someone else to know about it.
We know these different kinds of conversations once our attention is drawn to them. When we make mistakes is when we just kind of, you know, bluster our way into a conversation without thinking about what's really going on here. And if he helped hugged and heard tactic gets two people on the same page, it ensures they both know what the conversation is about.
It's a good tactic, but I wondered if tactics alone or enough are some people simply destined to be super communicators. And do I have any hope of learning how they do it? And you're exactly right when I first started writing this book, I thought that super communicators were going to be like these incredibly charming, you know, extroverts who had the gift of gab.
And it turns out that's not true at all, right? Some of them are charming and some of them are homogenly. Some of them are extroverts, some of them are introverts, some of them have the gift of gab and some of them are kind of taciturn. What they do have in common though is that they've thought a little bit more deeply about communication. They've practiced these skills and it's just a small handful of skills until they become habits.
And our brain makes them in habits very quickly. And they take communication seriously. So anyone can become a super communicator. All of us can become super communicator consistent super communicators whenever we want to be one. It's just a matter of recognizing those skills and then practicing them a little bit.
Super communicators are just normal people who have thought about communication and have practiced these skills. I can do that. I can practice these skills. So maybe I can be a super communicator. To reassure me, Charles shed an example of someone else who practiced a few skills on his own and became much better at communication. There's a surgeon in New York at Sloan Kettering named Dr. Bafar Adai.
And Dr. Adai is probably the world's leading prostate surgeon, right? Every single day there's patients who come into his office having just learned that they have a tumor on their prostate that is cancerous and asking him for advice.
And the way he used to start these conversations with patients is he would say to them, look, the absolute safest way to make sure that the absolute surest way to make certain that this cancer doesn't spread is to go in and remove the tumor. And I'm a surgeon. I know how to do that very, very well.
However, the prostate is located very close to the to the nerves that control your nation and sexual function. And so for some portion of patients, there are lifelong side effects of incontinence and sexual dysfunction that really damage your quality of life. And the weird thing about prostate tumors is that they grow very, very slowly. In fact, there's a saying among doctors for older patients that someone will probably die of old age before their prostate cancer kills them.
So he says, look, my advice for most people is we should do this thing called active surveillance or watchful waiting where we go and we draw bloods every six months and we do a biopsy every two years. And if the biopsy shows that the tumor is changing, we do an MRI to sort of visualize it.
But beyond just kind of watchful waiting, I don't think we should do anything else. I don't think we should do surgery. I don't think we should do radiation. I think you should just kind of pretend you don't have cancer.
And he would go into this explanation and he would show that his patients all the charts and all the data. And they would listen to him and then they would go home and they would discuss it with their spouses and they would come back the next morning. And they would say, I want you to cut me open as fast as humanly possible.
Like absolutely take this cancer out. And for Dr. Dye, this was bewildering because they had come to him because he's one of the world's leading experts on this type of cancer. He's telling people you don't need surgery and they're insisting on getting surgery. And he told me he realized, you know, when this happens once or twice, you can sort of blame the patients.
But when it starts happening all the time, it means the physician is doing something wrong. They are failing to communicate effectively with these with these patients. So he goes to these researchers at Harvard Business School and he asks them for advice. And these are folks who study everyday negotiations, the kinds of negotiations like when you're deciding where to go on vacation with your spouse that we don't think of as a negotiation, but it's actually a little bit of a negotiation.
And they said, do a more look. The first thing that you're doing wrong is you're starting this conversational wrong. You need to start this conversation, not by assuming you know what kind of conversation the other person wants. You need to ask them a question so they can tell you what kind of mindset they're into this moment. And in particular, you need to ask them what's known as a deep question.
Now a deep question is something from psychology. A deep question asks us about our values or our beliefs or experiences. And that can sound a little bit intimidating right to do. But it's actually as simple as if you meet someone who's a doctor, instead of saying, you know, oh, where do you practice medicine asking them about a fact of their life.
You say, oh, you know, what made you decide to go to medical school? Or what do you like about being a doctor? Is it is it everything you thought it would be right instead of asking about the facts of their life when you ask them how they feel about their life, what you're doing is you're inviting them to tell you something meaningful about how they see the world, about the experiences that they've had.
