The goal of supercommunicators is to say not that you have to have conversations constantly, but that when you do want to have conversations, you have the tools and the skills to make them easier, to make them better.
Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Charles Dohag, an author and reporter for The New Yorker magazine. When he previously worked at the New York Times. He won a Pulitzer Prize for a series about Apple called The I economy.
He's also written about the two thousand and eight financial crisis, how companies take advantage of the elderly, and has reported from Iraq, for which he has won many other awards. Today, Eric and Charles discuss his newest book, Super Communicators, How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection.
Hi, Charles, welcome to the show.
Hi, thanks for having me.
I'm really excited to have you, Charles. We're going to be discussing your latest book, Super Communicators, How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection. But before we do, we'll start like we always do, with the parable. And in the parable, there's grandparent who's talking to their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of
us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second and they look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do well.
It's interesting you mentioned this because in writing Supercommunicators, one of the things that I came across in the research really clearly, which speaks to the parable you just shared, is that we all know how important connection is, right. We know that talking to people and connecting with them, that calling someone an old friend you haven't talked to in two years and catching up with them would feel wonderful. That's I think the good wolf right, the instinct to
connect with others. But oftentimes what stops us is, as you mentioned, fear, the thing that the bad wolf symbolizes, and that we become anxiously you know, what's it going to be like the first ten minutes That conversation is going to be awkward. I don't want to do that. If I start talking to this uber driver, if I start talking to someone at a party, how am I going to get out of the conversation when I'm ready to, like, you know, do something else. And that fear, I think,
stops us from making those connections. But what we know from study after study is that it's actually much easier to have those conversations, and we think they're going to be we end up being delighted by them much more than we anticipate. The awkwardness and the difficulty of it is much less than we think it's going to be.
And so I think when we feed the good wolf by reaching out to other people, by having conversations, by calling that person we haven't spoken to in a year and a half, we make the world a better place.
That's a beautiful way of thinking of But you end the book with referencing this Harvard study that doctor Robert Woldinger did, and he was a guest on the show recently, and you reference a very particular part of the study, which is between two men, right, and tell us a little bit more about those two guys.
This is the Harvard Study of Adult Development, as many of your listeners know, and it's been going on for almost one hundred years now, following thousands of people around. And one of the fundamental questions is what determines who is healthy when they hit the age of sixty five,
and who's happy when they hit sixty five, and who's successful. However, you define success at age sixty five, and researchers looked at a bunch of variables and what they found was the single best determinant of your health, happiness, and success at age sixty five is having at least a handful of close relationships at age forty five, which of course means you've probably started making those friends before you were
forty five. And to your point. In the book, we tell the story of these two figures that appear in these studies back from many, many years ago. They started the study in the nineteen twenties, and both of these gentlemen enrolled at that point, and one of them seemed like he was destined for greatness. He came from a very prominent family, he was good at school, he'd won lots of awards for scholarship. The other student that enrolled
was exactly the opposite. This guy had real trouble making friends. He was unpopular. He actually at one point was hospitalized and his doctor said, he didn't use these words. He said, basically, I think this guy's a loser. And so the researchers follow them over the next couple of years and pay attention to them. The prominent guy ends up going into
the military and coming out with honors. The other one also goes into the military for World War Two and does not come out of the military with honors, and they assume that one of them, the prominent one, is going to do really well in life, and that the other one's going to end up directionless, perhaps you know, friendless. But what they found when they find these guys again in their fifties and in their sixties and in their seventies is exactly the opposite. The prominent one. He had
focused his entire life on his career. He was a lawyer, and he really invested in making his law practice the best possible. But as a result, he was not close to his wife. In fact, he ended up getting married a number of times. He was estranged from his children because he was never at home to spend time with him. When researchers asked him who he would turn to if he had a problem or something he wanted to talk about, he said no one. That there was no one in
his life that he thought he could trust. That way, where's this other fellow, the one who had had trouble making friends, who had not done well in the military.
He sort of has a second birth, a reawakening, and he decides to start investing in his community, and he becomes involved in a church, and he basically goes to the church every day and participates in pot lucks and student classes, and then he finds community organizations and he becomes involved with And when the researchers found both of these men at age sixty five and seventy, what they found was at the first one, the prominent one, he
was financially enormously successful and miserable, just unhappy about his work and his life. He had been kicked out of his own law firm. His bank account was full, but nothing else in his life was full. And that other one, the person who had invested in his community, had made connections. He was delighted to be alive. He was surrounded by people who loved him and whom he loved in return.
And this is what Waldinger and and all these other researchers have found is that we tend to think about life as something where the goal is rewards that we can measure. But actually what we know from study after study is if you want to be happy, if you want to be healthy, if you want to be successful, investing in other people. Investing in those relationships is the most important thing you can do. And the way that we often do that is through conversation So.
