The Secrets of Supercommunicators
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Summary
Have you ever known one of those people who seem to be able to connect with anyone? The kind of person who had the ability to make others feel understood and smoothly navigate even the trickiest of conversations? Charles Doherty calls these folks super communicators, and he s the author of a new book by the same name. Today in the show, he explains that what underlies super communicator skill and connection is something called the "Matching Principle" and how you can put it to use in your own conversations.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast
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have you ever known one of those people who seem to be able to connect with anyone
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the kind of person who had the ability to make others feel understood
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and smoothly navigate even the trickiest of conversations
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charles dohead calls these folks super communicators and he's the author of a
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new book by the same name today in the show charles explains that what underlies super
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communicator skill and connection is something called the matching principle
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and he unpacks how it works and how you can put it to use in your own conversations
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we discuss several techniques for how to figure out what kind of conversation you're having
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so you can align your language and energy with the other person and because emotional
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conversations can be particularly difficult we dig into tactics for successfully navigating them
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even when they contain a high degree of conflict we also get into how to carry the skills of
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connection into your digital conversations after the show's over check out our show notes at
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aom.is slash super communicator all right charles dohead welcome back to the show thanks for having
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me on so last time we had you on was back in 2016 to talk about your book smarter faster better it's all
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about the secrets of being more productive in life and business we've also had you on to talk about
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the power of habit and the habit loop you got a new book out though called super communicator
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how to unlock the secret language of connection i mean this is all about how to have better more
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meaningful conversations what led you take a deep dive into this topic well when i wrote the power of
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habit and smarter faster better you know it's very much focused on the self and and it's about how
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we succeed as as individuals what do we need to do to be successful but the thing i realized is that
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a huge amount of our happiness and our productivity and our success it depends on other people right like
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we work in teams we we have partners or spouses and kids and and parents and so i realized that at the
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core of dealing with other people coordinating with other people is communication it's conversations right
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and then when i started doing the research i learned that we're living through this golden age
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of understanding communication actually for the first time in ways we never have before because
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of advances in neural imaging and data collection and i just thought it was fascinating and more
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importantly i thought it could help a lot of people including myself was there a moment you had in
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your own personal life where you realized boy i really need to get better at talking because i'm not
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good at it oh oh yeah there was more than one moment right i think i think we've all had that
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experience for me it was i i fell into this pattern with my wife where i would come home after like a
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long and hard day and i would start complaining to her like my boss is a jerk or my co-workers don't
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appreciate me and she very rationally it would say oh here's a solution why don't you take your boss
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out to lunch and you guys can get to know each other a little bit better but instead of being able to hear
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what she was saying i would get even more upset and i'd be like why aren't you supporting me
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you're supposed to be outraged on my behalf and then she would get upset because i was you know
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reacting very poorly to this advice she had given and so i started going to these researchers and
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asking them why does this happen because it's not just me right this is a pretty common pattern
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and they said well actually here's what we've learned and this is one of the biggest insight
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from the last decade is we tend to think of a discussion as being about one thing right we're
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talking about my day or we're talking about you know the kids grades or the pets but actually
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every single discussion is made up of multiple different kinds of conversations and in general
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those conversations fall into one of three buckets there's there's practical discussions like where
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we're solving problems we're making plans then there's emotional conversations where i want to tell
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you how i feel and i don't want you to solve my problem i i want you to empathize and i want you to
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to listen and then there's social conversations which is about how we relate to each other and to
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society and they said the thing that we figured out is if people are having different kinds of
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conversations at the same moment then they won't really hear each other they won't really connect
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with each other and so the key is what's become known as the matching principle within psychology
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that in order to communicate with someone we need to be having the same kind of conversation
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at the same time because that actually causes our brains to align okay there's a lot to unpack here
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and i hope we can do that throughout this conversation and to get into this idea of the matching principle
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you start out the book talking about this guy named felix segala who worked for the fbi's crisis