About the values and beliefs that are important to them. So after Dr. Die has this conversation with the researchers from Harvard Business School. A couple weeks later, a patient comes in 62 years old. And he just found out that he has a tumor on his prostate as cancer. And instead of starting the meeting by going into his song and dance about active surveillance and watchful waiting, Dr. Die starts the meeting by saying,
what does this diagnosis mean to you? And the man, he says, you know, as when they told me I had cancer, the first thing I thought it was my father, because my dad died when I was 17 years old. And it was just, it was so traumatic for my mother. And I don't, I don't want to put my wife through that. And I don't want to put my kids through that. And also the other thing I started thinking about is like, you know, I'm only 62 years old. I want to work for like another 10 or 15 years.
But if I go to the office and everyone knows that I'm sick, suddenly they're going to see me as the old guy. Like it's going to be hard for me to do work. And then he starts talking about like, you know, climate change and he's worried about his kids and his grandkids. The man talks for five or six minutes. And Dr. Die realizes he has not mentioned cancer or medical questions or pain or anything related to this tumor even once.
It was clear from asking this deep question that this man wanted to have an emotional conversation, not a practical conversation, not a social conversation, an emotional conversation. And so Dr. Die matches him uses that matching principle. He starts talking about the fact that his dad had gotten sick about seven years earlier. And he says, you know, as doctors, we're not supposed to talk about our personal lives.
But I just want you to know like my dad had a lot of the same concerns and questions that you did. But, but it was also like we had these conversations that we would never have had otherwise. And it gave him a chance to think about what really mattered to him in life. He matched the patient in an emotional conversation in an emotional mindset. And then after about three or four minutes, he says, thank you for sharing that with me.
I'd love to talk about treatment options. Is it okay if we talk about some some practicalities of this disease? And he explains about active surveillance and watchful waiting. The man agrees and never changes his mind. And Dr. Die has found that since he has changed how he speaks to his patients, since he has started having the conversations with a deep question that allows them him to figure out what kind of mindset they're in what kind of conversation they want to have right now.
The incidence of people following his advice has gone up by 60%. And there's a real lesson there, which is what's super one of the skills super communicators have is that they ask deep questions. Super communicators ask deep questions. These deep questions made the surgeons patients feel heard and decreased the amount of unnecessary surgery by 60%.
Deep questions don't just help surgeons. They help speed data to in 2016 a group of Harvard scientists scrutinized hundreds of conversations recorded during speed dating meetups. The Harvard scientists compared the successful conversations where people said they wanted to go on a followup date with the unsuccessful conversations where people indicated that they didn't really fancy another date.
The scientists found that during successful conversations people tended to ask each other the kinds of questions that drew out replies where people expressed their needs, goals, beliefs and emotions. In unsuccessful conversations, people mostly talked about themselves. Well, they asked shallow questions, the kinds of questions that didn't reveal anything about how their partners felt.
In other words, these scientists found that the keys to a good first date is asking deep questions rather than shallow questions. But these deep questions, they can be pretty hard to ask. They can feel a little uncomfortable. In one experiment cited in Super communicators, researchers instructed participants to ask strangers and friends questions such as, have you ever committed a crime?
The researchers wrote in their paper that question is assumed that asking these sensitive questions would make their conversation partners feel uncomfortable and would damage their relationships. But in fact, the researchers consistently found that askers were wrong on both fronts. Asking deep questions is easier than most people realise and more rewarding than they would expect. Asking deep questions is not only effective, but it's also easier than we imagine.
Dozens of studies from the University of Utah, the University of Pennsylvania and the Amora University have found that people who ask lots of questions during conversations, particularly questions that invite vulnerable responses, are more popular amongst their peers and more often seen as leaders. These people who ask these questions have more social influence and are sought out more frequently for friendship and advice.
But I still wasn't totally convinced. Asking deep questions fills me with anxiety. I can't go around asking people about their deep fears and desires. Well, Charles disagreed. He shared a study that encouraged participants to do exactly that, and the results were astonishing. This is called the Fast Friends Procedure, and it was created by these two researchers who were professors in New York State.
What they were trying to do is they were trying to figure out if there was a method they could find that would reliably make strangers into friends. They tried all kinds of things. They tried having people solve puzzles together, telling each other stories, or tapping their fingers together, and none of it worked. Some people became friends, and some people didn't. They just basically wasn't. The intervention didn't have any clear impact.
But then they come up with this new approach. They come up with a list of 36 questions, deep questions. They bring people into a room, and they would sit them two by two. They're just me sitting across from the person I'm talking to, or both strangers. They would hand them the list of questions, and they would say go back and forth asking and answering these questions.