Something I'm going to be doing a little more often is ask you, the listener, to reflect on what you're hearing. We strongly believe that knowledge is power, but only if combined with action and integration. So before we move on, I'd like to ask you what's coming up for you as you listen to this. Are there any things you're currently doing or feeding your bad wolf that might make sense to remove, or any things you could do to
feed your good wolf that you're not currently doing. So, if you have the headspace for it, I'd love if you could just pause for a second and ask yourself, what's one thing I could do today or tonight to feed my good wolf? Whatever your thing is. A really useful strategy can be having something external, a prompt or a friend, or a tool that regularly nudges you back
towards awareness and intentionality. For the past year, I've been sending little good Wolf reminders to some of my friends and community members, just quick, little SMS messages two times per week that give them a little bit of wisdom and remind them to pause for a second and come off autopilot. If you want, I can send them to you too. I do it totally for free, and people seem to really love them. Just drop your information at oneufeed dot net slash sms and I can send them
to you. It's totally free, and if you end up not liking the little reminders, you can easily opt out. That's one you feed dot net slash sms. And now back to the episode. I love that study and I love that example of those two guys, and it really
does show this idea that connect is really important. And despite everything you've sort of taught us all through the book about how to be a super communicator, you say that the most important thing, or maybe not the most important thing, but a very important thing, is that we want to become a good communicator. We value communication, we value connection, and so if we start from that place of value in it, then, like anything else in life that we value, we tend to invest time and energy
in the things that we value. So it's really about orienting in that direction first and then going, Okay, well that's important to me. I may not be as good at it as I want to be. How do I get there?
That's exactly right, That's exactly right, And it's important to recognize that communication is a learned skill. Right when I started writing Supercommunicators, I thought that I would find these individuals who are supercommunicators, who were charming and extroverts, And it turns out that's not true at all. In fact, if you look at the research, it doesn't matter if you're charming or Curmudgeonally, it doesn't matter if you're an
extrovert or an introvert. What super communicators have is they've learned a handful of skills that at the core of communication. And most importantly, as you just pointed out, they think
about communication just half an inch deeper. They don't think about it all the time, but they just pay a little bit more attention to what's going on in a conversation, pay a little bit more attention to someone's body language and tone of voice, and in doing so, they see how to connect with them, and then they show them
that they want to connect. And that's often the most important step, is simply showing someone that I want to connect with them is the first and most important step to making that connection become real.
Do you find that some people are super communicators in one area of their life, but maybe not so good in other areas of their lives.
I think that one thing that can happen is that there might be realms in which we take communication really seriously, like when we're at work, and then we stop taking it seriously when we get home. And that's where I think you get these situations that people at work are thought of as being sort of these like fantastic communicators are so charming, and then you talk to their or their wives or their kids and they say things like, oh, yeah, like he's been divorced twice or right, we have trouble
connecting with him. I don't know that it's that some people are good in some forums and not in other forums, as much as sometimes we forget to think about communication, sometimes we forget ticket seriously. And now what's important to recognize is that our brains have evolved to be very good at communication. So when we practice these skills, even though they might be hard at first, our brain will
make them into habits very very quickly. And so that's why these skills are so important is because they pay these huge dividends. And so when we're at home or when we're at work, we can fall back on those communication habits to really engage with others.
Yeah, I was thinking about this a little bit, I'm someone who has that tendency. And my tendency is I am a really good communicator in the work world, always have been. Most of my career was in technology, and I wasn't a great technologist, but I was a good communicator. I think it was what made me good at what I did. And yet I sometimes have had trouble outside of that. And as I was reflecting on it, I had a thought, and I had a conversation yesterday with
a woman named a doctor and Nicole Lapara. She's the holistic psychologist on Instagram. Right, she's got like eight million followers, like she's crazy big, but she's actually really really good. But she was talking about how it's not new idea of we've heard it on this show countless times, how our earliest childhood experiences imprint upon us. And I was thinking, you know, a lot of times it's those closest relationships
to us that trigger those most difficult habitual patterns. And so I may have the skills to be a super communicator. Maybe I'm being a little less than humble there. But let's just say I do, right, you know, Let's say I do. But when I get home and those relationships, the stakes are a lot higher. All of a sudden, I'm more likely to drop back into these pre conscious
patterns of relating. And we do know that when you're more sort of limbically aroused, to use some neuroscience shortcuts here, you have less focus in your prefrontal cortex, which is where you need to be to do some of these skills you're talking about.
Yeah, that's exactly right, And I think it's worth defining what a supercommunicator is. And sometimes the easiest way to do is just by asking this question, which I'll ask you Eric, which is if you were having a bad day and you wanted to call someone who you know would just make you feel better, do you know who you would call? Like, does that person pop into your mind?
I'm really fortunate that I would have to decide between three or four people as to who I would call.
You're really lucky. And what's interesting is that for you, those three or four people, they're super communicators, and you're probably a super communicator back to them. Now, there are some people out there who can do this with almost anyone, right, They can connect with almost anyone. These are the consistent supercommunicators, and what we know about them is, as I mentioned,
they're not born with this right. Oftentimes, if you talk to them and you ask them where you always go at communication, they'll say something similar to what you had just been talking about. In our youth, They'll say something like, when I was in high school, I had trouble making friends, so I had to really study how kids talk to each other, or or my parents got divorced and I had to be the peacemaker between them, so I had
to think about communication. And it's that thinking about communication that often makes them better at it. But what we know is it's just a set of skills that we can talk about right now, that anyone can learn, anyone can make into habits, and once you do that, consistency of supercommunication becomes a part of your life.
