How to Connect Deeper in Minutes | Charles Duhigg

25:42That creates impact with people. And again, that's your entry to influence, to lead, to connect your high intention communication. AJ, when you sent that email to your new landlord, what did they reply with? What did they say in the reply? It was a phone conversation. So she gave me a WhatsApp call knowing that we had to talk, said, listen, I'm going to be traveling, but I want to hear how the move-in goes and had some information to share with us around how the garbage is handled and some codes that we didn't get when we moved in just based on her travel. So I knew it was going to be a conversation.

26:17I didn't know when she was going to be calling. And obviously there's a lot of tension there. As I said, you know, you want a great relationship. We were excited about the place, excited when we had the walkthrough with her, got to know a bit more of her values, which are being European and traveling and staying in the States. And we love as Americans traveling and staying in Europe. So felt there was a lot of value overmatch there. And I was like, hey, I want to maintain this relationship. I've had terrible relationships with landlords over the years, so I know how bad things can get. You don't want that to be where you're starting your relationship.

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28:53How did she respond? One thing, again, we didn't get into this, but what I picked up on from our walkthrough together was that she's also very health conscious. And I started off by saying, you know, this situation is actually really important to my wife and I and our infant's health. So tying it directly to a value that is shared, knowing that we'd wanna work to a resolution around this and knowing that if she was feeling the same way, she would be having the same conversation with me. And what I love about that is that what you're doing there is not only are you speaking in her language, right?

29:27You're bringing up a topic that you know is important to her that corresponds with her values. You're also proving to her that you've listened to her before, right? The fact that she's health conscious, that this is something that you're reflecting back at her. What you're doing is you're proving, I paid attention to who you are. I paid attention. I care about who you are. And one of the things that we know about social reciprocity is that if you believe that I am listening to you, you become much more likely to listen to me in return. We tend to think of listening as like this passive activity, right, where we close our mouth and we open our ears.

30:02And that's the first step, but that's not sufficient on its own for important conversations. Once you listen, you have to prove to the person that you're listening by oftentimes repeating what they've said in your own words. Look, I know health is really, really important to you. You mentioned to me that you had problems with asthma. I just want you to know that I totally hear that. And the reason why I'm calling you today is because health is important to us as well. And then when we do that, when we repeat back in our own words what we heard them say, what's really powerful is if we take a break and we ask them if we got it right.

30:34Did I hear you correctly? Because in that moment, when we're asking that person, did I hear you correctly? what we're really doing is we're saying, hey, do I have your permission to acknowledge that I'm listening really closely to you? Because inevitably they're going to say yes, or they're going to tell you, no, no, no, you didn't hear me correctly. Let me tell you what it is. And when they give you that permission to acknowledge that you were listening, that's when they become much more likely to listen in response. What's key there, I think many of us don't want to get it wrong. So we avoid saying, did I get that right?

31:08Because you feel this tension of what if they say no? But actually the clarification creates connection too. And I think that's something that's missed on a lot of people. Like you want to be on the same page. And if you got something wrong, you don't want to keep going down that path on a second date with a coworker, with your boss, even worse. You want the clarification to be on the same page. And it's okay if you get it wrong in what you thought you were hearing or what you thought you were perceiving. And that clarification really like, because sometimes we do get it wrong, right? Sometimes my wife tells me something and I say, okay, look, here's what I heard you say.

31:43Am I getting this right? And she's like, no, you didn't understand me at all. It's not that I care about this. It's that I care about that. And it's actually great for both of us because A, I was actually misunderstanding and now I understand a little bit better. B, she feels like she's finally getting me to understand what she's trying to tell me. This act, they call it looping for understanding, right? The step one is to ask a deep question. Step two is to repeat back in your own words. Step three is to ask if you got it right. The reason why looping is so powerful, and researchers have found that it's the most powerful way to diffuse tensions, particularly in workplace settings, is because the goal of a conversation is not for you and I to agree with each other.

32:23The goal of a conversation is for me to understand what you're trying to tell me and for me to speak in a way that you can understand me. And as long as we understand each other, even if we walk away completely disagreeing with each other, completely thinking each other's wrong, we're still going to feel connected to each other. And that connection is going to help us navigate our relationship even when we disagree. And you don't want to be solving the wrong problem for your wife. You don't want to be worried about the wrong thing. And I've been there where it's like, I'll go charging ahead because I want to solve something.

