Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

by Charles Duhigg

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.

“Do you want to be helped, hugged, or heard?”

He hadn’t been asking the right questions. He hadn’t been asking about their needs and desires, what they wanted from this conversation. He had assumed he already knew. And because he hadn’t bothered to figure out what mattered, he had deluged patients with information they didn’t care about.

Getting to Yes was first published,

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.

The What’s This Really About? conversation is a negotiation—only the goal is not to win, but to help everyone agree on the topics we’ll discuss, and how we’ll make decisions together.

Fast Friends Procedure

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.

“Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with it.”

In psychology, this is known as identity threat, and it is deeply corrosive to communication. “When someone says you don’t belong, or they put you in a group you don’t appreciate, it can cause extreme psychological discomfort,” Slepian told me. Studies have shown that when people confront identity threats, their blood pressure can rise, their bodies can become flooded with stress hormones, they begin looking for ways to escape or fight back.

Another researcher put it more bluntly: “The most important influence, by far, on a flourishing life is love.”