A Supercommunicator's Guide to Love and Dating

Some people ask searching questions and then really listen to the replies. These so-called supercommunicators make great romantic partners, so can anyone learn to be more like them?  

Journalist Charles Duhigg (author of Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection) was unhappy with how he and his wife were talking, so he studied his mistakes and adopted the habits of supercommunicators. He explains to Dr Laurie Santos how we can all make small changes that will improve our dating and romantic lives. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. I once went on a riverboat cruise with my
husband and some friends. As we chugged along the Connecticut River,
we enjoyed some picnic food and talked and laughed together.
But I was also a bit distracted by an elderly
couple sitting nearby. They just seemed kind of uninterested in everything.

(00:38):
They didn't seem to take notice of us, their fellow passengers,
or the gorgeous scenery along the river banks. But what
was most disturbing was that they also seemed really uninterested
in one another. I don't think they shared a single
word the entire trip. When we finally talked, I saw
the couple's daughter waiting for them on land. She seemed
excited to know if they'd had fun. You see, she

(00:58):
explained to the boat captain, this was their wedding anniversary.
On the drive home, I couldn't stop thinking about that couple.
Could any couple fall mute like that? Could it happen
to you or me? How do we keep the conversation going?
That's the question I want to address in this next
installment of our short season on Happiness and Love. I

(01:19):
want to explore how couples can communicate better to build happier,
healthier relationships, and so I tagged in journalist Charles Duhigg,
author of a recent book entitled Super Communicators, How to
Unlock the Secret Language of Connection. Charles is a Pulitzer
Prize winning author and reporter, someone who has made an
entire career using words to express complex ideas. But Charles,

(01:42):
as it turns out, wasn't always a super communicator, particularly
when it came to talking to his wife.

Speaker 2 (01:49):
So I got into this terrible pattern where I would
come home. My wife and I met each other in college.
We've been married for almost twenty years now, and I'm
supposed to be a professional communicator because I'm a journalist,
And I would come home from work after like a
hard day, and I would like start complaining about my
boss or my coworkers, and my wife, very reasonably would
say something like, why don't you take your boss out

(02:11):
to lunch so you can get to know each other better,
which is good advice, But instead of being able to
hear her advice, I would get even more upset, and
I would say, like, you know, why aren't you supporting me?
You're supposed to have my side on this, and be
outraged on my behalf, and then she would get upset
because I was acting irrational. And so this pattern, we
could recognize it, but we couldn't stop it from happening.

(02:31):
And so I went to these researchers and I said, look,
tell me what's going on here, like what's happening? And
they said, well, we're glad you asked, because we're living
through this golden age of understanding communication in ways that
we never have before because of advances in neural imaging
and data collection. And they said, the biggest problem here
is that most people think of a discussion as being
about one thing, right, it's about where to go on

(02:52):
vacation or what happened today, But actually each discussion is
made up of multiple different kinds of conversations, and most
of those conversations they tend to fall in one of
three big buckets. There's practical conversations right where we're solving
a problem or coming up with a plan. There's emotional
conversations where my goal is to tell you how I feel,
but I don't want you to solve my problem. I

(03:12):
want you to empathize and understand. And then there's social conversations,
which are about how we relate to each other, how
we relate to society and society relates to us. And
they said, the key here is if you're not having
the same kind of conversation at the same time, then
you're not really communicating with each other. So when you
came home from work and you were upset and you
started complaining to your wife, you were having an emotional conversation,

(03:34):
and then she responded with a practical conversation. She gave
you advice, but you couldn't hear that. And when you
said you couldn't hear that, she couldn't hear you. And
so the key here is what's known as the matching principle,
that we need to have the same kind of conversation
at the same moment if we really want to connect
with each other.

Speaker 1 (03:53):
And what seems super interesting is that you know, you
were talking about how you struggled with this, and I,
you know, I can totally relate. But it also seems
like there are people who are really good at this, right, Like,
there are definitely people in my life that I can
call up and whichever mode I feel like I'm in,
whether I'm you know, kind of really looking for some
practical advice, or just want to, like, you know, kind
of moan about something, they kind of instantly recognize it.

(04:15):
And this was something that you figured out in your
work too, that they're like these important individual differences there.

Speaker 2 (04:20):
That's right, that's right. So these are folks who are
super communicators. And what's interesting is that we're all super
communicators at one time or another. Some people just can
do it more consistently than others. So if I was
to ask you, you know, if you were having a
bad day and you wanted to call someone who you
know would make you feel better, Like, does someone pop
into your mind right away about who you would call?

