Unlocking the Secrets of Great Communication ft. Charles Duhigg

[00:00:06] Charles

When we are more deliberate about thinking about the kind of conversation we’re having, and sometimes asking what kind of conversation do people want to have, that’s when figuring it out gets pretty easy. But the truth of the matter is, it’s not that hard to begin with. All of us know, if we’re looking for the clues, we can figure out what kind of conversation this is and what the other person wants pretty quickly. It’s just a matter of reminding ourselves to look for it.

Intro 00:33

Imagine spending an hour with the world’s greatest traders. Imagine learning from their experiences, their successes and their failures. Imagine no more. Welcome to Top Traders Unplugged, the place where you can learn from the best hedge fund managers in the world so you can take your manager due diligence or investment career to the next level.

Before we begin today’s conversation, remember to keep two things in mind. All the discussion we will have about investment performance is about the past, and past performance does not guarantee or even infer anything about future performance. Also understand that there’s a significant risk of financial loss with all investment strategies, and you need to request and understand the specific risks from the investment manager about their product before you make investment decisions.

Here’s your host, veteran hedge fund manager, Niels Kaastrup-Larsen.

[00:01:28] Niels

For me, the best part of my podcasting journey has been the opportunity to speak to a huge range of extraordinary people from all around the world. In this series, I have invited one of them, namely, Kevin Coldiron, to host a series of in-depth conversations to help uncover and explain new ideas to make you a better investor. In the series, Kevin will be speaking to authors of new books and research papers to better understand the global economy and the dynamics that shape it so that we can all successfully navigate the challenges within it. With that, please welcome Kevin Coldiron.

[00:02:05] Kevin

Thanks, Niels, and welcome, everyone. Our guest today is Charles Duhigg. Charles is currently a writer for The New Yorker. He has won multiple awards as a journalist, including being part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize in exploratory journalism in 2013. He’s also the author of several books, one of them, which many of you would have read, is called “The Power of Habit”. It spent three years on the New York Times bestseller list.

He was also brave enough at one point to work as a bike messenger in San Francisco, although wise enough to quit that and move into journalism. He’s here today to talk about his latest book, which is called “Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection”, a skill that is fundamental for all of us. So, Charles, thanks so much for taking the time and joining the show today, and welcome.

[00:02:56] Charles

Thanks for having me on.

[00:02:57] Kevin

I’m going to start at the end in some sense. I try to be very diligent about reading the full book all the time. This week, I was a little pressed for time and I was tempted to skip the afterword of your book, but I didn’t. I’m really glad I didn’t because that’s where you tell the story of the moment that you started on the journey to write this book.

It sounded to me like you had reached a point where you were frustrated, or maybe even despondent, about your own ability to communicate both at work and in your personal life. I was wondering if you might be willing just to share with us how you got to that point and how that led on the journey for you writing this book.

[00:03:42] Charles

Absolutely. You’re exactly right. I was a reporter at The New York Times before joining The New Yorker and they made me a manager at the time. I basically figured how to be great at this job. I’ve had lots of managers myself. I got an MBA from Harvard Business School. So, I went in and I started the job. I was okay at the logistics part of it and the strategy parts, but I was really bad at the communication part.

That actually caught me completely off guard. I wasn’t expecting that because I’m a journalist, I’m a professional communicator. And then this thing happened at home which kind of reflected this, which is, I got into this bad pattern with my wife, who we’ve been married for 20 years. But I would come home after a long day of work, and I would complain about my day and my co-workers.

And Liz very practically and reasonably would offer me some advice, like, “Why don’t you take your boss out to lunch and get to know him a little bit better?” Instead of being able to hear what she was saying, I would get even more upset. “Why aren’t you supporting me? You’re supposed to be on my side.” She would get upset because I was attacking her for giving me good advice. I think anyone in a relationship has had this pattern, right?

[00:04:50] Kevin

That does sound somewhat familiar.

[00:04:52] Charles

Yeah. It happens. So I started calling up experts and saying to them, “Look, tell me what’s going on. Why am I so bad at this?” What they said is they said, well, first of all, we’re really glad you called because we’re actually living through this golden age of understanding the neurology of communication. Because of advances in neural imaging and data collection, we know what happens inside people’s brains when they communicate now.

They said, one of the things that we’ve discovered is that we tend to think of a discussion as being about one thing. Like we’re talking about our day or we’re talking about the kids’ grades or we’re going to go on vacation. But actually, every discussion is made up of multiple kinds of conversations. In general, those conversations tend to fall into one of three buckets.

There are these practical conversations that are about solving problems or making plans together. But then there are emotional conversations, where I might tell you what I’m feeling but I don’t want you to solve my feelings, I want you to empathize. Finally, there’s social conversations, which is about how we relate to each other, to society, the social identities that are important to us.

What they said is, we’ve discovered, if people aren’t having the same kind of conversation at the same moment, they have real trouble hearing each other, they have real trouble connecting. This has given rise to what’s known as the matching principle in psychology, that being able to communicate relies on having the same kind of conversation at the same moment.

This, of course, is exactly what was happening with my wife and myself. I was coming home and having an emotional conversation. She was responding with a practical conversation. Those are both equally legitimate conversations, but because we weren’t having the same kind of conversation at the same moment, we couldn’t really hear each other.

