Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

by Charles Duhigg

Now, ask yourself: Are they the funniest person in your life? (Probably not, but if you paid close attention, you’d notice they laugh more than most people.) Are they the most interesting or smartest person you know? (What’s more likely is that, even if they don’t say anything particularly wise, you anticipate that you will feel smarter after talking to them.) Are they your most entertaining or confident friend? Do they give the best advice? (Most likely: Nope, nope, and nope—but when you hang up the phone, you’ll feel calmer and more centered and closer to the right choice.)

The most effective communicators pause before they speak and ask themselves: Why am I opening my mouth?

Some schools have trained teachers to ask students questions designed to elicit their goals, because it helps everyone communicate what they want and need. When a student comes to a teacher upset, for instance, the teacher might ask: “Do you want to be helped, hugged, or heard?” Different needs require different types of communication, and those different kinds of interaction—helping, hugging, hearing—each correspond to a different kind of conversation.

If the What’s This Really About? conversation doesn’t happen, what follows can feel frustrating and directionless.

Some researchers call this process a quiet negotiation: A subtle give-and-take over which topics we’ll dive into and which we’ll skirt around; the rules for how we’ll speak and listen.

Underneath all those straightforward decisions are other, potentially more serious choices: If we openly disagree, can we remain friends? Can we afford to pay that much for a home? Is it fair for me to pick up the kids when I have so much work to do? Unless we come to a basic agreement about what we’re actually discussing, and how we should discuss it, it’s hard to make progress.

Elite diplomats have explained that their goal at a bargaining table isn’t seizing victory, but rather convincing the other side to become collaborators in uncovering new solutions that no one thought of before. Negotiation, among its top practitioners, isn’t a battle. It’s an act of creativity.

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.”

Boly has shifted the conversation. He has reframed this discussion by experimenting with an idea, by inviting the jurors to start imagining new possibilities, dreaming up different ways to analyze the questions at hand. They are negotiating over how they’ll come to a decision together.

Psychologists refer to this kind of thinking as the logic of costs and benefits. When people embrace logical reasoning and practical calculations—when they agree that rational decision making is the most persuasive method for making a choice together—they’re agreeing to contrast potential costs with hoped-for benefits.

We are applying what psychologists call the logic of similarities. This kind of logic is important because, without it, we wouldn’t feel much compassion when someone describes sadness or disappointment, or know how to defuse a tense situation, or tell if someone is serious or kidding. This logic tells us when to empathize.

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?

My reasonable arguments, my logic of costs and benefits, wasn’t persuasive to him in the slightest.

Sometimes, the stories we hear are enough to help us see a situation through someone else’s eyes, to empathize and reconsider. At other times, dispassionate reason wins the day. But we can only make decisions together if we all agree on which kind of logic is most persuasive. Once we are aligned, our minds become more open to what others have to say.

The most profound gift of the What’s This Really About? conversation is a chance to learn what others want to talk about, what they need out of a discussion, and inviting everyone to make choices together. That is when we begin to understand one another, and start finding solutions that are better than anything we could dream up on our own.

what linguists call backchanneling.

“Although people filled their conversational speech with information about their topic preferences,” the researchers later wrote, “their human partners failed to pick up on many of those cues (or ignored them), and they were slow to act on them. Taken together, our results suggest that there is ample room for improvement.”

Sometimes people don’t notice the signals we’re trying to send, because they haven’t trained themselves to pay attention. They haven’t learned to experiment with different topics and conversational approaches.

Someone will make an invitation, and their partner will accept or make counter-invitations.

The easiest way to do that is by asking open-ended questions, just as Dr. Ehdaie did with his patients. And open-ended questions are easy to find, if you focus on: 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?”)

how the other person responds is important, and so we need to train ourselves to notice what might go unsaid.

Do your companions lean toward you, make eye contact, smile, backchannel (“Interesting,” “Hmm”), or interrupt? Those are signals they want to accept your invitation. (Interruptions, contrary to expectations, usually mean people want to add something.) Do they become quiet, their expressions passive, their eyes fixed somewhere besides your face? Do they seem overly contemplative? Do they take in your comments without adding thoughts of their own?

People often misperceive these responses as listening. But they usually aren’t. (In fact, as the next few chapters explain, listening is much more active.)

