How to become a Supercommunicator with Pulitzer Prize winner, Charles Duhigg

0:00Watch it early on the High Performance App. Available now, Roman Kemp, the broadcaster, opens up a powerful conversation on success and mental health. That was just a good conversation. I feel so good after having that conversation. And that's, I think, the goal. Being lonely is the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. That's how much it impacts your health. And we know if you're lonely, you will die earlier. Something happens that makes us less healthy when we're lonely. as humans we have evolved to crave having good conversations we crave connection that is the author charles duig and this is high performance the show that unlocks the minds of some of the most fascinating people on the planet i'm jay comfrey and alongside our high performance expert damian hughes we learn from the stories struggles and successes of our guests allowing us all to explore be challenged and to grow and the reason why this was a particularly exciting episode for us to record is that Charles Duhigg is high performance in his own right.

1:04I mean, he's won the Pulitzer Prize. In his world of journalism and being an author, it does not get better than that. I mean, that is the top of the top. That is the Ballon d 'Or of his world. That is the World Cup. It's the Olympic gold medal of the world that Charles Duhigg inhabits. But not only is he a high performer, his experience of working and studying high performers is fascinating. he talks to us about his brand new book super communicators and being a communicator is at the heart of everything whether it's you trying to get people to come on the journey with you whether it's other people trying to get you to share the vision that they've got for something whether you're a parent a child a friend a colleague it doesn't matter your entire life can be defined by your ability to communicate and this really is the ultimate conversation about how you can become a super communicator in your world.

1:57So let's do it then and welcome the award-winning author Charles Duhigg to High Performance. But first, a few quick messages from our brilliant partners who allow us to offer you this content totally free.

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3:59Thank you so much for finding the time to come and join us. Thank you for having me. This is so much fun. Let's see. What is high performance, Charles? To me or just in general? What do you believe it to be? I believe high performance is the ability to define what is success for yourself and achieve it without ruining the rest of your life. Nice. Do you think it can do that too often? Well, I think that, I mean, I'd be curious what you guys think about this because I've often, there have been times in my life when I have been very focused on elite performance, on doing the absolute best job, on being the number one person at a particular thing.

4:39And what I found is that you can achieve that but I was always a little bit miserable right? If I wasn't doing that activity I was always a little bit miserable and it's because the rest of my life just didn't make any sense. I wasn't seeing my wife enough. I wasn't seeing my kids enough. I was making them crazy and so I think for me high performance is about being at a level where you feel like your performance is elite because it feels wonderful to be elite right? It feels wonderful to be operating at the top of your capacities and making use of whatever gifts you have, but without it ruining the rest of your life, which it's so easy to let it do so.

5:19Now, Charles, we're here to talk about your brilliant new book, Super Communicators. And there's a line in it that, so I judge your book by how practical it is you can use it. And I want to steal a line from it and ask you to open this interview. Of course. You talk about, sometimes the way into a conversation is to ask, do you want a hug? Do you want to be heard? Or do you want to help? Yeah, yeah. So which one do I want? Yeah, I want a hug. Come on, man. Let's hug it out. Actually, let me think. I mean, just a great conversation is wonderful, which I think is usually, that can be a hug or it can be just listening to each other and trying to understand each other.

6:00There's not much I need help with at this moment, but I'm sure halfway through the interview, you guys will be like, you know, you need some help with something. I got it. But would you explain to us a little bit about that concept and why it's such a great way into... Absolutely, absolutely. So one of the things that we've learned in the last decade, and we're living through this golden age of understanding communication for really the first time because of advances in neural imaging and data collection. And one of the big insights is that oftentimes we think a discussion is about one thing, right?

6:30We're talking about sport or we're talking about our kids. but actually every discussion is made up of different kinds of conversations and those kinds of conversations tend to fall into one of three buckets there's practical conversations where we're making plans we're solving problems together there's emotional conversations where I might tell you how I feel about something and I don't want you to solve my feelings I want you to empathize and then there's social conversations about how we relate to each other and society and the social identities are important to us and if we're not having the same kind of conversation at the same moment, it's very hard for us to connect.

7:05It's very hard for us to hear each other. And so this, do you want to be hugged, helped, or heard is an easy way of asking, do you want a practical conversation, an emotional conversation, or a social conversation? And oftentimes, when you ask someone, they can tell you, right? They know what they're looking for. Yeah. I love that because I think, too often we think a conversation is about the thing. Yeah. It's about the dinner, or it's about the journey home, or it's about just the holiday, whatever we're talking about. But it's about connecting on a much deeper level than that, right? The point of the conversation oftentimes is the conversation itself.

7:43It's showing this other person, I want to connect with you. I want to understand you. And then they often reciprocate, right? And they say, I want to understand you as well. Laughter is a great example of this. So 80 % of the time when we laugh, it is not in response to anything funny, right? We've laughed a couple of times in our conversation. neither of us have told any jokes, right? And I'm laughing now. But when we laugh, what we're using it for is to tell someone, I want to connect with you. And when they laugh back, which is the most natural thing to do, they're saying, I want to connect with you as well.

8:17Laughter has evolved as a way for us to show others that we want to connect with them. There will be people who are watching this or listening to this now, and they've had that conversation with their partner in the last few months. You don't listen to me. You don't understand me anymore. We don't connect like we used to. So if they're now thinking, well, does my partner want to be hugged? Or do they want to be heard? What's going on here? How do we work out what the other person wants without saying to them, what do you want from this conversation? Well, sometimes the easiest way, so I fell into this bad pattern with my wife, where I would come home from work after a long day, and I'd complain about my work.

8:53And my wife would make this very practical suggestion, like, why don't you take your boss to lunch and get to know him a little bit better? And instead of being able to hear what she was saying, I would get even more upset, right? I would say like, you're supposed to be on my side. You're supposed to be outraged on my behalf. And she would get upset because I was attacking her for giving me good advice. So now what we do is we just ask. Like when I start complaining about my day, my wife will say, do you want me to help you solve this problem or do you just need to vent? And it feels really good for someone to ask you what you want.

9:21Because oftentimes up until that moment, I haven't thought about it myself. And I say, look, oh, no, this isn't a real problem. I just need to complain about it for a little bit. So I think part of it is that we can ask. But sometimes that's awkward or sometimes that's not feasible. And at those moments, what we can do is we can ask what's known as a deep question. So a deep question is something that asks someone to talk about their values or their beliefs or their experiences. And that can sound a little intimidating, but it's as simple as saying like, oh, you know, like you're a doctor. What made you decide to go to medical school?