So I want to change directions real quick before we go into the practical aspects of that. And I don't want to spend a lot of time here, but I feel compelled to mention two things. First, is I heard you describe a hobby you took up about ten years ago, surfing as embodying poetry. And I became a surfer two years ago when you said that. I was like, that just describes it. I just love it. You know, I live in Ohio. It's a stupid hot for in Ohio, right,
I mean, it really is. But every chance I get, I go somewhere where there's water that I can get in and try and surf.
It's wonderful. So I live in Santa Cruz, California. We moved from Brooklyn to Santa Cruz in twenty twenty, so, just about four years ago. And one of the reasons why is because Santa Cruz has like the most consistent swells in the continental US. I have never been a graceful athlete, like I've never even calling myself an athlete is probably a stretch I run, but like I look goofy running. I've never felt beautiful in how I move.
But when you get on a surfboard, you have to pay attention to the waves, right, You have to pay attention to the water around you. You have to be in sync with this huge natural phenomena, this huge ocean. And when you do that, you start to allow this grace and this poetry into your life that suddenly you start expressing in your body. And I've looked at videotapes
of myself surfing, and I do not look graceful. I do not look beautiful in the slightest But when I'm on that board and I'm popping up and I'm catching that wave, and I'm feeling the power of the ocean beneath me and propelling me forward, I feel like poetry. It's a wonderful feeling. Yep.
I surfed in Santa Cruz last fall. Okay, I was in the La area for a couple things, and I needed to make my way to San Francisco, so I went to Santa Barbara and then I drove from Santa Barbara, but I stopped in Santa Cruz for a night and I went out surfing. And I went out early in the morning and it was like as gray and cold and socked in as could be. And what a great day of surfing it.
It was amazing.
It was just so good.
And when the sun comes out, so there's all these sea otters that live in Santa Cruz, so like, particularly at sunset, you'll be out on the water and you'll see the pelicans skimming over the water, like a couple feet from you. You'll see sea otters playing with their pups, and then the surface of the water will start reflecting the pink in the sky and it's like you're floating. It's amazing. Yeah, it's wonderful.
Yeah, it really is wonderful when you're out there on a beautiful day. Okay, Topic two. You wrote a hugely influential book, I guess about twelve years ago called The Power of Habit, and we spend a lot of time on this show talking about the science of behavior change, and I really focus on how we can use behavior
change to optimize for wisdom versus productivity or efficiency. But I wanted to ask you twelve years later, is there anything in your mind that you have learned about habits in the last twelve years that you feel like would be really a valuable addition to that book or anything you've learned where you've thought, well, you know, I sort of oversold that point, and maybe I would change what in your mind is different than twelve years ago.
There's not so much that I would change. There's been a little bit of emerging science. So in the book, in the Power of Habit, we mentioned this idea that willpower is like a muscle, and there's been some studies to show that willpower can get strengthened like a muscle can get strengthened, but that using the muscle as the analogy might not be the most apt analogy. So that's one thing that I might change, But it's such a
minor detail in that BOOKOK. I think the thing that in the last twelve years since Power of Habit came out, that's really struck me is oftentimes changing our habits is very inward looking, and that's good. That's how we become the people we want to become. Right and building the right habits and changing bad habits is really healthy and important. But it is about a focus on ourselves. And I would get email after email from people saying thank you.
I've been able to change my own habits. But there's this guy at work who's driving me crazy. How do I change his habits? And of course, you can't force someone to change their habits, right, That doesn't work. They have to want to change, And so then the question becomes, so what do we do? How do we convince them that they want to change? How do we explain to them? And that's where I came to communication, because I think when I was younger, I thought that much of our
life was focused on improving ourselves. But a lot of our success and our happiness and our health depends on others. Right. When we go to work, we're a member of a team. When we're at home, we're a member of a family. When we're out in this we're a member of a community. And so understanding how to invest in the people around us as much as we invest in ourselves, that's the
thing that I think is really really important. And so that's probably something I would have added to the power of Habit, But instead I just wrote a whole other book which hopefully gives people even more guidance on it.
There's a phrase I don't know who said it, but it's basically, when you realize how hard it is to change yourself, you realize the near impossibility of changing someone else. Right.
But it's interesting because when I started this show, I mean, I've been doing this show about a decade, and I would have told you in the beginning the primary thing that I would learn and the key to all this was sort of how to go within, how to change your thoughts and your mindsets and your habits and all all of that, and that is absolutely a huge part of the equation. But again and again, I've learned, and you just said it pretty eloquently that yeah, that's a
big part of it. But so is the outside world an ability to connect with it. And I like to think of it as an inflow and an outflow, right, Like, there's things happening inside me, but I want those things to go out into the world, and I want the things that are out in the world to come inside me and change who I am, you know, like there's ideally some reciprocity that's happening, of which my internal world is a part of.
You could be the best life hacker on earth, right, You could be someone who like has the discipline to wake up at five in the morning and work out for two hours and only eat healthy food and never smoke and never drink. And that's great, Right, It's good to have good habits. But if you're that person and you don't have any friends, you're miserable. It does not matter how many reps you can do in the gym if you don't have someone to turn to and be like,
hey man, did you see that that was awesome? Yeah? Then it makes life so much less meaningful yep.
