Supercommunicators - How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

many discussions are actually three different conversations. There are practical, decision-making conversations that focus on What’s This Really About? There are emotional conversations, which ask How Do We Feel? And there are social conversations that explore Who Are We? We are often moving in and out of all three conversations as a dialogue unfolds. However, if we aren’t having the same kind of conversation as our partners, at the same moment, we’re unlikely to connect with each other.

Our goal, for the most meaningful discussions, should be to have a “learning conversation.” Specifically, we want to learn how the people around us see the world and help them understand our perspectives in turn.

there’s also been a flurry of research showing that at the heart of every conversation is the potential for neurological synchronization, an alignment of our brains and bodies—everything from how fast each of us breathes to the goose bumps on our skin—that we often fail to notice, but which influences how we talk, hear, and think.

But when Sievers looked at the data, he found that strong leaders didn’t help people align. In fact, groups with a dominant leader had the least amount of neural synchrony. Participant 4 made it harder for his groupmates to sync up. When he dominated the conversation, he pushed everyone else into their own, separate thoughts.

the groups with the greatest synchrony had one or two people who behaved very differently from Participant 4. These people tended to speak less than dominant leaders, and when they did open their mouths, it was usually to ask questions. They repeated others’ ideas and were quick to admit their own confusion or make fun of themselves. They encouraged their groupmates (“ That’s really smart! Tell me more about what you think!”) and laughed at others’ jokes. They didn’t stand out as particularly talkative or clever, but when they spoke, everyone listened closely.

High centrality participants tended to ask ten to twenty times as many questions as other participants. When a group got stuck, they made it easy for everyone to take a quick break by bringing up a new topic or interrupting an awkward silence with a joke.

But the most important difference between high centrality participants and everyone else was that the high centrality participants were constantly adjusting how they communicated, in order to match their companions. They subtly reflected shifts in other people’s moods and attitudes. When someone got serious, they matched that seriousness. When a discussion went light, they were the first to play along.

Simplifying greatly, there are three kinds of conversation that dominate most discussions. These three conversations—which correspond to practical decision-making conversations, emotional conversations, and conversations about identity—are best captured by three questions: What’s This Really About?, How Do We Feel?, and Who Are We? Each of these conversations, as we will see, draws on a different type of mindset and mental processing.

Miscommunication occurs when people are having different kinds of conversations. If you are speaking emotionally, while I’m talking practically, we are, in essence, using different cognitive languages. (This explains why, when you complain about your boss—“ Jim is driving me crazy!”—and your spouse responds with a practical suggestion—“ What if you just invited him to lunch?”—it’s more apt to create conflict than connection: “I’m not asking you to solve this! I just want some empathy.”)

Happy couples ask each other more questions, repeat what the other person said, make tension-easing jokes, get serious together. The next time you feel yourself edging toward an argument, try asking your partner: “Do you want to talk about our emotions? Or do we need to make a decision together? Or is this about something else?”

Effective communication requires recognizing what kind of conversation is occurring, and then matching each other. On a very basic level, if someone seems emotional, allow yourself to become emotional as well. If someone is intent on decision making, match that focus. If they are preoccupied by social implications, reflect their fixation back to them.

When we match someone’s mindset, a permission is granted: To enter another person’s head, to see the world through their eyes, to understand what they care about and need. And we give them permission to understand—and hear—us in return. “Conversations are the most powerful thing on earth,” Lawler told me.

during the most meaningful conversations, the best communicators focus on four basic rules that create a learning conversation:

The most effective communicators pause before they speak and ask themselves: Why am I opening my mouth? Unless we know what kind of discussion we’re hoping for—and what type of discussion our companions want—we’re at a disadvantage.

So the first goal in a learning conversation is identifying what kind of dialogue we’re seeking—and then looking for clues about what the other parties want.

When someone says something and then laughs afterward—even if it wasn’t funny—it’s a hint they’re enjoying the conversation. When someone makes noises as they listen (“ Yeah,” “Uh-huh,” “Interesting”), it’s a sign they’re engaged, what linguists call backchanneling. When someone asks follow-up questions (“ What do you mean?” “Why do you think he said that?”), it’s a clue they’re interested, whereas statements that change the subject (“ Let me ask you about this other thing”) are hints they’re ready to move on.

So, in the moments before a conversation starts, it’s useful to describe for yourself: What are two topics you might discuss? (Being general is okay: Last night’s game and TV shows you like) What is one thing you hope to say? What is one question you will ask?

