Supercommunicators Quotes

“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.”
― Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

“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?”
― Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

“The most effective communicators pause before they speak and ask themselves: Why am I opening my mouth? Unless we know what kind of discussion we’re hoping for—and what type of discussion our companions want—we’re at a disadvantage.”
― Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

“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. (This explains why, when you complain about your boss—“Jim is driving me crazy!”—and your spouse responds with a practical suggestion—“What if you just invited him to lunch?”—it’s more apt to create conflict than connection: “I’m not asking you to solve this! I just want some empathy.”)”
― Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

“During any conflict—a workplace debate, an online disagreement—it’s natural to crave control. And sometimes that craving pushes us to want to control the most obvious target: The person we’re arguing with. If we can just force them to listen, they’ll finally hear what we’re saying. If we can force them to see things from our point of view, they’ll agree we’re right. The fact is, though, that approach almost never works. Trying to force someone to listen, or see our side, only inflames the battle.”
― Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

“1. A deep question asks about someone’s values, beliefs, judgments, or experiences—rather than just facts. Don’t ask “Where do you work?” Instead, draw out feelings or experiences: “What’s the best part of your job?” (One 2021 study found a simple approach to generating deep questions: Before speaking, imagine you’re talking to a close friend. What question would you ask?) 2. A deep question asks people to talk about how they feel. Sometimes this is easy: “How do you feel about …?” Or, we can prompt people to describe specific emotions: “Did it make you happy when …?” Or ask someone to analyze a situation’s emotions: “Why do you think he got angry?” Or empathize: “How would you feel if that happened to you?” 3. Asking a deep question should feel like sharing. It should feel, a bit, like we’re revealing something about ourselves when we ask a deep question. This feeling might give us pause. But studies show people are nearly always happy to have been asked, and to have answered, a deep question.”
― Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

“The single biggest problem with communication,” said the playwright George Bernard Shaw, “is the illusion it has taken place.”
― Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

“Laughter might seem like a strange place to look for emotional intelligence, but, in fact, it’s an example of a basic truth of emotional communication: What’s important is not just hearing another person’s feelings but showing that we have heard them. Laughter is one way of proving that we hear how someone feels.”
― Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

“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 focus. If they are preoccupied by social implications, reflect their fixation back to them.”
― Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

“Specifically, we want to learn how the people around us see the world and help them understand our perspectives in turn.”
― Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

“So, to become a supercommunicator, all we need to do is listen closely to what’s said and unsaid, ask the right questions, recognize and match others’ moods, and make our own feelings easy for others to perceive. Simple, right? Well, no, of course not.”
― Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

“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.”
― Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

“To communicate with someone, we must connect with them. When we absorb what someone is saying and they comprehend what we say, it's because our brains have, to some degree, aligned.”
― Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

“John F. Kennedy told students at American University in 1963, five months before he was assassinated. “In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
― Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

“But the most important difference19 between high centrality participants and everyone else was that the high centrality participants were constantly adjusting how they communicated, in order to match their companions. They subtly reflected shifts in other people’s moods and attitudes. When someone got serious, they matched that seriousness. When a discussion went light, they were the first to play along. They changed their minds frequently and let themselves be swayed by their groupmates.”
― Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

“Rather, the groups with the greatest synchrony had one or two people who behaved very differently from Participant 4. These people tended to speak less than dominant leaders, and when they did open their mouths, it was usually to ask questions. They repeated others’ ideas and were quick to admit their own confusion or make fun of themselves. They encouraged their groupmates (“That’s really smart! Tell me more about what you think!”) and laughed at others’ jokes. They didn’t stand out as particularly talkative or clever, but when they spoke, everyone listened closely. And, somehow, they made it easier for other people to speak up. They made conversations flow. Sievers began referring to these people as high centrality participants.”
― Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

“I learned that if you listen for someone’s truth, and you put your truth next to it, you might reach them.”
― Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

“So if a listener wants to prove they’re listening, they need to demonstrate it after the speaker finishes talking. If we want to show someone we’re paying attention, we need to prove, once that person has stopped speaking, that we have absorbed what they said. And the best way to do that is by repeating, in our own words, what we just heard them say—and then asking if we got it right. It’s a fairly simple technique—prove you are listening by asking the speaker questions, reflecting back what you just heard, and then seeking confirmation you understand—but studies show it is the single most effective technique for proving to someone that we want to hear them. It’s a formula sometimes called looping for understanding.”
― Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

“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.”
― Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

“The most effective communicators pause before they speak and ask themselves: Why am I opening my mouth?”
― Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

“Before any challenging conversation, think for a few moments about what you hope will happen, what might go wrong, and how you’ll react when it does.”
― Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

“Roger Fisher, who had recently written Getting to Yes,”
― Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

“So how do we achieve this kind of mutual understanding? The first step is recognizing that within each fight is not just one conflict, but, at a minimum, two: There’s the surface issue causing us to disagree with each other, and then the emotional conflict underneath.”
― Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

“She had assumed that the goal of discussing a conflict and engaging in debate was achieving victory, defeating the other side. But that’s not right. Rather, the real goal is figuring out why a conflict exists in the first place. Combatants—be they arguing spouses or battling coworkers—have to determine why this fight has emerged and what is fueling it, as well as the stories they are all telling themselves about why this conflict persists.”
― Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

“What are two topics you most want to discuss? What is one thing you hope to say that shows what you want to talk about? What is one question you will ask that reveals what others want?”
― Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

“What are two topics you might discuss? (Being general is okay: Last night’s game and TV shows you like) What is one thing you hope to say? What is one question you will ask?”
― Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

“We achieve this in four ways: By preparing ourselves before a conversation; by asking questions; by noticing clues during a conversation; and by experimenting and adding items to the table.”
― Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

“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.”
― Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

“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. Boly and Ehdaie understood that matching isn’t mimicry; it’s not simply looking concerned and repeating back what others have said. 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.”
― Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

“These discussions call for analysis and clearheaded reasoning. 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.”
― Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection