Supercommunicators

The book begins by telling the story of Felix, an FBI negotiator whose colleagues name him as the best there is, hands down. Through the book we learn the simple yet profound views and skills that Felix uses to connect with others.

The goal of a conversation is to connect. In order to do this, “we want to learn how the people around us see the world and help them understand our perspectives in turn.”

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

The Three Kinds of Conversation

The Matching Principle

“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.”

• To best connect with others we need to be in the same communication style that they are
• Research into groups showed that “high centrality participants were constantly adjusting how they communicated, in order to match their companions.”
• As a result they
  • Had larger social circles
  • Were more likely to be elected to positions of authority
  • Had more people turn to them to discuss something serious

Neural Entrainment

“When we absorb what someone is saying, and they comprehend what we say, it’s because our brains have, to some degree, aligned.”

• Researchers analysed one person telling a story to another, monitoring the speakers and listeners brains
• They saw that they synchronise, until both were experiencing the same feelings
• As if they were telling the story together
• “The more people’s brains had synchronized, the better they understood what was said.”
• “At that moment, our bodies—our pulses, facial expressions, the emotions we experience, the prickling sensation on our necks and arms—often start to synchronize as well.”

Three Conversations

1. Practical conversations (decision making mindset) - “I want to be helped”
2. Emotional conversations (emotional mindset) - “I want to be hugged”
3. Conversations about identity (social mindset) - “I want to be heard”

• Note that we often use all three in a single dialogue. They are not quite different types of conversation, and more like different levels of conversation
  • “For example, a discussion might begin when a friend asks for help thinking through a work problem (What’s This Really About?) and then proceeds to admit he’s feeling stressed (How Do We Feel?) before finally focusing on how other people will react when they learn about this issue (Who Are We?).”

So the key here is to engage in what the book calls a learning conversation, by paying attention to what is occurring - “Do you want to be helped, hugged, or heard?”

The What’s This Really About? Conversation

Every Conversation Is a Negotiation

“The first step is trying to figure out what each of us wants from a discussion” > “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” > “That requires conducting experiments to reveal how we’ll make decisions together.” “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.”_

Goal 1 - What do we each want?

• “determining what everyone wants from a conversation.”
• “ask open-ended questions designed to get them talking about their values and what they wanted out of life.”
• “In many conversations, there’s a surface topic—but also a deeper, more meaningful subject that, when we bring it into the light, reveals what everyone wants most from the conversation”

Goal 2 - How should we act?

• “Determining how we will talk to one another and cooperate in making decisions.” - What are the rules
• Often we find this out by testing the waters - “first I’ll interrupt you, and then I’ll be polite, and then I’ll bring up a new topic or make an unexpected concession, and watch what you do”

Getting to Yes

• The ideas of the book “Getting to Yes” are very useful here
• The best negotiators don’t try to take a bigger slice of the pie. They focus on making the pie bigger
• Finding win-win solutions
• “Get people talking about how they see the world and what they value most.” - What is a ‘win’ for them
• A good negotiator ensures everybody wins
• Find out what they want, share what you want, then work together to make both happen

Logical Persuasion

“What kind of logic does everyone find persuasive?”

1. Logic of Similarities (Empathetic) - Persuaded by stories and compassion
2. The Logic of Evidence (Analytical) - Persuaded by facts and data

A Guide to Using These Ideas

1. Prepare for the conversation
   • “simply preparing a list, researchers found, made conversations go better.”
   • “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?”
2. Ask questions
   • 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?”)
   • 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?”)
3. Notice clues
   • Leaning toward you?
   • Eye contact?
   • Smiling?
   • Interrupting?
4. Experiment
   • Tell a joke
   • Ask an unexpected question
   • Introduce a new idea
   • Watch how they play along

The How Do We Feel? Conversation

“When we tell a funny story, or have an argument with our spouse, or experience a rush of pride or sorrow during a conversation, that’s the emotional mindset at work.”

The Listening Cure

“How to listen more deeply and what to do when we hear someone say something meaningful.”

This chapter centres around the Fast Friends Procedure. “A series of thirty-six questions that, as Elaine and Arthur Aron later wrote, elicited “sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personalistic self-disclosure.”