Speaker 1 (04:38):
Yeah, it's either my good friend April or Ryan, who's
my producer who's also my very good friend.

Speaker 2 (04:44):
There you go. Yeah, So for you, they are super communicators,
and you are probably a super communicator back to them.
You guys know how to prove to each other that
you've been listening. You know how to intuit what the
other person needs. Now, you're exactly right, though, there are
some people who are super communicators on a more consistent basis.
They're that person for everyone everyone loves to call in them,

(05:06):
And one person described it as there's someone who is
my best friend who everyone else thinks he's their best
friend too, right, And it's interesting. And what we know
about these people is that they are not like super charismatic,
They are not extroverts, They are not people who are
born with this. Oftentimes exactly the opposite. There're folks who,

(05:26):
if you ask them, they say, I had trouble making
friends in high school, or or my parents got divorced
and I had to become the peacemaker between them. There
are people who had to think just a little bit
more about how communication works. And it's that thinking about
it just half an inch deeper that makes us into supercommunicators.
But it's skills that anyone can learn, their skills that
we're going to discuss on this podcast, so we can teach,

(05:47):
and if anyone learns them, anyone can connect with other people.

Speaker 1 (05:50):
And so let's do a deeper dive, kind of neuroscientifically,
into what happens when super communicators are at work, when
people are really connecting with one another. I know in
your book you talked about this form of kind of
neural entrainment of what is that and how does it
show that communication is working so well?

Speaker 2 (06:06):
I love this and this is something that we've all experienced,
which is communication. Is Homo Sapien's superpower, right. It is
what has caused our species to succeed so well, and
it's what allowed us to build families and then cultures
and societies and eventually cities and countries. And the way
that it evolved is that we actually developed little pleasure
centers that get activated when we connect with someone else.

(06:28):
So what's actually happening there, Well, what we know from
experiments and this a lot of this comes from Talia
Wheatley who's at Dartmouth, and Uri Hassan who's at Princeton,
is that when we actually connect with each other through communication,
our bodies and our brains reflect that connection. So right now,
even though we're separated by thousands of miles, if we
could measure it, our eyes are probably dilating at similar rates.

(06:50):
Our breath patterns are starting to match each other, even
though we're not in the same room together. Most importantly,
what's happening inside our brains is becoming similar. As I'm
describing something, you're experiencing the same emotion or idea that
I'm describing, and vice versa, and our neural activities beginning
to look more and more similar, and the more similar
or it gets, the better we understand each other. That's

(07:12):
what neural entrainment is. And when it happens, it feels wonderful.
Everyone knows that experience, Right when you've had a great
conversation and you just feel like you're on cloud nine afterwards.
That's actually a biochemical reaction. Your body is having to
encourage you to try and have those conversations because they've
been so successful at helping our species succeed.

Speaker 1 (07:31):
So what did neuroscientists learn when they started looking at
who's better at this neural entrainment? Were there some particular
characteristics of people who did it better? Like what did
they figure out?

Speaker 2 (07:39):
Yeah? Yeah, a guy named Bose Ivers, who working with
Talia at Dartmouth, did this really fascinating study where he
would bring strangers into a room and put them into
groups and have them watch these movie clips that were
totally confusing and in fact, they were in foreign languages
and there was no subtitles and the sound was off.
And then you'd have them talk to each other and
you'd scan their brains while they were watching it, and
then also scan their brains afterwards. And he found that

(07:59):
when people talk to each other, the way that they
reacted to the movie clips became very similar. Right that
they achieved neural and trainment in talking about the movie
clips that allowed them to connect with each other. But
some groups became much more entrained, much more synchronous than others,
and in those groups with someone special in those groups
was a supercommunicator. And one of the things that supercommunicators

(08:20):
do is they tend to ask more questions, like ten
to twenty times as many questions as the average person.
But many of them are things like, ah, that's interesting,
what'd you think about that? Or oh yeah, would you
say next, Like these little questions that we don't even
really register as questions, but they invite us into a conversation.
They also did this thing where they would repeat back

(08:40):
or positively reinforce what other people said. So someone would
say here's my idea, and they'd say, oh, I really
like that idea, or they'd say, you know, it's interesting.
What I hear you saying is this, like tell me
if I'm getting this wrong, you said X and Y
and z. This is known as looping for understanding, and
it's this amazing technique, particularly in conflicts. But most importantly,
what supercommunicators did in those groups that caused everyone else