9:55Right? Instead of asking, where do you practice? Hey, what's the best case you've ever worked on? What do you love about your job? Those are deep questions because they invite you to say something real. And when you say something real, you will inevitably reveal what kind of mindset you're in, what kind of conversation you're looking for. So if you ask, let's say you were talking to your wife, or let me ask you, when this happens in your marriage, where do you find that sometimes miscommunication occurs? It's either me not listening to a plan that we've made and going, and this is the first I've ever heard of this.

10:33I don't know what you're talking about. Or even worse than that is me feeling I have to be the problem solver. Right. And Harriet, my wife, going, why can't you just listen? Yeah. But I sometimes find it hard to know if you're telling me something, I feel this need to help you. And I think a lot of people fall into that trap. Absolutely. And I think that one of the things we can do is the best deep question, because it's so generic, is just to say, tell me why this is important to you like what does this mean to you right if if Harriet is saying like you know we're going here and we're doing this and and if you I tell me if you think this would work to turn to her and say like honey I hear what you're saying you this seems important to you tell me tell me why it's important to you like what what does this mean for you yeah my guess is she would say something like well I feel like I told you five times and you haven't listened so you know it's not actually about solving the problem that's right in front of you it's about proving that you're listening to her yeah and and it's absolutely right because i feel that you know she gave up her job to bring up children in the countryside i carried on with my job and i feel like sometimes what she's actually saying is i exist here and i've absolutely run ragged with all of these things that you don't even know happen because you're off and she'll say oh yes high performance is so bloody important to you isn't it and i know what she really means in that in that context.

11:56And this is not a dig at her because she's incredible. It's almost like a product of me working away from home a lot and her having to pick up all the pieces. And I don't think anyone in that situation ever quite gets the credit or the love for doing that stuff. Do you know what I mean? And sometimes we just need to be acknowledged. In emotional conversations, like I said, you often are saying a feeling and you don't want the other person to solve that feeling for you. You want them just to acknowledge. like honey I know that you've had a tough day and like I see that you've had a hard day and you did so much amazing work like just I want to just recognize that like and thank you for it I think there was a study done once wasn't there where they asked two couples how much are you responsible for what happens in this marriage and the combined total was like 160 % so they were both like well I'm responsible for 80 % of what happens here but I think this is a really you know this is almost the most important conversation to have about high performance because this is about human connection So let me ask you the question.

12:56Why are you interested in this? Why this? So I wrote this book, The Power of Habit, about 10 years ago. And it's about how to change our own habits, how to understand our habits. And I started getting all these emails from people saying, thank you so much. Like I use the ideas in the book to give up drinking or to start exercising. And oftentimes they would say, now can you help me change like my spouse's habits or change my boss's habits? and I realized the thing about power of habit is it's habits is it's focused very much on ourselves but so much of our success so much of our our peak performance is based on working with other people right you can be the highest achiever on earth and if you don't have the right team around you if you can't seg with the people if you have a bad home life it's not going to last and so I realize that the way that we do that is through communication.

13:50We, as humans, we have evolved to crave having good conversations. We crave connection. And for a long time, it was just kind of mysterious. There were some people who were good at it and some people didn't seem good at it. But now we actually know the science behind it. We know why people connect with each other or why they don't. And once you know the science, you know how to do it. Is there a danger of overthinking conversation. Absolutely. Absolutely. So what's really interesting is if you think about it, communication is Homo sapiens superpower. It is the thing that has set us apart from every other species.

14:27It's why we're so successful. And our brains have evolved to be really, really good at communication. And when we learn how to communicate, we make it into habits very, very quickly. So when we're first learning a principle like ask deep questions, or there's another one called looping for understanding how we prove we're listening to people. It can feel a little bit like we're in our own head at first. But what happens is if we practice it once or twice, it almost becomes automatic immediately because our brain is designed to turn these into habits very, very quickly. So if you find yourself overthinking, if you find yourself in your head too much, the thing to ask yourself is, am I trying something new?

15:07In which case, it's okay to be in your head. You're practicing it, making it into a habit. or is it I'm actually thinking about myself rather than thinking about the other person? Am I worried about what I'm going to say next? Am I worried about whether you like me, whether you think I'm smart? Because if I'm worried about how you see me or what I'm going to say or what's happening in my head, I'm probably not going to be able to listen to you. I feel that's 90 % of conversation. Yeah. Is people getting ready for their comment or their thought, what does this person think of me? How can I prove my brain power, my knowledge?

15:37it's so so little of it is giving isn't it? and yet if I was to ask you who are the best conversations who you love having conversations with inevitably the person you told me is not the person who says the smartest thing every single time it's probably the person who asks you the best questions and when you when you tell them something interesting or vulnerable they match your they engage in reciprocal vulnerability and reciprocal authenticity so we don't walk away from great conversations thinking oh that guy was so smart we walk away from conversations thinking oh like i just felt great during that conversation we remember the emotions yeah of a conversation not what's said oh that's a really good point yeah so can you give us an example then of somebody that you've had that connection with when you were writing the book you were able to reflect and go that's what they were doing that was what made them so special absolutely well okay so let me ask you guys so if you were having a bad day and you wanted to call a friend that you knew would make you feel or anyone that you knew would just make you feel better yeah do you know who you would call yeah yeah yeah it pops into your mind immediately right can i ask who it is for you guys yeah yeah my brother chris okay i'll call my wife okay yeah and most people watching and listening they someone popped into their mind immediately for you your brother chris and your wife are super communicators and you're probably a super communicator back.

17:03You know exactly how to listen to that person. You also know how to show them that you're listening. You know what kind of question they need to hear in order to understand themselves. Now, there are some people who can do this consistently. They can connect with almost anyone. These are super communicators. What we know about them is we know that they ask more questions, 10 to 20 times as many questions as the average person. Which is probably, if I was listening to your conversations with Chris and your wife, you probably ask a lot more questions in those conversations. And some of the questions are like, hey, what'd you think about that?

17:37Or what'd you do next to invite people in? But some are deep questions. We know that they also, they match other people's type of conversation, kind of conversation. So if you're in a conversation and someone says something serious, they get serious with you right away. If someone tells a joke, they laugh very quickly. They're showing the other person that they want to connect. And so for me, when I encounter super communicators, and in writing the book, I found a bunch of them. One of the things that you notice is you don't walk away thinking like, this is the smartest, most charismatic person I've ever met.

18:14You just walk away thinking like, oh, you know, I sounded smart in that conversation. Like, that was just a good conversation. I feel so good after having that conversation. And that's, I think, the goal. They show that they want to connect. and showing that you want to connect is like 90 % of making a connection. And actually, the number of times I've had a conversation, because you do spot them where you go, they didn't ask me a single thing about myself. Right. We've spoken for 20 minutes. They didn't ask once. Why are some people like that? I think just because, you know, we used to teach conversation in schools, right?