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negotiation team uh he's a master communicator but from the outside he looks pretty unremarkable he just
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looks like a middle-aged dude you know mustache maybe wear a sweater vest i don't know and so you'd
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see like how does this guy people just relate to him they connect with him that he doesn't look
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charismatic and so a team of researchers went in to study felix to figure out what made him so good
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at communicating what did these researchers learn about communication from felix so if felix is a
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really interesting test case because you're exactly right if you met him he would not stand out for you
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at all until he opened his mouth and what's really really interesting is that he is very
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typical of super communicators super communicators are not necessarily the most charismatic people
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they are not extroverts who they are they're people who think just a little bit like half an inch deeper
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about how to have conversations and as a result they can connect with almost anyone and the thing is
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it's just a set of skills anyone can learn any of us can become super communicators and so in felix's
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case what happened was these researchers sat down with him and they were like look tell us what you
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do that's so special why did so many people tell us that we had to be in in touch with you and he
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said well well let me demonstrate it might be better and he just starts asking them questions like you
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know tell me about like what's going on in your life now what's interesting is the questions he
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asking are a special kind of questions but they don't appear that special they're what's known as deep
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questions and a deep question asks us about our values or beliefs or experiences but it doesn't
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appear to be that deep at first it doesn't seem really probing or intrusive it doesn't force someone
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to reveal something but it's as easy like if you bump into someone and you ask them like what do you
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do for a living and they say i'm a lawyer a deep question would be to say like oh how did you decide to
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go to law school or you know what do you love about practicing the law both those questions are
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pretty easy to ask but what they do is they ask the other person provide an opportunity for the other
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person to tell us about their experiences why they went to law school to tell us about their beliefs
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what it is about you know justice in the law that gets them excited every day and when they share
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that with us then it provides an opportunity for us to engage in what's known as reciprocal authenticity
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where we can share something about ourselves and we'll feel closer to each other and that's exactly
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what felix would do he would ask these questions that were deep questions that didn't appear that deep
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and then somebody would bring up something meaningful you know they became a researcher because their
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parents were researchers or they the thing that they love about about teaching is to see how
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students develop and then he would share something about himself he said oh that's really really
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interesting because what i hear you saying is that you love to help other people and and actually
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that's why i joined the fbi because i love to help people too and i found this way right so what's
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happening there is that almost invisibly felix is letting people inviting people to bring their full self to
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the to the conversation he's proving to them that he's listening to them he's sharing his own life
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with them and as a result they feel connected they believe that he wants to connect with them and that's
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the most important thing that super communicators do they prove to us they want to connect so these
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questions that he asks is this what allows felix to match up so he's able to sync up with the person
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he's talking to so he they're on the same page and the person feels like they're communicating
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that's exactly right so so these deep questions and and i will say so people who are consistent
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super communicators because we're all super communicators at one time or another but but
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people who can do it all the time on demand they tend to ask 10 to 20 times as many questions as the
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average person and some of those questions are like throwaway questions they're like oh what'd you
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think of that or oh what'd you say next we don't even register them as questions but they invite us into
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the conversation but then about half of them are these deep questions and the reason why those
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questions are so powerful is exactly what you just said is that it allows you to say something
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meaningful like something that's true and authentic about yourself and it allows me as the listener to
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engage in reciprocal authenticity without it seeming like i'm trying to steal the spotlight from you or
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or i i asked where you went on vacation just because i really want to talk about where i went on
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vacation they're really powerful so the matching principle is figure out what kind of conversation
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you're having and then match the other person or invite them to match you and by asking deep
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questions felix was able to create this matching and we're going to talk more about how to create this
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kind of alignment throughout our conversation today but besides asking deep questions how else can you
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tell what kind of conversation someone wants to have well you just listen to what they're saying
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right because they're going to tell you i mean they might not say i want to have an emotional