[00:06:30] Kevin

You come up with these four rules for a meaningful conversation. The first rule is, pay attention to what conversation is happening, literally figure out which one of those three conversations is going on. What you say is that every conversation I think is kind of a negotiation in trying to figure out which one of those conversations you’re in. How do you go about negotiating that particular example that you just said?

[00:07:04] Charles

Well, it’s important to distinguish what kind of negotiation it is. Within psychology, there’s these things that are referred to as quiet negotiations, where the goal of the negotiation is not to beat each other. It’s not for me to beat you or you to beat me. The goal of the negotiation is to figure out what the other side wants. Of course, in every negotiation, this is actually what should be your first goal.

If I’m sitting down at the table with you, I don’t know your BATNA, your best alternative to a negotiated agreement, or your walkaway number is, unless I ask you questions, and I understand how you see the world and I understand how you make decisions. So oftentimes, what we’re trying to figure out in a quiet negotiation is we’re trying to figure out what the other person wants.

Take my conversation with my wife. Now when I come home and I start complaining about my day, she’ll often say something like, “Do you want me to propose solutions to what you’re talking about, or do you just need to vent and get this off your chest?” That actually feels great to me because what she’s really doing is she’s asking, “What do you want? How can I be of help to you?”

They do something similar in schools where they teach teachers that if a student comes and they have something important to discuss, the teacher should start the conversation by saying, “Do you want to be helped, do you want to be hugged, or do you want to be heard?” which are the three kinds of conversations: the practical, the emotional, and the social.

The reason why that’s effective is because a student knows right away what they want. They can say immediately like, “I need to be hugged. I’m feeling bad about this,” or “Actually, I don’t need a hug, I need you to help me. I need some advice or some assistance,” or “This is something that’s going on that I need you to know about it. I need you to hear me.”

So I think one of the things that I carried away from this is that when we are more deliberate about thinking about the kind of conversation we’re having, and sometimes asking what kind of conversation people want to have, that’s when figuring it out gets pretty easy. But the truth of the matter is, it’s not that hard to begin with.

All of us know if we’re looking for the clues, we can figure out what kind of conversation this is and what the other person wants pretty quickly. It’s just a matter of reminding ourselves to look for it.

[00:09:21] Kevin

Does it take two people to have the communication skills to get there? For instance, let’s say you’ve done all the work, you know the three different types of conversations, but the person you’re talking to doesn’t. Is it then incumbent upon you to say, actually, this is what I want to know?

[00:09:42] Charles

Not at all, because the truth of the matter is, so if you think about it, communication is Homo sapiens’ superpower. It is the thing that, as a species, has allowed us to succeed so well. One of the consequences of that is that our brain has evolved to be very, very good at communication. So you and I are able to have conversations with all kinds of people, people that we don’t know anything about, people that we meet on the street, people who might be speaking a foreign language and we’re trying to communicate with each other.

So we’re really good at having conversations. Both people don’t have to be supercommunicators. What a supercommunicator is, is someone who has recognized that there’s a set of skills that they can cultivate so that when they do want to have a meaningful conversation, when they do want to connect with someone, they know exactly what to do.

But all of us, at some level, know how to connect with other people. It’s just that sometimes we forget it. Supercommunicators are people who are really good at remembering because they’ve thought about it.

[00:10:43] Kevin

There’s a number of examples in the book about that kind of innate ability to communicate where you have different groups of people, people either who’ve never met or who’ve never met and had been chosen because they have completely opposite political views, and within 10 minutes are having these incredibly meaningful conversations.

[00:11:10] Charles

The experiment you’re referring to is this experiment where they brought together gun rights advocates and gun control activists. These are people who were accustomed to screaming at each other on protests and rallies and stuff. They bring them together and they say, “Look, we’re going to do this experiment. We don’t expect you guys to agree with each other. We don’t even expect you to find common ground. We just want to see if you could have a civil conversation.”

So they take them through a couple of exercises to teach them some basic methods. One of the things that they teach them is they teach them the importance of proving that you’re listening. This is actually something that comes up a lot in conflict conversations, when we’re talking about something that’s really challenging like politics or religion or race, or when we disagree with someone and we’re trying to work through that disagreement.

There is an instinct in all of our brains to suspect that the other person is not actually listening to us, they’re just waiting their turn to speak. So the question is, how do we overcome that? A lot of people think that the way to show someone I’m listening is what I do when they’re talking. I shake my head up and down, I make eye contact. But talking is such a cognitively intense activity. We often don’t notice how our audience is behaving. What matters is what you do after the person stops speaking.

What they taught them at this experiment was this method known as looping for understanding. There are three steps. Ask a question, preferably a special kind of question, and there’s a deep question that we can talk about. That’s step one. Step two, after they answer the question, repeat back in your own words what you heard them say. Don’t mimic them but show that you’ve been listening and paying attention. Step number three is, ask if you got it right. This is the one that we usually forget.

What they found is that when they did this with these people who, you’re exactly right, they saw each other as enemies. It transformed those dialogues. I talked to one woman who participated, and she told a story about a shooting when she had been in school and how worried she was for her kids, and this guy who owns 47 rifles, he says, “Here’s what I heard you say. I heard you say that you have been scared in the past and you don’t want any of your kids to be scared that way. Did I get that right in my understanding?”

This woman told me it felt amazing. It felt amazing for this person, who she had always seen as an enemy, to show how much she wanted to understand what she was saying, and then she did the same thing back to him.