And I think what is sometimes tragic is that we think that all those habits and all those things that we do are the thing that's going to make us somehow worthy of connection or be able to have that
deeper connection, whereas really that's not the case. And that's why I kind of started with and I like the way you ended with the story of these two men, because one of them sounds like he was a pretty disciplined guy when it came to his work life, right like dialed in, you know, yeh, but he died deeply unhappy.
All right.
So now let's actually get into some of the practical aspects of your book, and sure, I think it's probably worth starting with one of the core ideas, which is that there are different types of conversations and that in order for us to communicate or connect with someone else, we all have to be having the same type of connection or type of conversation.
That's exactly right. And for me, before I started in this book, this really came home when I fell into this bad pattern with my wife. And we've been married for about twenty years, and she's a much better surfer than I am and a much better runner.
Than I am.
But I would come home and after a long day at work, and I'd kind of start complaining about my work, and my wife would offer me these very practical suggestions, which is like, you know, why don't you take your boss out to lunch and you guys can get to know each other a little bit better. And instead of being able to hear what she was saying, I would get even more upset, and I'd say, like, you know, why aren't you supporting me. You're supposed to be outraged
on my behalf. And then she would get upset because I was attacking her for giving me perfectly good advice. And so I went to researchers and I asked them, like, what's going on here? Why do we keep falling into this pattern? Because I think a lot of couples fall into this pattern, right, yep. Sometimes the roles are reversed, but one person's talking about how they feel and the
other person's trying to solve their feelings. And the researcher said, well, it's kind of interesting you approached us because we're living through this golden age of understanding communication really for the first time because of advances in neural imaging, and data collection, and they said, one of the things that we found that's most important is we tend to think of a
discussion as being about one thing. Right We're talking about my day, or we're talking about where to go on vacation, But actually every discussion is made up of multiple kinds of conversations, and in general, all these different kinds of conversations they tend to fall into one of three buckets. There's these practical conversations where we're talking about solving problems or making plans. Then there's emotional conversations where I might tell you how I'm feeling and I don't want you
to solve my feelings, I want you to empathize. And then finally there's social conversations, which is about how we relate to each other and the social identities that are important to us. And they said, the thing that's important, as you just mentioned, is if you're not having the same kind of conversation at the same moment, you're going to have real trouble hearing each other. You're going to
have real trouble connecting. And in fact, in psychology this has become known as the matching principle that in order to communicate, you have to be having the same kind of conversation at the same time. And once you do that, once I match you and have an emotional conversation, or I invite you to match me and have a practical conversation, once we become aligned, then we can move from different
kind of conversation to different kind of conversation. We can start emotional and then moved to practical, and then moved to social, and then moved back to emotional. And as long as we're moving together, we're in sync, we'll hear each other. And so this is a really big insight is that super communicators are just a little bit better at asking themselves what kind of a conversation is happening here? Is this person in an emotional mindset or are they
in a practical mindset? How can I invite them to join me? And in fact, my wife has become great at this. Now when I come home and I start complaining about my day, she'll say, look, do you want me to help you solve this problem? Or do you want me just to like listen while you vent? And I actually loved being asked that because sometimes I haven't thought about it until she asks, right and to be asked means that she's someone who wants to give me
what I need. So figuring out what kind of conversation is happening is really really powerful.
I don't remember the exact phrase, but it was something that teachers use with students, something to ask them, which is sort of like a very shorthand summary for this.
That's exactly right. So in schools they've started instructing teachers that when student comes up and there's something meaningful that they want to talk about, the first thing the teacher should do is ask, okay, do you want me to help you? Do you want me to hear you, or do you want me to hug you, which, of course are the three kinds of conversations, right, the practical, the emotional,
and the social, And students understand immediately. Students usually say like I need you to hug me like I'm feeling bad about this, or I need you to help me I want to find a solution, or I need you to hear me like I just I just want someone to know what's going on. And the more that we do that in our own lives, and again, using that phrase is a little weird. If you're an adult in a workplace, you don't want to be asking someone do
you want me to hug you? But there are other ways of essentially asking that question that help people explain to us what they're seeking out of a conversation.
Here at the One You Feed workplace, I give my editor Chris the permission to ask me if you need a hug, go ahead, it's okay. So I have a question about these three types of conversations. I probably have a bunch of questions, but one of them is are there conversations that don't fall into that category? And I'll give you a very specific example. Maybe you can tell me how to do this. And this is for my life,
and it happens on a semi regular basis. My partner will suddenly pick some story out in the news and she will share it with me, and oftentimes then she will share it again with me. She's sharing a different element of it later that day, or another piece of it the day after, and oftentimes I'm kind of like, okay,
like it's just not yeah. So I thought about it and I was like, you know, after reading your book, I was like, well, I don't quite know what type of conversation this is she may just be sharing something she read and that's it. But it occurred to me perhaps I could ask, like, why is that.
Important to you?
But then that sounds a little bit not done right. It sounds like, well, why do you care?
Right?
