The 4 Keys to Better Conversations (Even When They're Messy) | Alison Wood Brooks

0:00Jonathan Fields: So have you ever watched those rapid fire witty conversations and shows like the marvelous Miss Maisel and thought to yourself, why can't I be that clever or quick or funny or smart? I know I have so many times and here's what fascinated me about today's conversation. Those perfectly polished exchanges that we see on screen might actually be holding us back from having truly meaningful conversations and the messy and perfect conversations we're having. They might be exactly what we need. I mean, what if the key to better conversations wasn't about being more polished, but actually embracing the beautiful mess that real human connection naturally creates?

0:36Jonathan Fields: And what if knowing this one truth could transform every interaction you have from this moment forward? When speaking with others, so many of us feel like we're the only ones experiencing anxiety, awkwardness, or that nagging feeling that we're somehow doing it wrong. But the truth is, that's not only completely normal. It's actually a sign that you care deeply about connecting with others. My guest today is Alison Woodbrooks, a professor at Harvard Business School. She teaches an award-winning course called Talk and has just released her fascinating new book, Talk, The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves.

1:10Jonathan Fields: And her groundbreaking research on conversation has been featured everywhere from the Wall Street Journal to Scientific American. And what she shared in our conversation about the science behind great conversations, it challenged a lot of what I thought I knew. And I've been earning a big part of my living in conversation for close to 14 years now. Like learning that face-to-face conversations are 30 times more likely to generate genuine laughter than digital ones, or discovering that those awkward moments we try so hard to avoid, they might actually be the things that are building blocks of authentic connection.

1:44Jonathan Fields: And through her remarkable talk framework, Alison reveals how small shifts in how we approach conversations can lead to profound changes in our relationships and sense of belonging. And wait until you also hear what she discovered about the hidden power of what questions versus why questions. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project.

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5:08Jonathan Fields: And I've now found myself earning my living through co-creating conversations for over a dozen years. So it's an interesting sort of like flip. And I've kind of wondered what's been the evolution there. So reading your work started to really help me understand a little bit of what was going on. But one of the things that you explore is this notion that so many people have some form of conversational anxiety. Yes.

5:31Alison Wood Brooks: There's so much that you just shared that I want to unpack with you about what it felt like to be, to sort of self-identify as an introvert as a kid and as a person your whole life and how your inner feelings about conversation have evolved or not evolved as you've gotten older and as you've gotten so much experience talking to people both privately and now publicly. Did you feel like when you were an introvert, Did you feel social anxiety or did you worry about things not going well when you interacted with other people?

6:05Jonathan Fields: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I don't think as a kid I would have labeled it social anxiety. But I always just, I felt other, like so many kids do. And part of that was I was a kid who kind of saw the world differently, moved through the world differently. and I was like so many others again, sort of like being raised in a culture, in a family culture that actually really resonated with me, but in a sort of a community culture and peer culture, that wasn't really a good, great fit for me. You know, so it's like you have to fit yourself, like your round peg into the square hole or the opposite there of what the culture expects of you, you know, on a social level, on a conversational level.

6:46Jonathan Fields: So I was aware of it. I wouldn't have labeled it conversational social anxiety when I was younger. Is this something that you see a lot?

6:53Alison Wood Brooks: Of course. Actually, I'm a behavioral scientist and my earliest research was very squarely focused on anxiety and not even the very large magnitude anxiety that people might need medication or lots of therapy or something, but the sort of low to medium grade anxiety that most people feel a lot of the time, like most days, many times per day, often triggered by social encounters or social things, fear of negative social evaluation, but also when you're alone too. So other things that make you feel anxious. And I started studying anxiety in lots of different contexts, like negotiations and advice exchanges.

7:39Alison Wood Brooks: Who do we go and seek advice from? Who do we listen to when we ask for advice, performing, so public speaking, that kind of anxiety, which boy, everybody, a lot of people feel a lot of anxiety about public speaking and other types of public performance. And in studying people's anxious feelings across all of these different behavioral domains, one resounding thing is so clear. Everybody feels anxious a lot of the time. and sometimes it's good. It shows that you care about something and you want it to go well. It shows that you're smart, that you're thinking about planning for the future scenarios of how things might go badly.

8:19Alison Wood Brooks: And it also sets you up to do really effective reframes. Like if you care about something and you're thinking about how it might go, that means you could also think about how it could go well. And that was very much what my dissertation research was about, was about reframing anxiety as excitement and thinking not only about how things might go terribly wrong, but about how they might go well. And it ended up in a scene in Pixar's movie Inside Out 2, where these little minions are doing projections about how everything might go badly for the main character, Riley, and then Joy sneaks in and is like, no, you need to do projections about how things could go well at this hockey tryout or at your school play.

9:00Alison Wood Brooks: And that was really my entry point into becoming very broadly interested in conversation and all things about the social world is like, hey, if everybody's feeling anxious about it all the time, oh, they're also feeling lots of other emotions too, like envy and anger and stress and boredom, which is a very big one that not a lot of people think or talk about. And how do all of those things play out in our conversations with each other.

9:30Jonathan Fields: It's great to know that other people feel this because I think oftentimes when you walk into a room and you feel this, one of the thought bubbles in your head is I'm the only one. Everybody else seems so comfortable. Everyone, look at all these beautiful conversations happening all around me. Everyone's alive and they're telling stories and they must have known each other for thousands of years or like they're just natural storytellers and I'm the one who doesn't have that. And in fact, so this is some of what you talk and write about, it's kind of the opposite. You're like, everybody is thinking these things.

10:02Alison Wood Brooks: Everybody is thinking these things. Even the people who seem so charismatic and confident have tons of room for improvement, are also feeling like imposters. In my class, my students designed this exercise where it was called like, I'm the only one who blank. And they would all fill it in with, I feel like I'm the only one who, you know, and it could be something about your identity, or it's like, I'm the only one who doesn't want to talk about private equity. I'm the only one who's not that interested in drinking alcohol. Everybody can fill in that blank with different things about who they are and what they're interested in.