18:57So we're all familiar with like the young women going to finishing schools. You basically went to finishing school to learn to be an interesting conversationalist. And in other schools, this was part, when my father was growing up in the United States, and then, you know, if you went to school in the 1950s, you took a class called home economics or interpersonal relationships or something. You learned to, and as schools got more technical, that fell out of the curriculum. And so those people who don't ask questions, I honestly think it's not because they're narcissists or self-involved. It's literally because nobody trained them to ask questions.

19:34They never developed a habit. But there's an interesting concept to it, because I'm thinking of myself that I very rarely offer anything about myself because I believe that, well, that's not either interesting or a place to do it. But I'm intrigued. I'll ask lots of questions of other people and I'm interested. But I'm quite intrigued by the fact that you feel that that might then create a breakdown. Well, actually, asking those questions might actually be revealing things about yourself. Because my guess is, and just like knowing your nature and having listened to the show, my guess is what you feel like is a question is actually also an exposure of who you are.

20:11Okay. That through the question, you're saying like, I'm really interested in what you said about this. And I intuit it's because you've had a similar experience. or because it's something that's meaningful to you. So to share who we are, that doesn't mean we have to make a little speech, right? And say, here's my background, here's where I'm from. Oftentimes, we share who we are and we express vulnerability by asking someone a question, particularly by asking kind of an intimate question because they could say, like, that's none of your business. But when we ask that question, we say, like, I'm interested in you, I'm interested in this part of your life.

20:46That can feel very intimate. Can I just tell you though we've worked with a lot of people on here for the last five years I feel I know more about you than anyone else that works on this podcast That's delusion Because I think you do share I don't think that you Damien is he has no ego at all very modest and will never say guess what but the way that you talk about life you understand how you feel about your family your children, your work, your passions Okay, that answers what Charles was saying. Yeah, that's interesting. I love the fact just having a conversation about conversation can give us this level of conversation.

21:28That's true, that's true. And it's depressing that we don't connect like this more often though, isn't it? And it's interesting. You see two people on a park bench having their lunch on a lunch break or something, and you think, if you just said one word to that person, imagine what could spark. I'll now go on the train home for two and a half hours. I will not speak to another person on the train. And if I try to, they'll look at me like, I need to be locked up. I wonder how society got to this point. Well, it's interesting. So this occurs two things to me. The first is, if you talk to people who are consistent super communicators, often they'll say that there was something in their past where they were bad at communication.

22:05Like they had trouble making friends in high school or their parents got divorced and they had to be the peacemaker between them. And it's thinking about conversation that makes them good at conversation, right? just paying half an inch more attention to how conversation functions actually makes us much better at conversation and that's why this is fun to talk about it because it's something all of us do right we get to think about our own conversations but to the point you just raised about riding the bus you know they've done studies and they found that one of the most anxiety producing things that you can ask someone to do is to ask them to have a conversation with a stranger right even just saying like on the bus home tonight, you should have a, you should talk to the, to the person next to you, even if they think you're a weirdo.

22:48Like you're like, Oh God, I get like, if I have to do it, I will. And what's interesting is that when people actually have those conversations and we ask them afterwards, how to go, they all say like, Oh, it was great. Like it was so much better than I thought it was going to be. Including if we asked them, if we asked them to ask really personal questions, like when's the last time you cried in front of another person? Yeah. and the reason why it feels so good to have those conversations is because we do connect with someone else we do engage in this reciprocity but we're terrible at forecasting it and so the question is how do we remove that anxiety and there was a study that was done at harvard where they found they told a bunch of students you're going to have a conversation with a stranger write down three topics that you want to talk about took like 10 seconds everyone worked on three topics.

23:36They stuck the card in their pocket. They went and they had their conversation. And then they asked afterwards, did those three topics ever come up? And everyone said, no, I never brought up the three topics. And they said, well, how was the conversation? Were you anxious? And they said, no, I was so much less anxious because I knew I had these topics to fall back on. Like I knew what I could talk about. So it's not that we don't like having conversations. It's the anxiety before the conversation begins that stops us. Because a lot leads me into the question of how do we lean into difficult conversations?

24:08So you offered an example that really resonated with me where you spoke about your father passed away a few years ago and how people were good at offering condolences. But what you really wanted was a conversation about your dad and the kind of man he was. Yeah, I wanted people to ask me about him. Because have you had parents who have passed away? I lost my dad. That's right, resonated. So I lost my dad a couple of years ago. So I could really empathize with what you wrote about. And what was that like for you? What did you find right afterwards? I found it very tough. I still find it quite tough to talk about it.

24:47But I struggled more with people just offering condolence because I didn't know how. Offering me their view of my dad. Yes. Rather than asking for my view if that made sense because I felt it was something very personal. Yeah, right. And I think it's because people are worried about saying the wrong thing. They're anxious about, you know, I don't want... But at the same time, and just because someone asks about your dad, there's a way to ask that doesn't pressure you into talking about it, but saying like, I'm sorry to hear that. Like, what was he like? And it's very easy to say he was great and just leave it at that.

25:25Yeah. Or if you're in a place where like, I'm sure you were thinking about your dad all the time. And you were thinking about how wonderful he was. And also battles you had when you were growing up and how much you love him. It's on your mind. And for no one to ask you about it, it feels like they don't want to connect with you. Yeah, sure. Well, I remember literally after the funeral where I just had to go and sit in a car on my own because I couldn't bear people telling me their view or offering me the sympathy. I wanted a connection. And I felt it was too shallow. And that was why I was wondering, Charles, because I thought your example was powerful of how do we lean into these difficult conversations?

26:09Because you say it can provoke anxiety in the person that has to initiate it. But we all have to do that at some time. What have you learned? I think the way that I try and do it is I try and make an invitation through a deep question. And again, the deep question can just be like, what was your dad like? Or what was the last week like? Now, I don't want to pressure them. I don't want to put them in a situation where they feel like they have to respond with something meaningful. Because sometimes we don't want a conversation, right? Sometimes we're on the train and we just want to zone out. We need some time for ourselves.

26:45But by making that invitation, by saying, if you want to connect, I am here. I'm here to connect with you. I want that too. And you don't have to accept the invitation right now and you don't have to accept it ever. But usually what I do is I say some variation of, what does this mean to you? You've been through something important. Like, what did you learn from it? How do you make sense of it? So when you do this, again, just to shift lanes slightly, because in the nature of the work that you do, where we were talking about your Pulitzer Prize earlier, like the Oscars of writing. When you have to go and speak to somebody, say in a professional context, and you're going to breach something that might be difficult or embarrassing or maybe something they don't want to talk about, how do you go about approaching a situation like that?

