Do you ever find yourself in a meeting at the office or out at a social event and notice how someone in the room seems able to put their opinions effortlessly and succinctly across while also listening to others and giving them room to speak?
Chances are that person is a supercommunicator. The good news is, with a bit of practice, any of us can hone our skills to become more effective conversationalists.
Here, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Charles Duhigg, author of Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection, shares his top tips on how we can all have better conversations.
Ask deep questions
One of the things we know about supercommunicators is that they ask 10 to 20 times as many questions as the average person. Some of those are questions that are designed to invite you in, like “Hey, what do you think about that?”
But some of them are special questions, which are known as deep questions. It can sound intimidating to say that you should ask someone a deep question, but it's easier than it sounds.
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A deep question is one that asks someone about their values, beliefs or experiences. And in doing so, it allows them to say something meaningful about themselves. It could be as simple as bumping into someone on the street and asking what they do for a living. If they say, “I'm a doctor” you can ask what made them decide to become a doctor or what they love about medicine.
Those are deep questions because they invite the other person to explain who they are, and how they see the world. Put simply, deep questions tend not to ask about the facts of someone's life, but about how they feel. In doing so, they offer someone an opportunity to say something real about who they are.
Listen actively
If you ask deep questions and you don't listen, then it's almost as if you didn't ask the question. Equally bad, though, is if you ask a deep question, listen to the answer and the other person doesn't realise that you're listening.
There are two aspects of listening – first actually paying attention, but the second aspect is showing the other person that you're doing it. We can do this with a technique known as looping for understanding.
Sometimes this can just be asking a follow-up question. “Oh, you said you became a doctor because you saw your dad get sick. I'm just wondering, how is he doing now?”
These follow-up questions show that we're listening. In some conversations, particularly where there's a little bit of conflict or we're talking about something where we stand on different sides of the fence, it’s important to prove that we're listening.
This is where looping for understanding comes in. It has three steps: First, ask a question, preferably a deep question if you can; Second, repeat what the person tells you in your own words. This shows them that you've processed it and that you've paid attention; The third step, the one people usually forget, is to ask if you got it right. When we say, “Did I get it right? Did I hear everything you were trying to tell me?”
The other person feels listened to and has an automatic reaction to want to listen back. By looping for understanding not only are we helping ourselves listen but we're proving that we're listening and making it more likely that the other person will want to listen to us.
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Be authentic
Authenticity is critical. We've all been in a conversation where someone turns to us and says “Oh, where'd you go on vacation?” because they want us to ask them so they can brag about some islands they went to.
Communication is Homo sapiens’ superpower. It is the thing that has set our species above all other species and has allowed us to succeed. But another thing that we have evolved the capacity to do is to detect inauthenticity very, very well.
This makes sense because if someone approaches your village, tribe or family and is inauthentic then they present a huge risk. If they seem like a friend but they're actually an enemy, then they can get inside your defences.
When we’re asking deep questions, looping for understanding and showing that we're listening, we are engaging in reciprocal authenticity and reciprocal vulnerability. Someone has shared something about themselves so we're sharing something about ourselves.
Our brains have evolved to be very, very good at picking up on inauthenticity. One of my favourite examples of this is an experiment where researchers recorded friends laughing together, and strangers laughing together. They cut the tapes down into one-second clips and found that people they played them to could tell the difference between the friends and the strangers with 90 per cent accuracy.
Make a connection
The goal of a conversation is essentially connection. When you're in a conversation with someone it's reflected in your body, in your brain. If you look inside the brains of people having a conversation, you find that their neural activity is becoming more and more similar.
And that makes sense when you think about it. Because if I describe an emotion or an idea to you, you actually experience that emotion or idea a little bit. That's what communication is, is it's the ability for me through words or gestures to help you understand what I'm thinking and feeling.
It's to help us align with each other. In neurology, this is known as neural entrainment. The more our brains become entrained, the more our thought patterns look the same and the better we understand each other - that is connection in the most visceral, fundamental sense. Connection is the goal of conversation.
About our expert, Charles Duhigg
Charles is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of the books The Power of Habit, Smarter Faster Better and Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection
He is also a regular contributor to This American Life, NPR, The Colbert Report, PBS’s NewsHour, and Frontline.
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