10:42Alison Wood Brooks: And it's so easy to forget that when you feel on the outside and other people seem so confident and articulate and they're having a great time. It's so easy to feel like you're on the outside of it. But actually, everybody feels like an imposter.

10:57Jonathan Fields: It's a little bit, it's comforting to actually know that, you know, like, okay, so actually, we're all the oddballs, which makes us all not the oddballs.

11:05Alison Wood Brooks: Exactly. When you were describing yourself as a kid, you said you move through the world differently. And in my mind, I thought, different than what? Different than who? They were moving through the world different than you. And maybe they should have been feeling othered, right? But I think, you know, local norms emerge about who feels like they're on the inside who feels like they're on the outside. And we all cope with that very, very, very differently. The other thing that I've realized in these situations, when you see other people interacting and you can feel so anxious and ill-equipped to deal with it, something that I think is very comforting to know is nobody's actually having great conversations.

11:44Alison Wood Brooks: When you look at real conversations, especially a very large scale, we look at transcripts of thousands at a time, none of them resemble the tidy, charming, smooth scripts that we see on sitcoms or in movies, or even that we hear on podcasts, because most of them have been heavily edited. Real conversations are very messy. And in every moment, there are these little fleeting glimmers of people feeling like, oh, I just made a mistake. And oh, we just collided. And oh, you didn't understand me. And oh, you want something different than I, and then I misunderstood you. And so it's just all these little collisions unfolding sort of relentlessly everywhere.

12:24Alison Wood Brooks: Real conversations are more like a train wreck than a smooth encounter.

12:28Jonathan Fields: I love the way you describe that also, because part of this is about expectation setting. You mentioned sort of like norms and we so often like we'll look at the fitness world or the fashion world and the models that are being presented and the imagery there and, you know, the airbrushing and Photoshop and all this stuff. And we're like, this is like, we're setting an impossible standard for people to meet. Until I really started thinking about the work that you're doing, you know, I was like, well, are we actually setting an impossible conversational standard for people? I mean, I love TV shows like The Marvelous Miss Maisel.

12:57Jonathan Fields: You know, like Amy Sherman Palladino's writing is so quick, so witty. It's just like, you know, it's like casting a spell that you just don't want to look away from. And we see that in really heavily scripted and beautifully acted, fast-paced, witty media all the time. We're like, oh, I wish I could relate that way. I wish I could speak that way. I wish it could be so quick-witted and funny. And nobody is. Like, this is all highly scripted, staged.

13:22Alison Wood Brooks: The writer has spent, like, weekdays, weeks, months honing this script. And then the actor, what's her name, Rachel Brosnahan?

13:31Jonathan Fields: Brosnahan, yeah.

13:31Alison Wood Brooks: Yeah. Has probably done, I don't know, eight takes to make sure she's not stumbling over her words, even delivering these beautiful words that have been written for her. I think seeing conversation like that, seeing speech like that is so enchanting. And part of what's so enchanting about it is that we can't do it. We can't do it naturally. Our brains are not supercomputers. We cannot curate the contents of our mind so beautifully on the fly. And so when we see pretend worlds or pretend people, fictional characters, seeming so witty and clever and saying all these beautiful things, it's aspirational to us.

14:10Alison Wood Brooks: One of the examples that I give to my students at Harvard is when you think of your favorite comedian and doing their standup routine, I think when we think of sort of like, oh, I wish I could be that funny in conversation. We all love people who are funny. But you have to remember that in a standup routine, they've been honing that work, that script, that one way show for probably months or years. They've been thinking about those jokes. They've practiced them across many, many shows to see what gets a laugh, what doesn't get a laugh, what lands, how does it land. If you see that same comedian sit down and do a live interview, especially if it were not edited, you would be far less enchanted with their ability to make their conversation partner laugh.

14:56Alison Wood Brooks: And we've all seen that, right? We've all seen people interviewed on late night shows and you realize, oh yeah, they're like funny and fun, but they're not relentlessly hilarious. and they don't have these beautiful, polished story after story and move after move. It's just very unrealistic. In my book, we call it the myth of naturalness. You see other people seeming charming or seeming so funny, seeming so polished, seeming like the marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and it's just not real, right? It's either fictionalized and has been worked on, or you realize, oh, actually, that was just one brief moment in the conversation, And then like for the rest of it, it was very messy and their joke didn't land.

15:38Alison Wood Brooks: And, you know, this other weird thing happened and they said something they regretted. And we have a tendency to sort of overlook that messiness. But when we think of people who are so fabulous or seem so fabulous, we put pressure on ourselves to be the same way. Right. And not for very dangerous pressure to put on yourself.

15:55Jonathan Fields: Right. Because all of a sudden we're setting up an impossible standard to meet, you know. And then if we just keep perpetually failing at it, then it creates this negative spiral where we feel even worse because we're like, all right, I thought maybe I could practice this or this is what I'm supposed to be doing and I keep trying and I'm falling flat and falling flat. And now if you had anxiety in the beginning, it's just going to start to probably ratchet up a little bit as you're going because you keep failing repeatedly at something that you will never succeed at that level. It's just not real.

16:24Alison Wood Brooks: Exactly. It's not real. And even the process of taking the thoughts in your brain and formulating them into words, we're not able to do that fluently. You're doing a crazy curation task. You can't actually say everything that's in your mind. And of course, you're going to misarticulate what you mean to say and what you're thinking about. And we got to go easier. And we need to find grace for ourselves for not being perfect. And as a corollary, find grace for other people who are also going to say tons of stuff that they don't mean or that they regret and weird things and make bad jokes. And we really requires a sort of conversational culture of forgiveness that I, I worry that many outlets for conversation these days is not a good environment for fostering forgiveness and grace.