And that's not the message, right, So.
And I'll tell you how to do it.
Yeah, okay.
So what I love about this question that you've asked me is it gets to what the right way to figure out what kind of conversation is going on, which is to ask questions. We know that supercommunicators, for instance, consistent supercommunicators, they ask ten to twenty times as many questions as the average person. And some of those questions are special questions what are known as deep questions, and a deep question asks us about our values or our beliefs,
are our experiences? A deep question basically asks like how do you make sense of the world, like why is this important to you? And so with your partner, if she brings up this story the third time about these kids in Ohio and you're like, I've never been to Ohio and I don't understand when she brings up the third time, I think it's as simple as saying, you know it seems like this story really touched you. What's important about this story to you? Why was this story
meaningful to you? And what you're really saying is tell me how you see the world right? Tell me why you keep bringing this up. There's something there that seems important and I'm having trouble seeing it, but I really want to understand. I want to understand how you see the world now you see the story. This is what deep questions do. And it can seem intimidating to ask those kinds of questions, but it's actually very simple once
you start looking for the opportunity. It's like if you bump into someone who's a doctor, instead of asking them where do you practice medicine, you ask them what made you decide to become a doctor? Like do you love practicing? Is it great? What's the best case you've ever had? When you do that, what you're doing is you're inviting them to say something real and meaningful to explain who
they are. And I'm sure with your partner, if you well, let me ask you, if you were to say to her, I see that you love this story, like you've mentioned a couple of times, tell me what it is about this story that you like, What does the story mean to you? Do you think she would respond.
Yeah, I'm not sure. She might just be like, well, I just think it's interesting, and that would be that, right. But I think it's worth doing because I've realized that what is happening. What I'm doing is not a super communicator trait, which is I'm judging whether the story is important to me or not, right and engaging in that way and in the way that many of us often do. I think of, well, if it's not important to me, I don't know why this keeps coming up. Yeah, I'm
not orienting towards her experience exactly exactly. I'm thinking, well, I don't see why that's important important to me, And of course we know that's not That is not a good communication skill.
Yeah, and it's worth noting. What you just said illustrates this beautifully. Sometimes we don't want to have a conversation, Like your wife or your partner might be telling you these things just because like she kind of wants to like tell you something. She doesn't want to have a conversation about it. She just wants to tell you something interesting, and like you being like, oh, okay, that sounds good. That's enough, right now. We don't have to have a
conversation all the time. Sometimes we get into an uber and we just want to check our phone, right, we do not want to have a conversation with the driver. But the goal of super communicators is to say not that you have to have conversations constantly, but that when you do want to have conversations, you have the tools and the skills to make them easier, to make them better. And it might very well be because my wife does
the same thing. She'll like mention something to me, and I like am listening out of the corner of my ear, and then I wonder, like, should I actually like engage with her about this? But she doesn't want me to engage. She just wants to tell me something funny that she saw on the internet. Right, it's not that big a deal, right,
It doesn't have to be a conversation. And I think you can even ask, like, when you tell me about these details, do you want me to engage or is it just that you want to share with me?
So listener, consider this. You're halfway through the episode Integration reminder. Remember knowledge is power, but only if combined with action and integration. It can be transformative to take a minute to synthesize information rather than just ingesting it in a detached way. So let's collectively take a moment to pause and reflect. What's your one big insight so far and how can you put it into practice in your life? Seriously,
just take a second, pause the audio and reflect. It can be so powerful to have these reminders to stop and be present, can't it. If you want to keep this momentum going that you built with this little exercise, i'd encourage you to get on our Good Wolf Reminders SMS list. I'll shoot you two texts a week with insightful little prompts and wisdom from podcast guests. They're a nice little nudge to stop and be present in your life, and they're a helpful way to not get lost in
the busyness and forget what is important. You can join at oneufeed dot net slash sms and if you don't like them, you can get off a list really easily. So far, there are over one than one hundred and seventy two others from the one you Feed community on the list, and we love to welcome you as well, so head on over to oneufeed dot net, slash SMS, and let's feed our good wolves together. It's worth trying to figure out. But it may not actually be a conversation in the sense of like it has a goal.
You know, when you talk about these three types of conversations, they tend to have a purpose, and it may not have a purpose beyond just I found this interesting and I'm sharing something from my interior world with you for a second.
Absolutely, this happens with my kids all the time. Sometimes I will say to them, I want to have a conversation about your rooms, and I don't actually want to have a conversation about their rooms. I want them to go clean their rooms. Right, I'm trying to be polite and how I tell them to do it. But it's the same type of thing where it's okay not to have conversations. It's just that when you do want to have a conversation, you should have the tools available to you.
Yeah, so I want to come back to deep questions in a second. But before that, is there a type of question we can ask either externally or internally for us to try and determine what type of conversation we're in. So we talked about. If you're an elementary school teacher, you may ask, you know, do you want to be helped, heard, or hugged? Right? Yeah, what's an adult way of trying to figure out what type of conversation are we about to have here?