The first question is something like, if you could have a dinner party with anyone from history, who would it be? Pretty quickly, it's getting into even deeper territory. Tell me about your mother, or when's the last time you cried in front of another person. They're going back and forth. I answer the question, and then you answer the question, and then I answer the next one, and you answer the next one.
And then the experiment ends. It only takes about 45 minutes. And this is like in the early days of the internet. So it's hard to track people down. They say to everyone, thank you so much for participating. We really appreciate it. Have a good day. They don't give anyone each other's contact information. They don't do anything to help them find each other.
Everyone in the experiment assumes the experiment is over, but it's actually just beginning. Because what they do is seven weeks later, they track down everyone who had been in that room, and they ask them one question. And the question is, have you seen the person that you did that experiment with since the day that you did the experiment?
And they found, they would ask this question, people would say, oh yeah, yeah, you know, I knew that his name was John, and his last name started with S. And so I got out the white pages, and I called every single John S in the white pages until I found the right one. Or they would say things like, you know, I like, on Saturday nights, I'd walk up and down dorm halls looking for that guy, and I eventually found him.
And then we went, we got a beer together, and we've been hanging out since then. One guy actually said, he was like, yeah, you know, I actually, I like found my partner that person I had done the thing with. And I asked her if she wanted to get a beer, and we got a beer, and then the next week we got a pizza, and then we got a movie, when to go see a movie together. And when he got married a year later to his, to do that woman, he invited everyone from the lab to come to the ceremony.
And what the researchers found is that something about this procedure, these 36 questions, they caused about 70% of people who had been in those rooms to search out their partner after the experiment and have some kind of social experience with them. They became fast friends, right? And so what's interesting about it is they tried to figure out why, and the first thing that they figured out is, it was the nature of the questions.
They were asking people to ask each other deep questions, questions that asked about their values, their beliefs, or their experiences. And they didn't always seem obvious in that respect. But if I ask you, you know, who would you, who from history would you invite to dinner? What I'm really asking you is, what do you value in other people? Like what do you value? What is admirable to you?
If I ask you, when's the last time you cried in front of another person, I'm asking you to describe an experience that for you was probably pretty powerful. But that's not the only reason why this procedure works. The other reason is because they did another experiment. They took the same 36 questions, and what they would do is they would sit people down in the same room, and they would have one person answer all 36 questions.
And then the second person would answer all 36 questions. No back and forth, just one and one. People didn't feel close afterwards. In fact, they said it was super weird. They just, it felt really uncomfortable and boring just to listen to someone like kind of like talk about their life. There's something about the back and forth. And what's going on there is what's known as emotional reciprocity or authentic reciprocity.
When somebody says something that's authentic, when they say something meaningful, if we want to connect with them, we have to match that meaningfulness. We have to match that authenticity. We have to reciprocate. And that doesn't mean if somebody says, you know, oh, my aunt just passed away, you should talk about when your dog died seven years ago. That's not reciprocity, right? That's, that's basically sort of stealing the spotlight for yourself.
What reciprocity can be is saying to someone, oh, I'm so sorry. I know how hard it is to lose someone. Like tell me about your aunt. What was she like? Right, that's showing that I want, that I hear what they're saying and I want to reciprocate by sharing something with them by, by hearing more about what the aunt was like.
Or if somebody smiles at me, when I smile back, I'm engaging in that reciprocity. And that's why it feels so good. And there's a basic, this is the second skill that super communicators recognizes a skill and practice is when somebody says something emotional or practical or social.
They lean in and they share something about themselves and that might consist of just telling, asking a question, might consist of telling a story, might be that when you meet that doctor and you say, why did you decide to go to medical school and they say, oh, I saw my dad get sick. And I wanted to be one of the people who healed him that we say, oh, that's interesting. Like, I'm a lawyer. And I decided to become a lawyer when I saw my uncle get arrested. And I thought it was really unjust.
This reciprocity is at the core of social interactions and the more that we observe it and we abide by it and we honor it, the easier it is to feel connected to other people. The fast friends procedure worked because the participants asked deep questions and they took turns when they did that 70% of these participants arranged to meet up after the survey.