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conversation but if they bring up things like feelings if they mention something that feels vulnerable
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to you or feels kind of emotionally authentic then they're having an emotional conversation right the
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same way that when i get home and i talk about you know my boss is a jerk and he doesn't he
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doesn't appreciate me it's not really about what my boss did it's about how i feel about it and that's
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obvious right just from listening on the other hand if i'm talking to my wife and i say like look
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let's figure out the budget for our vacation next year because i really want to like you know go
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someplace exciting but i don't want it to be too expensive well that's clear that that's a much more
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practical frame of mind right so it's not hard to figure out what kind of conversation is happening
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it's just a matter of listening for it and understanding that there's these different
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kinds of conversations another way you suggest creating alignment is to share your goals for the
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conversation and then ask others what their goals are so instead of you know being opaque and each
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person has to decipher what kind of conversation is going on and what it's about you're just up front
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about that oh absolutely absolutely and and think about how helpful that is i mean sometimes this
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happens really naturally right like we have an agenda we're in a business meeting and like we're
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like look we're here to discuss the budget so we know we know what everyone ostensibly wants out of
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it but if you even just take half a beat and you start by just saying like look and again this is a great
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deep question tell me what the budget means to you what's important to you about this budget
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then what i'm really doing is i'm opening it up because you might say what's really important to me is
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that we hit our numbers right practical conversation or someone might say what's really important to me
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is that i'm worried we're gonna have to do layoffs and like i i don't i don't want to do that to people
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and their families okay now you're signaling that's a much more emotional conversation and so simply by
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asking someone what their goals are and the easiest way to do that is a to share your own goals and b
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to simply ask them what does this mean to you why is this important to you okay so ask people what
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their goals are for a conversation and tell people your goals another suggestion you make in the book
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that i really like is to come prepared internally for a conversation like mentally prepare you know
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think beforehand about what you want to get out of the conversation and what you want to talk about
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with someone and that can help you get more out of the conversation there was this study that was
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done by some researchers who went into an investment bank and this was a place where like people
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screamed at each other all day long we just got in fights constantly and they told everyone for the
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next week before each meeting write one sentence where you describe what you want to accomplish in
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this meeting and the mood you want to establish it took about 10 seconds for people to do this right
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they would literally like scribble down one sentence about the upcoming meeting and then they'd usually
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just stick the paper into their pocket and walk into the meeting and people didn't even usually
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announce what their goal was they didn't announce what they had written down but the incidence of
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conflict in those meetings went down by 80 percent and the reason why is because everyone knew what
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they wanted and so they were able to express that to others knowing what we want just taking like
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literally two or three seconds before we start a conversation to figure out why we're having the
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conversation it pays enormous dividends no that's something that my wife and i do whenever we get
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together with friends before they come over or before we meet them for dinner on the drive over
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we might say what are the things we want to talk to these people about like what do we want to catch
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up on so we make like a list so that whenever we see a friend we haven't seen a long time it's like
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i want to follow up with this and our friends do the same thing with some really good friends of
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ours we have uh we called uh quality conversation so qcs um and we only see each other maybe once or
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twice a year because they've they moved away from us but we we each come with our list of like here's the
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things we want to talk about and we don't get to all of them but because both of us have an idea of
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what we want to talk about like we can we can go really deep with uh our conversations yeah that's
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really really smart and in fact there was an experiment done at harvard business school by
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allison wood brooks who's a professor there where what she did is she had all of her students she told
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her students you're going to have a conversation with a stranger and what i want you to do is i want
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you to write down three topics you might discuss and again this was like 10 seconds of thought
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right like people would write down like you know last night's tv show and the game this weekend and
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you know where are you going on vacation and then they would just stick that list in their pocket
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and most of the people never discussed one of the topics that they had written down but almost all of
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them reported feeling much less anxious during the conversation and that the conversation went much
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much better than they expected because they had this this list to fall back on just like you and