32:53And then I get to the solution, check back in. And my wife's like, that wasn't my problem at all. And now I just wasted all this time. I ticked her off even more because I could have been using that time on something else. And the other point I want to make, because we hear this all the time and we share this in our programs, we listen with our eyes and our ears. So when I was doing the tour of our new place, I saw all the signs in the place around her health. I saw the advanced water filtration system. I saw the Peloton in the garage. It wasn't that she was coming out and saying, I exercise four times a week and I'm an avid X, Y, and Z.

33:29I was listening through watching what's going on around me. And we're listening through body language and these cues. And I know so many of us, when we think about listening, we're like, oh, I just got to tune into the words. I just got to pick up on what's saying, close my eyes, open my ears. But it's more than that. It's actually an interesting point because we know that about anywhere from 40 to 60 % of communication is nonverbal or I'll say non-linguistic because sometimes we make noises that are verbal, but they're not words, right? We go, hmm, hmm, or hmm, right? All these different gestures and noises that we can make, the expressions on our face, all of these are part of how we communicate.

34:10And what's interesting is, as Johnny pointed out, we're now at this time when so many people are communicating digitally, right? When we have meetings online, we have meetings via Zoom, we might do telephone calls. It's easy for us to think that we don't know how to communicate non-verbally in those settings. But the truth is that people who pay attention to communication, they find that it's just as important. When you're on the telephone, all of us tend to over-enunciate our words by about 30%. We try and display our emotions in our voice rather than on our face when we're on the telephone. And none of us are really aware that we're doing this, right?

34:51This almost happens at a subconscious level, but it's because we've been using phones our entire life. And we know that if they can't see our face, we need to somehow convey to them what we're feeling. And so we automatically put that emotion into our voice. We can use this non-linguistic communication in any setting. It's just a matter of thinking about it and reminding yourself that like, you know, sending an email is a little bit different from sending a text is different from giving someone a phone call. There's slightly different rules and we need to abide by those. We tend to pay less attention to these signals as we get older.

35:24And NASA is now testing for this exact reason. What they're doing is they're looking for astronauts who have emotional intelligence. And what they found was that the way to test for that, there was no magic question they could ask because people who are like, if you're in the final rounds of an astronaut interview, you're kind of amazing, right? You're like, you have two PhDs, you fly fighter jets, you're usually like super handsome or beautiful. Like most importantly, you've been doing interviews your entire life. You know how to fake emotional intelligence better than anyone else. And so a lot of these guys that could fake emotional intelligence and, and they would get hired as astronauts and NASA would send them up to space for six to 12 months at a time.

36:05And the thing is you can't fake emotional intelligence for six months, right? They would drive each other crazy or drive other people crazy. And so one of the researchers, the psychologist, the chief psychologist for manned spaceflight at NASA, he developed this technique. What he would do is he would walk into the interview room and he would spill all these papers on the floor. And then he would laugh as if on accident, but he'd done it on purpose. And then he would laugh this big boisterous laugh and go, I cannot believe I did that. and then he would study how the person reacted. Because everyone reacted in one of two ways.

36:40Some people were like, oh, oh, I'm sorry that happened. That's really silly. Let me give you a hand. And some people would laugh that same voice. Just laugh. Oh, that's so silly. I can't believe that happened. Let me give you a hand. Some of the people were matching the intensity of his response because what they were doing is they know what's going on, right? They know that this guy made a mistake and then he compounded the mistake by overreacting to it. and they want to make them feel at ease. So they overreact as well. That's how we figure out who has emotional intelligence is the people who pay attention to us, who show that they're listening to us, who match us.

37:16They're the ones who understand us and want to hear what we have to say.

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38:16CarMax. Pickup not available everywhere. Restrictions and fee may apply. I think, unfortunately, we're oftentimes trying to get to our own point and rush ahead to the things that we've prepared to say. So, looping back to my conversation, I knew that if, you know, maybe she had a terrible trip to Europe and lost her luggage and a lot of other stressful things on her, I wasn't going to just launch into, Hey, I had this other really stressful thing. That's a deal breaker. I want to check in. It matters a lot. You know, there's this, um, there's this guy, Nick Epley, who's a professor at the university of Chicago.

38:50And for a lot of time, we talk about perspective taking, right. That like, if you want to understand, like, if you want to communicate with someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes and really understand how they see the world. It turns out though that humans are very, very bad at perspective taking. Like if I told you like, imagine what it's like to be living in Gaza right now, you might, you might be, or imagine what it's like to be living in Israel or imagine what it's like to be living in Russia. You think you can kind of put yourself in that person's head, but it turns out not very much, right?