27:38So it's a great question. And in the book, there's this chapter about Netflix and this huge civil war that they had on Netflix. an executive used the n-word in a meeting and he got fired but it set off the civil war within netflix between people who said look there's a lot of racism in this company that we're not acknowledging and other people who said i'm not a racist like i disagree and it would have been very easy for the company to just back away from it to for the head of the ceo to say look politics belongs at home conversations of race aren't like appropriate in the workplace but instead they did the opposite and what they did to make those conversations about disagreements or conversations where we're just tense easier is they did a couple of things.

28:22The first thing that they did is they started each conversation by saying, look, this is going to be awkward, right? And that's okay. Like the awkwardness is part of the reason we're having the conversation. And I'm probably going to say some things in the wrong way. And I'm going to ask for you to forgive me. And I promise if you say something in the wrong way, I will not get offended. I'll ask you to explain. And we say this often, lean into people, get to know people. You'll find that almost everyone is good. Yeah. And almost everyone wants to say and do the right thing. Yes. But the world we're in at the moment, it's so dangerous.

28:56It feels so dangerous sometimes to have an opinion, doesn't it? So it's interesting. There was a study done, this really interesting researcher brought together friends, one of which was black and one of which was white and so these are people who already knew each other and she asked them if they wanted to have a conversation about race and overwhelmingly everyone said no I do not want to have that conversation even with a good friend and she asked them why and the white people said I'm afraid I'm going to say something racist accidentally and their black friends said I'm afraid my white friend is going to say something racist accidentally and I'll have to deal with it I'll have to like it'll impact our friendship it'll impact how I see them and so one of the easiest ways to resolve or lessen that anxiety is to start by saying i might say the wrong thing and like i want you to know i if i say something that makes you think maybe i'm racist like please ask me about it because that's not that's not who i am yeah but if we have to self-monitor everything we say you can't have a real conversation right you can't be in the back and forth and intimate and vulnerable we have to have some we have to give each other the grace of safety and say in this conversation i am going to assume the best intentions and if you say something that seems off to me or wrong i'm going to ask you to explain it and i'm going to prove to you that i'm listening to you that's that's magical that is lovely what a nice empathetic way to see the world but there's another experiment you built about chiles that if on this topic of race or something as difficult as that that really sort of jumped out from me from the book about when students that were seen as having a high level of academic ability were brought in to do exams and stereotypes were reinforced.

30:49Yeah. Would you tell us a bit about that? Yeah, absolutely. So this is this really interesting finding and Claude Steele is the researcher who's done the most work on it. It's called stereotype threat. and what they found was that he found students in the U.S. who were in college who basically looked exactly the same. They got the same test scores on their standardized tests. They got into the same schools, the same classes. The only difference was that some of them were black and some of them were white and what he found is that the black students were getting worse grades than the white students and he wanted to try and figure out why and he discovered it was only on timed tests that black students were performing and scoring less than their white peers.

31:33And what he figured out is it's because if you know that a stereotype exists about you, even if no one said it to you, if it's in your head, you become reactive to it, right? Black students, they knew that for some kinds of tests, there was a stereotype that they would perform less well. And so instead of just doing the test and going through as fast as they can, they started double checking all their answers. And because they were double checking their answers, because they want to prove that stereotype wrong, they would run out of time. And this is stereotype threat. What it says is, just knowing that a stereotype exists can be damaging to us.

32:11And it's not just black students, right? It's somebody who's in sport, the stereotype that, oh, you must not be that smart because you used to... You're a footballer. Yeah, you probably hit your head a couple of times. When we know that stereotype exists, even if no one said it to us, we overcompensate. And that becomes a barrier to everything. The reason I mention it is when you're talking about those different friends of different races and saying I might make a mistake here, I think it was something about saying, I'm your friend, so I change it from a different stereotype. That's exactly right.

32:46So the way that you undermine stereotype threat is instead of focusing on one identity, you bring in all the identities. So with some students, what they would do is they would say, okay, before you take the test, I want you to write down all the different identities you have. So one of them is I'm black or I'm white. And another one is I'm male or I'm a woman. But then some of them are like, I'm a brother. I'm a father. I'm a son. I play on my football team. I'm the captain of the football team. I go to the cheer squad. I'm someone who volunteers with kids. When we bring all of those identities into someone's consciousness, it makes any one identity less important.

33:28And as a result, the stereotype is not as loud in our head. And more importantly, we don't push people into a stereotype. If I say to you, you know, as a man, you probably think that, you know, like X and Y and Z, right? there's part of you who's like yeah I'm a man but I'm all these other things like I don't believe like just because I'm a man I I have I have a I have a multitude of identities we all contain multitudes and when we bring those into a conversation that's when we can talk about the hard things so I found when I'm talking to police race and policing has been a big deal in the U.S.

34:06as it has here. And I have a friend who's black. And when this comes up, I often say, I'm just wondering, like, you know, as a black man, you probably have an opinion on policing, but I also know that you're a father and I know that you're a lawyer. And as a lawyer, you probably have a really interesting perspective on this. And I know that you coach Little League with me. And so we both think about, like, what our kids are experiencing when they're walking home. And I'm just wondering, with all those different hats on, how do you think about policing. And what I'm really saying is like, I want to see your full humanity, right?

34:42And then we don't feel like we're being pushed into a stereotype. No fuck.

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36:54I think this idea of not pushing people into stereotypes when they're adults is important. It's also really vital as parents with young people. what and how should we be talking about communication with our children that all of us sit here as parents right yeah you know we either have kids or we once were a kid okay so this is relevant to everyone how should we be talking to young people about communication okay so let me ask you guys how are your conversations with your kids like when they don't go well how do they not go well I think when I start to shout probably but then the whole thing just shuts down or that, maybe it's the wrong thing but when my daughter particularly just bites back and has an opinion and then I just revert to, well because I'm an adult and I have no other answer other than that which then in the cold out of the day sounds like a very shit argument even against a 10 year old, doesn't it?

37:54She's sharp, I mean if I get something wrong she looks at me and goes oh Mr. High Performance I'm like okay I'm also human so she's stereotyping me I'm really fascinated to know the things that I should and shouldn't be talking about what are your conversations like with your kids? when they don't go well I think it's I become a preacher I'm telling them do this this is what I've told you and it's not a conversation they don't believe that you're listening to them no it's a sense of like a series of diktats Yeah, and sometimes we have to do that. Sometimes I say to my kids, I need to have a conversation about your rooms.