17:09Jonathan Fields: You also mentioned something that I think is really important to highlight, which is this notion that, okay, so those conversations that we watch, they're fun, they're entertaining, The word you used was enchanting, right? And we love it. We get lost in the moment. It's playful. It's fun. It's delightful. But what you said also is that that's not how good conversations actually happen in real life. Like we don't connect with other people. Those conversations that happen where you meet somebody, you know, like at eight o 'clock at night and three o 'clock in the morning, you just, you can't believe that you've known this person for eight hours instead of, you know, like 25 years.

17:45Jonathan Fields: it's not because it was a perfect conversation and you like the linguistics were precise and fast. It's, it's because you're stumbling and fumbling together and messing up. I mean, I've been on stage speaking to thousands of people and gone blank and freaked out and being like, oh my God, I'm not perfect on stage now. And then later he turned to an audience member and said, I have no idea what's next. What was I talking about? And like, they'll yell up at you. We're talking about this. And like, and then all of a sudden the audience is actually with you until you just let go and be human, you're terrified of being seen that way.

18:18Alison Wood Brooks: I know. I think I've spent a lot of my life, and I'm sure a lot of people have, of sort of battling this inner perfectionism. And at some point in your life, you realize not only is it not the right goal, it's the wrong goal. Actually, if your ultimate goal is to connect with people, perfection actually repels people away, right? Like it's not relatable. It's not endearing. When we think about like protagonists in movies who we actually fall in love with, they are always so fallible, right? They're always making mistakes and we see them make those mistakes and we can relate to them and then we're cheering for them.

18:53Alison Wood Brooks: We want them to sort of overcome a challenge or some sort of weird difficulty. The same is true for real people. It's much easier to relate to other people when you see them making mistakes and struggling and having triumphs and losses. And so we really have to battle against this myth of naturalness, this sort of perfection standard that we often hold ourselves to, especially in conversation that is, it's just an impossible thing to achieve.

19:23Jonathan Fields: And it's interesting, right? Because there are also different contexts for conversations. There's, you know, the just hanging out with friends type of conversation or trying to make new friends conversation. There's a potential romantic interest context. There's the work, the professional context ranging from the initial interview or the interview experience where it's a completely altered reality to then being in an organization and trying to understand their culture and like what is appropriate here and how do I fit into that and we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Girl Live Project is sponsored by BetterHelp.

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23:32Jonathan Fields: That's cachava, K-A-C-H-A-V-A dot com, code goodlife. You have, through all your research and your work, there's a framework that effectively you've developed that you shorthand us, topics asking levity and kindness, which helps us understand, okay, so how do we do this in a way that feels good, that where we can kind of like step into all these different contexts and feel good about the way that we're actually interacting with others. So I'd love to kind of walk through that framework a bit, starting out with that T topics. Content really matters, you argue. Take me into this.

24:04Alison Wood Brooks: Absolutely. Learning about topics and conversation has really changed my worldview and my mindset myself, both as a scientist and just as a human being. And I hope it's helpful to other people too. I think for a long time, we've had a tendency to think of difficult conversations, almost at like the conversation level, right? Like, oh, I have to give hard feedback. That's going to be a difficult conversation. Or, ooh, my kid's in trouble and I need to talk to him about it. That's going to be difficult. I need to negotiate my salary. That's going to be a difficult conversation. When you start looking at transcripts of real conversations, what you realize is even difficult conversations aren't difficult the whole time, or they shouldn't be.

24:45Alison Wood Brooks: Actually, every conversation unfolds as a cascade of chunks of topics, of thematically related turns. So you and I are now talking about this tea and the talk framework. Before we were talking about how perfectionism is hard in conversation, we put pressure on ourselves. So our brains are remarkably good at doing this chunking task. Our brains are good at saying, oh, okay, well, we just talked about perfectionism. Now we're moving into topics, and then next we're going to move into asking. And we can use that organizing mechanism that our brains are very naturally good at. We can make it useful.

25:23Alison Wood Brooks: And when you think about a difficult conversation, what I find very empowering is, oh, maybe there's one topic or two topics that are going to be tricky because maybe you have very different goals you want from something. But we're going to put that, we're going to couch those topics among nine other really great topics. So the whole thing doesn't have to be this horrifying prospect. When I ask people to look back at the conversations they've had, if you ask people to rewrite it like a script, they would not be able to do it. Our brains are not good at remembering sequencing or who said what and in what words and in what way.

26:02Alison Wood Brooks: But our brains are very good at remembering what topics we covered, almost like a bulleted list. And so while a conversation is unfolding, we can use that chunking ability to actually actively manage topics. What you want to do is keep your hand on the pulse of, is this a good topic? Are we enjoying this together? Am I enjoying it? Is my partner enjoying it? Are we making progress? Are we learning from each other? Are we leaning in? Are we seeming engaged? If you don't seem engaged or if your partner doesn't seem engaged, we should assertively switch to something else, right? That's a meaningful signal.

26:38Alison Wood Brooks: If there are long pauses and awkward laughter, awkward silences, if someone starts repeating things they've already said on that topic, those are all reliable signs that it's time to switch to something else. And so that's the main takeaway from this T is for topics is just to switch topics more assertively until you find something that really makes both people lean in and feel like, oh, we're really getting this right right now. Another helpful tip is that this chunking heuristic of topics, you can use it before the conversation begins. And this sort of calls back to this myth of naturalness.

27:15Alison Wood Brooks: A lot of people think that good conversation needs to be constructed spontaneously on the spot. and that it should just sort of come to you in the moment. What you realize though is that because it's so messy and hard, a little bit of forethought can go a long way. And so prepping a couple topics ahead of time, especially in some of the scenarios you mentioned, Jonathan, like meeting new people for the first time, going into a work meeting, seeing an old friend you haven't seen in a while or someone you don't know that well, thinking about two or three little bullet points of topics you could raise with them does so many good things.

27:49Alison Wood Brooks: It makes you feel less anxious because you always have an idea of where the conversation can go next. It reduces disfluencies. So stutters, ums, uhs, long pauses, those go away a bit because you're much smoother moving on to the next topic when you know where you can go. It reduces blurting. So a lot of the time when we go into conversation, there actually are things that we want to keep to ourselves. And sometimes we sort of just blurt them out. But if you think about it ahead of time, then you're better prepped to disclose the things you feel comfortable sharing and not disclose the things that you don't want to.