[00:13:42] Kevin

What was interesting, and I remember reading that in the book, is that in some sense, their underlying fears were very similar. It was about safety and control. Despite having the same underlying fear, they had chosen different extremes of positions, in their own mind I suppose, to ensure that that was satisfied. I don’t know if I’m quoting that correctly.

[00:14:09] Charles

That’s exactly right. The truth is that, again, because of how our brains have evolved, we feel wonderful when we make a connection with another person. That feeling that you have after a great conversation, that’s actually a dopamine reaction inside your brain. It’s been trained by evolution to push us to connect with other people.

So when we talk to someone, particularly someone who we think can’t understand us, and they prove that they’re trying to understand us, and that we even have something in common, it feels magical. The truth is, we can do that with anyone if we understand the skills to do it.

[00:14:47] Kevin

Yeah. That really popped out in the book multiple times. So it’s really this looping, this coming back, repeating back what the person has said. In your own words, it’s not just verbatim and then just confirming, hey, did I get that right?

[00:15:04] Charles

Yeah.

[00:15:05] Kevin

So this is actually a discussion my wife and I were having after I was telling her about your book. I was saying that it was kind of amazing they brought these people together, no apparent connections, yet they were able to communicate. So there’s this deep instinctual ability for us to communicate, yet we don’t seem to do it very well. Is there some other instinctual barriers that are stopping us from getting to that deeper connection level?

[00:15:36] Charles

Yeah, it’s a good question. It’s important to note that we actually do it well most of the time. What’s kind of amazing is like, I don’t know, how many conversations, you’ve probably talked to four or five different people today at least?

[00:15:49] Kevin

Yeah.

[00:15:51] Charles

My guess is that you were able to have conversations with each other, understand each other that it wasn’t a negative experience, you didn’t walk away saying, “I don’t understand what that person is talking about and they didn’t understand me.”

[00:16:03] Kevin

That’s right.

[00:16:04] Charles

We are actually very good at communication. You’re right though. There are these important conversations where we want to connect with someone and it doesn’t happen. So the question is, what’s going on there? It’s a couple of things. Number one. Oftentimes, we’re walking into that conversation with anxiety or with some other sort of heightened emotion that is preventing us from hearing the other person and is preventing us from having an exchange with them. That can happen a lot.

Those are what conflict conversations are. We often come into those with our fight-or-flight instincts triggered. Sometimes we come in and we’re just having different kinds of conversations. I’m talking about emotional things and you’re talking about practical things and we need to reset and say, “Let’s get on the same page here. Are we talking about solving this problem or are we just sharing the problem and how we feel about it?”

And then sometimes, we don’t know what skills to apply. Let me ask you a question. This is a good example of this. If you were having a bad day and you wanted to call someone who you know would make you feel better right away, do you know who you would call?

[00:17:14] Kevin

I do. Yeah.

[00:17:15] Charles

Who is it?

[00:17:18] Kevin

Probably my brother.

[00:17:19] Charles

Okay. So for you, your brother is a supercommunicator. He knows the right questions to ask you. He knows what to say. You’re probably a supercommunicator right back to him. You know exactly how to draw him out. What you’re doing, when you talk to your brother, is you’re using a set of skills that you’ve learned.

Now, you might think that those skills are unique to your brother or unique to your relationship with your brother. But the truth of the matter is, you can take those same skills and you can apply them to anyone if you recognize them as skills. One of the things you’re probably doing is you’re probably asking him the right question. You’re asking him what are known as deep questions. You’re asking him about his values and his beliefs and experiences instead of about the facts.

The truth of the matter is that you could do that same thing with anyone. So what supercommunicators do, there are some people who can consistently connect with almost anyone else. They have these traits in common, these skills that they all seem to know. A big part of it is just understanding that those are skills that we can use with anyone.

[00:18:30] Kevin

Okay. By the way, my wife is a very close second just in case she listens to this podcast.

[00:18:36] Charles

I’m sure so.

[00:18:37] Kevin

A very close second. You mentioned asking the right questions, and that’s something that comes up in the second part of your book where you’re talking about rule number two, which is sharing your goals and asking what others are seeking. You talk about these, I think you call them deep, vulnerable questions, questions that elicit emotions in other people.

I was wondering if you could maybe give us some examples of questions that would come up in just regular conversations that we can all use.

[00:19:11] Charles

It’s important to note that it doesn’t have to elicit emotions, it does have to elicit values or beliefs or experiences. Often, for many people, those are synonymous with some emotions that they have. Here’s a good example. If you bump into a doctor, the easiest thing to ask him is, “Where do you practice medicine? What hospital do you work at?” That’s not really a deep question. In fact, that’s a shallow question.

A deep question would be to say, “What made you decide to go to medical school?” Or “What do you love about your job? Do you like being a doctor? Do you enjoy it?” Those are questions that invite someone to tell you about who they really are. Now, there might be some emotions in those responses.

Someone might say, “I’m so proud to be a doctor. I feel like I help so many people and it makes me so happy.” But they could also say, “I became a doctor because I really wanted a stable job, and I knew that there was always going to be demand for someone who can practice medicine.” Both of those responses are deep answers because they tell me something about who you are.

They give me a sense of how you see the world and what your values are and what’s important to you. They tell me what kind of conversation you want to have, whether you’re an emotional mindset or a practical mindset or a social mindset. So it’s really important to train ourselves not to ask about the facts of someone’s life but how they feel about their life.