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your wife and and my guess is that because you guys are creating a list of stuff you really want
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to discuss you do get to a lot of it because it's it's stuff that's important to you but just having
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that list it makes the entire conversation easier and it probably doesn't take you guys long on the
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car ride over to come up with what you want to talk about yeah yes just a few minutes another useful
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tip you provide to help people figure out what the conversation is about because again everyone can be
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going into conversation with a different agenda you might be thinking i'm just going to focus on
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just practical things this person wants to have a more of an emotional conversation you talk about
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thinking of every conversation as a negotiation yeah how can thinking of conversation as a negotiation
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help you get that matching principle going so this is really interesting and there's a lot of
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research on this and and the word negotiation might be a little off putting or misleading to people
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because within psychology this is referred to as a quiet negotiation where the goal is not to win
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anything the goal is to figure out what each person wants so think about how most of your
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conversations start is subconsciously you actually probably conduct a couple of experiments at the
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beginning of every conversation without even realizing it right like sometimes when you start talking to
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someone at the beginning of a conversation you might try you might interrupt them just to sort of see
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like you know and then you you pay close attention to their reaction to try and figure out like are the rules of
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this conversation that we can interrupt each other or is it like no we each have to wait our turn
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you might make a joke and and then you'll pay close attention to see if the other person laughs
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to try and figure out is this a casual fun conversation or is this a little bit more serious
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like we need to be a little bit more formal we already engage in this quiet negotiation when we conduct
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those experiments the difference is that for super communicators they just pay a little bit more
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attention to how other people react and they take lessons from them and most importantly if they tell a joke
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and the other person doesn't laugh they don't assume that that means that the other person doesn't
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like them they don't assume that that means that they made a mistake rather what they just did was
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conduct an experiment and they got data from it and the thing about experiments is they're not all
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supposed to work right like my wife is actually a scientist and if every experiment she did was a
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success she'd be the worst scientist on earth like the reason you do experiments is to learn things
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and so super communicators treat the beginnings of conversations just a little bit more like a
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series of experiments to figure out what does this person want so you could okay so you're going to
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throw out a question maybe throw out one of those deep values questions we'll talk more about that
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and the person doesn't bite on it they don't really talk about what drove them to become a lawyer
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it's just like well it's more of the practicality they paid a lot of money so you can understand well
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this person might want to talk about how to finance a 401k or something
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totally or maybe they don't even play along at all maybe you say like oh what made you decide
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go to law school and they just say ah it just seemed fun seemed like a good idea okay i just
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conducted an experiment to figure out is is talking about careers a way for us to connect and the answer
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the results you just gave me are no so then i might try a completely different topic and say
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something like oh you know the super bowl is coming up are you who you're rooting for in the game
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and then when someone says oh you know i'm rooting for the niners oh yeah what do you love
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about the niners like why the niners instead of the instead of you know kansas by conducting these
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little experiments and just paying attention to how people react a little bit more we figure out
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how they want to connect with us okay so to figure out what kind of conversation you're having and what
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it's about you listen you ask questions you tell the person what your goals are for the conversation
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you ask them what their goals are you think of the conversation like a negotiation you throw things
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out there maybe you throw in a joke and see how they respond to that if they respond to the joke
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maybe they just want to connect absolutely so you're gonna or or sometimes you don't even have
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to throw out a joke you could just laugh right 80 of the time when we laugh in conversations it is
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not in response to something funny it's to show the other person we want to connect with them
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and then the most natural thing to do is to laugh back right they're showing us that they want to
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connect with us so i mean think think like i'm laughing right now think about how many times
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in a conversation you laugh but nobody's told a joke that's a little experiment okay so we've talked
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about how to tell what kind of conversation you're having and i think emotional conversations are some
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of the hardest i'd like to dig in more into that if you're having an emotional conversation
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your advice is to ask about others feelings and share your own yeah so once we're in emotional
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conversation once i've said like you've brought up something that seems clearly to have to do with