28:23Alison Wood Brooks: So topic prep can be quite helpful as well.

28:26Jonathan Fields: I love that idea. And where my brain is going with it also is I absolutely see the value of it. And I think, you know, you're like, okay, so I'm going to an event, I'm going to a conference, and the conference is about X, Y, and Z. And maybe I can prep some things to talk about in the context of X, Y, and Z, but also maybe even outside of that. Here's my curiosity, though. Is there a risk of over-prepping? Is there a risk of actually being too committed to your prep? And what was popping into my mind as you were describing this is, I'm somebody who has studied interviewers, legendary interviewers for years.

29:01Jonathan Fields: Larry King is one of the most legendary interviewers in history. And he was famous for what he called being intentionally naive. He would enter a conversation that would sometimes last for a really long time with the highest profile people in the world that had been interviewed by everyone on the planet or just by people who he knew very little about. He didn't want to know a lot about them because he felt like it wouldn't be a natural conversation. And I sort of have a middle ground in the way that I prepare for conversations. And I don't call things like this interviews because I really just prefer to have a natural conversation.

29:37Jonathan Fields: I've learned over time that there's a line of preparation for me in terms of topics where if I go past it, it's not constructive for just a fun and engaging conversation.

29:48Alison Wood Brooks: Absolutely. You can go so much, you can, it becomes scripting rather than topic prep. The great conversation is a balance of forethought and expertise and experience, right? Even if you're not prepping specifically for that conversation, if you've had conversations like that in the past, in a way that's prep also, right? It's a reps, it's practice. It's a combination of that prep and then really being present, right? So you can be flexible and creative and really listen to your partner in the moment and really be responsive to what they're giving you. Because of course you could over prepare and then stick too tightly to your script, which would lead you to not really be responding to what your partner is giving you in the moment.

30:38Alison Wood Brooks: The jazz musician Charlie Parker has this great quote where he's like, you know, you got to practice, practice, practice as much as you can. But when you get up on the stage, you just let it all go and just wail. And I think that's true for conversation too, like prep, prep, prep. But once you're there, let it all go and really focus in on your partner and keep your hand on the temperature gauge. How are they feeling? What are they thinking about? What do they seem excited about? What are you feeling excited about? Are they bored? Do you need to move on? Those perceptions are so important and they're actually easier to do.

31:13Alison Wood Brooks: It's easier to listen and pay attention to your partner if you're not also worried about what you're gonna talk about next, right? So you're not, it's called cognitive offloading when you take some of the mental effort that you have to do during a conversation and do it beforehand because in the moment, then it allows you to have a better time together.

31:32Jonathan Fields: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. And we kind of dipped into the third part of your acronym, but let's back up a little bit. We'll move back into it. So the second letter is A for asking. And this is really about questioning, about asking questions, which can be really engaging, but also fraught, I found. So take me into this a bit more.

31:52Alison Wood Brooks: Yeah. Asking questions is the most common way that we switch between topics. So if I want to move to a new one and I say, have you seen Game of Thrones, right? Like all of a sudden we're off in another direction. They're also the way that we get deeper on a certain topic by asking follow-up questions. They're so very powerful, Jonathan, which you know. It's sort of tapping the power of interactivity that's only possible in live conversation. It's really the only way to tease out your partner's perspective. There's so much work in behavioral science showing how bad people are at perspective taking, this idea that I could guess what you're thinking or feeling.

32:31Alison Wood Brooks: The best way to do that is actually to ask you, what would you like to talk about? How are you feeling? Do you want lunch? Are you hungry? And people can just tell you directly. So the sort of top line feedback is just to ask more questions. Ideally, don't walk away from a conversation having asked zero questions, which happens much more often than we'd like to admit. I have a professional matchmaker friend that I've worked with who she said, just don't be a ZQ. This is like a zero questioner on a date, especially at a date, right? Like you have so much to learn about each other. And so not asking questions is a really huge faux pas, a big error there.

33:12Alison Wood Brooks: But then once you get past this top line advice of asking more questions, there's a lot more nuance about how to do that well. There are great question types, there are great patterns of questions, and there are less great patterns of question asking, which I think you were hinting at a bit.

33:29Jonathan Fields: It is interesting, right? Because in part of what I want to tease out a little bit to make sure I understand, like what you were saying is that we want to ask questions because that's part of what helps build rapport. And then that opens the door to trust and vulnerability. That's what builds the connection. But at the same time, if we're not asking questions, we're making assumptions. and oftentimes those assumptions are just really really wrong and there's a conversation that's going on that's not spoken then there's the spoken conversation i wonder if sort of like part of the aspiration is to bring those into the same thing you like to sort of take the thought bubbles out of your head and make them a part of the actual spoken conversation instead of just assuming there's a sama kid of the 80s there's this iconic movie called better off dead with john Cusack.

34:15Jonathan Fields: If you've never seen this clip, you would geek out over this. It's like 30 seconds long. Look this up. Better off dead. Just Google the awkward conversation scene or the awkward picnic scene.

34:26Alison Wood Brooks: I can't wait.

34:27Jonathan Fields: And it's just like him and this other person sitting across from a picnic table from him and starting to have the thought bubbles of what they're thinking the other person is trying to transmit to them by rubbing their nose or doing this. And it's like, you watch that. You're We're doing this all day, every day with people. And the conversations that we think we're having, we're just not. The things we think they're thinking, they're not. And what happens if we just lay it all out there?

34:52Alison Wood Brooks: Well, and we can try to lay it all out there. But even if you take it to an extreme, even if you're asking a question every time you talk and they're answering you, we still cannot get close to having full information about somebody's life, right? I have an identical twin sister, and there's so much I know about what she's experienced in her life. There's so much I can anticipate about how she's feeling or what her decisions are going to be because she has the same brain as me in many ways, same body as me. But I still get it wrong a lot of the time. I can't possibly know that she almost hit a turkey on her drive over to my house or that she had a really bad day at work that day.