(09:01):
to become synchronized, helped other people speak up and hear
each other, is that they showed that they wanted to connect.
They did things like laughed when other people laughed, or
got serious when other people got serious. They changed how
they were communicating to match the kind of conversation that
others brought up and invited them to match back in return. So,

(09:23):
in one conversation, one of the participants brought up they
were talking about this movie clip where a kid looks
like he's abandoned, and this participant says something that makes
you think like, probably he knows abandonment firsthand. He knows
what it's like. And the conversation was really jovial up
to that moment, and as soon as he says that,
the super communicator says, huh, yeah, that can be really
really hard, like tell me what you think about that,

(09:44):
Like he gets serious. He matches that solemnity, and within
forty five seconds, everyone else in that group was being
supportive and empathetic was talking about the seriousness of this.
That's what super communicators do. They match others. They invite
them to match back, and they show they want to
connect and it's really powerful.

Speaker 1 (10:04):
And so this must have huge implications for the kinds
of things that happened to superper communicators, Like they're so
good at this, Like do we know anything about what
happens in their real life too?

Speaker 2 (10:13):
You won't be surprised to learn they're very popular and successful, right,
Like we have data on what supercommunicators are like outside
of the laboratory. And of course they are the people
who are asked to run for office or given leadership roles.
They're the people everyone turns to when they have a
problem or or they're always invited along because they just
know adding them to the conversation will make everyone feel better.

(10:35):
Because of the Harvard Adult Health study that was done,
the Harvard Adult Health Happiness Study, I guess is what
they're calling it. Now, we know that the folks who
do this, who tend to have a lot of connections,
They live longer than the average person, They're happier as
they get older. They tend to be more successful because
people just bring them opportunities. As I mentioned, communication is
our superpower, and super communicators have that superpower. It is

(10:59):
something any of us can learn to do, and its
dividends are enormous.

Speaker 1 (11:03):
And one of those dividends is the ability to quickly
build bonds with new people. To the break, we'll learn
how adopting the habits of supercommunicators can help us navigate
the minefield that is dating. The Happiness Lab will be
back in a moment. Before we start swiping on a

(11:27):
dating app, we usually set up a profile that makes
us look really cool. We upload pictures of us wearing
nice clothing, living the high life, maybe even traveling to
exotic locations. We try to share all our accomplishments and
interesting activities, so it seems like we should want to
keep that vibe going when we get to the dat itself,
sharing stories that make our lives look fun and adventure filled. Well,

(11:50):
according to Charles Douhig, that's not what a super communicator
would do.

Speaker 2 (11:54):
It's all about the interaction. And my guess is, and
tell me if I'm getting this wrong, is that when
you and your husband met each other, it's kind of
like when me and my wife met each other, that
we walked away from the conversations feeling special because the
other person told us we were special, not because they
were special, but because they told us we were special.

Speaker 1 (12:14):
So give me an example from your early like how
you guys met and how you got first get together,
first date conversation.

Speaker 2 (12:20):
Yeah, so we met in college and I was studying
intellectual history at Yale, and so I was super into
like postmodernism, and I just babbled about postmodernism for like
ten minutes, and she said, she's the kindest woman on earth.
She said, that's really really interesting. I've never heard that before,
and it doesn't make any sense to me, but I
like to learn more. Of course, she was just being nice,

(12:43):
but as a result, I felt like the smartest person
on the face of the planet. Like I felt like
I was. I was so special. And here's one of
the things that we know so we know about when
it comes to romantic relationships, particularly at the start of
romantic relationships. There are two things you can do that
is more powerful than anything else, and then a third
thing that's really effective. The first thing you can do
is ask questions, and some questions are more powerful than others,

(13:06):
and these are known as deep questions. A deep question
is something that asks us about our values, or our beliefs,
or our experiences and Oftentimes a deep question doesn't appear deep. Right.
If we're on a first date and I say what
do you do for a living? You say I'm a lawyer,
And I say, oh, that's really interesting, Like what made
you decide to go to law school? Like what's the
best case you ever had? Those questions are asking you

(13:28):
to tell me about your experiences, the values that brought
you to law school, the beliefs that you carry into
your work. And when you answer those questions, you're going
to tell me something incredibly valuable about yourself. You're going
to tell me something meaningful. So the first step that
we can do is teach ourselves not to ask about facts,
but instead to ask essentially about feelings about people's values

(13:50):
and beliefs and their experiences.