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 contrast, questions that pushed people to describe their beliefs, values, or meaningful experiences tended to result in emotional replies, even if the questions themselves didn’t seem all that emotional. These kinds of questions were powerful because they often prompted people to reveal vulnerabilities. When someone asks “What do you value most in a friendship?” (question sixteen), it might not seem particularly emotionally probing, but it frequently draws unexpectedly revealing replies about past incidents of hurt or betrayal, or expressions of love for friends, or other anxieties or pleasures. Such questions make ever-deepening follow-ups (“ What did you say after he broke up with you?”) easy to ask.

Put another way, if you want to have a successful conversation with someone, you don’t have to ask them about their worst memories or how they prepare for telephone calls. You just have to ask them to describe how they feel about their life—rather than the facts of their life—and then ask lots of follow-ups. Questions about facts (“ Where do you live?” “What college did you attend?”) are often conversational dead-ends. They don’t draw out values or experiences. They don’t invite vulnerability. However, those same inquiries, recast slightly (“ What do you like about where you live?” “What was your favorite part of college?”), invite others to share their preferences, beliefs, and values, and to describe experiences that caused them to grow or change.

“The best listeners aren’t just listening,” said Margaret Clark, the Yale psychologist. “They’re triggering emotions by asking questions, expressing their own emotions, doing things that prompt the other person to say something real.”

Dozens of other studies from the University of Utah, the University of Pennsylvania, Emory, and elsewhere have found that people who ask lots of questions during conversations—particularly questions that invite vulnerable responses—are more popular among their peers and more often seen as leaders. They have more social influence and are sought out more frequently for friendship and advice. Any of us can do this in nearly any setting or conversation, be it with a roommate, a coworker, or someone we just met. We simply need to ask people how they feel and reciprocate the vulnerability they share with us.

When my father died a few years ago and I told people I had recently attended his funeral, some of them offered their condolences. But almost no one asked me any questions. Instead, they quickly moved on to other subjects. The truth was, I was desperate to talk about what I had been through, about my dad, about the eulogies that had made me so proud and sad, about how it feels to know I won’t be able to call him with good news. His death was one of the most important—most emotional and profound—events in my life. I would have treasured someone asking, “What was your dad like?” But outside of my closest friends and family, no one asked anything, either because they didn’t know how, or because it felt impolite, or they didn’t know I wanted to talk, or because they worried that, if I answered, they wouldn’t know what to say next.

“It is easier to judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers,” the nineteenth-century thinker Pierre-Marc-Gaston de Lévis wrote, and yet he stayed silent on which questions, exactly, should be asked. Science has provided guidance: Ask others about their beliefs and values. Ask them about experiences and those moments that caused them to change. Ask how they feel, rather than about facts. Reframe your questions so they are deeper. Ask follow-ups. And as people expose their vulnerabilities, reveal something about yourself. It will be less uncomfortable than you imagine. It will be more fascinating than you think. And it might lead to a moment of true connection.

Laughter might seem like a strange place to look for emotional intelligence, but, in fact, it’s an example of a basic truth of emotional communication: What’s important is not just hearing another person’s feelings but showing that we have heard them. Laughter is one way of proving that we hear how someone feels.

“Contrary to our expectations,” he reported in the journal American Scientist, “we found that most conversational laughter is not a response to structured attempts at humor, such as jokes or stories. Less than 20 percent of the laughter in our sample was a response to anything resembling a formal effort at humor.” Rather, people laughed because they wanted to connect with the person they were speaking with.

“Mutual playfulness, in-group feeling and positive emotional tone—not comedy—mark the social settings of most naturally occurring laughter,” Provine concluded. Laughter is powerful, he wrote, because it is contagious, “immediate and involuntary, involving the most direct communication possible between people: Brain to brain.” We laugh, in other words, to show someone that we want to connect with them—and our companions laugh back to demonstrate they want to connect with us, as well.

As the human rights activist Dorothy Thomas once wrote, “Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with it.”

she realized that she had made a common mistake in her more youthful days: She had assumed that the goal of discussing a conflict and engaging in debate was achieving victory, defeating the other side. But that’s not right. Rather, the real goal is figuring out why a conflict exists in the first place.

When we’re speaking, we’re frequently so focused on what we are saying that we don’t pick up on how our listeners are behaving. We miss the signals that listeners are trying to send to show they are following along. So if a listener wants to prove they’re listening, they need to demonstrate it after the speaker finishes talking. If we want to show someone we’re paying attention, we need to prove, once that person has stopped speaking, that we have absorbed what they said. And the best way to do that is by repeating, in our own words, what we just heard them say—and then asking if we got it right.