That’s where a deep question resides. We’re always really asking why, why do you make the choices you make, and it can be really powerful.

[00:20:43] Kevin

You say that when you ask those questions, the “why” questions, that when you get an answer, it’s very important that you reciprocate, that you then respond with your own “why”.

[00:20:59] Charles

Yeah, that’s exactly right. One of the best things about a deep question is that when we ask a deep question, it’s very, very natural to answer that question ourselves. If I ask you, “Why did you decide to become a doctor?” and you say, “Oh, man, when I was a kid, my dad got sick, and I just saw what those nurses and physicians could do for him,” it’s very natural for me to be like, “That’s interesting. I became a lawyer because when I was young, my uncle got arrested and I thought of the lawyer as the person who saved us.”

It doesn’t feel at that moment that I’m forcing my story on you. If you don’t think to ask me a question in return, that’s okay because it’s very natural for me to answer my own question when it’s a deep question. It’s a little bit clumsier if I ask you, “Where do you practice medicine?” and you say, “University Hospital?” And I say, “Oh, that’s funny. I’m a lawyer at Lantham Wright” That doesn’t make any sense. It seems like I’m just bringing up random facts.

But deep questions are special, because not only do they allow and invite the other person to say something meaningful, it allows us to say something meaningful about ourselves.

[00:22:06] Kevin

These deep questions, are they appropriate in any context? I’m thinking here about our listeners who are, for the most part investors, businesspeople. Do these questions work in business settings as well?

[00:22:22] Charles

Absolutely. In those minutes before a meeting starts when you’re trying to get to know someone, “So why did you decide to become an investor? What’s your favorite part of your job? Where’d you go to school?” “Oh, I went to Harvard Business School.” “Oh, yeah. What was that like? Did you enjoy that? Are you glad you went?” Those are super easy questions to ask. They don’t seem overly personal or intrusive.

Sometimes people don’t want to have a conversation. Sometimes we get in the Uber and we don’t want to talk to a driver. We just want to check our email. That’s okay. That’s totally, totally fine. Sometimes you ask someone a deep question and they’re like, “Yeah, I liked HBS. Let’s get down to business.”

The point is not that we have to have a deep conversation or a meaningful conversation every single time we meet someone, but that when we do want to have a meaningful conversation, we have the skills and the tools available to us in order to make it go well.

[00:23:19] Kevin

I had a question for you about a conversation you recall on the book with I think, is it Nicholas Epley?

[00:23:28] Charles

Yeah, Nick.

[00:23:30] Kevin

So, he’s the psychologist from the University of Chicago who had been brought into work with this hedge fund group and help them learn to be better listeners.

You recount a conversation that you had with him where you’re calling him, you’ve got your reporter’s hat on, you’re trying to get facts from him, and then he’s responding with these questions about you. You kept trying to bring it back to the facts and he kept trying to do more deep questions.

In the end, you said that you found the conversation meaningful. But I have to say, as I was reading that, I’m thinking, well, this guy is not picking up on what you want out of the conversation.

[00:24:18] Charles

I think he actually was. That’s funny. I hadn’t thought about that. I completely understand what you’re saying, that it could seem like we’re two ships passing in the night because he’s asking one kind of question and I’m trying to ask a different kind of question. But I think what’s happening there, and I should explain the experiment that Nick Epley does, because Nick Epley is wonderful.

I give a bunch of speeches about this book “Supercommunicators” sometimes to private equity or hedge funds or other financial professionals. I repeat in those speeches one of the experiments he does, which is that at the beginning of the speech, I tell everyone, I’m going to ask you in 30 minutes to turn to the person next to you, someone whom hopefully you don’t know, and to ask and answer one question. “When is the last time you cried in front of another person?”

When I ask this, everyone’s like, “Oh, nuts.” Then I usually say, “Who’s enthusiastic about this?” Not one hand goes up. Nobody came to a conference wanting to have a therapy session with a stranger sitting next to them. And then I explain why they should want to do this, why that’s a deep conversation, why deep questions are so important. And then we do the experiment.

We spend two minutes, two and a half minutes per person having that conversation, and people love it. They will not shut up. They just talk and talk and talk. Some of them say it’s the best conversation they’ve had in the last month. Nick has done this experiment thousands and thousands of times. The reason it works is because he recognizes what a conversation ought to be, which is the same thing that he did with me, which is, a conversation is an opportunity for us to understand each other and to understand ourselves. It’s an opportunity for us to connect with each other.

If I’m asking him a bunch of questions about, “Hey, this scientific paper, how did you write that, why’d you write this?” And he’s like, “Look, what the thing that’s actually important to me is I’ve got these two kids that I adopted from Ethiopia,” which in his case is true, “and I’m so proud of them. It gives me such joy.” To have that conversation means that when I ask him about his work and his studies, I understand it so much better.

So what he was actually doing is he was inviting me to match him. Part of this matching doesn’t just mean that I conform to you. It means that I know how to invite you to match me as well.

[00:26:44] Kevin

So, in the end, you were able to get the information that you wanted to but you feel you were able maybe to get more information or understand the context better because you understood the person better.

[00:26:58] Charles

Exactly. Sometimes we don’t really know what information we want. This happens a lot as a journalist. When I’m calling someone, what I’m really trying to do is I’m trying to get them to tell me what questions I should ask them that are the most interesting questions, because they know what’s interesting about their brain better than I know what’s interesting about their brain.