35:33Alison Wood Brooks: And because of this subtle thing that one of our colleagues did. Like we just can't know everything about everybody, no matter how many questions we ask. And so we just got to try and get a little bit closer to having full knowledge, really to know each other at all. Otherwise, it's just this extreme illusion of shared understanding.

35:53Jonathan Fields: Yeah. Let's get a little bit practical here. How do we ask good questions?

35:58Alison Wood Brooks: The first thing is, so we've done a lot of experiments with this. How do we get people to ask more questions. And truly going in with a mindset of just telling yourself, ask more questions, does lead people to ask more questions. It's one of these, many of the interventions or sort of advice that we give in conversation on its surface seems very simple. Because the cognitive load of having live conversation is already very heavy, trying to give very complicated, nuanced advice is too much to handle while you're also in the chaos of conversation. So really, the first thing you should try is just, okay, I'm going to try and ask more questions in my life.

36:33Alison Wood Brooks: That's it. I got to ask at least one, at least two. Don't leave asking zero. So that's the top line advice. To get more tactical though, as you're honing your question asking skills, there are some superhero question types that emerge. The first of which is follow-up questions. Follow-up questions can follow up on anything that your partner has said, either in the previous turn of the conversation or earlier in the conversation or earlier in your relationship. Follow-up questions are so amazing because they get more information quickly, right? They help clarify if you misunderstood something, they might share something with you, but you could say, oh, but why did you feel that way?

37:16Alison Wood Brooks: Like, tell me more. It sounds like you were really anxious as a kid. What scared you the most? Without asking that follow-up question, I knew that you felt anxious, but I don't know why or when or with whom or in what community. So follow-up questions help us get digged down into that sort of detailed nitty gritty of what someone's lived experience. So follow-up questions are super hard. They also show your partner that you were listening to them. I can only follow up on that anxious kid story because I actually heard it in the first place and I care about it. And I was thinking about it for the last 10 minutes in the intervening time.

37:50Alison Wood Brooks: And all of those things are attributes that we admire about people. It's like, oh, you listen to me? You care about me? You're smart enough to hold that in your head and then bring it up later? That's amazing. So follow-up questions are superheroes. We have an amazing data set of speed daters. It's about 900 speed dates. And people who ask more questions get more second dates on average. So much so that like, imagine you went on 20 dates. If you ask just one more question on each of those 20 dates, you'll convert another of the dates into a second date. Just one question per conversation. Imagine if you asked five questions, 10 questions.

38:31Alison Wood Brooks: It's a very strong effect. That effect is almost entirely driven by follow-up questions. If you go into a conversation with the goal to ask more, we tend to naturally ask more follow-up questions. You're sort of like, oh yeah, they just shared a thing with me and now I know because I'm going to try and ask more questions that I could dig deeper on the thing they just share it with me. And that's a good instinct. So follow-up questions are great. The other type that we've been studying are open-ended questions versus closed questions. We all know the difference between those. Open-ended would be like, what did you like about your childhood versus did you like where you grew up, right?

39:09Alison Wood Brooks: Yes or no. Open-ended questions are really, they both have important purposes in conversation. Open-ended questions are helpful for switching topics to something new, It opens this new space where we can now explore, I would really love to hear about where you grew up, rather than yes or no. And then we kind of, oh, where do we go from there? And when you're formulating an open-ended question, which on average elicits like twice the word count as a closed-ended question from your partner. So it's very meaningful. What we find is the way you phrase the question can matter as well. So what questions like, what did you have for breakfast?

39:47Alison Wood Brooks: What do you love about muffins? What do you think about when you're eating avocado on toast? What does it make you think of? These tend to hit the sweet spot in terms of social outcomes like likability and information exchange. Compared to questions, for example, that start with the word why. Like, why do you like avocado toast? Why don't you eat eggs? Why don't you eat breakfast? Why questions can feel accusatory.

40:14Jonathan Fields: Right, like judgy.

40:15Alison Wood Brooks: Judgy. They're like immediately judgy. How questions like, how do you make avocado toast? How do you like your eggs? They can be okay, but they get a little bit too like technical. So they're also a little bit too, the person asking the question is pushing you in a very specific direction. Whereas what questions leave a lot of space to the person who's answering to take it in a direction they're actually excited about. Like, how do you make avocado toast? Now they're required to say, well, I put bread in a toaster and then I do put butter on it and then I smash the avocado. Whereas if I said, what's your favorite breakfast food?

40:51Alison Wood Brooks: They can take that in so many more creative and possibly interesting directions. So follow-up questions, open-ended questions that start with what are winners.

41:01Jonathan Fields: Love those strategies. And I also love how you described that there's part of the reason that this is really compelling in a conversation is that it shows that you're paying attention, and that you're listening, that you're seeing and hearing what somebody is offering up. And that's so rare these days. We're so used to living in a world of distraction that when somebody actually gives you any form of even partially divided attention, you're just like, wait, more, more of that. Thank you. Thank you for that. It's so appreciable.

41:32Alison Wood Brooks: It feels like a gold. It's like, oh my, are you talking to me? Did you listen to what I said? It's the ultimate gift. I think it's always been a great gift, but it just feels even more precious and valuable now that our attention is so fragmented. I have my students do an exercise that's a sort of conversation audit where I have them record all of the incoming and outgoing messages that they send and receive across all modes of communication, text, email, phone, Zoom, face-to-face, Snapchat, whatever, DMs, whatever, for like 20 minutes of their life. And anyone can do that exercise. What it really shows you in a very undeniable and vivid way is how very distracted and fragmented our attention is now.

42:24Alison Wood Brooks: And it allows us to be in touch with more people at once than ever before in human history. And that has upsides, that has lots of opportunities. We can be more connected to more people. But when they look back on their audit, my students often say, well, really only the face-to-face conversations felt real. And I'm really only remembering those sort of magical moments from those face-to-face connections where someone was also paying attention to me that felt meaningful and felt grounded in reality and like we were really connected. and almost everything else feels so transactional, which has its own benefits.