38:29And I don't actually want to have a conversation about the room. I want them to go clean their rooms. But most of the time when we're talking to our kids, we need to prove to them that we're listening to them because they suspect that we aren't. They suspect that we're grownups and we ignore what they have to say. And so I think a huge part of talking to our kids is proving we're listening. So the problem I have with one of my kids is, you know, I'll ask questions like, how was school today? Fine. Did you learn anything? No. How was basketball practice? It was okay. Right. It's all these like, and I'm like, oh, it's like pulling teeth to get this kid to tell me about his day.

39:05So what I've started doing is I've started asking these deep questions. Instead of asking him about the facts of his life, I ask him how he feels about his life. So now I'll say things like, oh, I know you were playing basketball with Jasper, like, I'm just wondering, like, what do you admire about Jasper? Like, why do you enjoy playing basketball with him so much? And then suddenly this kid starts saying these things. And then I prove to him that I'm listening. I said, you know, what I hear you saying is you think Jasper's courageous. And I'm just curious, tell me if I'm getting this right. Is that because he's good in social settings or because like he rode his bike off the roof the other day?

39:42And like, and so I'm showing him that I'm listening. I'm showing him that I'm curious. and it's made a huge difference. And I think when we get into that preachy mindset, it's because we stop listening. Have you always been a great communicator? No, no. I wrote this book because I was shocked at how bad a communicator I was. You know, I had this pattern with my wife where we would disagree with each other over stupid things. We'd get into these dumb fights. They made me a manager at work and I was fine at like making schedules and strategy and logistics. And then my direct reports would come to me with problems and I would try and solve them right away.

40:24And I was not listening to what they were actually saying. What they were sometimes saying is like, I just need you to recognize me or I need you to acknowledge the work that I've done. And I would say like, you know, here's a solution. Let's make this problem go away. And they just wanted me to know that I saw the problem. So I literally wrote this book because I'm a journalist. I'm a professional communicator. I was so shocked at how bad I was at communication. I wanted to figure out what I was doing wrong. How did you realize you were bad at communication? You know, so I had this one conversation at work that did not go well.

40:59Yeah. And I thought I did everything right and the employee came home, walked away just furious. And so I went home and I actually took out a piece of paper, everyone else in bed, and I wrote down all the times I'd had a conversation in the last year that I thought went poorly. Right? And I tried to figure out like, why did it go poorly? What's going on here? And like, I filled up three pages. Like when I started thinking about it and going through my diary, I was like, oh, that was, it wasn't terrible, but it could have been better. And that's when I realized that this is something I can work at.

41:34Now, what I've learned since then is that super communicators always are working at having better conversations. There was this study that, this is anecdotal, but at one point the CIA wanted to figure out who the best communicators were. So they asked people to rank themselves. Are you a good communicator on a scale of one to ten? They found that the surest way of knowing who's a bad communicator is they would say, I'm a nine or a ten. I'm an elite performer. I have big performance. the best communicators inevitably said on a good day on a great day I'm 8.5 8 but on like some days I'm like a 5.5 or a 6 because those are the people who think about communication more but even super communicators can have bad days or certain blind because I think I have blind spots in my communication you know certain people certain areas that I'm not so good at other areas that I that I feel I'm better at.

42:35And that's okay. Yeah, it's totally okay. I mean, that's being human, right? And my guess is that your wives help you see some of those blind spots and your friends help you see some of those blind spots. I think, I'm not sure. I don't know whether they do because I don't know whether they know what my communication is like with other people. Do you know what I mean? So I think that I love communication like this. I love communication with a team on high performance. I love communicating at this kind of a level. Where I'm then bad is I go back to Norwich and go and see my mum and dad, and we might have a cup of tea.

43:10And I might be sitting there thinking, I've run out of things to say. And that's no dig at my parents. They're amazing. But it's an observation of myself that I get fascinated in these circles. Why am I less fascinated in those circles? Do you know what I mean? when you're when you're with your mom and dad what would they say if you said to them i want to have better conversations with you like what do you think we should talk about to have better conversations or or how did how did what did you learn about conversation that you passed on to me yeah yeah that's yeah sort of these big deep and my guess is if you ask parents about parenting they have lots to say right now some of it might be misremembered like i was the best parent ever and you might be like not so much but but there are these deep questions that would unlock something and i think in that case what you're really saying is you're saying i don't want to see you as a parent i want to see you as another person like i want to be your friend and that's what i ultimately i'm trying to do with my kid is i'm trying to say i don't want to be the dad i don't want you to be the son i want to ask your advice on what's great about this person because I want us to have a conversation of equals.

44:27Yeah, you've absolutely nailed that. And I think it's partly because they feel like they have to help still all the time. And there's part of me going, I'm just talking to you about life or work. But it's hard, I think, as a parent. You feel you are a parent forever, aren't you? So you feel you have to care for them. And sometimes you don't want to have a conversation. Sometimes it feels too intimate. It feels like too much. but I'll bet you that there is a way to ask your parents to reflect on their life as they would to a friend instead of as they would to their son that's going to open up a treasure chest.

45:03It did with my dad. Like I would ask him. What did you ask? Oh, I would ask about like, he was a lawyer and so I would ask him like, I'd ask him like how he decided to like try a certain case or like what he liked about being a lawyer. he'd been married once before and so I'd ask him like what you know what happened there like why do you think that the marriage didn't work out and and and if you ask I mean if you if you don't ask the right way if it feels like an attack that doesn't work but if you're like look I actually want to know you like I want to connect with you I want to understand your past do you want me asking whether you're whether your dad was ill or whether that was the moment where you changed the way you spoke no no prior to I think as I became I mean part of it is I had to stop thinking myself as the kid, right?

45:49Like it wasn't all his fault. It was me coming home and being like the bratty child and not like taking the responsibility for being a good friend. So no, it was, what's really interesting is when he did, he was only sick for about a year.

46:10He was more gentle in that year. But the thing that I actually feel great about is nothing really changed because we were already friends. And it was all because of him. He worked really hard to empower me to not just be his son, but to be a peer. That's beautiful, that. Yeah. And also, I think the fact things didn't change meant that he was happy with where he was at as well. I think that's exactly right. He felt he got it right. Yeah. And I don't know if this was true of your dad. I'm curious. but he he gave us this amazing gift like his death was sad but it was it wasn't traumatic and that was him giving us this gift to experience this and be able to walk away from it saying this is so meaningful and so deep and I don't have to feel bad about what happened which ultimately I think is what we want yeah definitely I think about that with my kids, like trying to, if I was to get hit by a bus tomorrow, I want them to feel like they had a real relationship with me.