So honestly, the best way to do it is to ask a deep question, okay, And the kind of key principle to think about asking those deep questions is don't ask about the facts of someone's life, ask them how they feel about their life, because the thing about facts is that they can often be a dead end. If I say, Oh, what neighborhood do you live in? Oh? I live in the heights. Oh do you know my friend Jim? Like, if you don't know Jim, pretty much
the conversation we've hit a dead end. Yeah. But if I say what neighborhood you live and you say in the heights, and I say, oh, do you like living up there?
Like?
Why'd you move up there? What do you like about the heights? Then you're going to start telling me what you value, right, And you might answer that question different ways. You might say something like the same person might say this in different times. They might say, you know, I really wanted a place that was going to be a store of value, and I knew that home prices wouldn't go down up in the Heights, so I bought up there.
So that's someone who's in a practical mindset right now, right, and like we can join them there and be like, oh, what do you think about real estate on the west Side. That same person might also, in that different moment, answer the question by saying, oh, you know, actually, we bought up in the Heights because like it has this wonderful community.
Like we go to the park on Friday nights and we see these friends and there are people that I probably wouldn't know otherwise except that we just happened to live next to each other, and it's so kind of wonderful to have this diverse group of friends. So that's a person who's in a social mindset, right. Or they might talk about their kids and the opportunities for their kids to roam around outside. That's probably more of an
emotional mindset. Once we train ourselves to listen for these three conversations, asking a question about how someone feels about their life will reveal what kind of mindset they're in, what kind of conversation they want to have, and that doesn't mean we have to match them, but we can or we can invite them to match us. And that's how we become aligned. In the language of neurology and neuroscience, that's how we become neurally entrained.
Say more about neural entrainment, and maybe, as you're saying more about it, tell us about the study of guitar players. As a guitar player, I loved this, so.
Yeah, it's wonderful. Right, So, there's been all these studies trying to figure out how do we actually communicate with each other. And there's some forms of communication like playing music together, playing guitar together, that is a nonverbal form of communication, but it's still a form of communication. Right, You're listening to your partner, you're playing with them. And what researchers found is that when two people were playing a score together but they weren't in duet, their neural
activity looked very, very different from each other. And then as soon as they started playing a duet, as soon as they came together where they were actually communicating with each other. Here, you know, I'm gonna wait for you to finish that chord. Then I'm going to come in with this chord. Suddenly their brains started looking more and more similar, their neural activity became more and more synchronized, and then they would veer into solos and it would end.
They're thinking we'd go back to normal. And what researchers found is it's not just playing music together. It's when we talk to each other. That happens right in any meaningful conversation like this conversation right now, even though we're separated by thousands of miles without us realizing it, our breath patterns have become similar, our heart rates have started to match each other in many cases, our pupils start
dilating at the same rate. And most importantly, if we could see inside our brains, which we now can with some advanced neural imaging, but see that my thoughts and your thoughts are becoming more and more similar, more and more synchronized. And that makes sense when you think about it, because if I describe to you an emotion or an idea, you actually experience that emotion a little bit, or you
experience that idea. That's why communication is powerful, is because it allows you to see the world through my eyes just a little bit, and as we do, our brains become entrained. Our brains become similar until we're having the same thoughts at the same moment and we're communicating with
each other. And that entrainment is a product of evolution, and it's the reason why a good conversation feels so wonderful, Why you walk away from a good chat with a friend and you just feel great, is because our brains have evolved to crave this connection, to look for opportunities to train, and when we do, it feels fantastic.
I often think about one interview I'm doing, like with the last couple I had, and I referenced the one I did the other day with this psychologist, and she talks about a phenomenon there of regulation in an emotional sense, and this sounds like a very similar concept. It's a way you know that you can co regulate each other. So if you're in a certain state and someone else is in a better place, yeah.
That's why you love calling those three or four people. And in the book, there's a story of the CIA officer who's sent over to Europe to recruit spies and he's just terrible at the job. He's so bad at it. He can't recruit anyone, and he'll go to people in like embassy parties and they'll say things like, look, I know you're trying to recruit me, and if you don't stop right now, I'm going to tell the authorities and get you deported.
Like should to a comedy on this if they haven't. It sounds like a great comedy setup.
And he's a wonderful guy. His name is Jim Lawler. And it's not until he essentially learns this coregulation that he becomes good at recruiting other folks to help him. And you're exactly right. It's him matching the kind of conversation that they're having, him showing that he wants to
connect with them. It's co regulating our emotions together. That's when we feel like we can really trust each other, when we can really hear each other, when feel a connection that this other person cares about us.
So I want to go back to deep questions because I think they're so important and you've kind of laid out how to do them. I'm just going to read a very specific thing that you say, because I think this sort of brings it all together, which is a deep question asked about somebody's values, their beliefs, judgments, or experiences. Right, And I think having those four categories in mind is
actually really helpful. Like, that's one thing I really want to take away, because in some cases I think I am a really good conversationalist, and there are other cases where I don't quite know the next move. And to your point, I think that just having that quick framework of like, well, ask them about an experience, ask them about a value or a belief is the way to go deeper. Yeah, it's the way to move the conversation in a new direction.
And sometimes it's just as simple as saying, like why you know, what did you like about that movie? What do you like about where you live? Why did you become a doctor? And those are easy questions to ask, that's not hard. It doesn't feel intrusive, it doesn't feel probing. You're inviting this person to share and not mandating that they share with you.