43:06Alison Wood Brooks: But the other thing that it shows is like, as you're looking at a mess, an email, a text, a group text thread, a phone call's coming in, you're on Zoom all at once, we're making lots of choices about who to prioritize and which topics to prioritize. It's sort of like, which deserves my attention most? And so when you do give that attention to someone and to a certain topic, it says a lot about that you actually do care about them. They mean a lot to you. And that topic in that moment means a lot to you.

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46:46Jonathan Fields: See bonus points, TNCs, and Sweep's rules for details and visit bestwestern.com for complete terms and conditions. I'm curious also, like building on that, I think a lot of people were exposed to the work of Arthur Arons back when, you know, I think it was a decade ago where the modern love column came out, like the 36 questions to make anyone fall in love with you, which took his work in a lab designing, you know, like taking two strangers, putting them together for 45 minutes and having them each ask each other a series of questions that took them slowly deeper and deeper and were more vulnerable.

47:18Jonathan Fields: And part of that, you know, when I read that research years ago, and they're trying to figure out what literally made people feel like they were closer to these strangers after 45 minutes or an hour than they were to people they'd known for years. And you're probably more up to date on the research than I am here. But I remember reading that it was the mutuality and it was like mutual progressive vulnerability. So I'm wondering in this context of when you're sitting here and saying, okay, I'm gonna start asking questions and really listening and really paying attention. If that's not reciprocated, if there's no mutuality there, does the conversation still fall apart?

47:55Alison Wood Brooks: Yeah, it's such a big and important question. My bestie at Harvard, Leslie John, who's also a behavioral scientist, studies disclosure, and importantly, like mutual disclosure. And what does that do? What are the pros and cons? Early in her career, she studied privacy. And so it was almost sort of like, I can't believe how much people share with each other online. And over time, she got to this point that's much closer to Arthur Aaron and what you just described so beautifully of like, oh, the risk isn't really about TMI. sharing too much information, but actually sharing too little information with each other, TLI, because that is the root of feeling known and knowing each other and feeling really connected in a realistic way to anyone.

48:38Alison Wood Brooks: And question asking is such a fabulous way, really the only way to do that. But then this question comes up of like, well, what if I'm asking lots and lots of questions and I'm aware of it and I'm getting lots from them, but they're not asking anything back. And my students ask this all the time after we've gone through so many exercises to practice question asking. And my answer is usually this, and I don't know if it's particularly uplifting, but conversation is co-constructed. You only have control over your own thoughts and behaviors. You only have control over the decision to ask a question, the decision to switch topics, make a joke, ultimately leave.

49:18Alison Wood Brooks: You don't have control over what other people say and do. And if you find yourself talking to somebody who's not asking you anything, you can try some approaches like, oh, well, I'm just going to disclose things and see if that piques your interest, right? Start telling stories, start sharing things unsolicited. That's one way that you might trigger mutual disclosure. Or if over time it really is bothering you that this person isn't asking questions, you could deliver that as direct feedback, right? If you know this person well, you could say, no, like I, or, you know, hand them a copy of my book and say, look, you have to ask lots of questions.

49:56Alison Wood Brooks: How do you think we're both doing? But ultimately, what we have control over in our conversational lives is who we talk to and what we choose to do. So if someone persistently is asking you nothing and it really bothers you, I think that is a legitimate reason to sort of deprioritize them in your life or in your social portfolio. you. Yeah.

50:18Jonathan Fields: And maybe it's not that they're ill intended or, you know, it's just, it's maybe they're just not your people and that's okay.

50:24Alison Wood Brooks: Exactly.

50:24Jonathan Fields: You know, or maybe it's like the, whatever the topics that are being explored or the energy that's happening or it's just not happening and that's okay. You know, it's okay to say like there are other people.

50:35Alison Wood Brooks: Conversation is about fulfilling each other's needs and your needs are not being fulfilled by someone repeatedly over long periods of time. That's okay. Then it might not be your person. Yeah.

50:47Jonathan Fields: Let's drop into the L in your framework here, levity. And again, this is the one where when you try and bring humor or playfulness into a conversation, it can go phenomenally well.

50:59Alison Wood Brooks: Or not.

51:01Jonathan Fields: It can also like, you know, like you're like, oh, I have this snarky thought is a really funny line or this like joke or this funny story. And I tell it and it's complete silence. It's cricket. You're like, that was not helpful in this conversation. Take me into how we think about levity in conversations.

51:18Alison Wood Brooks: Absolutely. The way you describe it is exactly right. Especially for humor, right? Humor attempts take tremendous courage. And it is like these little tiny moments of risk. Like, am I going to take this risk right now? And it could fail in many different ways. People don't laugh. People don't think it's funny. They don't think it's appropriate or not. Am I going to keep it to myself. I think a lot of people would commiserate with the feeling that I experience in so much of my career, especially early on, is like, I felt like in this prison of having to like hide my silly from people, from everyone for so long, because you're constantly making these judgments about what's appropriate and how people are going to view these attempts.

51:59Alison Wood Brooks: But let me back, zoom out for a second. Levity in general in conversation, it's so funny. I think we naturally think of humor and warmth as these sort of like extra bonuses that are on top of the important parts that are on top of the real work of conversation, the productivity, the learning, the content. And every once in a while, someone said something funny and you're like, oh, that's so fun. Yay. And then back to work, you know, like back to the real stuff. When we study levity and conversation, it becomes quite clear quite quickly that it's not actually this extra bonus that lies on top of the important work, but actually it is a core determinant of mutual attention.

52:40Alison Wood Brooks: Because conversation requires sustained engagement from both people, from everybody involved, the quiet killer of good conversation is often boredom and disinterest. We're talking about a topic that I don't want to talk about. My mind's going to start to wander even more than it already does. I'm going to start to lose interest in you. I'm going to start to lose interest in this. I'm going to want to walk away. And that happens a lot. I think when we think of bad conversations, it's easy to think of arguing, fighting, hostility, which are very loud killers, kind of kill conversation at knife point.

