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The most effective communicators pause before they speak and ask themselves: Why am I opening my mouth?
The best negotiators didn’t battle over who should get the biggest slice of pie. Rather, they focused on making the pie itself larger, finding win-win solutions where everyone walked away happier than before.
Ask open-ended questions and listen closely.
you want the other side to appreciate your interests,” Fisher wrote, “begin by demonstrating that you appreciate theirs.”
“The challenge is not to eliminate conflict,” Fisher wrote in Getting to Yes, “but to transform it.”
“Stories bypass the brain’s instinct to look for reasons to be suspicious,”
Asking deep questions about feelings, values, beliefs, and experiences creates vulnerability. That vulnerability triggers emotional contagion. And that, in turn, helps us connect.
joke might not be funny, but if we both agree to laugh in similar ways, we’re signaling to each other that we want to connect.
When we match or acknowledge another person’s mood and energy, we show them that we want to understand their emotional life.
“Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with it.”8
This is the real reason why so many conflicts persist: Not because of a lack of solutions or because people are unwilling to compromise, but because combatants don’t understand why they are fighting in the first place.
you want someone to expose their emotions,19 the most important step is convincing them you are listening closely to what they say.
we want to show someone we’re paying attention, we need to prove, once that person has stopped speaking, that we have absorbed what they said.
It’s a fairly simple technique—prove you are listening by asking the speaker questions, reflecting back what you just heard, and then seeking confirmation you understand—but studies show it is the single most effective technique for proving to someone that we want to hear them. It’s a formula sometimes called looping for understanding.fn1
And people had learned how to show they were listening, ask honest questions, and become vulnerable enough to reveal feelings that, if they were lucky, led to finding common emotional ground.
Researchers have found that in a conflict, proving we are listening and sharing vulnerabilities can be particularly powerful—and we can prove we are listening through specific techniques.
The goal is showing that the aim of this conversation is not winning, but understanding.
“It is not our differences that divide us,” wrote the poet and activist Audre Lorde. “It is our ability to recognize, accept and celebrate those differences.”
Put differently, when researchers changed the environment, it made stereotypes less salient and therefore less threatening.
In any hard discussion, and particularly in a Who Are We? conversation, we are wise to avoid generalizations—and to speak, instead, about our own experiences and emotions.
people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest (mentally and physically) at age 80.”
“Good relationships keep us healthier and happier.”
Another study, published in 2016, examined dozens of biomarkers of health, and found that “a higher degree of social integration was associated with lower risk” of illness and death at every stage of life.