It’s a fairly simple technique—prove you are listening by asking the speaker questions, reflecting back what you just heard, and then seeking confirmation you understand—but studies show it is the single most effective technique for proving to someone that we want to hear them. It’s a formula sometimes called looping for understanding.[*] The goal is not to repeat what someone has said verbatim, but rather to distill the other person’s thoughts in your own words, prove you are working hard to understand and see their perspective—and then repeat the process, again and again, until everyone is satisfied.

Happy couples, for instance, spent a lot of time controlling their own emotions. They would take breaks when they felt themselves growing angry. They worked hard to calm down through deep breathing, or by writing down how they were feeling rather than shouting it, or by falling back on habits—using “I statements”; reciting a list of what they loved about each other; bringing up happy memories—that they had practiced during less angry times. They tended to speak more slowly, so they could stop, midsentence, if something came out harsher than they intended. They were more likely to defuse tensions by changing the subject or making jokes. “Happy couples slow down the fight,” said Karney. “They exert a lot more self-control and self-awareness.”

Finally, happy couples seemed to concentrate more on controlling the boundaries of the conflict itself. “Happy couples, when they fight, usually try to make the fight as small as possible, not let it bleed into other fights,” said Karney. But unhappy couples let one area of disagreement spill into everything else. “They start arguing about, ‘Are we spending the holidays with my family or yours?’ and pretty soon it becomes, ‘You’re so selfish, you never do the laundry, this is why we don’t have enough money.’ ” (In marriage therapy, this is called kitchen-sinking, a particularly destructive pattern.)

Deep questions are particularly good at creating intimacy because they ask people to describe their beliefs, values, feelings, and experiences in ways that can reveal something vulnerable. And vulnerability sparks emotional contagion, which makes us more aligned. Deep questions can be as light as “What would be your perfect day?” or as heavy as “What do you regret most?” Deep questions don’t always seem deep at first: “Tell me about your family” or “Why do you look so happy today?”

A deep question asks about someone’s values, beliefs, judgments, or experiences—rather than just facts. Don’t ask “Where do you work?” Instead, draw out feelings or experiences: “What’s the best part of your job?” (One 2021 study found a simple approach to generating deep questions: Before speaking, imagine you’re talking to a close friend. What question would you ask?)

A deep question asks people to talk about how they feel. Sometimes this is easy: “How do you feel about...?” Or, we can prompt people to describe specific emotions: “Did it make you happy when...?” Or ask someone to analyze a situation’s emotions: “Why do you think he got angry?” Or empathize: “How would you feel if that happened to you?”

Asking a deep question should feel like sharing. It should feel, a bit, like we’re revealing something about ourselves when we ask a deep question. This feeling might give us pause. But studies show people are nearly always happy to have been asked, and to have answered, a deep question.

Mood and energy levels often tell us all we need to know in order to align emotionally. Sometimes, we might not want to match emotions: If someone is angry, and we become angry, it may drive us apart. But if we acknowledge their mood and energy—“ You seem upset. What’s wrong?”—we can start to align.

One of the most important aspects of emotional communication is showing others we hear their emotions, which helps us reciprocate. There’s a technique for this—looping for understanding. Here’s how it works: Ask questions, to make sure you understand what someone has said. Repeat back, in your own words, what you heard. Ask if you got it right. Continue until everyone agrees we understand.

Researchers have found that in a conflict, proving we are listening and sharing vulnerabilities can be particularly powerful—and we can prove we are listening through specific techniques.

First, acknowledge understanding. We do this through looping and statements such as “Let me make sure I understand.” Second, find specific points of agreement. Look for places where you can say “I agree with you” or “I think you’re right that...” These remind everyone that, though we may have differences, we want to be aligned. Finally, temper your claims. Don’t make sweeping statements such as “Everyone knows that’s not true” or “Your side always gets this wrong.” Rather, use words like somewhat or “It might be...” and speak about specific experiences (“ I want to talk about why you left dishes in the sink last night”) rather than broad generalities (“ I want to talk about how you never do your part around the house”).

There are four things that studies show make online conversations better. [..]

• Overemphasize politeness. Numerous studies have shown that online tensions are lessened if at least one person is consistently polite. [..]
• Underemphasize sarcasm [..]
• Express more gratitude, deference, greetings, apologies, and hedges [..]
• Avoid criticism in public forums.