53:13Alison Wood Brooks: But boredom and disinterest are quiet, much more common killers of conversation, sort of kills it with this sleeping, silent sleeping pill. And levity is the antidote. Levity, moments of levity pull our attention back into each other. And whether it's through humor, that's these fleeting moments of laughter and joy and mirth, or just warmth. So things like expressing gratitude, giving compliments, switching to a fresh topic, focusing on the other person rather than yourself. There are so many levity moves that can help pull people's engagement back in. And that effect of levity is quite serious, right?

53:54Alison Wood Brooks: Like you need that mutual engagement to achieve any of the goals that you want to achieve in a conversation, not just to have fun on its own.

54:02Jonathan Fields: Yeah. I so appreciate how you made the distinction there also that levity is not always humor.

54:07Alison Wood Brooks: Yeah.

54:07Jonathan Fields: There's a whole bunch of other things that can go into this that just create a certain, I mean, a lightness to the conversation. I wonder sometimes if some of the, like one of the conversation killers also is just conversation starts to get really heavy.

54:20Alison Wood Brooks: So heavy. You start circling them. You can circle the drain in so many different ways. If you're stuck on a topic for too long, if the topic's too serious, if you're disagreeing, if you're bored, and it just starts to feel really heavy and it needs that fizz to bring you back up. And that's levity.

54:38Jonathan Fields: Yeah, I love that. And that brings us to Kay in the final, in the talk framework here, kindness. I thought it was really interesting that you were looking at this as a really critical factor because I would imagine there are probably a lot of people who have conversations where they feel like there was no sense of kindness, of generosity in this conversation, but it was a phenomenal conversation. So talk to me more about the role of kindness in good conversation.

55:04Alison Wood Brooks: So the way that I define kindness is just caring about another person and showing it during the conversation. Sometimes that care is invisible to our conversation partners. And so you might just feel like, wow, that was really fun, engaging. I learned so much. We really felt connected. But if you look back on those great conversations, they were probably making lots of moves that didn't just serve their own interests. Like if you're only thinking about what you want to talk about in the way you want to talk about it to help you in some way, the chances are that that conversation goes well is very, very low.

55:43Alison Wood Brooks: because it's just so profoundly co-created and each person has their own set of needs and desires. And if one person's completely acting in their self-interest, often it's just not going to work out. Kindness is funny. It's this thing that we learn about as children as a virtue. And I spent like most of my life really thinking about like, what does it actually look like? Like people who are really kind, what are they thinking about? What are they doing from one moment to the next to truly like pay attention to other people, actually care about them, serve other people's needs. And often in conversation, that means sometimes prioritizing the other person's preferences before your own.

56:24Alison Wood Brooks: Like we have to talk about something that you love and I'm excited to do that because I care about you and I want you to find this interaction rewarding. And it's so circular, right? If you find the reaction rewarding, that's going to be rewarding to me. And so it's this sort of reciprocal push and pull. And often the way that plays out is through really engaged and attentive listening to the other person.

56:53Jonathan Fields: I love that. It tethers nicely. I mean, I've often thought about conversations and the role of what I would call generous or benevolent intent, which I think is kind of the same thing we're talking about here.

57:04Alison Wood Brooks: Definitely.

57:04Jonathan Fields: You know, it's like I'm coming to this conversation and I see in you, if you say something, if If you offer something into the conversation and it can be interpreted in different ways, I'm going to step into like my assumption is going to be benevolent intent or benevolent intent, you know, generous intent, kind intent, rather than assuming something destructive and just trying to hold a container that says, you know, like I see you, I respect you. Like I hold you in dignity and let's, yeah. And let's have that conversation at that level. Do you find that that's rare?

57:36Alison Wood Brooks: Yes. It's rare because it's effortful and it goes against human nature, unfortunately. Our brains were designed to be egocentric. We have perfect, full self-knowledge and we were designed for survival, to protect ourselves and to survive and procreate. We don't have complete knowledge about other people's perspectives. Just by nature, we're egocentric beings. We think about our own perspective much more often than others. It's easier to do that. And so we kind of have to battle against those egocentric instincts and really relentlessly push yourself to have this generous intent to learn as much as you can about the other person, to really push yourself not to judge them negatively or feel threatened by them.

58:24Alison Wood Brooks: or jump to conclusions. That walking through the world with this benevolence, I think it's easy to think that's like, oh, that makes you a good person. No, it probably makes you a hard worker. You're working really hard, relentlessly at trying to prioritize other people, care for other people, not judge them negatively, not instinctively focus on yourself all the time. I think in the kindness part of the book, the point is not to say that you're always going to prioritize other people or that you should be a people pleaser or that some sort of Pollyanna-ish altruism. It's saying the only chance you have of ever being able to walk through the world with generous intent and really be kind to other people means that you're going to have to fight against your egocentric instincts constantly.

59:16Alison Wood Brooks: You're not always going to get it right and you don't always have to prioritize other people, but you do have to kind of have this relentless focus on other people to have a fighting chance of being able to be benevolent.

59:28Jonathan Fields: Yeah, I mean, I think that makes a lot of sense. I'm curious also, and you speak to this a bit, and when you sort of like you explore the topic of emotions and conversation, if we go even broader, and we talk about the part of the conversation that is everything but the words that are being spoken, certain studies that people just like perpetually misquote about, you know, like 85 or 90 % of all communication is nonverbal. And then when you actually look at the research, you're like, it's completely wrong. What's the reality here about the role of everything outside of the actual language that's being used in co-creating something magical?

1:00:05Alison Wood Brooks: So here's the bottom line. It's the wrong question to say which matters more. We do all of them. So the right question is, how are they interacting with each other? I like to think of three buckets. The first is the words that we say to each other, verbal content, so the meaning of our words. The second bucket is nonverbal, and that's everything that comes in through your eyes. It's their body language. It's the clothes they're wearing. It's their facial expressions, their hand gesticulation, their shoes. It's everything in their environment that's around them too, right? So all of that visual information.