39:20Because their experiences are so different. So what's much better than perspective taking is what Nick Epley calls perspective getting. Ask deep questions. and then listen to what the person says and they will tell you their perspective, right? How was your trip? It was like, I thought it was gonna be easy and it's so miserable and I'm totally jet lagged now and they lost my luggage. Okay, instead of just assuming you're on vacation and you're having a great time, now what I'm hearing from you in this perspective getting is you're telling me you're actually super frustrated too. You know what these frustrations are like.

39:54You don't want someone calling up and being like, here's a problem, deal with it right now. it's really powerful to be able to do ask those questions and get that perspective and recognize that you again can get it wrong and i think that's where the looping comes back in you know we've talked about the fast friends framework and i think for a lot of people it sounds good i just ask a series of questions and all of a sudden i'm in a deep connection with someone it works at a lab you know let's talk about reading these cues in an actual conversation with someone where maybe you can't get through all of those questions or you are pressed for time.

40:29I know every one of us, as we talked about earlier with the loneliness epidemic are trying to build deeper connections. What should we be doing once we're getting these answers and how do we know we've gone too deep, too fast? What are the cues here? So a couple of things, three things in particular. Number one, ask the deep question, right? And then again, the deep question, it doesn't have to be like, tell me about your mother or like, are you sad right now? The deep question can be as simple as, Oh, you live in the Heights? Like, what do you like about the Heights? Why'd you move up there? Or it could be as big as, oh, I'm sorry to hear that you were at a funeral.

41:02Was it someone who like mattered to you a lot? The reason why those are deep questions is because they ask people to tell us who they are. But also it's important to note their invitations. They're not mandates. If I say to you, oh, who died? It's a mandate. You have to tell me. But if I say, oh, was it someone important to you? It gives them the option to say, yeah, yeah, it was someone who's important. But you know, this happens, right? Clearly, they don't want to talk about it. Or to say, yeah, yeah, it was my favorite aunt. I loved her so much. And I'm so sad that she's gone. So we want to ask a deep question in a way that invites the other person to share who they are.

41:41It doesn't have to be a big question. It just has to be something to ask them how they feel about life rather than the facts of their life. number two is we do want if it's an important conversation we want to state what our goal is and our goal might be just as simple as being like hey i just wanted to hang out with you guys for a couple of hours because i hadn't seen you a little bit right so i'm saying my goal is just to catch up i don't have any other agenda or it might be that my goal is hey you know i wanted to talk to you about this project because i feel like we've got a little bit of tension and and i think if we if we can figure out how to work through that tension we're actually going to be a stronger team together.

42:14Okay, now I know your goal. Your goal is not to tell me I'm doing something wrong. Your goal is for us to come together and figure out how to do this. So ask a deep question, number one. Declare your intention, number two, at the beginning. And then number three, go ahead and say if there's something that's on your mind that makes this conversation harder. There was this really interesting study that was done about people talking about race. This researcher brought together friends who were black and white, and she asked them to talk about race. And for many of these folks, they had been friends for years and they had never really talked about race.

42:47And she divided them into two groups and she told one group, okay, look, before you have this conversation, I want you to do something. I want you to just acknowledge that it's going to be awkward, right? Say something like, you know, well, I want to talk about race. This is going to be super awkward. And I might say the wrong thing. Like sometimes my brain, my lips move faster than my brain. And, and what I, what I mean might come out wrong. And I hope that you don't get offended. And I promise if the same thing happens to you, I will not get offended, right? But then declare your goal, why you want to have this conversation.

43:17But it's really important to me to talk about this because I know it's something that's part of your life. And I really feel your friendship really matters to me. I want to understand more about you. When people do that, it diffuses the tension in that conversation by about 80%. And so you ask a deep question, you state your goal, you acknowledge anything at the outset that might be uncomfortable or might kind of where your head's at, invite them to tell you about where their head's at. If you do those three things, even if you're talking to someone who like you completely disagree with, even if you're talking to like, you know, your crazy uncle, you're going to do okay.

43:57You're going to walk away from that conversation feeling like you both genuinely hurt each other and that you feel connected. You're right. Discomfort is useful. Like owning the discomfort is a big part of this here and recognizing it allows the other person to own it and feel more comfortable in the discomfort that's happening. Think back over the last year, what's the best conversation you've had in the last year? Okay. Does one come to mind? Tell me a little bit about it. It was a catch up with an old high school friend that I hadn't seen in 20 years now. 20 years, that's a long time. And my guess is that like the beginning of it was kind of awkward, right?