So when you find someone who’s really talented like Nick, what they do is they say, here’s what I’m thinking about. I can relate what I’m thinking about and what I care about to the question you asked. But there’s actually an even more interesting question underneath that. There’s a more interesting piece of information that it might not occur to you to ask for.

Now, sometimes we do call. We call customer service when we need to change our flight and we just say, look, I just need to change the flight. That’s not really a conversation though, right? That’s basically like a transaction. But when it’s an actual conversation, understanding who the other person is, giving them the space to explain who they are, that will make it so much better, and you’ll learn so much more.

[00:28:04] Kevin

The private equity funds, the hedge funds where you do your work and Nick does his work for, their goal is to make their employees connect better with the people that they’re considering investing with or that are considering investing with them. Obviously, they find value in it.

[00:28:24] Charles

There’s a couple of things going on there. Because I’ve talked to a number of the funds or the professionals who were at when Nick did this one thing that we talk about in the book. Part of it is that if you’re an investment professional, you need to be able to listen really, really well.

Sometimes you’re watching someone respond to questions in an earnings call or something like that. Most people will miss how someone failed to answer a question or how they dodged a topic. But if you know how to listen really, really well, you can pick up on what goes unsaid.

Sometimes it’s just we have 100 people working in this firm, all the analysts basically have to interact with each other a little bit. We want them to get along. we want them to share ideas. We want them to share information. We want them to feel happy here. Having friends at work is the most important thing to actually enjoying your work. Or sometimes, yeah, it’s talking to your investors, your LPs.

If I go and I raise money from Yale endowment, then maybe having a personal relationship with them isn’t that important. But actually, and I say this as a Yale graduate who knew David Swensen when he was there, David as much as anyone else wanted to feel a connection to the people he was giving his hundreds of millions and billions to.

So knowing how to connect with another person, even if you’re in the most technical industry possible, it’s really important because we talk to other people all day long.

[00:29:58] Kevin

I have to say, that’s a lesson that took me quite a while to learn because an investor, as a professional investor, we were quantitatively oriented, we built models. So, it was all very mathematical model-driven. But at the end of the day, getting to know your investors is important because in those times let’s say when things aren’t going well and you need to buy yourself another quarter to turn things around or another year, having some personal connection can really help. They trust you or they understand your motivations better.

[00:30:33] Charles

I’ll point out to Jim Simons, the founder of Renaissance, which is absolutely the most successful hedge fund in history. It returned 66% returns per year since it was founded in the early ’80s. He was quant’s quant. He was a math genius and he basically birthed quantitative investing. Even he would talk about the importance of communication.

In fact, at one point, he got into a big fight with his partners, one of his co-founders, and it distracted everyone for a long time. He will talk about everything that we do is based on math, but the only way we can get that math off the screen and into the market is by understanding how to communicate with each other. Communication is really important.

[00:31:28] Kevin

You talked a few minutes ago about the different types of communication. You were talking about earnings calls. Obviously, there’s verbal communication, but there’s also nonverbal communication, which can be extremely important in terms of…

You give the example in the book, a great story about this NASA recruiter who was trying to find astronauts and was subjecting them to the normal battery of psychological tests, and it wasn’t really producing any discernible results. He ends up going back and watching I think you said 20 years’ worth of interviews. Maybe you could explain what he ended up seeing in those interviews that helped him.

[00:32:14] Charles

So this was in the early 1980s and NASA faced an interesting problem, which is, Ronald Reagan, President Reagan had come to them and said, I want you to start preparing for having a space station and sending astronauts in missions of 6 to 12 months. For NASA, that’s a problem because until then, basically, their longest missions had been about 10 days long.

The thing about sending someone into space or even a couple of people into space for 10 days is it really doesn’t matter if they get along. They’re only up there for 10 days. They’re professional enough, many of them are ex-military, they can deal with each other. But if you send people into space for 6 months or 12 months and they’re living in this tin can next to each other and they don’t get along, it’s disastrous. There had been a couple of incidents to show just how bad this could get.

So they say, look, we need to start hiring astronauts who have high emotional intelligence. The problem for them is that it’s really hard to tell who has good emotional intelligence when you get to the final rounds of an astronaut interview. Because by the time you make it into the final rounds, you’re like handsome or beautiful. You’ve got two PhDs. You have this stellar resume.

Most importantly, you’ve been doing interviews your entire life. You are so good at interviewing, you know exactly what your biggest weakness is and how to describe it. So what they found is that they could not tell the difference from interviews between who actually had emotional intelligence and who could fake it really, really well.

But on the other hand, if you send them into space for six months, you can tell after about a month and a half or two months who’s faking it and who’s actually emotionally intelligent. So they try and figure out, how do we tell the fakers from the real thing? You’re exactly right.

This guy who was the lead psychiatrist for manned spaceflight at NASA, he starts listening to recordings of old interviews, he starts looking because he knew which of the astronauts went on to be really good leaders and which got washed out. He’s looking for some difference and he’s just batting his head against the wall. Eventually, he realizes the really good astronauts, they laugh differently than everyone else.

So he comes up with this new way to interview candidates. Now what he does is he walks into the interview room and he’s holding a big stack of papers. As he’s coming in, he trips, as if by accident, and he spills the papers everywhere. And then he laughs this big boisterous laugh. He goes like, “Ha, ha, ha, ha! I am such a klutz.” And he pays close attention to how the candidate reacts. Because he knows something’s going on here.