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feelings and the most natural thing for me to do is empathize oftentimes people are very scared of
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asking about this question i mean the best example of this in my life was that about six years ago my dad
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passed away and i came back to i was living in new york at the time i came back to new york from the
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funeral and like this was the most meaningful thing that had happened in a long time right like the most
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profound experiences of many people's lives and i would tell people i bumped into they'd say like
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oh how are you doing i said oh you know my dad passed away i was there last week for the funeral and
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they would usually they would almost always say like oh i'm so sorry or oh my condolences and then
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because it felt uncomfortable to them they would go on to something else they would be like i'm so sorry
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to hear that um but thank you for coming in today because i really wanted to talk about the budget
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but for me this was the most profound thing i had been through like i was desperate to talk about it
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i didn't want to talk about anything else and if somebody had said to me like i'm so sorry to hear
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that tell me about your dad what was he like i would have appreciated that so much and exactly what
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you just said when we're having emotional conversations oftentimes instead of asking about
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people's feelings we avoid asking and as a result we deny ourselves that opportunity to connect on an
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emotional level which often is one of the most profound connections we can have i'm curious do
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all conversations have an emotional emotional undercurrent even when it's brass tacks you know
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where we're going to go for vacation or who's doing who's taking the kids where is there typically
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absolutely yeah absolutely they it from the second you open your mouth emotions in some
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small way are shaping what you say and how you hear other people going on vacation right like i say
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to my wife i'd really like to go to hawaii and she says i'd really like to go to japan and suddenly
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i'm like well japan's twice in my head i'm like japan's twice as expensive as hawaii and that makes
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me kind of anxious and also we went where you wanted last time so it seems like fairness would
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dictate i get to choose this time right those emotions are all there now that doesn't mean that we
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have to make this into an emotional conversation but it does mean that if we're having
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problems connecting with each other on this practical discussion of where to go on vacation
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it might be because actually we want to have an emotional conversation and we need to recognize
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that and let that out well i think sometimes too people don't even know when there's emotion tied
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to something they they're saying right like they think it's yeah they think it's completely
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practical you might see this in i don't know it could be a business meeting or a meeting that you
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have with a group you belong to and you're trying to make a decision that's seemed on the surface
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seems very brass tacks what are we gonna do for the budget uh who are we gonna assign to this task
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whatever and whenever you see people coming out of just loggerheads it's just butting heads
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in my experience there's always been there's some emotional hang-up there like someone's
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feels strongly about this it's not even logic it's just you have to dig deep like why is this
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person so stubborn about this thing or why am i so stubborn about this thing and then once you get
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that on the table things it might not resolve right away but at least you know where everyone's coming
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from that's exactly right and and one of the things you just said is really important is listen for
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conflict listen for this isn't going the way i planned it going listen for i just feel like we're not
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connecting with each other we all know when that happens right when we're in that meeting and we're
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discussing something that seems practical and you can just feel at the table like like we're not on
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the same page something's happening here we're not agreeing with each other we're not building on each
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other's ideas that is a great great clue that you're having a practical conversation and there's
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something emotional that you need to discuss that you need to shift a little bit so that you can get
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those emotions on the table because oftentimes once we simply acknowledge them they become much
00:23:02.060
less powerful right once i say like look i know that you are worried i hear you saying that you are
00:23:07.500
worried that we're gonna have to lay people off and that's going to be incredibly stressful and so i
00:23:11.960
just want to say if it comes to that you and i will be in this together we will do this shoulder
00:23:17.640
to shoulder now all of a sudden that anxiety is gone now we can talk about plans but if we don't even
00:23:24.320
acknowledge the anxiety then it's it's hopeless right and the reason why people don't acknowledge
00:23:28.820
it because they feel uncomfortable about talking about emotions yeah or or they simply don't recognize
00:23:34.680
that like that this is an important part of conversations we're gonna take a quick break
00:23:40.080
for your words from our sponsors and now back to the show we'll go back to this idea that you know
00:23:50.040
you gave that example your father died um you get back and people are like oh i'm sorry and then they
00:23:55.480
just moved on to business as usual and you talk about people do that because they just yeah they
00:24:00.140
don't know what to say they feel uncomfortable they feel awkward and a technique that i really i found
00:24:06.300
really useful i got from your book and we you mentioned it earlier this idea of deep questions
00:24:10.740
is turning what are typical shallow questions into deep questions i want to go into this deeper okay so
00:24:18.340
what are some more examples of turning shallow questions into deep questions so the the basic
00:24:24.160