47:25And my friends and my wife. I'm sure you guys feel that about each other. Without question. But I think it's so easy to discount the power of human connection amongst all the other things. That's exactly right. And when you have a chat like this, you realize it's all it's all about, isn't it? It's literally all it's about. are you guys familiar with the Harvard study of adult development? No. So it's this really interesting study. It's been going on for almost 100 years. They followed thousands of people around trying to figure out initially they wanted to figure out longevity. What makes you live longer?

48:01And they expanded it to happiness as well and success, however you define it. And they found there's only one thing that can predict your happiness and your health and your success at age 65. and that's having a handful of close relationships at age 45, which of course means you probably have had them for a while. It doesn't matter, like having a lot of money, having a lot of professional success, even being famous, that stuff does not predict whether you're going to be happy and healthy when you're 65. What predicts it is having relationships. And the way we form relationships is through conversation.

48:40It's calling up someone who like, you haven't seen in a year and a half, and knowing that the first 10 minutes are going to be awkward. Yeah. But being willing to sit with those 10 minutes because you want to be connected to them. So how dangerous is loneliness? Oh, it's incredibly dangerous. So the U.S. Surgeon General just a couple months ago said, being lonely is the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. That's how much it impacts your health. And we know if you're lonely, you will die earlier. I mean, something happens. Something happens that makes us less healthy when we're lonely. And you don't have to have a ton of friends.

49:25I mean, one of the interesting things about super communicators is that when I started working on this book, I thought that the people who are the best communicators would all be like super charming or charismatic or extroverts. It turns out that's not true at all. Anyone can become a super communicator. We're all super communicators at times, but it's something that anyone can do. It's just a set of skills that we can learn. And if you don't do it, if you don't connect with someone else, you will be miserable. It's the worst form of punishment that you can give. Which throws up then an interesting question about the age we live in of social media and technology, because there was another story you wrote about really brilliantly, Charles, about the gun lobbyists in America and how the face-to-face conversation brought them together when they went online.

50:18It all fell apart. Yeah. So I love, thank you for asking about this because I love the story. So yeah, so there was this experiment. They brought together a bunch of gun rights advocates, like people who owned like 45 guns and a bunch of people who were fighting for gun control, which in the US is a huge issue. And they said, look, our goal is not to get you to agree on anything. It's just to see if you can have a civil conversation. And so they taught them this looping for understanding. Prove you're listening. And after two days, everyone was like, look, I have not changed my mind, but this was wonderful.

50:48Like, I feel so close to these people that I used to hate. It was amazing to hear them like, you know, like where our lives are similar, even though they're different in other ways. And then they go home and they set up a private Facebook group for them. And within 45 minutes, people were calling each other jackbooted Nazis, right? It was like, it was like, it went to hell immediately. and it's because we sometimes forget that different forms of communication have different rules right so you guys both have kids do you let your kids use phones oh yeah phones yeah yeah it's a real cause of anxiety yeah no absolutely access to the Pandora's box yeah social media and are they on like TikTok and the yeah no no?

51:32not at all? no oh wow we're rallying against it for as long well we see this studies that just say it removes your creativity, it dampens your energy. I don't know what the science is behind it. I don't think anyone knows the science behind it, but we basically know that if you allow your kids on phones too much, everything is. That's absolutely right. And I think things where they're not communicating with other kids are particularly dangerous, right? Where I fall into a loop where I'm just watching YouTube videos or TikTok videos. and why are they especially dangerous because you're not really connecting with anyone else you're not having conversations now I'll say with my kids my kids are a little bit older than yours and it's basically we have to give them phones because all of their friends are on Snapchat that's how they communicate with each other and so what's interesting is they use Snapchat and they use digital forms of communication in a way that's as intimate as anything you and I might say they sometimes send each other messages that are just emojis.

52:35I don't have any idea what they mean. But then they decode them for me. And what they're saying is like, oh, we have a test tomorrow and I'm sad because I don't think I'm going to do that well. And I'm a little bit worried. And it's just a series of pictures that I'm like, oh, I didn't know that that's what that meant. But we can learn to use different forms of communication in really meaningful ways as long as we remember that there's different rules for different forms of communication. So go on, explain different concepts. Yeah, so when phones first became popular about 100 years ago, there were all these studies that said people are never going to be able to have real conversations on telephones because you can't see each other.

53:14And what's interesting is they were right at that moment. If you read early transcripts of telephone conversations, people didn't know how to talk to each other on phones. They used it like a telegram. They would send like grocery lists or stock orders. And then by the time we're in middle school, of course, like we talk for seven hours a night, right? It looks like the most... Do you remember that? You think, what were we talking about for hours? We were at school all the time together. Why were we on the phone for four hours in the evening? There was nothing interesting going on in your life, and yet you managed to find things.

53:44So we learned how to communicate on phones. And what's interesting is when you're talking on the phone, even now, without realizing it, you'll over-enunciate your words. You'll put more emotion into your voice because you know the person can't see you. You know that there's a difference in rules between talking on the phone and talking face-to-face. Well, there's also a difference in rules between sending an email versus sending a text versus sending emojis versus sending a Snapchat versus telephoning someone versus face-to-face. Our kids are hyper-aware of these rules. They feel very natural.

54:18When we get into trouble is when we say like, I'm going to type this as fast as I can. I'm just going to email this guy and assume that the rules are the same for an email than if we had called him up. And that's when we say something sarcastic and he can't hear the sarcasm in our voice and he gets offended. So just reminding ourselves of these rules, that's what you do so well as a kid because you're learning all the rules. It feels very natural. Can I talk to you about something else? Yeah. We get lots of business leaders listening to this podcast, Charles, who often are really intrigued when we speak to high performers around how they recruit.

54:55So we recently had, I'll give you an example, a brilliant Michelin star winning chef called tom carry john and he was talking about his recruitment of chefs is the guy that wants to go and see the raw produce to see how good the product the product he's working with not the guy that's fixated on producing something that looks beautiful on a plate that's interesting and i was thinking about your book when tom was telling us this story through the nasa recruitment story yeah and i was wondering if you could explain that because i think that would be intriguing for a lot of people who they let into their inner circle absolutely yeah you know i and i love this story so much so in the 1980s nasa decided that they and people know what nasa is around the world okay so in the 1980s nasa decided that they needed to start finding um astronauts who had more emotional intelligence and the reason why is because they were going to start building the space station and astronauts were going to be up there for six months to a year right living next to each other in this tiny can.