Yeah, I think that's the trick. Let's say somebody's a casual acquaintance. How do you ask the type of question that moves the conversation deeper but isn't too much. And that's why I like what you've got there.
Yeah, And oftentimes it's about inviting, right, not mandating, Not saying, oh, how did it feel when you learned that your dad died? That's a pretty deep question, right, You got to be on the same wavelength with someone already. Right. But to just say, like, tell me about your dad, what was he like? That's an invitation and someone can say like, oh, he was great and leave it at that, or they can say, oh, he was he was amazing, Like let me tell you about like what he did this one time.
An invitation rather than a mandate, makes every question easier.
Let's talk about cases where you ask somebody a question like that and you get back sort of what they said, like he was great.
Yeah.
Is that generally a sign like okay, let's not go that direction because they don't want to go that direction. Or is it just possible that they're a shy person, right, and it's taking them time to find their way in, you know, because I think a lot of people freeze or get intimidated in conversation a little bit.
Yeah. No, I think that's totally fair. And so the answer to whether they're shy or whether this just isn't an avenue they want to go down is probably something that you can into it at the moment. So if you think about how our brains have evolved, communication is Homo sapiens superpower. Like, the reason our species has done so well is because we can communicate. That's what's allowed
us to build families and villages and nations. It's what allows us to share knowledge without having to experience the learning of that knowledge firsthand. So throughout history, communication is the thing that has made our species succeed, and as a result, our brains have evolved to crave that communication, to crave connection, to crave outreach. And so one of the things that's happened is that our brains are very very good at detecting a number of things in conversation.
When someone is shy versus when they are disinterested, we can usually pick up on it just by listening to how they respond to questions. When someone is inauthentic, they're not actually matching us, they're just mimicking us, right. They ask us things like where do you want to go on vacation? Because they don't really care where I want to go on vacation, but they want to tell me
all about their vacation, right. We know that we pick up on that pretty quickly, and so part of it is just listening to our intuitions and listening to what we hear the other person saying, and then again making these invitations. So asking about someone's dad and they say, oh, he's doing great, and that's it. They don't want to talk more about their dad. Now, you know, we might try a different invitation, or we might say, oh, it's
so nice to hear that. You know, my parents are doing really, really well too, although I'm getting a little bit worried about, like, you know, my dad and he's getting older, and sharing something about ourselves, and then just seeing if they accept that invitation, and they might not. They might not. They might say like, oh, I'm glad to hear that, or I'm sorry to hear that, at which point we can say something like you know, how's work,
what's going on at the office. But the point is that you're exactly right that oftentimes we feel a sense of anxiety about conversations and that that anxiety stops us from having the conversation. And there's a lot of techniques to do this. There's a study at Harvard Business School where the professors and the researchers. They told a group of students, Okay, you're going to go have a conversation with a stranger, which is like the most anxiety producing
thing you can tell someone to do. And they said, but before you have this conversation, take seven seconds and write down on a piece of paper, three topics you might talk about, like dumb topics like you know, have you seen doom? Two? Are you going to the party this weekend? And then they told everyone, okay, go ahead, your conversations. And what they found was that those topics that the students wrote down hardly ever came up during
those discussions. But the students afterwards said, I felt so much more confident and so much more calm and relaxed, and the conversation went so much better as a results. And it's because I knew if there was an awkward moment, I had this thing in my pocket I could fall back on. I had three topics I could ask about or I could talk about. And so what's really interesting about that is that it acknowledges that there is this awkwardness,
this anxiety that conversation produces. But it also shows how easy it is to disrupt that, which is just to think about this conversation for seven seconds before we start it can make a huge difference totally.
I mean to apply that to myself. I am a diligent over preparer for interviews, but the best conversations I almost never look at my notes. Yeah, taking the time that I do ahead of time makes it just much more likely that I can disappear into the conversation. Absolutely, But then the notes you're there if I need them, right, And part of what.
I think is going on, and tell me if you think this is wrong, is by writing those notes, you're figuring out what you want from this conversation. You're figuring out what for you is important. What are the kinds of questions that are important to you, What are the kinds of insights that you hope to get to, And just thinking about what we want that it can make all the different. Then we can stop thinking about it, we can just be in the conversation totally.
I mean, as I've gone on, I don't write questions usually for whatever reason, that just doesn't make sense to me. But I found more and more less is better, Yeah, it is. I do have a sense of what in this person's work resonates.
With me, that's exactly. Yeah.
One idea in the book that I found really interesting is the idea of looping for understanding share more about what this is.
It's a really important concept because even if we ask deep questions, even if we listen to what the other person is telling us, oftentimes in some conversations, particularly conflict conversations, particularly conversations where there's some tension or we disagree with each other, there's this thing that happens that makes it harder for us to connect, which is that as I'm speaking, there's this little suspicion in the back of my head
that you're not actually listening to me, You're just waiting your turn to speak. And we've all felt that, and so what's really important in a conversation is that, particularly in a conflict conversation, is that we prove to each other that we're listening. And the way that we prove we're listening. It's not about how we act while someone is speaking, it's about what we do after they finished speaking.