principle of a deep question is instead of asking someone about the facts of their life ask them how
00:24:30.740
they feel about their life and and anyone who's listening who has kids knows how true this is right
00:24:35.640
i have kids myself if when my son comes home from school and i'm like what'd you do today that's a
00:24:40.780
facts question he'll be like nothing what did you learn today nothing right it's like pulling teeth
00:24:46.720
whereas when he comes home and i'm like hey i was just wondering what was the best part of your day
00:24:52.360
or oh you know i saw that you hung out with jasper after school what do you like about jasper what do
00:24:57.140
you think is cool about him suddenly it's like opening the floodgates because instead of asking him
00:25:02.360
about facts i asked him how he felt and this is the principle that underlies every deep question
00:25:08.500
the question doesn't have to be very profound and the question doesn't have to be very specific
00:25:12.600
it just has to be some version of tell me what you make of that what does this mean to you
00:25:18.320
why is that important so instead of asking someone like you know hey where'd you go to college
00:25:24.020
you can ask them like what was the best part of college for you what you're really asking them
00:25:29.180
there is what was important to you about college and it's really easy once you shift your brain a little
00:25:35.960
bit to look for these opportunities deep questions are incredibly easy to find and there's so much more
00:25:41.420
fun to talk about yeah you talk about you have some other examples instead of asking where are you
00:25:45.820
from like what's the best thing about where you grew up and yeah someone might talk about their
00:25:50.520
friends and playing in the fields and memories with barbecues and some people might say well you know
00:25:57.000
i had a i don't know a really nice park system i mean you'll be able to figure out what people value
00:26:02.420
with their answer that's exactly right what they will tell you is they'll tell you what actually
00:26:07.420
matters to them you know i actually grew up in albuquerque new mexico so if someone says what's
00:26:11.840
the best part of growing up in albuquerque what i'd say is oh you know it's just i had a lot of
00:26:15.420
family around me and and it was really easy to see them you know it's not a fast-paced high-pressure
00:26:20.280
place and so what i just told this person is i told them family is important to me and so that's
00:26:25.920
something we can dive into i told them that like i i was born into a place where it was a slower
00:26:31.840
pace which also implies that maybe i've lived other places that are faster paced like i just
00:26:37.360
told you so much about myself simply by telling you what i liked about growing up in albuquerque
00:26:41.440
and it gives you a chance to tell me about yourself to be like oh i grew up in in boise and like
00:26:47.700
same thing it was like sort of slow paced and and now i live in new york it's a little bit more
00:26:52.200
fast-paced and i kind of like that too now we're having a conversation where we can get real with each
00:26:56.780
other and get deep so you didn't value blake's lot of burger green chili burger oh wait so you
00:27:01.880
know albuquerque yeah i will say a blake's green chili cheeseburger is a pretty good way to go it's
00:27:08.720
a good one yeah okay so ask those deep questions you figure out what they value and you can even do
00:27:13.080
this with things that are practical based if you feel like there's an emotional undercurrent here
00:27:17.040
you can turn these shallow questions into deep questions i've been doing this with my kids
00:27:20.840
before we go to bed at night we lie down next to them we kind of talk about the day with each of
00:27:25.020
them and i've been trying to ask these sort of deeper questions instead of asking like what'd
00:27:28.680
you do today what was i asked what was the best thing you did today or what'd you like about that
00:27:32.540
yeah yeah and it opens up opens up some great conversations another part of having these
00:27:37.060
emotional conversations is we need to start paying attention to like how the other person feels during
00:27:43.040
this conversation we got to pay attention to their mood and energy what do you mean by paying
00:27:47.640
attention to mood and energy and the other person so okay when we're kids we do this almost
00:27:52.520
automatically right actually babies almost from birth if you smile at a baby they'll smile back
00:27:57.160
at you but as we get older instead of paying attention to nonverbal communication we start
00:28:03.020
focusing on people's words so we ask someone like hey how you doing and they say i'm fine but their
00:28:09.320
arms are crossed and their voice sounds really like lethargic and their eyes are kind of downcast
00:28:14.260
but we pay attention to their words rather than how they look to us the signals they're sending us
00:28:19.540
and so a big part of this is just just making ourselves a little bit more open to noticing
00:28:24.180
what's going on beyond the words coming out of someone's mouth are they leaning in towards us
00:28:30.240
are they interrupting us interruption we think of interruption as being a bad thing but oftentimes
00:28:35.200
when we're interrupting each other it shows that it's a good conversation because it means that both of
00:28:40.540
us really like what we're talking about we really want to connect here or are they someone who's just
00:28:45.840
sitting there listening are they kind of like looking away it's really easy to ignore all of
00:28:50.880
those signals but once we just train ourselves and again this isn't hard it's a habit that we can
00:28:56.120
develop really easily once we train ourselves to notice how people are behaving how much energy is in
00:29:01.800
their voice are they high energy or low energy do they seem upbeat or glum that tells us almost
00:29:08.720
everything we need to know about what's going on inside their emotional mind even without them saying a word
00:29:14.460
about their emotions and should we match them so if they're high energy should we respond by being
00:29:19.720
high energy as well it would feel pretty good if we do right think about how you know again going back
00:29:25.560
to laughter so and in fact nasa uses this to figure out which of their astronaut candidates or applicants
00:29:32.300
have high emotional intelligence think about if you tell a joke and then you go and you laugh really
00:29:38.620
big at it and the other person goes yeah it's funny you don't feel like you're connected right
00:29:44.000
like the fact that you're high energy and they're low energy they're laughing back they're doing the
00:29:48.900
same thing you are they're matching you but because our energy levels don't match we know that we're not
00:29:54.020
connecting whereas if we chuckle a little bit and the other person chuckles with us then we're
00:30:01.380
basically telling each other oh we're on the same wavelength yeah that story about nasa there's this guy it
00:30:06.800
was uh terence mcguire right yeah and that started putting astronauts up into space stations and so
00:30:12.540
they're gonna be up there for months even years a year at a time and said to figure out how can we
00:30:17.000
make sure these people don't kill each other while they're up there and like because they're annoyed
00:30:20.660
and the thing they found he started studying their conversations looking at psychological profiles
00:30:25.780
and the thing he found that determined it wasn't the determining factor but a sign that someone
00:30:31.620
had emotional intelligence and could get along with other people was was laughing was laughing when other
00:30:37.140
people laughed and laughing the same way they laughed right so so what's really interesting is when you
00:30:43.000
make it to the final rounds of like astronaut you know interviews everybody there knows how to fake
00:30:48.360
into emotional intelligence really really well like these are the people who have the right stuff right
00:30:52.820
they've practiced this for years but the difference between someone who can fake emotional
00:30:57.320