Throughout our chat, Charles mentioned this matching principle. He constantly talked about the matching principle. And I wondered if this principle was just as simple as mimicking what someone else had said. But Charles warned me that simply mimicking what someone had said wouldn't work. What's interesting and important about matching other people in the matching principle, which says we have to be having the same kind of conversation at the same moment to really connect,
is that there's a very big distinction between matching and mimicry. Right? Mimicry feels inauthentic. Mimicry feels false. Matching is when I'm proving to you that I'm listening to you, I'm thinking about what you said, and I'm trying to share in a way that you have shared with me. And what's important here is two things. The first is when we ask those deep questions, when we invite someone to match us, or we try to match them, the key word here is invite rather than mandate.
So if I meet someone and I say to them, they say, you know, what do you do for living on a doctor? And I say, oh, you know, what's it feel like when someone dies, when one of your patients dies? That's not a great deep question, right? I mean, I'm definitely asking about values beliefs and experiences, but I'm doing there is I'm mandating a certain kind of response.
An invitation feels very different, and an invitation is something like, what's the best part of your job, or what's hard about your job? Because somebody might very well say, oh, what's hard about my job is that sometimes you have patients who don't make it. But they might also say, oh, the hardest thing about my job is just there's a lot of insurance stuff to deal with. It's, you know, it's tough.
Those are people in two very different mindsets, the same person might answer that question in those two different ways, depending on the mindset that they're in. And so the first most important thing when it comes to matching is to provide opportunities where you invite someone to tell you what's going on inside their head and inside their life, rather than mandate that they do.
But the second thing is that you have to prove that you're listening to them, particularly when we're in a conversation, which is known as a conflict conversation, where we disagree with each other, or there's a little bit of tension, or we're talking about something where, you know, that feels kind of hard and important.
In a conflict conversation, one of the things that happens is that we, we have a suspicion in the back of our head that the other person is not actually listening to us, they're just waiting their turn to speak. And so we have to overcome that suspicion by proving to someone that we're listening to them. And it's not what we do while they're speaking that proves that we're listening.
It's what we do when they finish speaking. And there's actually a technique for this known as looping for understanding. And this is a great example of what matching is. Looping for understanding has three steps. The first step is, ask a question, preferably a deep question. The second step is, once someone has answered that question, try and restate what they have said in your own words. And again, the goal here is not mimicry.
The goal here is matching. It's to say, okay, here's what I hear you saying and prove that I was paying attention, but also prove that I've been processing this, I'm thinking about it. You know, you mentioned that your mom took you out to this one club and, and it was really a bad experience. And, and I'm wondering like, it sounds like from what you're saying that like, this was actually about your mom and not necessarily about the place you went.
And then the third step is, and this is the one we often forget, ask if you got it right. Because one of two things will happen. You know, I think you said that, am I getting that right? Am I, am I hearing you correctly? One of two things will happen. The first is, the person will say, no, I don't think you understood me completely, which is really useful to know, right? That we, we misheard them.
The second thing is that they might say, yeah, no, I think you understand, like I think you heard what I was saying. And what actually happened in that moment is, I just asked you for permission to acknowledge that I was listening. And when you give that permission, when you say, I acknowledge that you are listening, they become more willing to listen to us in return.
This is again, basically the, the neuroscience, the neural receptors associated with reciprocity. When we believe someone is listening to us, we become more likely to listen to them. And so this is the other thing that super communicators do is they prove that they are listening through techniques like asking follow up questions or looping for understanding.
This looping for understanding has been proven to work in studies as well. Remember that Harvard study on speed data, well, they studied looping for understanding as well. Their analysis revealed that follow up questions made speed data is far more successful. They write that follow ups are a signal that you're listening that you want to know more.
One of the researchers, Michael Leomans, said that follow up questions makes reciprocity easier. He said these questions allow self disclosure without it seeming like self obsession. They make a conversation flow. Asking deep questions, taking turns and looping for understanding are the three key pillars behind super communicators. But can I use these tips to improve my communication? Can these tips make me more popular?
Well, find out after this quick break when I try these tips out on four total strangers. Everybody is talking about AI. We're told it'll make us more productive, more intelligent, and perhaps a little better at our jobs. But how? How will it achieve those things? And what does it mean for Earth's marketers? To help answer these questions, HubSpot have just launched its new AI trends for marketers reports. The fantastic report reveals how AI usage has increased significantly since 2023.
How content creation remains the most popular use case for AI tools and how 68% of leaders who invested in AI reported seeing a positive ROI. The report contains tons of original data and research. It really is a gold mine of information and analysis that I haven't seen anywhere else. It covers everything from the challenges marketers face to the AI tools they're using to achieve their goals.