He made a mistake, and then to compound that mistake, he kind of overreacted. He laughs in this kind of like over-the-top, we’ve all been there. We’ve done something dumb and then we make it even worse by overreacting to what we’ve done, trying to play it off. And he wants to pay attention to what the astronauts do in response. He finds that some of them, everyone would laugh in response because they’re just self applied. So, everyone would say, “That’s really silly. Let me give you a hand with that.”

And then some other candidates would go, “Ha, ha, ha! That’s really silly. Let me give you a hand with that.” Those people who matched his intensity, who matched his loudness, his energy, what they were really saying was, “I want to make you feel comfortable. You just spilled papers and then you did this kind of crazy laugh. I want to show you that that’s okay. I’m right there with you. I want to match you.”

What he discovered is that the way to figure out who had emotional intelligence was to pay attention to who matched his energy and who matched his demeanor. At some point, he would mention someone who had passed away in this family. Everyone would say basically the same thing. Everyone would say “Oh, my condolences.” And then some candidates would just say “my condolences” and then wait for the next question.

But some would say, “Oh, my condolences. I know how hard that is. What was your sister like?” It’s the people who showed him that they wanted to connect with him who were the ones who were emotionally intelligent. At its core, that’s what supercommunicators do. They show us that they want to connect with us.

[00:36:28] Kevin

Yeah, I think you say that it shows a desire to align. That’s when it works. What happens in a situation where (how do I want to phrase this), sometimes I might have a guest show up on the podcast. We chat for a few minutes ahead of time, and oftentimes, it’s people like you who have published a book, you’re doing a lot of podcasts, you might be sick of doing podcasts. So the green room chat is you can tell their mood isn’t great. I don’t really want to match that mood, but at the same time, you want to also not dismiss it.

[00:37:07] Charles

Matching doesn’t necessarily mean mimicry. If you’re feeling angry, I don’t have to show you that I feel angry too. Sometimes matching is just acknowledging that you feel a certain way. Take for instance if someone passes away. If I say, “Oh, you know, last week my aunt passed away,” which is not true, but let’s say I said that.

The wrong thing to do is to be like, “Oh, I know exactly what you’re feeling. My dog died seven years ago, and I still think about him sometimes.” That’s not matching. That’s trying to steal the spotlight. What’s much better is to say like, “Tell me about your aunt. I’m so sorry. I know how hard that is. Tell me, what was she like?”

Sometimes we walk into a green room and someone’s just like, they’re on their third interview of the day. It’s totally fine to say the way to match you is just to give you your space to get ready for this interview, I’m not going to try and get into your head. Or to say, hey, look, as we’re waiting for this to start, I don’t know, what’s the most interesting thing you’ve done this week, something that you’re not going to talk about on the podcast, something that has nothing to do with their book or what they’re there to promote.

It is so nice. It’s so nice when somebody asks you something that’s unexpected and kind of fun to answer. That’s a form of matching. It’s saying basically, I see that you do not want yet another person to harass you in the green room about your book. So instead, I’m going to talk to you about a totally normal thing that humans talk to each other about. That’s better.

[00:38:43] Kevin

Good. well, now I’m armed with that tool next time it happens. I appreciate that. I wanted to maybe just talk about the role of identities in communication because that’s, I think, rule number four, which is to explore if identities are important to the discussion. It seems like a topic that’s exceptionally important right now because identity politics or identities have become so prominent in everything we do.

I have to say that your book helped me think about it a little differently. I think previously, I was like, “Well, there’s too much emphasis on identity politics. We ought to just all put that aside.” And really, what you’re saying is, hey, we’ve all got multiple identities, and the way forward is to expand the conversation to introduce those other identities, and at some point, there’s going to be overlap and you’ll find it. You’ll find a connection.

[00:39:51] Charles

Yeah. When we talk about identities, sometimes people just default to race or politics. But I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico. That’s part of my identity. I live in Santa Cruz, California. That’s part of my identity. I’m a surfer. That’s part of my identity. Being a journalist is part of my identity. There are a thousand different things about you. You’re a partner, you’re a father, you’re a businessperson, you’re someone who lives in California. Those are also identities.

Some of those identities might not be important, they might not be important to this conversation. That’s why rather than always force identities into a conversation, just try and figure out if identities are important. But if we’re talking about something where you feel like your experiences and who you are informs it in an important way, then I want to know that.

If you were to ask me a question about the Southwest, I would say, well, look as someone who grew up in Albuquerque, I feel like I can answer that question from a unique perspective. That identity is important to how I see myself. Now, when this gets really bad is when we focus on one identity. When I say to you, “As the Black man in this room, as the woman in this company, what do you think about X?”

Because what I’m doing in that moment is I’m pushing that person into a corner. I’m pushing them into a stereotype. It might not be a stereotype that they feel like is germane to who they are. On the other hand, if I do something very different, and experiments have shown this is really, really successful.

If I say, “Look, I’m wondering as we’re talking about policing, as a Black man, you probably have some perspectives on policing. But I know you’re also an attorney, and that probably gives you some different perspectives on police force. I know that you’re a dad and I know that you’re a manager at this company and I know that we both coach Little League together. All those different hats, that probably gives you slightly different perspectives on this question. How do you think about policing?”