44:33Like it's like, hey, I can't remember your wife's name. And it's been 20 years since we talked to each other, right? Did you call him or did he call you? Like, what was the genesis of that? I was actually just randomly next to him. So. Oh, really? Was visiting, but not our hometown. Just again. Oh my gosh. World's a small place. And we ran into each other in person. That's awesome. How long did you talk for? I don't even know. It was, it started, I obviously thought it was just going to be a few moments and went on for probably close to an hour. And if I had said to you, you should call this guy.

45:07like you haven't talked to him in 20 years you should pick up the phone and call him you'd be like i don't want to call this guy right like like this is going to be like miserable like like it's been too long there's just too much to catch up on and yet you enjoyed that conversation so much and this gets at this other thing you mentioned the harvard happiness study one of the things that we know from that study what was originally known as the grant study and is now known as the the harvard study of adult happiness or adult development is that the people who are happiest are the ones who maintain relationships.

45:40And that does not mean that they talk to people on a regular basis. It doesn't mean that they talk to people weekly or even monthly. It means that ever so often they talk to someone who they've been out of touch with. And in doing so, they reify that relationship and guaranteed the first couple of minutes are always going to be awkward. Hey, Jim, it's been five years since we've spoken to each other. How are your kids? You got two kids, three kids, five kids? I can't remember, right? It's gonna, but after you get through that, you are gonna enjoy talking to each other so much. It's gonna make you feel good.

46:15It's gonna make you feel better. So that's one interesting thing is that it makes you happier. The other interesting thing is that it makes you more successful. There's a guy named Gansovetter, who's a really famous psychology experimenter. And he tried to figure out how people found the jobs that they're in. And what he found is that when someone gets a new job, it's usually not because of what's known as a strong tie. It's usually not a close friend who helped them get that job. Because oftentimes your close friends already work with you, right? You work alongside them. You see them every single day.

46:47If there's an opportunity that comes up, you know about that opportunity. You guys are watching the same shows and reading the same magazines. The way that we find new jobs is because of what are known as loose ties, people who are distant friends or friend of a friend. Because in doing so, what happens is that oftentimes they see opportunities that we're not aware of. They see opportunities for us that never occurred to us. That's how we become successful. And when we become successful, that's how we end up becoming the people we want to be. that discomfort that we're talking about here you're both feeling it but you're also feeling disconnected and the connection piece is far more important than the discomfort of the first few moments or first few minutes of the conversation and it feels really really good it just feels it just feels amazing to to get a chance to connect with someone particularly if there's someone who's important to you who you haven't talked to in a long time having those opportunities opportunities those organic opportunities obviously it frames the conversation in a new way where people are much more relaxed right whereas if i'm like hey i want to talk to my high school buddy here's my calendly book a book a call with me right because that's what i do now because i'm so used to doing it for work so it's like you said this and and i i don't even know like does everyone do that now or my regular friends going why did you send me a calendly link for well i i don't think it's the link that matters i think it's how you present it right like like because because because norms change about like i when someone sends me a calendar calendar i don't even know how you say it it's kind of nice right because it lets me instead of doing like the back and forth right but but the con the context should be you know i really want to reconnect with you.

48:41I've got, I've got like, there's like a bunch of dates where I could do it. I put them into this thing so that you can find one that works for you really well. Right. So again, I'm stating my intention there. I'm stating my goal, um, as opposed to just being like, Hey, here's my link. Like just find a time. I'm, I'm sure we can chat at some point. What do we do in those situations where we feel like someone's just not listening to us as much as we're trying to be a super communicator? The truth of the matter is, um, oftentimes look, you can't force someone to do something they don't want to, right?

49:12Like when I talk to my kids, there are times that they just do not want to listen to me. And it doesn't matter what I do, right? There's no, there's no conversational trick that can work its magic. But let's assume that it's a situation where there is at least a glimmer, a glimmer of the possibility that you do want to connect with each other. You do want to communicate with each other, which is actually what happens with my kids, right? The number one thing you can do is start that conversation by proving to them that you want to listen to them. I become more likely to listen to you when I believe that you are listening to me.

