Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

by Charles Duhigg

There’s a lesson here: The first step of a quiet negotiation is figuring out what people want from a conversation. The second step is determining how we’re going to make choices together—and that means deciding if this is a rational conversation or an empathetic one. Are we going to make decisions through analysis and reason, or through empathy and narratives?

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?”)

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’s the same framework for emotional connection described before, but in a slightly different guise: If we ask questions that push people to think and talk about their values, beliefs, and experiences, and then reciprocate with emotions of our own, we can’t help but listen to one another. “The best listeners aren’t just listening,” said Margaret Clark, the Yale psychologist. “They’re triggering emotions by asking questions, expressing their own emotions, doing things that prompt the other person to say something real.”

Noticing mood and energy allows us to immediately determine whether we should flee or stay, if they’re a potential

“Everyone has a story inside their head that explains why they think they’re having a fight,” she told me. “And all those stories are different. We usually don’t understand what’s in the other person’s head, even if we

think we do.” Looping lets us hear others’ stories, and prove to them we’ve heard what they are saying. “When you start to undersand each other’s stories, that’s when you can start talking about what’s actually going on.”

who were equally well prepared and asked them to complete the verbal reasoning section of the GRE. On this kind of test, Steele wrote, there was, for Black students, an ugly “stereotype of their group’s lesser intellectual ability.” When the results came back, “white students did a lot better on this difficult test than Black students” with “a large difference that, if sustained over the whole GRE exam, would be very substantial.” Steele concluded this disparity was because Black students were aware of the stereotype suggesting they couldn’t do well on the exam, which had generated just enough stress and demanded just enough mental energy to undermine their scores. (In contrast, when Black students were told that the test didn’t evaluate intellectual ability, reducing the salience of the stereotype, they scored similarly to white students.)

So Rosenbloom spoke to the couple for a while. He asked where they lived, where they planned to send their kids to school, what they enjoyed doing on weekends. He told them about himself, and they discovered a few restaurants and parks they both liked. He asked them to describe their concerns about vaccines, but also inquired about other worries: Were they anxious about their kids starting school? How did they feel about things like sugar and soda pop? He never pushed the vaccines. Instead, he just asked questions, and after they answered, he shared his own thoughts. At the end of the conversation, the parents said they wanted to start a vaccination schedule for their kids that day. “It worked because they felt listened to,” Rosenbloom told me. “You have to find some way to connect if you want people to hear what you’re saying.”

surprise; it had been obvious to everyone, across the decades, as they had conducted their interviews. The most important variable in determining whether someone ended up happy and healthy, or miserable and sick, was “how satisfied they were in their relationships,” one researcher wrote. “The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were