So make sure you're staying on top of everything AI with HubSpot's AI trends for marketers report. Go to hubspot.com slash marketing to download the report for free. Okay, it's time to put these tips to the test. Can I become a super communicator? Let us find out. I've recruited four strangers and invited them to a 10 minute Zoom call.
These strangers they all listen to nudge, but we've never met before and I had no idea who they were. The plan for the experiment was simple. For the first two calls, I'd have a standard conversation asking normal questions that I'd typically ask during small talk. I'd speak in my normal style, which means no looping for understanding and unfortunately no deep questions.
But for the two calls after that, I'd use Charles's techniques. I'd ask deep questions. I'd use his deep questions that he writes about in his book and a loop for understanding to keep the experiment fair. I've limited the conversation to just 10 minutes per person and after that 10 minutes is up, I'll ask the strangers what they thought of the conversation and what they thought of me.
So let's see how I get on. Okay, well, can you start please by just saying hello and saying your name? Hello, I'm Corin. Corin was in the control group. So I asked her shallow questions without looping back or asking follow up questions. Where do you live? I live near Geneva. And where do you work? I work in France in a high school. And where did you go to university? I went to university in France and in Denmark. Are you married? Not anymore.
I'd say this conversation felt awkward. Corin wasn't sharing much. I wasn't following up on Corin's answers. And that felt a little bit rude. These shallow questions, they really didn't seem to be working. And the same was true for my second conversation with Hugo. Do you have any hobbies? Yes, reading music and running. Where did you go to high school? In Port-de-Lac, a small town near the border with Spain. Where did you go up? There, in that small town.
To me, both these conversations felt lifeless and I didn't feel like there was much of a connection at all. After the conversations were over, I asked Hugo and Corin what they thought. How would you rate that conversation we had with 10 being... it's the best conversation you've had this year and one being it's the worst conversation? I would say below five, probably three or four because you're friendly, but I didn't feel very involved. Three, let's say.
I would rate the quality of the questions as well, so 10 being there the best questions you've heard or one being. Five. It was about me, so it was interesting. Six. Out of ten, Hugo rated the conversation at a three and Corin at a 3.5. Both were a little bit more generous about the questions, rating them at a five and a six. But then I asked Corin the crucial questions. Did you feel like the questions I asked you allowed us to connect? Not really. Did you feel like you were able to open up?
Well, I trust you, so I was able to answer openly, but only because I heard you before, otherwise not really. Hugo agreed. Did you feel like those questions allowed you and I to connect at all? And did you feel like you were able to open up? Not really. So two pretty unsatisfied conversation partners right there. I'd spent a good 10 minutes asking them both lots of questions, but it's obvious that that's not enough. The questions were shallow and I didn't follow up at all.
Both Hugo and Corin felt the conversations were pretty bad. Now this did surprise me a little bit. I'd always naively believed that just asking questions was enough. Dale Carnegie says so in his book How to Win Friends. He suggests that questions alone are key to good conversations. They're key to getting someone else to open up, but it's clear in my case that they're not asking shallow questions led to a shallow conversation. So let me try and redeem myself.
That's time for me to try some deep questions, more follow-ups and more looping back. Here's how I got on. Yep, hello, my name is Caranter. Okay, so I would like to ask you what you like about where you live. What do I like about where I live? I like that it's a very relaxed and friendly base. It's peaceful and it is calming. These deeper questions were already getting longer responses, but I decided to loop back to learn a little more. A calming. Yes. What makes it calming?
What makes it calming? Well, it's not desperately busy. It's not moral, but it's not a big town or city. And nobody is in a massive hurry, so everybody's able to go about their business in a relaxed way, which has a calming effect on me. Yeah, that sounds very nice. Sounds like sort of place I'd like to live as well. Okay, what was your favourite job? What was my favourite job? Well, it's probably the one I'm doing now, which is being an artist.
I've done all sorts of different jobs before that in offices, but being an artist is the one that suits me the best. Okay, and so is that job you've been doing for a while? I've been doing it for three years, whilst doing an office job, but yeah, an artist is now becoming the main thing. Yeah, well, I know the difficulty of doing a side job alongside a normal job. Yes. It can be pretty tough, is it? A lot to manage. It's seven days a week work, yes.
So it is tough to manage, but it does. It's worth it. I would rather work seven days and be happy than just do the office job and be unhappy. Sounds like it's quite fulfilling, then. It is, yeah. Already this conversation felt much better, and the same was true for my fourth conversation with Tom. What was or is your favourite job? My current job at Vox Popney, Product Market Manager, yes, my favourite job.