intelligence and someone who actually has emotional intelligence is pretty big when you're like nine
00:31:01.500
months into a mission and you've been living in a tin can for the with five other people and so
00:31:07.240
you're exactly right what mcguire did was he changed how he interviewed people so he'd walk into these
00:31:11.840
interviews carrying a bunch of papers and he would spill the papers as if on on accident but he would
00:31:17.000
actually do it on purpose and he would always wear this yellow garish tie and he would turn to the
00:31:22.460
person who he hasn't even met yet who's about to interview and he'd say oh my gosh my son made me
00:31:26.980
wear this tie today and i just dropped all these papers like i kind of look like a clown
00:31:31.640
and he would laugh at himself in this big kind of energetic laugh and then without the applicant
00:31:38.880
realizing he would pay close attention did the person laugh back politely or did they match his
00:31:46.000
energy and his intensity of laughter because if they're matching him that's someone who takes emotional
00:31:52.120
intelligence seriously that's someone who has thought about how to connect with other people
00:31:56.900
and and to that person it just feels like a habit right like they're just doing what feels natural
00:32:00.980
but we develop those natural instincts by thinking at some point in our past about how we want to be in
00:32:07.760
a conversation so some of the most emotionally laden conversations are high conflict conversations
00:32:14.720
yeah and you talk about this tool that can help you navigate these high emotion high conflict
00:32:21.020
conversation is the loop of understanding what is the loop of understanding yeah and it's actually
00:32:26.520
looping for understanding is like when we talk about how people do it so one of the interesting
00:32:31.020
things is that when we are in a conversation that has any kind of tension or conflict in it even if
00:32:36.220
it's small like we're disagreeing about something we hold different political opinions there's this
00:32:40.900
thing in our head that immediately makes us suspect that the other person is not listening to us
00:32:45.560
but they're just waiting their turn to speak and that can be really frustrating and that makes us less
00:32:50.580
likely to listen to them so the way we overcome this is this technique known as looping for understanding
00:32:55.860
and there's three steps to it the first step is ask a question preferably a deep question
00:33:00.520
the second step is once a person has answered the question repeat back what you just heard them say
00:33:06.340
in your own words and then the third step and this is the one most people forget is ask if you got it
00:33:13.460
right and the reason why this is so powerful is because what we're trying to do is prove that we're
00:33:18.880
listening we want to prove to the other person that we're hearing what they said that we actually
00:33:24.820
want to understand what they say that we're not just waiting our turn to speak and this list looping
00:33:30.420
for understanding it becomes real it's like a second nature i do it all the time now i'm like
00:33:34.340
like oh what i hear you saying is and tell me if i'm getting this wrong you know and then i just
00:33:38.400
repeat what they said in my own words and it's important that it's in my own words i'm not just
00:33:42.400
mimicking them i'm proving to them that i've heard what they said and processed it a little bit
00:33:47.280
and study after study shows if you do this in a tough conversation in a tension-filled conversation
00:33:53.800
or just discussing politics with like your uncle it changes the entire dialogue for the better
00:34:00.140
another idea you talk about to navigate high conflict conversations is trying not to control
00:34:07.780
the other person because that just ratchets up the tension why do we have a tendency to want to control
00:34:11.960
the conversation and the other person and what can we do to counter that so a lot of this research
00:34:18.660
and insights comes from looking at marriage counseling and how married couples talk to each
00:34:23.760
other everybody fights every married couple has arguments some of those arguments almost seem not
00:34:30.120
to matter at all like people just like they have an argument and then the next you know 10 minutes
00:34:34.180
later they're fine some of those arguments become toxic every single time and so researchers
00:34:39.740
started looking trying to figure out what's the difference between these two groups and what
00:34:43.000
they found is that in the toxic conversations the toxic fights what happens is that we're trying to
00:34:48.860
control each other and and when we're when we're feeling attacked or when we're discussing something
00:34:54.500
that's kind of you know tense it's very natural to want to control something like we actually have
00:35:00.440
inborn instincts to try and control a situation when we feel anxious and the most obvious thing to
00:35:05.700
control is the person i'm talking to and that control can be like if i can just get you to listen
00:35:11.840
to me then you'll agree with me if i can just get you to see things from my perspective or or i can try
00:35:17.480
and control your emotions you i might say oh you shouldn't feel that way like that's not such a big
00:35:21.820
deal you're making too big a deal of this when people try to control each other it becomes toxic
00:35:27.960
but we have this instinct for control and we can't just repress it so what we should do instead
00:35:33.900
is we find things we can control together and there's three things in general that even if we
00:35:38.920
are in a fight with each other we can control together the first is the environment if this
00:35:44.840
fight starts at two o'clock in the morning we can agree like okay let's wait until tomorrow when we're
00:35:49.640
both well rested and we've gotten a chance to think on this a little bit let's not talk about this
00:35:54.180
until 10 that's controlling your environment together and that's really really positive the second
00:35:59.620
thing you can control is yourself and you can make this obvious you can say things like look
00:36:03.800
i hear what you're saying i just want to take like 10 seconds to think about what you said before i
00:36:08.220
respond that's something that shows that we're trying to control ourselves instead of the other
00:36:12.580
person and the third thing we can control is the boundaries of the fight itself there's this pattern
00:36:18.440
in a lot of marriages called kitchen sinking that's like one of the most toxic things that can happen
00:36:23.720
which is like we'll start by arguing about where we're gonna you know spend thanksgiving and it becomes
00:36:29.660
your mom hates me and we don't have enough money right like a fight about one thing becomes a fight
00:36:34.260
about everything that's terrible so oftentimes you see what the best couples do is they say okay look
00:36:40.600
we got to figure out where we're spending thanksgiving let's just focus on the thanksgiving
00:36:44.540
question like i don't want to talk about your mom i don't want to talk about money we can talk about
00:36:47.720
that stuff but that's a different conversation and what happens is when we try and control our
00:36:51.660
environment and ourselves and the boundaries of the fight itself what we're doing is we're
00:36:56.300
introducing control that we can share places where we can cooperate with each other and instead of
00:37:01.940
controlling each other we're controlling these things together and again that doesn't mean that
00:37:06.580
the fight disappears but it makes it so much easier for us to get through it no you mentioned earlier i've
00:37:12.800
i got to watch myself for that because i've i've done that a few times i do that a few times is where
00:37:16.980
you're having a conversation and someone's saying someone says something and i'm like you're not
00:37:21.840
listening to me but they are listening to me they just don't want to do what i they don't agree
00:37:25.980
with me but i project on them and say well you're actually not listening well no and there's times