Now what I’ve done is I’ve basically said, I’m not going to push you into a corner. Rather, I’m going to acknowledge that there’s a lot of different aspects to who you are. The fact that you’re Black or that you’re a manager or you’re a Little League coach, that’s not inessential. But it also isn’t the defining characteristic. You can tell me how much you look to that identity to help you see the world. Again, what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to invite someone to share to help me understand.

[00:42:26] Kevin

When you talked earlier about putting someone in a box, a single identity box, is that what you mean by identity threat? Because you talk about that as being something that’s a real hindrance to conflict resolution.

[00:42:41] Charles

Absolutely. There’s a lot of literature about identity threat, that basically, what happens is that when we do try and identify someone by one identity, oftentimes what we’re doing is we’re assigning them membership in a group that they’re not completely enthusiastic about or denying them membership in a group that they want to belong to.

So, if I say, “You don’t have kids so you probably don’t understand what I mean when I’m talking about schools,” what I’m doing is I’m basically forcing you into this club of people who don’t care about schools and don’t know anything about schools. And you’re like, “No, I’m a teacher. I actually know plenty of stuff about schools.” Or if I say, “You’re a Republican, so you must be for cutting taxes.”

Identity threat is that instinct to be like, “Yeah, I am a Republican, but actually, also, I believe that some things should be taxed.” Not all Republicans are exactly the same. There’s a lot of varied beliefs among Republicans. So identity threat is what happens when we feel like someone else is forcing us into that corner. It triggers that fight or flight response inside our brain.

So the best thing that we can do as the person who’s asking the question and as the recipient of the question is bring in other identities. That creates space for people to explore and explain who they really are.

[00:44:02] Kevin

There’s a great example of that in the book, from Iraq, where you talk about this soccer league that was set up in Iraq. I wonder maybe if you could just explain that because it sounds like such a great story.

[00:44:20] Charles

I love the story. So this is a researcher who’s now at Dartmouth. She was at Stanford. Is she at Dartmouth now? No, she’s at Yale now. When she was a PhD candidate at Stanford, she conducted this experiment. She speaks Arabic, and she went to Iraq. She went to a part of Iraq where there was a large Christian population and a smaller Muslim population.

These populations had always been very, very divided. I used to live in Iraq. I was a reporter there. In front of grocery stores, they’ll have someone who checks your ID that says what religion you are. So there was Christian grocery stores and Muslim grocery stores, Christian restaurants and Muslim restaurants. They basically never mixed.

So there were a bunch of Christian soccer leagues and a few Muslim soccer leagues, but mostly the Christians dominated the soccer leagues. She comes to town, and she says, “Okay, we’re going to do a new tournament. We’re going to start a new league. You should actually join because we’re going to give you new jerseys and we’re going to have all these super nice trophies to give away and we’re going to have professional refs.”

So everyone wanted to be a part of this. She said, “Look, here’s the deal. If you do join, half the teams, we’re going to add three players to your team roster, and of course, the three players we are going to add our Muslim players.” So they have some teams that are purely Christian and some teams that are Christian and Muslim. And then they basically just step back to see what happens.

What they find is that at first, basically, all those old divisions, they still were there. The Muslims, and the Christians wouldn’t sit next to each other on the benches. The Christians actually, instead of speaking Arabic that everyone knew, they spoke this language that basically only Christian speak. So the Muslims, they’d be on the field and the Muslim players couldn’t understand what was being said.

What they noticed is that the teams that were doing that, they were losing. Because when you’re on a soccer field, you need to be able to communicate with each other. You need to be able to play with each other. You need to know how to work on the plays during practice. So once the identity shifted from what’s important here is your religion to what’s important here is what helps us win, then things started to shift.

Then they did this other interesting thing. They assigned people roles that were very salient to the team. So there was one guy who it was his job to bring the sports drinks. There was another guy, it was his job to give a pep talk during the warmups. There was another guy who it was his job to count how many saves the goalie made. They gave everyone jobs and identities and roles that had to do with the soccer team as opposed to had to do with society at large.

What started happening is that people started defining each other on those identities. The fact that you’re Muslim and I’m Christian doesn’t actually matter as much as you’re the guy who brings me my sports drink. When we’re together and playing soccer, that sports drink is really, really important.

So what we know is that our environment, particularly the salience of our identity in an environment matters a lot. So when we downplay those things that might be divisive and we emphasize those things that give us a common goal, oftentimes, that’s where we find new identities that allow us to connect with each other. I’m sure everyone has experienced this on their own.

[00:47:50] Kevin

Yeah. I just think that’s a message that is really important for all of us right now in this particular moment. Is that something that we can translate into online communication? You talk about this a little bit and the difficulties of taking some of the experiments that were done in person and trying to translate them online. Can that be done?

[00:48:20] Charles

Yeah. Absolutely.

[00:48:22] Kevin

Are there different rules for online engagement?

[00:48:24] Charles

Yeah. So that’s the key is that each form of communication has its own rules. One of my favorite examples of this is that 100 years ago, when telephones first became popular, there were all these articles that appeared that said no one will ever have a real conversation on the telephone. Because up till then, all conversations had happened basically face-to-face.

They said, look, if you can’t see the person, you’re not going to be able to really talk with them. What’s interesting is that at that moment, they were exactly right. If you look at early transcripts of phone conversations, people basically used them as telegrams. They would send stock orders or grocery lists. Now, by the time you and I and everyone listening was in middle school, we can have conversations for like seven hours a night on the phone, and these are the most meaningful conversations of our lives.

