Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

by Charles Duhigg

Epley started meeting with a counselor and braced himself for more lectures and criticisms. But the counselor was completely unlike his parents, not to mention most of the other adults he had met. She didn’t give speeches or tell him he needed to turn his life around. She didn’t say she understood where he was coming from or give him advice. Instead, she simply asked questions: “Why were you drinking?” “How would you have reacted if your car had hit someone?” “What would happen to your life if you had been arrested, or had injured yourself, or had killed another person?” “I had to sit with that,” Epley told me. “I couldn’t pretend I didn’t know the answers.” The questions themselves didn’t ask about Epley’s emotions, but, inevitably, he became emotional as he responded to them. They pushed Epley to talk about his beliefs and values, how he felt, what he was anxious about, what he feared. He came home from each session exhausted and ashamed, scared and angry, and most of all confused, a complicated mix of feelings that usually took days to untangle. These were some of the most emotionally intense conversations of his life, even though the therapist never asked him to describe his feelings.