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Never pretend you’re anything other than a cop. Never manipulate or threaten. Ask lots of questions, and, when someone becomes emotional, cry or laugh or complain or celebrate with them. But
what ultimately made him so good at his job was a bit of a mystery, even to his colleagues.
When someone revealed something personal, Felix would reciprocate with a story from his own life.
He explained that one reason she felt so at ease was likely because of the environment they had created together, how Felix had listened closely, had asked questions that drew out people’s vulnerabilities, how they had all revealed meaningful details about themselves.
“It’s a set of skills,” he told the scientists. “There’s nothing magical about it.” Put differently, anyone can learn to be a supercommunicator.
When we “click” with someone, our eyes often start to dilate in tandem; our pulses match; we feel the same emotions and start to complete each other’s sentences within our heads. This is known as neural entrainment, and it feels wonderful.
“The single biggest problem with communication,”2 said the playwright George Bernard Shaw, “is the illusion it has taken place.”
happen. They’ve learned that paying attention to someone’s body, alongside their voice, helps us hear them better. They have determined that how we ask a question sometimes matters more than what we ask.
Every discussion is
influenced by emotions, no matter how rational the topic at hand.
When starting a dialogue, it helps to think of the discussion as a negotiation where the prize is figuring out what everyone wants. And, above all, the most impo...
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Our goal, for the most meaningful discussions, should be to have a “learning conversation.” Specifically, we want to learn how the people around us see the world and help them understand our perspectives in turn.
And that’s important, because learning to have meaningful conversations is, in some ways, more urgent than ever before. It’s no secret the world has become increasingly polarized, that we struggle to hear and be heard. But if we know how to sit down together, listen to each other and, even if we can’t resolve every disagreement, find ways to hear one another and say what is needed, we can coexist and thrive.
They have learned how to hear what’s unsaid and speak so others want to listen.
Because the right conversation, at the right moment, can change everything.
“Ultimately, the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation,” wrote Oscar Wilde.
Supercommunicators aren’t born with special abilities—but they have thought harder about how conversations unfold, why they succeed or fail, the nearly infinite number of choices that each dialogue offers that can bring us closer together or push us apart. When we learn to recognize those opportunities, we begin to speak and hear in new ways.
Lawler learned that working for the CIA was essentially a communications job. A field officer’s mandate wasn’t slinking in shadows or whispering in parking lots; it was talking to people at parties, making friends in embassies, bonding with foreign officials in the hope that, someday, you might have a quiet chat about some critical piece of intelligence. Communication is so important that a summary of CIA
training methods puts it right up front: “Find ways to connect,” it says. “A case officer’s goal should be to have a prospective agent come to believe, hopefully with good reason, that the case officer is one of the few people, perhaps the ONLY person, who truly understands him.”2
