A Brief But Spectacular take on super communication

Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author whose latest book seeks to unlock the secret language of communication. He shares his Brief But Spectacular take on super communication.
Amna Nawaz:
And finally tonight, Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author whose latest book seeks to unlock the secret language of communication.
Here, he shares his Brief But Spectacular take on connecting with others.
Charles Duhigg, Author, “Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection”: The goal of a conversation is not to convince someone else that you’re right. It’s not even to come to agreement or find a common ground. The only goal of a conversation is to understand each other.
So, my relationship with small talk is that I used to be terrified of it, until I started doing this research about how to have conversations, in which I learned the key for small talk is to get deep as fast as possible. The best way to get deep with someone is to ask a deep question.
And a deep question asks someone about their values or their beliefs or their experiences. And this can seem intimidating, but it’s as easy as meeting someone who says they’re a lawyer and saying, oh, what made you decide to go to law school or do you love practicing the law? Those are easy questions to ask, but they invite the other person to really tell you who they are in a meaningful way.
My favorite question is, when someone tells me something, say, oh, that’s really interesting. What does that mean to you? And the other person feels like I’m so curious about their life, which I actually am.
I have nine siblings. And, as you might imagine, dinnertime conversation was challenging. What I discovered is, if I could make everyone laugh, it was like magic. And that’s kind of one of the things that got me so interested in understanding communication.
Why sometimes am I able to do that and, at other times, I want to connect with someone and I just can’t?
My book is called “Supercommunicators,” unlocking the secret language of connection. This is a book about why some people manage to connect with others so much more, what we know about the science behind conversation and how we can learn the skills that help us connect and have real meaningful conversations with almost anyone.
The biggest roadblocks to having a real conversation with someone is twofold. First of all, oftentimes, we’re anxious. And so one thing that you can do is just write down a couple of topics that you want to discuss before you start the conversation. And then the second thing that we can do is prove that we’re listening.
Show the other person by repeating back what they say by asking questions that we’re listening closely and we want to understand them. Laughter is a great example. Eighty percent of the time when we laugh, it’s not in response to something funny. It’s to show someone that we want to connect with them.
And then, when they laugh back, they’re showing they want to connect with us. Almost all discussions fall into one of three kinds of conversation. There’s practical conversations, which is about decision-making and solving problems and making plans. And then there’s emotional conversations, where I might tell you how I feel and I don’t want you to solve this for me. I want you to empathize and listen.
And then there’s social conversations, which is about how we relate to each other and how we relate to society. And the key is what’s known as the matching principle, which says that, in order to communicate with each other, we need to be having the same kind of conversation at the same moment.
Communication is humans’ superpower. It’s what has allowed the Homo sapiens to be so successful. The more we learn how communication works, the more we understand how to take a conversation apart and fiddle with its gears, the more we allow our own instincts to come out.
And the truth is, we were born to connect with each other. We just have to learn how to listen to that.
My name is Charles Duhigg, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on supercommunication.
Amna Nawaz:
And, as always, you can watch more Brief But Spectacular videos online at PBS.org/NewsHour/Brief.