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Whenever someone said something emotional—even when they didn’t realize their emotions were on display—Felix had reciprocated by voicing feelings of his own. All those small choices they had made, he explained, had created an atmosphere of trust.
The first one is that many discussions are actually three different conversations. There are practical, decision-making conversations that focus on What’s This Really About? There are emotional conversations, which ask How Do We Feel? And there are social conversations that explore Who Are We? We are often moving in and out of all three conversations as a dialogue unfolds. However, if we aren’t having the same kind of conversation as our partners, at the same moment, we’re unlikely to connect with each other.
Which brings me to the second idea at the core of this book: 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.
In other words, the high centrality participants were supercommunicators.
So, to become a supercommunicator, all we need to do is listen closely to what’s said and unsaid, ask the right questions, recognize and match others’ moods, and make our own feelings easy for others to perceive.
“Do you want to talk about our emotions? Or do we need to make a decision together? Or is this about something else?”
Effective communication requires recognizing what kind of conversation is occurring, and then matching each other. On a very basic level, if someone seems emotional, allow yourself to become emotional as well. If someone is intent on decision making, match that focus. If they are preoccupied by social implications, reflect their fixation back to them.
The most effective communicators pause before they speak and ask themselves: Why am I opening my mouth?
But prostate cancer usually grows very slowly—in fact, there’s a saying among physicians that older patients will usually die of old age before their prostate cancer kills them.
This problem wasn’t limited to Ehdaie. Surveys indicate that, even today, an estimated 40 percent of prostate cancer patients opt for unnecessary surgeries. That’s more than fifty thousand people, each year, who fail to hear—or decide to ignore—the advice their physicians are giving them.
Getting to Yes
What are two topics you most want to discuss? What is one thing you hope to say that shows what you want to talk about? What is one question you will ask that reveals what others want?
Asking about someone’s beliefs or values (“How’d you decide to become a teacher?”) Asking someone to make a judgment (“Are you glad you went to law school?”) Asking about someone’s experiences (“What was it like to visit Europe?”)
(Interruptions, contrary to expectations, usually mean people want to add something.)
Perhaps the correct approach wasn’t trying to put yourself in “someone else’s shoes.” That, after all, was impossible. Rather, maybe the best you can do is ask questions. Ask about people’s lives, about what they’re feeling, about their hopes and fears, and then listen for their struggles, disappointments, joys, and ambitions.
This is how to ask emotional questions in the real world: Ask someone how they feel about something, and then follow up with questions that reveal how you feel.
“It is easier to judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers,” the nineteenth-century thinker Pierre-Marc-Gaston de Lévis wrote,
“Contrary to our expectations,” he reported in the journal American Scientist, “we found that most conversational laughter is not a response to structured attempts at humor, such as jokes or stories. Less than 20 percent of the laughter in our sample was a response to anything resembling a formal effort at humor.”
We laugh, in other words, to show someone that we want to connect with them—and our companions laugh back to demonstrate they want to connect with us, as well.
Roughly half the nation believes those with differing political beliefs are “immoral,” “lazy,” “dishonest,” and “unintelligent.” Roughly four in ten self-described liberals, and three in ten conservatives, have unfriended or blocked someone on social media because of something they said. Over 80 percent of U.S. workers say they experience conflicts in the workplace.
As the human rights activist Dorothy Thomas once wrote, “Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with it.”
She had assumed that the goal of discussing a conflict and engaging in debate was achieving victory, defeating the other side. But that’s not right. Rather, the real goal is figuring out why a conflict exists in the first place.
The data indicated that Black students and women in advanced math classes were getting lower grades due to one primary factor: Because they were doing worse on timed assignments. They seemed to know just as much as their fellow students, they worked just as hard, but when it came to exams with a time limit—an hour-long test, say—they seemed to second-guess their answers at the cost of precious minutes.
