Supercommunicators, page 8
Regardless of how this negotiation unfolds, there is a common format: Someone will make an invitation, and their partner will accept or make counter-invitations.
Sometimes, we want others to go first. The easiest way to do that is by asking open-ended questions, just as Dr. Ehdaie did with his patients. And open-ended questions are easy to find, if you focus on:
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?”)
These kinds of questions don’t feel intrusive—asking “How’d you decide to become a teacher?” doesn’t seem overly personal—but it’s an invitation for someone to share their beliefs about education, or what they value in a job. “Are you glad you went to law school?” invites someone to reflect on their choices, rather than simply describing their work. Open-ended questions can be shallow or deep. But, as the next chapter explains, questions about values, beliefs, judgments, and experiences are extremely powerful—and easier to ask than we think.
NOTICE CLUES DURING CONVERSATIONS
In other conversations, rather than wait for our companions to express their needs and goals, we might seek first to express our own. At those moments, when we extend an invitation—“We need to talk about the schedule for Saturday,” or “I was wondering if you might invest in my company?”—how the other person responds is important, and so we need to train ourselves to notice what might go unsaid.
Some important things to pay attention to:
Do your companions lean toward you, make eye contact, smile, backchannel (“Interesting,” “Hmm”), or interrupt?
Those are signals they want to accept your invitation. (Interruptions, contrary to expectations, usually mean people want to add something.)
Do they become quiet, their expressions passive, their eyes fixed somewhere besides your face? Do they seem overly contemplative? Do they take in your comments without adding thoughts of their own?
People often misperceive these responses as listening. But they usually aren’t. (In fact, as the next few chapters explain, listening is much more active.) These are signals that someone is declining our invitation and wants to talk about something else—in which case, you need to keep searching—and experimenting—to learn what everyone wants.
It’s easy to miss these reactions, in part because speaking takes up so much of our mental bandwidth. But if we train ourselves to notice these clues, it helps us answer What’s This Really About?
EXPERIMENT BY ADDING ITEMS TO THE TABLE
When someone declines our invitation, we might feel stuck. At such moments, it’s useful to remember the lesson of interest-based bargaining: Get creative. Start experimenting with new topics and approaches until a path forward is revealed, the same way John Boly introduced a new way of thinking about public safety to draw in Karl.
We can figure out which new topics and approaches might be fruitful by paying attention to:
Has someone told a story or made a joke? If so, they might be in an empathetic logic of similarities mindset. In this mindset, people aren’t looking to debate or analyze choices; they want to share, relate, and empathize.
Or are they talking about plans and decisions, or evaluating options? Have they brought up politics or finances or choosing a place for next year’s vacation? (“Is Maine or Florida better in June?”) If so, they might be in a more practical logic of costs and benefits mindset, and you’re better off getting analytical yourself.
Listen for attempts to change the topic. People tell us what they want to discuss through their non sequiturs, asides, and sudden shifts—or, put differently, through the experiments they conduct. If someone asks the same question in different ways, or if they abruptly introduce a new subject, it’s a sign they want to add something to the table and we’d be wise to let them proceed.
Finally, experiment. Tell a joke. Ask an unexpected question. Introduce a new idea. Try interrupting, and then not interrupting. Watch to see if your companions play along. If they do, they’re hinting at how they want to make decisions together, the rules and norms they accept. They are signaling how they’d like this conversation to unfold.
You likely already have these instincts, but they’re easy to forget. And we don’t have to embrace all these tactics at once. We can gradually make them part of our conversations until, eventually, negotiating over What’s This Really About? feels natural.
THE HOW DO WE FEEL? CONVERSATION
AN OVERVIEW
Emotions shape every conversation. They guide what we say and how we hear, often in ways we don’t realize. Every conversation is, in some respect, a discussion about How Do We Feel?
Because this kind of dialogue is so important, the next three chapters are devoted to emotional conversations. When it comes to discussing emotions, listening is essential. We need to listen for vulnerabilities, hear what is unsaid—and, just as important, we must show we are listening. Good listening, when it works, reveals new worlds beneath the surface of people’s words.
Chapter 3 explains how to listen more deeply and what to do when we hear someone say something meaningful. Chapter 4 examines how we can get better at hearing emotions that are unspoken—how our bodies, our vocal tones, our gestures, and our expressions say as much as our words. Chapter 5 explores how emotions can fuel conflicts or help resolve them, and how to create safer environments for discussing disagreements, both online and off.
The How Do We Feel? conversation is essential to connection. These next three chapters explore how to express—and how to hear—what we feel.