1:00:41Alison Wood Brooks: And the third bucket is acoustic. It's everything that comes in through your ears that is not the words. The sound of their voice, how fast they're speaking, their tonality, their vocal fry, all of it, right? So those three buckets all matter profoundly. And we've only, as scientists, started to study the words bucket, the transcripts from real conversations at large scale. We've only started studying in the last like 10 years. And so to make arguments about which one matters more is a little bit crazy. I think where the future of conversation science is headed is actually towards trying to parse out those acoustic cues.

1:01:23Alison Wood Brooks: Like what is it about our voices and the way we speak to each other about accents, about delivery and timing and pauses and all those prosodic cues, all those back channel feedback things where we go, oh, yeah. Like, what are those things doing? When do they matter? How can we do them better? And seeing how all three of those buckets interact. There's also an important point that because of how we toggle across different modes of communication, face-to-face, on the phone, texting, emailing, calling, every mode of communication except face-to-face limits those cues in some way. So like only face-to-face in-person interaction has the full richness of verbal, nonverbal, and acoustic information.

1:02:10Alison Wood Brooks: And that's why it feels the most real. We are 30 times more likely to laugh in person. We are 34 times more persuasive in person because we're getting so much more information there than anywhere else. And I think we know that intuitively, but we kind of underestimate the scale of it. We know that it's the best, but it's like, oh, you know, Zoom calls are really convenient too. But you're like, are they 30 times more convenient? And it's just something to sort of keep in mind as you go through the world and design your conversational life is thinking about how these different types of information are limited or constrained in different ways.

1:02:53Jonathan Fields: Yeah. Yeah, and that last point also really makes you wonder what we're losing as so much of our interaction moves into the virtual domain, into the digital domain. We all went there far faster than anyone ever imagined we would because of circumstances or the pandemic. And then it became the default. We just stopped questioning that. And it's interesting to see now people grappling with in the workplace, like return to work orders and how people are trying to figure out. But even on a personal level, like you were describing, if we're 30 times more this or 34 more times this, what about when we talk about just friendship?

1:03:31Jonathan Fields: What about when we talk about just loving feelings? All these things that are kind of like the marrow of life. What happens to all of that when we feel like we're getting what we need through virtual conversations or through technologically enabled conversations, and we default to that as the primary mode of conversation? Like, what are we actually losing? I imagine we're not going to know the answer to that for a while, but when we do, I would bet it's going to be pretty eye-opening and concerning.

1:04:00Alison Wood Brooks: I think scientists often will use, bucket those losses into a category that they may call like intangibles or like subjective outcomes. And sometimes I have this little panic where I'm like, but isn't 98 % of what matters actually the intangibles or like the subjectively measured things about life? How could you ever measure the magnitude of importance of feeling loved compared to any sort of information exchanged through email? It's a profound thing that I worry about, especially as a mom. I'm thinking of our kids as they grow up. What's the world going to look like? What's going to matter? Can we preserve the feeling of real love and connection as the world becomes increasingly attention fragmented, digitized, and artificial?

1:04:47Alison Wood Brooks: what's real in a world that's so largely artificial.

1:04:50Jonathan Fields: Yeah, especially when AI is going to start to take in so much of what happens around us already is. We've talked about so much and there's so many rich ideas and things to think about, strategies, tips. I'm sure everyone listening along is sort of sitting here nodding and saying like, I would love to be able to move through the world and just have great conversations on a regular basis. And I also would imagine that some folks certainly joining us start thinking to themselves, this feels like a lot. Is there a world where just the average typical human being who's not devoting themselves to this can kind of like on a fairly regular basis get to a point where you're like, it's not heavy, it's not technical.

1:05:31Jonathan Fields: There's a fluency that feels like this, I feel comfortable, I feel good, sort of like being like and confident that I can kind of fairly regularly create like a half decent conversation. Yeah.

1:05:42Alison Wood Brooks: There's one school of thought that's like, great conversations are the best thing about life. And I do think that is true, but it doesn't happen very often. What I hope people take from me and my course and my book is more like, I feel confident. I understand what's going on here. I understand that it's messy and hard and very seldomly going to be amazing. But I feel confident and empowered and comfortable. And knowing how the sort of mechanics of it work make me feel like I can be more present, that I can listen more to other people, and puts me in a position to maybe, when I get lucky, to have those moments that are really magical or those conversations that are really magical.

1:06:30Alison Wood Brooks: But most of the time, just go through life knowing that not everything's going to be perfect, it's going to be messy, and sometimes we're going to stumble on greatness.

1:06:40Jonathan Fields: It's almost like part of that is lower your expectations, but actually increase your expectations about what a lower expectation conversation would actually give you.

1:06:50Alison Wood Brooks: Yes. Lower your expectations, but maybe raise your aspirations, your hopes for what's possible.

1:06:57Jonathan Fields: Love that. It feels a good place for us to come full circle as well. So in this container of Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?

1:07:06Alison Wood Brooks: Acceptance. Acceptance of yourself, acceptance of other people, and acceptance that when you interact with other human minds, it's not going to be perfect, but every once in a while, it'll be pretty great.

1:07:22Jonathan Fields: Thank you.

1:07:23Alison Wood Brooks: Thank you so much, Jonathan. This was totally delightful.

1:07:28Jonathan Fields: Hey, if you loved this episode, safe bet you'll also love the conversation we had with Priya Parker about making impossible conversations possible. You can find a link to that episode in the show notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers, Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Alejandro Ramirez and Troy Young. Christopher Carter crafted our theme music. And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app or on YouTube too. if you found this conversation interesting or valuable and inspiring, chances are you did because you're still listening here.

1:08:04Jonathan Fields: Do me a personal favor, a seven-second favor, share it with just one person. I mean, if you want to share it with more, that's awesome too, but just one person even, then invite them to talk with you about what you've both discovered, to reconnect and explore ideas that really matter, because that's how we all come alive together. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

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