And this idea of looping for understanding. It's taught at Stanford and Harvard, a bunch of big fancy schools what it says is Okay. Look, here's the three steps to prove to someone that you're listening to them. The first step is ask them a question, preferably a deep question.
If you can let them answer the question. Then step number two is repeat back what you heard them say, but in your own words, like show them that you were paying attention, show them that you're processing what they're saying, you're trying to you're trying to really understand what they mean. And then step three, and this is the step that most of us usually forget, ask if you got it right?
And the reason why that's so powerful is because sometimes they say, no, you didn't get it right right, and it turns out you actually weren't listening as well as you thought you were. But even if you did get it right, when you ask them, did I get this right, you're asking them for permission to acknowledge that you were
listening closely. And there's this thing hardwired into our brain again by evolution, that when we think someone is listening closely to us, we become more willing to listen to them. In the addition, you know, there's a couple of big skills figuring out what kind of conversation you're having and matching each other, asking deep questions, asking people how they feel about their life and rather than the facts of their life. And this is the third one, which is
oftentimes we need to prove that we're listening. And sometimes we do that just by asking asking a follow up question or or sharing something about ourselves. But when we prove to other people that we're listening, what we're really saying is I want to connect with you, and showing that we want to connect is often the most important part of actually forming that connection.
A conversation my partner and I have had before about this is that idea of saying it back kind in your own words. And she often believes that saying back some of the exact words that somebody used is important because those words mean something very specific or important to them. And so I think doing that without mimicking or you know, without sounding robotic. But yeah, does that make sense to you?
Absolutely? Absolutely, And I think you're exactly right. The key is you don't want it to send inauthentic. You don't want to say like what I hear you say is and then literally repeat word for word where they just said. But on the other hand, it might be important to say what I hear you say. Is you said that you felt like I should be more caring with you, and I completely hear what you're saying, and that's important to me as well, and like, here's some ways that
I can be caring. I think your partner's exactly right that sometimes words have a magic power for a certain person, and repeating that word back shows that you're paying attention, and that's part of matching. That's part of this symmetry that we talked about. But there's a difference between mimicry and matching. Mimicry feels inauthentic because it's not you doing any work. It's not you paying attention to the words
I'm using. It's you just like keeping this like short term memory of like what I just said and then trying to say the exact same thing. That's what used car salesman's do.
Right.
Not to disparage use car salesmen, but we've all experienced. But I think your partner's exactly right that sometimes the way that we show that we're listening is to use the same language that the person has used, but to do it in an authentic way. Where we're saying. What I hear you say is this phrase. Here's what I'm thinking about this phrase, And here's the question that this phrase raises for me.
So listener in thinking about all that and the other great wisdom from today's episode. If you're going to isolate just one top insight that you're taking away, what would it be? Not your top ten, not the top five, just one?
What is it?
Think about it?
Got it?
Now?
I ask you, what's one tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny little thing you can do today to put it in practice? Or maybe just take a baby step towards it. Remember, little by little, a little becomes a lot. Profound change happens as a result of aggregated tiny actions, not massive heroic effort. If you're not already on our Good Wolf Reminder SMS list, I'd highly recommend it as a tool you can leverage to remind you to take those vital baby steps forward. You can get on there at oneufeed
dot nets slash SMS. It's totally free, and once you're on there, I'll send you a couple text messages a week with little reminders and nudges. Here's what I recently shared to give you an idea of the type of stuff I send. Keep practicing even if it seems hopeless. Don't strive for perfection, aim for consistency, and no matter what, keep showing up for yourself. That was a great gem
from recent guests Light Watkins. And if you're on the fence about joining, remember it's totally free and easy to unsubscribe. If you want to get in, I'd love to have you there. Just go to one ufeed dot net, slash SMS all right back to it. I love that next step of asking if you got it right, that's exactly right. That seems like it's really key. I think a lot of people know the first two most any communication class you ever take will tell you the first two steps.
Yeah, And once it becomes a habit, like I find myself constantly saying, Okay, what I hear you saying is and tell me if I'm getting this wrong. But what I hear you saying is right? Yeah, And it's that third step. It's the asking permission to acknowledge that I've listen to you.
I went on an outward bound trip last fault. It's generally something that you know teenagers do.
But yeah, my teenagers going this summer.
Yeah, they do them for adults too, and it was a great experience. And the end everybody was kind of joking around, kind of making up nicknames for people, and they didn't quite land on a nickname for me. But the basic thing was, you know, basically me saying, let me ask you another question about that. And then what I heard you say is, you know, like almost maybe to a point of a character I don't know.
Well, And they probably having you on that trip, right, You're you were a super communicator who made conversations easier among everyone. When we become a super communicator, that's actually the gift that we give the world and to ourselves and to our friends, is we make it easier for other people to connect, not just with us, but with each other. That is feeding the good wolf to go out and to make the world a better place. By
helping people connect with each other. That's only something that can make the world a better place.
Well, I think that is a beautiful place to wrap up. Thank you so much, Charles. Really happy to talk to you. I enjoyed the book and I really enjoyed this conversation.
Thank you for having me on. This has been such a treat.
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