Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

by Charles Duhigg

how do we train people to get better at communication?—the scientists sought out Felix. They had learned about him from various officials who, when asked to name the best negotiators they had ever worked with, brought up his name, again and again.

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.

“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.

We know that our brains have evolved to crave connection: 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. Sometimes it happens and we have no idea why; we just feel lucky that the conversation went so well. Other times, even when we’re desperate to bond with someone, we fail again and again.

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. We’re better off, it seems, acknowledging social differences, rather than pretending they don’t exist. 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 important goal of any conversation is to connect.

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.

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.

Anyone can become a supercommunicator—and, in fact, many of us already are, if we learn to unlock our instincts. We can all learn to

hear more clearly, to connect on a deeper level.

Conversation is the communal air we breathe.

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.

there’s also been a flurry of research showing that at the heart of every conversation is the potential for neurological synchronization, an alignment of our brains and bodies—everything from how fast each of us breathes to the goose bumps on our skin—that we often fail to notice, but which influences how we talk, hear, and think. Some people consistently fail to synchronize with others, even when they’re speaking to close friends. Others—let’s call them supercommunicators—seem to synchronize effortlessly with just about anyone.

high centrality participant or core information provider—but

High centrality participants tended to ask ten to twenty times as many questions as other participants.

are best captured by three questions: What’s This Really About?, How Do We Feel?, and Who Are We? Each of these conversations, as we will see, draws on a different type of mindset and mental processing.

“Is this discussion serious or playful?” “Should I offer a solution or just listen?” The What’s This Really About?

Miscommunication occurs when people are having different kinds of conversations. If you are speaking emotionally, while I’m talking practically, we are, in essence, using different cognitive languages.

“The underlying mechanism that maintains closeness in marriage is symmetry,” one prominent researcher, John Gottman, wrote in the Journal of Communication. Happy couples “communicate agreement not with the speaker’s point of view or content, but with the speaker’s affect.” Happy couples ask each other more questions, repeat what the other person said, make tension-easing jokes, get serious together. The next time you feel yourself edging toward an argument, try asking your partner: “Do you want to talk about our emotions? Or do we need to make a decision together? Or is this about something else?”

The importance of this insight—that communication comes from connection

and alignment—is so fundamental that it has become known as the matching principle: 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 ...

learned that if you listen for someone’s truth, and you put your truth next to it, you might reach them.”

When we match someone’s mindset, a permission is granted: To enter another person’s head, to see the world through their eyes, to understand what they care

about and need. And we give them permission to understand—and hear—us in return. “Conversations are the most powerful thing on earth,” Lawler told me.

A case officer creates an ever-deeper relationship through the process—from becoming an ‘associate’ then a ‘friend’ in the assessment phases and then moving to the role of ‘sounding board’ and ‘confidant’ as development moves to recruitment…. The agent then can look forward to each meeting as a chance to spend quality time with a comrade he can trust with his life.”

Or it might consist of asking a spouse, as he describes a hard day, “Do you want me to suggest some solutions, or do you just need to vent?”

So, for a week, before each gathering, every attendee scribbled out a goal: “This is to choose a budget that everyone agrees on,” or “This is to air our complaints and hear each other out.”

What’s This Really About? has two goals: The first is to determine what topics we want to discuss—what everyone needs from this dialogue. The second is to figure out how this discussion will unfold—what unspoken rules and norms we have agreed upon, and how we will make decisions together.

But once we know what everyone wants from a conversation, and how we’ll make decisions together, a more meaningful dialogue can emerge.

“When it happens again and again, you start to realize: This isn’t a problem with my patients,” Ehdaie told me. “This is a problem with me. I’m doing something wrong. I’m failing at this conversation.”

“An important step in any negotiation is getting clarity on what all the participants want,”

But as Ehdaie interacted with patients, he wasn’t asking the most important questions. He wasn’t asking patients what mattered to them. He wasn’t asking: Did they want to extend their lives if the treatment robbed them of things like travel and sex? Would you want an extra five years of life if the trade-off was constant pain? How much of someone’s decision depended on their own desires versus what their family wanted? Was the patient secretly hoping the doctor would just tell him what to do? Ehdaie’s biggest mistake was assuming, at the start of a conversation, that he knew what the patient wanted: Objective medical advice, an overview of options to make an informed choice. “But you don’t want to begin a negotiation assuming you know what the other side wants,” Malhotra said. This is the first part of the What’s This Really About? conversation: Figuring out what everyone wants to talk about. The simplest method for uncovering everyone’s desires, of course, is simply asking What do you want?

many people had assumed that negotiations were zero-sum games: Any time I gained something at the bargaining table, you lost. “A generation ago,” reads Getting to Yes, “in contemplating a negotiation, the common question in people’s minds was, ‘Who is going to win and who is going to lose?’