THE LISTENING CURE
Touchy-Feely Hedge Funders
The men and women filling the auditorium of the Connecticut hedge fund all appeared to hail from the same, very expensive planet. Many wore bespoke suits, while others sported watches that cost more than some cars. As they waited for this invite-only event to begin, they discussed their recent art acquisitions and real estate projects, or groused about how the Seychelles and Vineyard had become overrun. A few, in an effort to demonstrate their uniqueness, wore kabbalah beads or limited-edition sneakers. One person had a soul patch.
But despite these attempts at distinctiveness, all of them—professional investors from dozens of Wall Street firms who oversaw billions of dollars—spent their days in much the same way: Talking to CEOs and chatting up investment bankers, poring over economic reports and working hallways at industry conferences, always hoping to find some nugget of information that might help them predict which stocks would go up and which would go down.
Today, however, was different. Today they were here to meet with a forty-three-year-old psychology professor from the University of Chicago, Nicholas Epley, who had flown in to give a presentation on how to listen. All the attendees knew, many from personal experience, that poor listening skills could be very, very costly. One person in the room had managed to lose $20 million in a single afternoon after he failed to register that a broker, who was usually cheerful and unflappable, had yelled at a waiter during a two-martini lunch and had repeatedly excused himself to answer phone calls. The man had offered a valid explanation each time he returned to the table, but the hedge funder later learned the man’s firm had been failing, and he had missed the clues. One tiny mistake—not hearing the hesitation in someone’s voice during a meeting, overlooking an evasive answer to a straightforward question—could spell the difference between victory and defeat.
So the organizers of this event had brought in Epley to help everyone get better at hearing what was easy to miss. Epley was just the person for the task because he had devoted most of his career to studying why we mishear one another. Why, for instance, were some people incapable of picking up on the emotions in others’ voices? How was it that two people could attend the same meeting and then, afterward, completely disagree on what had been said?
Many in the audience assumed that Epley would launch into a PowerPoint with a series of listening tactics: Always maintain eye contact. Nod encouragingly to show you’re paying attention. Smile a lot. In other words, the kinds of tips popular on late-night infomercials and social media accounts.
But Epley’s research indicated that such methods, particularly when forced, undermine real communication. Nodding doesn’t mean you’re listening. Constant smiling and eye contact can be a little…intense. Besides, Epley believed, everyone already knows how to listen closely. “You don’t need anyone to teach you how to listen to an interesting podcast or a good joke,” he told me. “When you’re in a great conversation, no one has a problem following along. When something is interesting, you listen without thinking about it.”
Epley wanted to help this group tap into their natural listening abilities, which meant he needed to help them learn how to have more interesting and meaningful conversations. One way of doing that, he was convinced, was getting everyone to talk about more intimate things. In particular, he believed people should talk about their emotions. When we discuss our feelings, something magical happens: Other people can’t help but listen to us. And then they start divulging emotions of their own, which causes us to listen closely in return. If the hedge funder who lost $20 million, for instance, had inquired how his lunch companion was feeling, had pressed him on emotional questions, he likely would have heard that the man was stressed. He would have noticed clues that something was amiss.
Epley wanted to nudge these hedge funders into a How Do We Feel? conversation. “When you open up to somebody,” Epley told me, “they get drawn in.”
However, Epley knew that many people shy away from discussing intimate or emotional topics because we think it will be awkward, or unprofessional, or we’ll say the wrong thing, or the other person will respond poorly, or we’re too busy thinking about what the other person thinks of us.
Epley believed he had found a way around these kinds of pitfalls. The key to starting a How Do We Feel? conversation was teaching people to ask specific kinds of questions, the kinds that don’t, on the surface, seem emotional, but that make emotions easier to acknowledge. Epley had spent the previous decade teaching people to ask these kinds of questions, and now he wanted to see if his techniques would work with a group of hedge funders, people who are usually allergic to touchy-feely displays. So as he stood at the front of the room, he laid out what was going to happen: Everyone, he explained, would be assigned a partner, someone they didn’t know. And for the next ten minutes, they would engage in a conversation.
Then Epley revealed the questions they would ask each other. There were three of them. The third one was: “Can you describe a time you cried in front of another person?”
“Oh, shit,” said someone in the front row. “This is going to be awful.”
* * *
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There comes a moment, in many dialogues, when you must decide: Will I allow this conversation to turn emotional? Or will I keep it dry and aloof?
Perhaps you’re discussing plans for the weekend with a friend and, during a lull, they say, “There’s some stuff going on I might need to deal with.” Maybe you’re catching up with a coworker and you hear a sigh hinting at sadness and troubles. Perhaps it’s a reference to a family emergency, or a mention of how proud someone is of their kids. At these moments, you face a choice: Are you going to let that comment go by without asking for elaboration? Or are you going to acknowledge the feelings that were expressed, and respond emotionally yourself? This is when the How Do We Feel? conversation begins—if we allow it to.