00:37:30.160
where like people will tell me something and like i understand completely what you want i just don't
00:37:34.540
agree with it so and think about how good it would feel if you're in that conversation and that person
00:37:38.920
says okay look i might disagree with you but i want to repeat back what you just said to me to make
00:37:44.120
sure i understand it and and tell me if i'm getting this right and that takes like 30 seconds to
00:37:48.800
repeat that back right if they did that then you would not say you're not listening to me
00:37:54.060
you would actually say like oh no you heard what i'm saying and and we might disagree with each
00:37:58.520
other but you heard me and actually and this is hardwired into our brains that would make you more
00:38:03.860
more likely to listen to them when we prove that we are listening through looping for understanding
00:38:09.720
we make the other person more likely to listen to us a lot of this looping for understanding it's
00:38:15.560
easy to do in person because you can do it real time right yeah but it gets hard when you take that
00:38:20.660
conversation online and so online conversations can become just really fraught just you know dumpster
00:38:26.660
fires as people say immediately right there's a story in the book about um this experiment that
00:38:31.560
was done where they brought together gun control enthusiasts and then gun rights activists and the
00:38:36.440
goal was just to have like teach them how to have a civil conversation and so they taught them looping for
00:38:40.600
understanding and a couple of other skills and it worked really well face to face and then they go home
00:38:45.680
and they had actually created a private facebook group for them and like within 45 minutes people
00:38:50.400
were calling each other jackbooted nazis right it just it just fell apart immediately why why is that
00:38:56.340
what's going on well i think what's happening there and and this gets to everything else we've been
00:39:00.920
talking about because you can do looping for understanding online you just have to think about how to do it a
00:39:05.140
little bit differently one of my favorite examples of how technology changes these conversations
00:39:09.460
is if you look at when telephones first became popular about 100 years ago there were all these
00:39:15.140
studies that were written that basically said no one will ever use a telephone for a real conversation
00:39:20.460
because because we can't see each other we're not going to be able to discuss real things
00:39:25.040
and in fact the researchers were right at that at that time there were all these studies where they
00:39:31.180
would transcribe people's phone conversations and they're like stilted and weird basically people used
00:39:36.640
phones as telegraphs just to send like grocery lists or stock you know news of the day but of
00:39:43.120
course by the time you and i and everyone listening were teenagers we could talk for like seven hours a
00:39:48.180
night and they were the most meaningful conversations of our lives and the reason why is because we learned
00:39:53.520
how to speak on the telephone differently than we learned how to speak face to face and in fact one of
00:39:57.920
the things we know is that without realizing it when you talk on the phone you tend to enunciate a
00:40:04.040
little bit more than you would face to face and because you know the person can't see you we tend
00:40:09.360
to put a little bit more emotional signals into our voices we do this unthinkingly now when it comes
00:40:16.120
to online communication most people have only been emailing for like 25 years at the most right like
00:40:23.800
slack we've been slacking for four or five years texting each other using emojis to text each other
00:40:30.480
i still don't know how to do that and so we make this mistake when we go online which is that we
00:40:35.440
assume online conversations are like offline conversations but they're not they have their
00:40:41.620
own rules and we know those rules we actually intuit those rules but sometimes we just have to remind
00:40:47.500
ourselves that if i'm talking to you over the phone and i say something sarcastic you will hear the
00:40:52.560
sarcasm in my voice but if i email you and i can still when i'm writing the email i can hear the
00:40:58.380
sarcasm in my head you can't hear it and so you're going to read that as being serious and you're going
00:41:03.500
to get upset so i need to use a different way to signal to you i'm being sarcastic either not be
00:41:08.440
sarcastic or maybe i put like one of those little winking emojis at the end something to show you that
00:41:14.340
i'm being sarcastic which i don't have to do when we're talking to each other and if we just take a
00:41:19.460
second before we hit send to say like what are what are the rules of email what are the rules of
00:41:24.800
texting how are they different from the rules of making a phone conversation then we tend to
00:41:30.160
communicate much much better online yeah you have some other rules over emphasize politeness
00:41:35.300
yeah express more gratitude deference greetings apologies and hedges and studies back all that
00:41:40.820
stuff up study after study shows that like in fact there was this really interesting study of
00:41:44.420
wikipedia editors where the you know people would be fighting with each other all day long online
00:41:50.140
and they just asked they told one person to start saying please and thank you every other comment
00:41:55.280
and like everyone else stopped fighting it's just like we start mirroring each other we start
00:42:00.180
matching each other and just being a little bit more polite online it has these totally outsized
00:42:05.280
impacts and you can use looping for understanding to de-escalate these high conflict online
00:42:10.420
conversations if you see someone throw something out there just a total flame they knew it was like a
00:42:15.560
grenade is going to cause everyone to get angry you can ask you can get curious and be like
00:42:20.060
it sounds like you're really you feel passionately about this tell me why why is that instead of
00:42:24.860
responding with an immediate barb yeah and you might find that it just it forces the person to get out
00:42:30.220
of their own limbic system their yeah reptile brain and start thinking like a homo sapien that's exactly
00:42:38.180
right yeah right it takes advantage of those parts of our brains that have evolved to be good at
00:42:42.700
communication well charles where can people go to learn more about the book in your work
00:42:46.300
yeah absolutely so so the name of the book is super communicators you can buy it at amazon or
00:42:51.100
anywhere else that you uh you get books if you want to reach out to me or learn about me if you
00:42:56.240
just google my name charles dohig i'm the only charles dohig on earth d-u-h-i-g-g or if you google
00:43:02.500
like power of habit or smarter faster better my website will come up and i'll mention on my website
00:43:08.100
is my email address which is charles at charles dohig.com and i read and reply to every single email i get
00:43:16.300
so it you know it might take me a couple of days but i want to connect with you and have a
00:43:21.280
conversation and so if you send me a note i will read it and i will reply well charles dohig thanks
00:43:26.920
for time it's been a pleasure thanks for having me on this has been so much fun my guest today was
00:43:31.980
charles dohig he's the author of the book super communicators it's available on amazon.com and
00:43:36.000
bookstores everywhere you can find more information about his work at his website charles dohig.com
00:43:40.420
also check out our show notes at aom.is super communicator where you find links to resources
00:43:46.580
well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast make sure to check out our website at
00:43:58.060
artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives and while you're there sign up for
00:44:01.980
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00:44:22.320
mckay reminding you to listen to aom podcast put what you've heard into action