49:44And so one of the best things is this thing called callbacks. There was actually a study that was done at Harvard Business School of speed daters. And they tried to figure out who gets, the whole point of a speed date is you talk to each other for a minute or two, and then you get to say who you want to have a real date with afterwards. And so they were trying to figure out who got the most requests for real dates. And they initially thought maybe it's like, maybe it's like the most handsome or beautiful men or women. Maybe it's the ones who are the most interesting or have the, you know, the, the doing or have the highest education or the highest paycheck.

50:20None of that mattered. The only thing that mattered in determining whether you were successful at speed dating was if you asked questions and did this thing called callbacks. Oh, it's interesting that you like to go to, um, to Peru. Cause I remember at the beginning of the conversation, you said that your family is from South America. All right. Do you have family in Peru? Is that why you like to go there? So what I'm doing there is I'm proving to you that I'm listening to you. And if you start a tough conversation with someone, you know, Hey, when I talk to my kids, Hey, I want to talk to you.

50:52Cause like, you know, two weeks ago you told me that, that it was really important to you that, that you get good grades this year. And, and I've been noticing that it's been harder to get you to do your homework at night. So like, tell me a little bit about why you think that is and, and what we can do to help you get the grades that you told me you wanted to get. Right. What I'm doing there is I'm proving that I'm paying attention. I'm proving that I'm listening. I'm showing him that our goal is the same. Our goal is for him to get good grades and it really matters. We all want to feel heard and important to someone else.

51:24So it makes sense that the callback would be so effective. even a callback with a distant friend you haven't talked to is going to put them back in that nostalgia feel good right yeah do you remember that time when we were in high school yeah yeah it's really it feels good to be heard we all want to be heard and seen and when we facilitate that when we help someone know that they've been heard and seen it really helps them become the person that they most esteem about themselves as we wrap i'd love to hear what you're working on because part of being a super communicator is recognizing that these are tools that atrophy and we continue to work on them to get better.

52:02I write for the New Yorker magazine, and I think my next book is going to be about AI. And so I've been spending a lot of time looking at how technology changes how we communicate in ways that are both good and bad. And one of the things that I'm realizing is that we tend to learn how to communicate in a kind of uneven way, right? We might learn really quickly at first and then there's a big valley and then we learn a little bit more and so one of the things i'm trying to figure out is as ai becomes more popular as it influences more people's lives how do we make rinse takes your laundry and hand delivers it to your door expertly cleaned and folded so you could take the time once spent folding and sorting and waiting to finally pursue a whole new version of you like tea time you or this tea time you or even this tea time you So did you hear about Dave?

52:57Or even tea time, tea time, tea time you. Mmm. So update on Dave. It's up to you. We'll take the laundry. Rinse. It's time to be great. Sure that it remains a force for good. Something that helps us communicate rather than removes our ability to communicate. And a big part of that, I think, is my own personal goal is I try and ask one deep question a day to someone who's kind of unexpected that I would ask them a deep question. whether it's a stranger that I see on the street or like my barista, or it's someone that I work with. Those deep questions are what connect us. And so I try and ask those and then try and think, and then oftentimes I'm asking them about AI.

53:35How do you use AI? What is it? What does it represent for you? Trying to understand how our communication will shift. Well, we're excited for the next book on AI. Where can our audience find out about your paperback? The paperback comes out this month of super communicators. And you can find it in Amazon or bookshop.org or your local bookstore, which is great to support your local bookstore. And you can find me online. I have a newsletter called The Science of Better. I'm just at charlesduhigg.com. D-U-H-I-G-G. Thank you, Charles. Thank you.

54:14What a fantastic interview. I hope you enjoyed it. And now comes a part of the show where we showcase one of our X Factor Accelerator members. Take it away, Daniel. My name is Daniel Bosing, and I'm a manufacturing engineer. My overall experience with the X Factor Accelerator program has been excellent due to effective teaching and a supportive community of like-minded individuals. Since joining, I've cultivated deeper connections with my friends, family, and colleagues by implementing the conversational techniques learned in the program. These deeper connections have made my life more fulfilling, both personally and professionally.

54:52I would recommend joining the X Factor Exciter program because the excellent teaching and consistent accountability ensure you will grow into the person that you want to become. Thank you, Daniel. It was a pleasure working with you too, and good luck to all of your future endeavors. If you've gotten value out of this or any of our podcasts, head on over to your favorite a podcast player and rate and review the show. It means the world to us and it helps others find the show. Until next week, go out there and network and make some awesome new friends. Cheers.

55:44song of a tragedy cause you had your taste of black on the easy day yeah but I remember you oh yeah I remember you yeah but I remember I remember I remember I remember