55:56So if they didn't know how to connect with each other, it would be disastrous. So they start saying, okay, look, let's start screening for emotional intelligence. Now, the problem is, if you make it to the final stages of a NASA interview, you're awesome, right? Like, you are, like, good-looking. You're, like, brilliant. You know the answer to every question. You've practiced. What they found was that at that level, people could fake emotional intelligence so well, right? They could fake it so well that they couldn't tell the difference between someone who actually has emotional intelligence and someone who's faking it.

56:32But the problem is once they go up into space, after three or four months, if you're faking it, everyone knows that you're faking it because they want to like send you out the airlock. So this one psychologist, they turn to this psychologist, they're like, figure out how to solve this problem. And so he's listening to old tape recordings of interviews and he notices that people who ended up becoming great astronauts they laughed differently than everyone else they laughed in such a way that they would match him and this gets back to that like laughter is a way of showing i want to connect that we're not laughing because it's funny we're laughing because we want to connect with someone so he starts interviewing people differently what he starts doing is he walks into the interview room and he's holding a stack of papers and he spills them as if on by accident and then he would laugh this big voice.

57:17You'd go like, I am such a klutz. And then notice how the astronaut candidate reacted. Because everyone would laugh back because that's social politeness. We know we're supposed to do that. But some people would just chuckle and go, that's, that's, yeah, let me, let me give you a hand with that. And other people would go, yeah, let me give you a hand with that. The people who matched him were showing him that they want to connect. Those were the people with emotional intelligence. They were making it obvious that they wanted to connect with him. He would do these other things. He would mention a sister who had passed away and then pay attention because much like our experience, there were some people who said like, oh, my condolences.

58:01I'm really sorry. That must have been hard. And then there were other people who would say, oh, my condolences. I had a friend who passed away 12 years ago and I still dream about them. I wonder, do you still think about your sister? What was that like for your mom? They were showing that they wanted to connect with her. And this is how they started choosing the best astronauts, right? Because the people with emotional intelligence were the ones who matched his laughter or his sadness, who showed him that they wanted to learn more about him. They wanted to connect. And I think this exact same thing is true of job interviews, right?

58:43Yeah. That when we're bringing in candidates and we're, by the final round, everyone can do the job. They all have the technical skills. They all have the resume that got them to the final round. The real question is, which of them are you going to enjoy spending time with? Which of them, when your company is under attack, and everyone's stressed out, which of them are going to help lower the temperature versus raising and making everyone more paranoid? And I think that the way we figure that out is we see like, do you actually want to connect with me? Do you want to learn about me? Because those people are usually super communicators.

59:22Those are people that, that when we're in the foxhole together, we won't mind, we'll appreciate that they're there. Yeah. And before we finish with our quickfire questions, I just want to know what should people who've listened to this fascinating hour and a bit do next? If they want to be a super communicator with their partner, their children, the people in the office, if they've actually, if the penny's dropped today, that all of the things in their life that they feel are broken, actually are not broken. They're just not communicating. Right. If that's what they've realized, because I think I've realized that in some areas of my life from this conversation, what should they do?

1:00:00I think there's two things that if we just practice them will become a habit. The first is asking those, asking more questions and asking deep questions, right? Just turning to someone and saying, what do you make of this? Like, why is this important to you? Turning to your kid and saying, I hear that you had a bad day today. Like, what was it about the day that made it bad? Like, what are you feeling right now? What are you thinking? So just asking more questions, asking a bunch more questions. And then number two, when someone says something, proving to them that we're listening. And if it's a tough conversation, we can do that looping for understanding, right?

1:00:37It's kind of formal. We can repeat back, did I get that right? But sometimes we show we're listening just by asking a follow-up question. Just by saying, oh, what I hear you say was this. I'm wondering, what do you think about that? Like, what happens next? If we ask questions and we prove we're listening, what's going to happen is they inevitably will want to listen to us in return. they will start asking us questions it might take a little while with my 12 year old it definitely takes a little while but eventually we have this innate need for reciprocity they will start asking you questions about yourself yeah and then you have a conversation going and if there's someone that springs to mind from people that just heard that and they think that person never asks me a damn question maybe ask yourself how do you make that person feel Yeah.

1:01:24I think that's exactly right. I think, and it might be that all the questions you're asking them are these fact questions, right? You're never asking them how they feel. You're asking about the facts of their life rather than how they feel about their life. Have you created a space where they feel they can talk to you? And sometimes, sometimes we have to invite the question by saying, oh, it's so interesting you say that. I felt that way myself when my dad died or when I fought with my wife and give them the space to ask the question, the permission to ask the question. but they will we just we're hardwired to want to connect with each other brilliant and you have helped so many people to connect from this conversation thank you for I love you guys' show this is such a treat for me to be alive so kind should we do some quick fire questions I love it we'd like to do quick fire questions with a twist again into your book so we were inspired so we normally do quick fire questions about your three non-negotiables and golden rules but this time we're going to take the questions from your fast friends procedure.

1:02:23Oh, I love it. Okay, but only if you answer them as well. Can I ask that? Yeah, yeah, okay. But let's just set some context for these questions for people listening. So do you want to tell us about that? So this is from an experiment that was done in the 1980s where they brought on these two researchers, a husband and wife team. They would bring strangers together in pairs and they wanted to see if there was a way to make strangers into friends. Like what's the procedure? And it's called the fast friends procedure. And they would give them this list of 36 questions. And they're all deep questions.

1:02:56Some of them are fun, like who would you invite to a dinner? Some of them are very deep, like when's the last time you cried in front of another person? But what's key is that you go back and forth. That I answer a question and then I ask you and you answer the same question. So they did this experiment. They had people do this. It took like 45 minutes. This is pre-internet. They send everyone home. They don't give anyone contact information. And then seven weeks later, they actually do the experiment, which is that they call everyone who had been in those rooms. And they say to them, by the way, did you ever track down the other person?

1:03:29Like, have you talked to them since that experiment? And they found that 57 % of people had gone and found their partner. One guy was like, I knew his name was John S., but I didn't know his last name. So I called every John S. in the phone book until I found him. Because they felt so connected to each other. Three people ended up getting married. Three couples got married. And so these questions, these 36 questions, they make us feel closer. Brilliant. We won't do all 36. We'll just pick some. I think people can use in terms of their own deep questions. So given the choice of anyone in the world, Charles, who would you want as a dinner guest?

