A good conversation is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after. Ann Lindbergh. Conversations range from awkward, mundane, and filled with small talk, to deep, engaging, and meaningful.
Super communicators know how to steer their discussions toward the latter. You might have a super communicator in your life, someone who draws you in, gets you to think of your best ideas, calms you down when you feel stressed, and makes an hour of conversation feel like five minutes. Like most super communicators, they probably learn their skills through years of trial and error. In the book Super Communicators, author Charles Duhigg details what these skills are and how you can develop them. These skills will make you an awesome friend, loving partner, impactful parent, and outstanding manager.
More and more people will look forward to talking with you, and you'll find those conversations to be more and more enjoyable. The first step to achieving super communicator status is to recognize what kind of conversation you're having in the first few seconds of a conversation. When someone comes to you to talk, they either want to be helped or heard.
In other words, they want a practical conversation or an emotional conversation. When your partner, kids, teammates, or close friends come to you wanting to have an emotional conversation and you start helping them instead of hearing them out, you won't connect with them and you may even anger them. Therefore, if you sense a heightened level of emotion in someone's voice, focus less on helping them and more on making them feel heard. I once believed that being a good listener just required maintaining eye contact and nodding encouragingly to show that I was paying attention. But that was only half the formula.
Truly great listening requires looping for understanding. To loop for understanding, you need to ask, paraphrase, and verify. First, ask a question that gives someone a chance to open up and express their feelings.
A question like, you seem a bit quiet today. Is everything okay? Or what are you going through right now?
I'm here to listen. Now, whatever they say, paraphrase it to prove that you were listening. You might say, just so I understand correctly, you feel like your workload is too much and you're overwhelmed.
Or, so you're anxious about the test tomorrow and find it hard to focus. After paraphrasing what you heard, verify that your summary was accurate. This step may seem unnecessary, but getting verbal confirmation increases trust and connection. Therefore, it's important to end your paraphrase with, does that sound right or am I close? When you loop for understanding, you can't help but give people your full attention because you don't want to botch your paraphrase and show that you weren't listening.
It's like you have a pop quiz every few seconds, so you better lock in. After completing one loop, open another by asking for more detail. Like, can you tell me more about, or how is this starting to affect?
The more you loop, the more they open up, which makes your conversation more and more meaningful. But if you're talking to someone you barely know, like someone you just met or someone at work who only has surface-level conversations with you, it's impossible to get them to open up, right? Not for super communicators. Supercommunicators get anyone they meet to open up and be vulnerable, signaling trust, in extremely little time.
And they do it by asking deep questions and then reciprocating vulnerability. But before we dive into deep questions and reciprocating vulnerability, here's a quick word from the sponsor for today's video, Jam. An awesome tool that makes it easy to capture and share software bugs.
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In 2016, Harvard researchers recorded and studied speed dating conversations to see what led to successful matches. The researchers discovered a striking difference between conversations that led to a second date and conversations that went nowhere. They discovered that those who went on to enjoy a second date asked questions that elicited an emotional response. You see, most people ask questions to gather facts, like where are you from or what did you do last weekend?
But super communicators and successful speed daters ask questions to generate feelings. Questions like, what do you love most about your hometown? Or what was the highlight of your weekend? These types of questions not only gather information, but also get people to reveal their values, beliefs, and experiences that can help you connect with them on a deeper level. And that's why Charles Duhigg calls these questions deep questions.
Super communicators are masters of asking deep questions that don't seem intrusive and get people to reveal what they're feeling Without a second thought you'll find that this is easier to pull off than you imagine The key is simply to direct your questions toward dreams elevated experiences and passions D-e-e-p deep for instance When you learn what someone does for a living, don't ask, how long have you worked there? Instead ask, do you love doing that? If they say, not really, ask, have you dreamed about doing something else? If the person you're talking to is wearing a college shirt, say, oh, I see you went to, insert the name of the college. What was your favorite experience there?
To direct the conversation toward an elevated experience that will elicit emotion. When you learn where someone is living, ask, what do you like most about living there? If they say, it's a great place to raise kids, it's a clue that they love being a parent, and you can ask more questions about parenting to get them more emotionally engaged in your conversation.
Reframing your questions so that they get at people's dreams, elevated experiences, and passions will typically get people to open up and be a bit more vulnerable. When that happens, you must return the favor. Charles Duhigg calls this reciprocating vulnerability. One of the first super communicators that author Charles Duhigg met while researching his book was named Felix, and he was exceptional at reciprocating vulnerability.
In the book, he writes, when someone revealed something personal, Felix would reciprocate with a story from his own life. One scientist mentioned problems he was having with his teenage daughter, and Felix responded by describing an aunt he couldn't seem to get along with, no matter how hard he tried. When we exchange and try to match our emotional experiences, we naturally feel more connected to someone.
It's important to share just enough of a personal emotional experience so that someone doesn't feel alone, but not so much that you steal the spotlight. Super communicators always look to play a supporting role in a conversation and avoid being the main character. They let other people drive the conversation by asking a series of interesting questions.
In fact, super communicators ask 10 to 20 times as many questions as the average person. In the end, when someone initiates a conversation with you, your first thought should be, do they want to be helped or heard? If you sense that someone wants an emotional conversation and just wants to be heard, loop for understanding by asking, paraphrasing, and verifying.
When you initiate a conversation, go beyond small talk by asking deep questions to better understand their dreams, elevated experiences, and passions. Then reciprocate vulnerability to strengthen your connection and officially become a super communicator. That was the core message that I gathered from super communicators by Charles Duhigg. Great communication is vital to a happy, productive life, and this book provides many useful communication tools.
I highly recommend it. If you would like a one-page PDF summary of insights that I gathered from this book, just click the link below and I'll be happy to email it to you. If you're already subscribed to the free Productivity Game email newsletter, this PDF is sitting in your inbox. If you like this video, please share it. And as always, thanks for watching, and have yourself a productive week.