Good Questions Elicit Vulnerability

• Ask emotional questions (“What was it like living there”), not factual questions (“Where did you live”)
• “the difference between a shallow question and one that sparks an opportunity for emotional connection is vulnerability.”
• People that ask lots of good questions “are more popular among their peers and more often seen as leaders.”
• Good questions ask about peoples …
  • Meaningful experiences
  • Lives - Struggles, disappointments, joys, ambitions
  • Feelings - Hopes, fears
  • Values - What they believe in
• Good questions focus on perspective getting

Vulnerability Triggers Emotional Contagion

• Humans “synchronize their own emotions with the emotions expressed by those around them.”
• “Men and women tend to ‘catch’ expressions of joy, love, anger, fear, and sadness.”
• “This contagion is at the root of the How Do We Feel? conversation”
• This “emotional contagion must be triggered by something, and one of the most reliable triggers is vulnerability”

“Asking deep questions about feelings, values, beliefs, and experiences creates vulnerability. That vulnerability triggers emotional contagion. And that, in turn, helps us connect.”

Good Listeners Show Reciprocity

• “The Fast Friends Procedure worked only if participants took turns asking each other questions.”
• “If you don’t have reciprocity, then people aren’t matching each other’s emotional ups and downs.”
• Show reciprocity by …
  • Revealing your own emotions when they reveal theirs
  • Asking follow up questions

Remember, participants “consistently expected their conversations to be more awkward, and to lead to weaker connections and less happiness, than they actually did.”

How Do You Hear Emotions No One Says Aloud?

Unspoken emotions - “how our bodies, our vocal tones, our gestures, and our expressions say as much as our words.”

• They “comprise a vast portion of how we convey our feelings in everyday life.”
• To emphasise their importance, the author highlights that “Software made by the company Cogito prompts operators, via pop-up windows on their screens, to speed up their speech or slow down, to put more energy into their voice or match the caller’s calm.”

Laughter

• We laugh to show someone we want to connect with them
• “Less than 20 percent of the laughter in our sample was a response to anything resembling a formal effort at humor.”
• These laughs are “embodiments of the matching principle, which says that we communicate by aligning our behaviors”

Mood & Energy

• Matching the emotions of others involves mirroring their mood and energy
• Mood: “Is this person feeling positive or negative?”
• Energy: “Are they high energy or low energy?”
• “When people genuinely laughed together, their mood and energy almost always matched.”
• Sometimes we cannot or should not match others emotions - “if matching will only exacerbate tensions, show that you hear their emotions by acknowledging how they feel. Make it obvious you are working to understand their emotions.”

Connecting Amid Conflict

“How emotions can fuel conflicts or help resolve them, and how to create safer environments for discussing disagreements, both online and off.”

• Conflict is a part of life
• “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. They need to work together to determine if there are any “zones of possible agreement,” and have to arrive at a mutual understanding about why this dispute matters, and what’s needed for it to end.”
• “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.” - Whats the fight really about
• “The problem, however, is that we often hate talking about our feelings during a disagreement.”
• ““But if you don’t at least talk about your emotions,” Heen said, “you’ll just keep having the same argument over and over.””

Looping for Understanding

• “To convince others we are genuinely listening during an argument, we must prove to them that we have heard them, prove we are working hard to understand, prove we want to see things from their perspective.”
• “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 formula sometimes called looping for understanding”
• “Looping lets us hear others’ stories, and prove to them we’ve heard what they are saying”
• “When you start to understand each other’s stories, that’s when you can start talking about what’s actually going on”

Controlling Conflict in Couples

“if, during moments of tension, we focus on things we can control together, conflicts are less likely to emerge.”

• All couples fight - “nearly every marriage contained some degree of conflict.”
• “During fights, happy and unhappy couples seemed to approach control very differently”
• “Among unhappy couples, the impulse for control often expressed itself as an attempt to control the other person.”
• Happy couples “focus on controlling things together.”
  1. Happy couples control their own emotions - “They would take breaks when they felt themselves growing angry. They worked hard to calm down through deep breathing, or by writing down how they were feeling”
  2. Happy couples control their environment - “they would put off a tough discussion until they were in a safer setting.”
  3. Happy couples control the boundaries of conflict - “Happy couples, when they fight, usually try to make the fight as small as possible”. They “find ways to lower the temperature and make this fight smaller.”
• It is hard to understand another persons perspective after just one conversation - “It takes a while, and so we usually have to revisit the conversation, again and again, until we can hear everything each person is saying”

A Guide to Using These Ideas

• Ask a deep question
• Pay attention to mood and energy
• Reciprocate vulnerability
• In a conflict
  • Loop for understanding
  • Find specific points of agreement
  • Avoid general sweeping statements

The Who Are We? Conversation

“When we, for instance, gossip about office politics, or figure out the people we know in common, or explain how our religion or family background”

Our Social Identities Shape Our Worlds

“Our social identities push us unthinkingly to see people like us—what psychologists call our in-group—as more virtuous and intelligent, while those who are different—the out-group—as suspicious, unethical, and possibly threatening.”