1:04:08Ooh, I would say Barack Obama. Because? I just, I love Barack Obama. Like, as an American, particularly what's going on in America right now, Like, it was this time when it felt like the world was just fresh and new and so hopeful. Yeah. I am tied up, like, emotionally. So let me ask you guys, who would you... I'll choose a guy called Brian Keenan. So most people won't know of him, but he wrote a book that had quite a significant impact on me as a kid. He was a teacher from Northern Ireland. And in the 1980s, he went out to teach at university in Beirut. and he was taken as a hostage for nearly six years.

1:04:51Oh my gosh. And he wrote a book about it after he was finally released in 1991 called An Evil Cradeling. And I remember reading it as a kid and what struck me was, in such horrific circumstances, if he retained the essence of who he was, he wouldn't allow himself to be seen as a victim. And his book is beautiful. The way he writes about a traumatic experience, really. had an impact on me and I'd often thought I'd love to meet him and just explore that so he'd be my guest. I gotta look that up. Can I ask one follow-up question? Yeah go on. How old were you when you read it? You were a teenager?

1:05:3016. And why do you think it was so impactful at that moment in your life? I think being around somebody that had such a clear sense of their own values and their own identity at an age where you're searching for that. The courage to do that in the face of such horrific circumstances really resonated. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Who's yours? I would choose, I'm torn. Lewis Hamilton, I'd love to have a conversation with him because when I worked with him in Formula One for a time, I felt like he didn't know really who or what he was. And now I really feel like he does. And I think he's such an impressive individual.

1:06:10I'd love to talk about that journey with him. Those are pretty good answers. I would come to that dinner party. Yeah, man. imagine that Barack Obama Brian Keenan Lewis Hamilton and us three I would show up you could not get me away from the table I would be there all night where should we go go on next one oh okay for for what in your life do you feel most grateful oh my kids my kids health yeah and I know as parents you feel the same way and I'm so grateful for my wife and I'm so grateful that I've had this career that lets me do work I love but when you have a child you just it's almost like you take a part of your heart outside of you and you just give it to the world and you're powerless to defend it.

1:06:52And so the fact that we have made it this long and hopefully knock on wood for longer. How old were you when you first became a father? These aren't meant to be quick fire by the way, guys. I know. Let's just leave that and move. I was 32? No, yeah, yeah, 32. I was 32. How about you guys? How old were you? I was a similar age, actually. 30 yeah 30 33 okay yeah I was 33 yeah and it's I mean it's so much better than anyone tells you right it's amazing but it's it's definitely like you'll you never have a completely deep sleep after you have a child I've not slept once in 10 years since what about can I ask you guys the same question I'd answer the same for my children I think it would be the wrong thing to come up with a different answer you're going to watch It'll be like a Ferrari.

1:07:45A Ferrari. Dad, I'm glad I come in second place. Exactly. Actually, I won't say, do you remember when we... No, I'll leave it. Yeah, we are literally. Okay. 20 to 8 or so. Okay. What do you value most in a friendship? You know, I value loyalty. And by loyalty, I mean not just having my back, but being honest with me when I need someone to be honest with me. Right? Like someone who says, like, I'm so loyal to you that I'm going to tell you you are screwing up. You are making the wrong choice. That and knowing that I can fall back on this person. That's so meaningful. What about you guys?

1:08:35I think I think just the ability to not take ourselves seriously that's a big one for me I find that I do that too often I'm too caught up in this sort of stuff do you know what I mean and sometimes it's just like life is fun I need to remember that I think yeah I'd go for loyalty yeah somebody being true and active with integrity yeah Yeah. Final question. Okay. And this is one of ours, I'm afraid, not one of yours. Okay. Your one golden rule for living a high-performance life, what would you leave ringing in the ears of people? So my golden rule for living a high-performance life is every time you do something hard, every time you bring self-discipline to something and you push yourself, it's a success in and of itself, right?

1:09:24And this actually comes from something Sean Connery once said, he once said, I read this in something, I don't know if it's true, but he said this thing like, self-discipline is the goal of self-discipline. Like every time you do it, you're proving to yourself that you can do something hard. And just because you did something hard and no one saw it, or you did something hard and it didn't pay off at all, that doesn't mean it's a waste of time because you've learned how to push yourself to do something new that at some point will help you. And so every time I encounter something where it seems just a little bit scary to me or I'm anxious about it, that's when I know I need to push myself to do this because I might not succeed at it and it might not matter.

1:10:14But at some point, being able to push myself to do the hard thing is going to matter more than anything else on earth. and so practicing that is making it a habit. Charles what a great conversation thank you so much for your generosity for your time for everything you've given us I think this will be really valuable for so many people it was for us. Thank you so much thank you for having me this is such a treat.

1:10:40Damien. Jake. So really what we're saying then is communicating is about understanding other people therefore communication good communication is about empathy kindness understanding listening putting yourself in their shoes really what Charles has just spoken to us about for the last hour or so is about just trying to do the right thing and it makes the world a better place yeah and from a selfish point of view we feel better when we do that as well as making other people feel better so this is such a great in for any of us we can all ask deep questions we can all ask ourselves is somebody looking for a hug for help or us to hear them, you know, the looping to understand.

1:11:24Can I just play back what I've heard you say? They're techniques that with a little bit of thought we can incorporate into our practice. And let's say everybody wins. I love him. I love his message. I love his book. And I think that the sort of thing I'm walking away from feeling, right, is that before today I assumed there are people I just got on with and people I just didn't get on with. And I'm sure that is still the case. But I think I should look at the people that I believe I don't get on with and ask myself, am I putting the effort in to understand those people? Am I being a super communicator with them?

1:11:55Or have I kind of just switched off from those people and those conversations? I think that's probably the truth. Yeah, but I think what's great about Charles' message is we can apply that universally. We can talk about it personally, like the conversation with our kids and contracting with them about the different media that they go on, our parents, about are they a friend or are they still parenting us? but we can then use it professionally as well like the conversation at the NASA recruitment of recruiting for emotional intelligence and knowing how do I do that it's a universal application that can mean that we use this term high performance but it just means making any situation we inherit better Charles has just given us some really good easy accessible clues to do it An enjoyable conversation loved sharing it with you mate Likewise mate I loved it And that brings us to the end of this conversation listen don't forget you can watch these conversations on our app or on youtube and there's one thing i'd love you to do for us wherever you get your podcasts please leave us a review just tell us why this podcast is valuable for you because your message is valuable for so many other people and a big thanks a big thanks for continuing to come to high performance for trusting us with your time we don't take it lightly but most importantly of all thank you so much for continuing to spread and share the learnings that you're taking from these conversations And I know that that chat with Charles was full of great takeaways for you.

1:13:20So thanks for being here. Don't forget to remain humble, curious and empathetic and go and chase your own version of high performance.

1:13:44Thank you.

1:14:14A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at capella.edu.