“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 knew that many people shy away from discussing intimate or emotional topics because we think it will be awkward, or unprofessional, or we’ll say the wrong thing, or the other person will respond poorly, or we’re too busy thinking about what the other person thinks of us.

There comes a moment, in many dialogues, when you must decide: Will I allow this conversation to turn emotional? Or will I keep it dry and aloof?

At these moments, you face a choice: Are you going to let that comment go by without asking for elaboration? Or are you going to acknowledge the feelings that were expressed, and respond emotionally yourself? This is when the How Do We Feel? conversation begins—if we allow it to.

Numerous studies show that emotions come into play nearly every time we open our mouths or listen to what someone says. They influence everything we say and hear. They’ve already entered your conversation through that sigh, or that flash of pride, or in a thousand other ways you hardly noticed. Emotions have been at work since you sat down, shaping how you react, how you think, why you’re here in the first place. However, you can glide over the sigh, let the pride pass unacknowledged. You can minimize How Do We Feel? and stick to safer territory: The shallows of small talk.

Most of the time, that’s the wrong choice.

one prevailing theory within psychology said that, in order to understand others—and persuade them to listen to us—we should engage in what is known as perspective taking: We should try to see a situation from the other person’s perspective and show them we empathize. Psychology journals noted that “to communicate effectively, we must adopt the perspective of another person both while speaking and listening.” Textbooks taught that “perspective taking not only fosters greater interpersonal understanding” but also “constitutes a vital skill for very powerful negotiators.”

had simply asked him questions that elicited emotional replies: “Why are you making these choices?” “Is this who you want to be?”

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.

In contrast, questions that pushed people to describe their beliefs, values, or meaningful experiences tended to result in emotional replies, even if the questions themselves didn’t seem all that emotional. These kinds of questions were powerful because they often prompted people to reveal vulnerabilities.

we become more susceptible to emotional contagion, and more emotionally contagious ourselves, when we share something that feels raw, something that another person might judge. We might not care about their judgment, we might forget it as soon as we hear it, but the act of exposing ourselves to someone’s scrutiny engenders a sense of intimacy.

To get deep, we have to make an offering of our vulnerability.

There is a cycle: Asking deep questions about feelings, values, beliefs, and experiences creates vulnerability. That vulnerability triggers emotional contagion. And that, in turn, helps us connect.

Rather, reciprocity means thinking about how to show empathy.

Sometimes it requires simply acknowledging someone’s emotions and showing them you care. “It’s being responsive to others’ needs,” Clark said.

if you want to have a successful conversation with someone, you don’t have to ask them about their worst memories or how they prepare for telephone calls. You just have to ask them to describe how they feel about their life—rather than the facts of their life—and then ask lots of follow-ups.

Follow-up questions are particularly powerful. “Follow-ups are a signal that you’re listening, that you want to know more,” one of the researchers, Michael Yeomans, told me. Follow-up questions make reciprocity easier (“Your favorite part of college was ultimate frisbee? Me too! Do you still love to play?”). “They allow self-disclosure without it seeming like self-obsession,” said Yeomans. “It makes a conversation flow.”

“we all crave real connections,” Epley said. We all want to have meaningful conversations.

people who ask lots of questions during conversations—particularly questions that invite vulnerable responses—are more popular among their peers and more often seen as leaders. They have more social influence and are sought out more frequently for friendship and advice. Any of us can do this in nearly any setting or conversation, be it with a roommate, a coworker, or someone we just met.

Asking deep questions is easier than most people realize, and more rewarding than we expect.

People don’t announce their emotions. They perform them.

“People’s emotions are rarely put into words,” wrote the psychologist Daniel Goleman. “The key to intuiting another’s feelings is in the ability to read nonverbal channels: tone of voice, gesture, facial expressions and the like.”

As we grow older, however, this capacity can atrophy. We start to pay increasing attention to what people say rather than what they do, to the point where we can fail to notice nonlinguistic clues.

Spoken language is so information rich, so easy to rely upon, that it lulls us into ignoring hints that someone might be, say, upset—crossed arms, creased brow, downcast eyes—and instead focus on their words when they say, It’s nothing. I feel fine.