Speaker 1 (13:52):
And there's some really cool experiments to show the power
of this. One was a study that was actually about
speed dating and like what you can do in the
context of speed dating, So tell me a little bit
about that.

Speaker 2 (14:02):
Oh my gosh, I love this study. And there's been
a couple of times that they've collected this data. So
what they did is they had all these speed daters
come to and they kept track of which speed dates
were successful and which weren't. Basically, do people say that
they want to have a follow up date, And what
they found is that the number one thing that made
a speed date successful is if one person asked a

(14:24):
question within like the first thirty seconds, and asked a
deep question, then when the other person would respond, something
important would happen. The asker would oftentimes answer that same
question for themselves, Oh, it's interesting. You became a lawyer
for that reason. I became a doctor because I also
love helping people. Right, it was very natural to share

(14:44):
something about themselves, to engage in emotional reciprocity or vulnerability reciprocity,
and then they would inevitably do something to prove that
they had been listening to what the person had said.
Sometimes that was asking a follow up question. Follow Up
questions are incredibly powerful because they show that I'm paying attention.
They show that I'm curious in you. Sometimes it's what's

(15:06):
known as looping for understanding, where I peep back what
you said in my own words and I ask if
I got it right. These behaviors of proving we are
listening are incredibly meaningful, particularly if we're in a stressful
situation like a fight or a first date. Part of
what we're wondering in our head is like, is this
person actually listening to me? Or are they just waiting

(15:27):
their turn to speak? And speaking is such a cognitively
intense activity. We don't notice if the person is staring
into our eyes, we don't notice that they're nodding their head.
We're focused on the words coming out of our mouth.
So it's what they do after we stop talking that
proves to us that they've been listening to us. And
that's really powerful.

Speaker 1 (15:46):
That's so interesting because I feel like we get this
advice of like, to show that you're listening, really look
someone in the eyes or kind of nod, you know,
while they're speaking. But the evidence seems to suggest that
that's not really doing anything because people can't pay attention
to that in the moment. What they have to pay
attention to is after you're done and you've told your story.
Is how people follow up is what they say afterwards.
That seems to really that's.

Speaker 2 (16:05):
Nice, exactly right, that's exactly right, And that doesn't mean
you shouldn't not and you shouldn't look people in the
eye because because it's oftentimes encouraging to get that. But
next time you're talking to like a small group of people,
and after you finished speaking, try and remember who was
looking at you and who wasn't. And you'll have no idea,
right because we just don't pay attention. But that person
who says, oh, that's so interesting what I heard you say?

(16:27):
Was that person we remember?

Speaker 1 (16:30):
And so broadly, it seems like what you're trying to
do to kind of in an early conversation is to
really make sure you're actually listening and learning about somebody.
If you sort of set up this goal that the
conversation is really for learning about the person and specifically
learning not facts, but their values and their beliefs, that's
the kind of thing that can get communication off the ground.
That's what super communicators seemed to be doing.

Speaker 2 (16:49):
That's exactly right, and that was an excellent looping for understanding.

Speaker 1 (16:52):
Yes, yes, I totally conversation, I totally totally.

Speaker 2 (16:57):
I totally believe you're listening to me. But it is
super interesting in that once we get in the habit
of this. So once I was exposed to this idea
for looping for understanding, and there's these three steps, right,
ask a question, a deep questes, repeat back what you
just heard in your own words. Then, and this is
really helpful in a conflict, ask if you got it right.
Once we start doing that, it almost becomes habitual, like

(17:19):
it was for you right to sort of repeat back
what you've heard. And what it shows the other person
is not only do I want to connect with you,
which is what's important, but also it creates trust, and
it creates a sense of intimacy because if you believe
that I'm listening closely to you, you'll want to listen
back to me. It also helps me be present in
that moment, because you're exactly right. If I realize the

(17:41):
point of this conversation is to have a learning conversation,
to understand you and to help you understand me, not
to convince you of something, not to change your mind,
not to convince you that I'm the greatest thing on earth,
but just to understand you and help you understand me.
Then it doesn't matter if we walk away still disagreeing
with each other, or if we walk away and say, ah,

(18:02):
I'm not interested in the second date. The conversation has
been a success if we understand each other.

Speaker 1 (18:09):
The best way to understand each other differs from what
we often think. You know, these days, we hear a
lot about perspective taking, you know, not just in relationships,
but I think even in times of conflict in things,
you know, we have to perspective take on what the
other side thinks or what the other person thinks. But
the research shows that there's something better than perspective taking.
Explain what this other thing is because it seems to
fit really well with the kinds of strategies we're talking

(18:31):
about here.