Regardless of your decision, it is certain that emotions are already influencing your discussion. Numerous studies show that emotions come into play nearly every time we open our mouths or listen to what someone says. They influence everything we say and hear. They’ve already entered your conversation through that sigh, or that flash of pride, or in a thousand other ways you hardly noticed. Emotions have been at work since you sat down, shaping how you react, how you think, why you’re here in the first place. However, you can glide over the sigh, let the pride pass unacknowledged. You can minimize How Do We Feel? and stick to safer territory: The shallows of small talk.
Most of the time, that’s the wrong choice. And it’s wrong because it denies us access to a powerful neural process that has evolved over millions of years to help us bond. It’s wrong because it will leave everyone less satisfied, and make a conversation feel incomplete. It’s wrong because if we acknowledge someone else’s vulnerability, and become vulnerable in return, we build trust, understanding, and connection. If you choose to embrace the How Do We Feel? conversation, you are harnessing a neurochemical process that powers our most important relationships.
How Do We Feel? is critical because it reveals what’s happening inside our heads, and opens a path to connection.
THE POWER OF QUESTIONS
Once upon a time, Nick Epley had been a very bad listener. So bad, in fact, it almost ruined his life. He had grown up in a small town in Iowa, a high school football star, as strutting and self-assured as you might imagine. Then one night, during his junior year, he was driving home from a boozy party, weaving across lanes, when he was pulled over for drunk driving. The cop saw Epley’s letterman’s jacket, which seemed to trigger a pity for youthful stupidity. So instead of putting him in handcuffs, he delivered a lecture: If you don’t turn your life around, you’re going to end up somewhere ugly. Then he called Epley’s parents and told them to come get their son.
Over the next few weeks, his mother and father lectured him relentlessly about the dangers of this path he was on. They told Epley they understood how hard it was to be a teenager; they realized he wanted to impress his friends and test his limits; they sympathized with his desire to experiment. After all, once upon a time, they had been teenagers themselves. But they were worried he was making bad choices. Epley hardly paid attention. “It kind of washed over me,” he told me. They were just adults saying the things that adults are supposed to say.
A few months later, he was pulled over for drunk driving a second time. A different cop gave him another, similar lecture and, once again, let him off after calling his folks. At that point, his parents decided, it was time for professional help.
Epley started meeting with a counselor and braced himself for more lectures and criticisms. But the counselor was completely unlike his parents, not to mention most of the other adults he had met. She didn’t give speeches or tell him he needed to turn his life around. She didn’t say she understood where he was coming from or give him advice. Instead, she simply asked questions: “Why were you drinking?” “How would you have reacted if your car had hit someone?” “What would happen to your life if you had been arrested, or had injured yourself, or had killed another person?”
“I had to sit with that,” Epley told me. “I couldn’t pretend I didn’t know the answers.”
The questions themselves didn’t ask about Epley’s emotions, but, inevitably, he became emotional as he responded to them. They pushed Epley to talk about his beliefs and values, how he felt, what he was anxious about, what he feared. He came home from each session exhausted and ashamed, scared and angry, and most of all confused, a complicated mix of feelings that usually took days to untangle. These were some of the most emotionally intense conversations of his life, even though the therapist never asked him to describe his feelings.
These sessions also seemed to unlock something. Epley began talking to his parents about what he was feeling—and listening, for the first time, as they described their own emotional lives. Epley’s dad mentioned a day, a few years earlier, when Epley had left the house early in the morning without telling his parents. They went into the basement looking for him and saw a rifle was missing. They panicked. Was he going to kill himself? His father described his grief and terror until Epley came home, unharmed and annoyed by his parents’ worry, peevishly explaining that he had gone hunting with his friends. As his father recounted the day, Epley could remember that moment, could remember that his dad had been upset, how he had brushed off his parents’ panic because it had seemed so ridiculous at the time. He hadn’t been able to hear what they were trying to say: They had wanted him to understand that he was loved. But love carries obligations to be safe, to tell others when you leave or where you are going, not to dismiss a parent’s worries. “That conversation changed our relationship,” Epley told me. “I felt so lucky I was finally able to see him as this real, complex person.”
After his second session with the counselor, Epley decided he wouldn’t drink anymore. Then he decided to get serious about school. Eventually, he enrolled at St. Olaf College, where he discovered psychology. After getting his degree, he entered a PhD program at Cornell.
While there, Epley began thinking more deeply about why, after those near arrests, he had been so unwilling to listen at first. “Sometimes you look back, and you wonder, Why was I so deaf?” Why hadn’t the police officers’ lectures scared him straight? Why had it been so easy to ignore his parents when they had pleaded, cajoled, and tried so earnestly to help him?
By 2005, Epley was a professor at the University of Chicago. He was married, starting to have kids of his own, and terrified that, someday, they would become teenagers who shut him out and refused to listen. He wanted to understand how to convince them to hear him.