I just really enjoy the variation of it, and then the culture of the workplace too is really awesome. You don't feel like you just have to say that because you're on the podcast. Absolutely, no, I'm joking. I've been here 10 years, if that's a good enough testament to that belief. Yeah, that belief. 10 years is, I mean, for a tech job, that's pretty rare. There probably aren't many people at Vox Popney that have been there for 10 years, right?
No, there's a small crew of us. We do an annual work of mummers, which is Super Fancy, and to celebrate our annual anniversary. So we will all officially hit 10 years in January, February next year. All sounds good, but what did Karen and Tom actually think of these conversations? Let's find out. How would you rate our conversation that we just had there with 10 being, that's one of the best conversations you've had all year, and one being, it's one of the worst. What would you rate it?
I give it a five. Let's give it a eight. It was very warm and friendly. Yeah. And how would you rate the questions I asked? Let's give it a six. Let's go for another eight. I think a good question. I think they probably revealed a little bit about my life character. So yeah, good questions. Did you feel like those questions allowed us to connect?
Yes. When you were able to put in a little bit of your thoughts on things, it's a lot easier to connect when somebody kind of gives back a little bit of their take on the question. I'd say so. I mean, what would you have this conversation in a pub, for instance, probably asking you a bit about yourself and yeah, in return. And final one for me, did you feel like you were able to open up when I was asking you those questions?
Yes, but I'm trying to think why I'm sort of pausing to say that why it wasn't a sort of full throttle, yes. I did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's perhaps a bit less positive than Tom, but both a far more positive than Corinne and Hugo. All in all, the findings from this mini experiment seem pretty conclusive. The deep question group of Karen and Tom rated the conversation an average of 6.5 out of 10. The shallow conversation group of Corinne and Hugo rated it at just 3.25.
The deep group rated my questions as a 7 on average, the shallow group rated them at just 5.5. And in the shallow group, Corinne and Hugo both said they weren't able to open up and they both said they weren't able to connect. While Karen and Tom in the deep group, they said the opposite. They said they were able to open up and they said they were able to connect. I think this informal experiment is a cracking example of Charles Duhig's theory in action.
Deep questions definitely help people open up, but it's those follow-ups that really made the conversation feel like it was working. Looping back and asking Karen why the town she lives in is calming made her feel more engaged and made me appear like I cared. But when Corinne said that she wasn't married anymore and I instantly moved on to the next question, I felt rude and I think Corinne agreed.
Karen put it nicely, she said it's a lot easier to connect when someone gives their take on a question and that's really my main takeaway. I'd always naively assumed that just asking questions on their own was enough to have a good conversation. I always believe that simply asking people things is all I ever needed, but that is totally wrong.
Asking questions might be better than just talking about yourself, but it still leads to a lousy conversation. To become a super communicator, you have to focus on deeper questions and you have to loop back. Now I don't think all these tips alone will suddenly make everyone I meet desperate to be a friend me, but I still think it's cracking advice. And I reckon that if I keep following Duhig's advice, I'll be that little bit more popular.
Okay, that is it for today folks. I really hope you enjoyed this episode of Nudge with me Phil Agnew. A massive thank you to Karen, Hugo, Corinne and Tom for joining me on today's show. If you want to participate in a future experiment like these four lovely people, then do make sure you subscribe to my newsletter. I share all the info on my future Nudge experiments there. And if you're on the newsletter, you'll be invited at some point in the future.
Huge thank you to Charles Duhig, not only for making me more popular, but also for writing such a fantastic book. If you've enjoyed today's episode, you will absolutely love his book, super communicators. Do you go and check it out? I've left a link to it in the show notes. But this wasn't all Charles and I spoke about. He actually went on to give me some relationship advice.
He asked me about how much my partner and I argue and he started to share some golden bits of wisdom on how I can become a better boyfriend. So if you want to hear that brilliant advice, go and listen to our bonus episode to get access to the bonus episode. All you have to do is click the link in the show notes and enter your email address. Once you do, you'll be sent straight to the bonus episode.
So if you're keen to hear more from Charles and learn what I'm doing wrong in my relationship, you can do so by clicking the link in today's show notes and adding your email. If you're already a nudge newsletter subscriber, then just go to the link in the email for today's episode. You'll be able to access the episode very quickly there. Okay, I hope you enjoyed today's show. As always, I'll be back next Monday for another episode of Nudge. Bye-bye.