• Social Identity: “The self-images we all form based on the groups we belong to, the people we befriend, the organizations we join, and the histories we embrace or shun.”
• For example: black and white, male and female, immigrant and native
• “The desire for belonging is at the core of the Who Are We? conversation, which occurs whenever we talk about our connections within society.”

Stereotype Threat

“Simply knowing that a stereotype exists can influence how we behave.”

• Women doing maths tests
• Study in which women were given maths tests to do. One group was given a presentation about the differing mathematical abilities of men and women, the other was not
• Women who were reminded of the stereotype did worse - “I need to double-check, I need to be careful, because I know there’s this stereotype.””

Elicit Multiple Identities

“We can make the bad voices in our head less powerful by remembering all the other voices in there, too.”

• The women were then told to draw ‘self concept maps’ that summarise the groups they belong to, they either drew a limited number of nodes, or many many nodes
• Drawing maps with more nodes was much more effective, and they did better on the test after
• Acknowledging multiple identities nullifies stereotype threat
• “It’s crucial, in a Who Are We? conversation, to remind ourselves that we all possess multiple identities: We are parents but also siblings; experts in some topics and novices in others;”
• Draw out multiple identities in discussions by talking about
  • Their backgrounds
  • How their communities shaped them
  • Then reciprocate

Find an Identity We Can Share

“When we discover overlapping social identities, we’re more prone to connect.”

• Find a common “in group” with a meaningful connection
  1. Common in group - “Seek out topics where everyone has some experience and knowledge, or everyone is a novice.”
  2. Meaningful connection - “Our similarities become powerful when they are rooted in something meaningful”
• Football league example: “The idea that a soccer league might overcome deep enmities in Qaraqosh, where a vast majority of Christian residents, when polled, said their Muslim neighbors had betrayed them,“

How Do We Make the Hardest Conversations Safer?

How to have better conversations about social injustice

Avoid Identity Threat

• Identity Threat: “When someone says you don’t belong, or they put you in a group you don’t appreciate, it can cause extreme psychological discomfort”
• “These kinds of comments sparked irritation because the listeners had been assigned to a group (the wealthy snobs, the selfish Republicans, the undeserving college students) they didn’t identify with. Or, they were denied membership in a group (people who understand how the law works, people who sympathize with children) where they felt they rightfully belonged. So the listener, offended, would become defensive as their sense of self—their identity—was attacked.”

Prepare

• What you hope will happen
• What could go wrong & how will I react
• What emotions may come up
• What benefits could emerge

Avoid Generalisations

“Identity threats typically emerge because we generalize”

• “speak, instead, about our own experiences and emotions.”
• Just because a topic does not negatively affect us does not mean it does not exist - “because we have not personally experienced their suffering, it therefore is not real.”

Give Everyone a Voice

• “Invite everyone into the dialogue and give everyone a voice—and let everyone know they are expected to examine themselves. Focus on belonging, and creating a sense that everyone is welcome.”
• Everyone is welcome, but they must bring contribution and self-awareness, not criticism and blindness - “most of the work is about gaining awareness of yourself, your culture, and the culture of others.”

A Guide to Using These Ideas

• Prepare beforehand - What could go well/badly and how we plan to deal with it? Is this better as a group conversation or one to one?
• Establish rules at the beginning
  • “for instance, no one is allowed to blame, shame, or attack others.”
  • What are everyones goals?
• Find common ground by drawing out multiple identities and ensuring everyone is on equal footing
• “Acknowledge, and keep acknowledging, that discomfort is natural—and useful.”

Afterword

The Harvard Study on Human Development

• “The most important influence, by far, on a flourishing life is love.”
• “Participants who ended up happy all had “warm adult relationships” with numerous people.”
• Camille: ““He was a very self-critical person,” said Waldinger, who currently leads the Harvard project. “He pushed himself hard and judged himself pretty harshly, and that made him successful in his profession. But it also meant he was critical of other people, which is probably what alienated so many of them.””
• “Researchers later determined that, until the age of thirty, Camille didn’t have one real, durable friendship; a decade later, he was among the most socially active people in the study, and as his network expanded, his career took off.”
• “The happiest participants called others regularly, made lunch and dinner dates, sent notes to friends saying they were proud of them, or wanted to help them shoulder sad news. Most of all, happy participants engaged in many, many conversations over the years that brought them closer to others.”