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. The concept that both sides could “win” in a negotiation, Fisher and his colleagues wrote, might seem impossible, but “it is increasingly recognized that there are cooperative ways of negotiating our differences and that even if a ‘win-win’ solution cannot be found, a wise agreement can still often be reached that is better for both sides.”

interest-based bargaining, and its first step looks a lot like what Boly did in the jury room or what Dr. Ehdaie did with his patients at Sloan Kettering: Ask open-ended questions and listen closely. Get people talking about how they see the world and what they value most. Even if you don’t learn, right away, what others are seeking—they might not know themselves—you’ll at least inspire them to listen back. “If you want the other side to appreciate your interests,” Fisher wrote, “begin by demonstrating that you appreciate theirs.”

until the conversation has changed enough that new possibilities are revealed. “If you’re negotiating over salaries, for instance, and you’re stuck,” Gelfand said, “then drag something new in: ‘We’ve been focused on wages, but what if, instead of increasing paychecks, we give everyone more sick days? What if we let them work from home?’ ” “The challenge is not to eliminate conflict,” Fisher wrote in Getting to Yes, “but to transform it.”

To an outside observer, it might seem as if we’re simply discussing who will pick up the kids and the groceries. But we—the people participating in this quiet negotiation—are aware of subtexts and undercurrents, the experiments under way. We’re asking open-ended questions (“Am I doing enough to help?”) and adding items to the table (“What if I do grocery pickup and wash the dishes, and you get the kids and fold the laundry?”) until the conversation has changed enough to make clear what everyone actually wants and the rules we’ve all agreed on: “I want to respect your time, and work is important, so what if I get takeout and ask Uncle Arvind to get the kids, so we can both come home late?”

How do we connect during a What’s This Really About? conversation? The first step is trying to figure out what each of us wants from a discussion, what we are seeking from this dialogue. That’s how we get at the deeper questions beneath the surface.

Then, once we know what people want from a conversation, we next need to work out how to give it to them—how to engage in a quiet negotiation—so that their needs are met, as well as our own. That requires conducting experiments to reveal how we’ll make decisions together. This is the matching principle at work, recognizing what kind of conversation is occurring and then aligning with others, and inviting them to align with us.

Rather, matching is understanding someone’s mindset—what kind of logic they find persuasive, what tone and approach makes sense to them—and then speaking their language. And it requires explaining clearly how we, ourselves, are thinking and making choices, so that others can match us in return. When someone describes a personal problem by telling a story, they are signaling they want our compassion rather than a solution. When they lay out all the facts analytically, they are signaling they are more interested in a rational conversation than an emotional one. We can all learn to get better at noticing these clues and conducting the experiments that reveal them.

When someone says something and then laughs afterward—even if it wasn’t funny—it’s a hint they’re enjoying the conversation. When someone makes noises as they listen (“Yeah,” “Uh-huh,” “Interesting”), it’s a sign they’re engaged, what linguists call backchanneling. When someone asks follow-up questions (“What do you mean?” “Why do you think he said that?”), it’s a clue they’re interested, whereas statements that change the subject (“Let me ask you about this other thing”) are hints they’re ready to move on.

But Epley’s research indicated that such methods, particularly when forced, undermine real communication. Nodding doesn’t mean you’re listening. Constant smiling and eye contact can be a little…intense. Besides, Epley believed, everyone already knows how to listen closely. “You don’t need anyone to teach you how to listen to an interesting podcast or a good joke,” he told me. “When you’re in a great conversation, no one has a problem following along. When something is interesting, you listen without thinking about it.”

One way of doing that, he was convinced, was getting everyone to talk about more intimate things. In particular, he believed people should talk about their emotions. When we discuss our feelings, something magical happens: Other people can’t help but listen to us. And then they start divulging emotions of their own, which causes us to listen closely in return.

Epley wanted to nudge these hedge funders into a How Do We Feel? conversation. “When you open up to somebody,” Epley told me, “they get drawn in.”

The key to starting a How Do We Feel? conversation was teaching people to ask specific kinds of questions, the kinds that don’t, on the surface, seem emotional, but that make emotions easier to acknowledge.

Then Epley revealed the questions they would ask each other. There were three of them. The third one was: “Can you describe a time you cried in front of another person?”

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.

Now, as an adult, Epley wondered if the psychology textbooks had it wrong. 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. Hearing people describe their emotional lives is important because when we talk about our feelings, we’re describing not just what has happened to us, but why we made certain choices and how we make sense of the world.

Epley began thinking there must be an alternative to perspective taking. Maybe there was a different technique to help people ask the kinds of questions that nudge emotions into the open? Perhaps, instead of perspective taking, we ought to be focused on perspective getting, on asking people to describe their inner lives, their values and beliefs and feelings, the things they care about most. Epley sensed there was something about asking questions—the right questions—that contained the seeds of real understanding.