It’s because we learned what the rules for phones are. In fact, we learned them so well we didn’t even realize they were rules. But even today, when you get on the telephone, you will over-enunciate your words a little bit. You will put more emotion into your voice because you know that the person you’re talking to can’t see you. There are rules for phone conversation that we have learned so well that we don’t think of them as rules. The same thing is happening with online discussions. Do you have any kids?

[00:49:40] Kevin

I do.

[00:49:41] Charles

Okay. How old are your kids?

[00:49:42] Kevin

They’re 26, 24, 22 and 20.

[00:49:47] Charles

Perfect age. Next time you see them, ask them to open up their messages app and show you messages that they’ve sent that are just emojis. What you’ll see is that they’ve sent other people a line of emojis and ask them to decode it. What they’ll tell you is, here’s the message that I sent this person. Inevitably, it’s, here’s something emotional that I want to share with you. I was angry, smiley face, winking face, whatever it is. They have learned how to use emojis as an emotional form of communication.

For those of us who didn’t grow up with it, we have to think a little bit more about it. We have to study the rules because they’re not quite as intuitive. But the truth is that texting someone has slightly different rules than calling someone, than emailing someone, than talking to someone face to face.

When we get into trouble is when we forget to pay attention to those rules. But it’s really just taking a couple seconds to say, look, I’m about to send a text, what are the rules of texting? And then it can be as robust a form of communication as anything else.

[00:50:54] Kevin

I’m really glad we had that bit of the conversation because that makes me very optimistic that we’ll, as a society, work through the ability to communicate online, and personally, that I’ll get my emojis because I definitely get embarrassed if I send the wrong emoji, which I seem to do a lot.

I know we’ve only got a few minutes, and there’s one, I don’t know if you want to call it a slightly controversial question I wanted to ask, and it’s about the difference between communication and manipulation. I’m just being honest, this came up with me a couple of times in the stories in your book. Actually, the very first story, we were talking about this CIA agent who’s in Europe. He’s trying to recruit a spy, he’s never been able to do it. He finally has one in his sights.

This is a woman from the Middle East. He’s trying to recruit her and he’s failing. He’s at basically their last meeting and she doesn’t want to do it. Eventually, he breaks down and he tells her this emotional story about his past. And for whatever reason, that triggers an emotional response in her and she’s like, “Yeah, I’ll do it. I want to do it.” So is that manipulation? That’s my question.

[00:52:16] Charles

It’s a good question. I’ll say two things. Communication is built on a series of tools or skills, and “Supercommunicators”, the book, the goal is to draw out these skills and teach them to people, these tools. An axe is a tool that you can use to build a house or it’s a tool that you can use to cut someone’s head off. It really has to do with whoever’s holding that axe. That doesn’t mean the axe is good or bad. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have axes in the world. It has to do with the intent of the person.

Now, the thing I will say is, when it comes to this question of manipulation, humans are actually very, very good at avoiding manipulation. There’s been a bunch of studies that have been done looking at scam artists. What you find inevitably, when you talk to the victim of a scam artist is they don’t say, “Oh, I really believed he was a prince.” What they say is, “I was really, really lonely. Actually, the fact that he kept on saying he was a prince, I was willing to basically indulge that because it gave me someone to talk to.”

It’s not that they’re getting the wool pulled over their eyes. It’s that they are willing to ignore the wool because they’re getting something else from it and it gets out of hand. One of the things that I think happens is that when we’re in a conversation and the other person is being inauthentic, we pick up on it very, very quickly. We’ve all been in that conversation where someone says, “Where did you go on vacation?” And it only takes us like five seconds to realize they don’t care where we went on vacation, they just want to tell us where they went on vacation. They want to brag about the yacht they rented.

We have a hair trigger in our brains to detect inauthenticity. So in the case of Jim Lawler, the CIA officer you mentioned, if he had tried to fake that connection, if he had tried to manipulate this woman, Yasmin, which he had tried before, it just wouldn’t have worked. The reason why she was able to hear what he was saying and say, actually, you want the same thing for my country that I want for my country, we can work together I can trust you, is because he stopped trying to manipulate her.

He basically said, look, I don’t think this is going to work. I’m just going to give up trying to recruit this woman and I’m just going to be honest with her because I have nothing left to lose. That’s when they started to hear each other. He actually told me. I said, “Did you use this technique going forward?” And he was like, “Yeah, but it doesn’t work all the time. For years, it didn’t work for me because I was trying to force it. I was trying to use it as a manipulation tool.”

You can’t trick someone into taking a suicidal risk. You have to actually care about them to convince them that you care about them. So I’m less concerned about manipulation and more concerned about situations where people genuinely want to connect with each other and are having trouble doing so because they don’t have the tools available to them.

[00:55:13] Kevin

Okay. So even though he in some sense got what he wanted, that wasn’t manipulation.

[00:55:21] Charles

If I tell my wife that I love her, I get what I want. She loves me back. That doesn’t mean it’s manipulative to tell her that I love her. It’s truthful. Apologies, I have to jump.

[00:55:34] Kevin

Understood. Well, thanks so much for joining us, Charles. Just for everyone, the book is called “Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection.” It’s an important book. It’s a fun one. So I encourage everyone to go out and read it. Charles, thanks again and we wish you all the best.

[00:55:53] Charles

Thanks for having me on.

[00:55:56] Ending

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