Speaker 2 (18:32):
And this work comes from Nick Appley at the University
of Chicago, who's just wonderful and just for anyone who
hasn't heard that phrase perspective taking before, there's this theory
in psychology that the best way to communicate is to
put yourself in someone else's shoes, right, to try and
take their perspective on a problem. You know, I'm a man,
but like I'm going to try and put myself in
my wife's shoes and see the world from her perspective.

(18:53):
The truth of the matter is, and study after study
shows us I can't do that. I have no idea
what it's like to be a woman in today's world, right,
and if I think I do, I'm kind of fooling myself.
But what I can do instead is this thing called
perspective getting, which is when I ask you what it's
like to be you. When I say, and I can
say this to Laurie, like, you know, my wife is

(19:14):
an academic and you're a woman in science, I'm just wondering, like,
what's it like? Like what are the challenges that you
face that I might not understand about being a woman
at a university. What are the challenges of being a
mom of you know, being someone who has outside interests.
Instead of trying to assume that I can stand in

(19:35):
your shoes, let me just ask you what it's like
to be in your shoes. This is where if I
can repeat it back, it becomes really powerful. It's not
only to show you that I'm listening, It's to force
myself to listen. Because the truth of the matter is, sometimes
even if we want to listen, we just get in
our own way, right. We start coming up with counter
arguments in our head. We start thinking about what we
should say next so that we seem smart. But if

(19:56):
my assignment is I need to listen closely enough that
I can repeat back what you just said, I'll actually
listen closely enough.

Speaker 1 (20:02):
And that kind of close listening also contributes to the
second thing that I think could be so powerful about
perspective getting, which is it increases people's trust. Right, there's
a kind of emotional contagion and an emotional bond that happens.
Can I explain with some of the research shows why
that's so powerful.

Speaker 2 (20:17):
So one of the things that happens when we engage
in perspective getting is that oftentimes people will reveal something
vulnerable about themselves. Now, when I say vulnerable, it doesn't
mean like they're crying or they're admitting that they killed someone.
It can be something as small as saying, you know,
I became a doctor because I like helping people. I
might not care about your judgment, but I'm giving you

(20:38):
an opportunity to judge me. You could be like, look,
money matters more than whether you should help people. Right,
offering you an opportunity to judge me, even if I
don't care about it feels vulnerable. And there's this thing
that happens of emotional contagion, which is vulnerability is the
loudest form of communication. If I say something vulnerable, you
will listen really, really closely, to what I'm saying, and

(20:59):
then if you say something vulnerable in return, if you
share something about yourself, I will listen really closely. And
that emotional contagion, once it occurs, makes us feel more
trusting and liking of each other. It's hardwired into our brains.
We almost can't even overcome it. I'm sure everyone has
had this experience where it's someone you really dislike, you
disagree with them, and then they say something so real

(21:22):
and honest, and you just find yourself sympathizing with them
or liking them a little bit more. That's because we
can't fight this emotional contagion, and so we should use
it to help us bond with other people and connect
with them.

Speaker 1 (21:33):
Explain this sort of fast friends experiment. I think this
is something that's even entered the public consciousness. People have
heard about these thirty six questions. Talk about what the
science really shows and how increasing vulnerability can be powerful
for like maybe even romantic connection.

Speaker 2 (21:47):
Oh, I love this study. So these two researchers who
are married I'm Elaine and Arthur Aren went and they
did this experiment. They wanted to try and figure out
if they could make strangers into friends. So they would
bring all these strangers into a room, just pairs of them,
you know, one by one, sit down with someone else
you don't know, and they gave them this list of
thirty six questions to ask and answer right back and forth,
and it would usually take about forty five or fifty minutes.

(22:09):
And this is all pre internet, and then people would
just go their separate ways. So then seven weeks later
they tracked down everyone that had come into that room
and they asked them, did you ever talk to that
person again? And they found that seventy percent of the
people who had participated went and they found the other
person so that they could go out to beers with
them or go see a movie together because they felt

(22:31):
so close to them. And this is back when it
was hard to find other people right you had to go.
Some people would like go through the phone book and
call everyone with a similar name until they found the
right one. They would wander up and down dorms looking
for the person that they had talked to, because after
forty five minutes of asking and answering these questions, they
felt really close. In fact, more than one couple ended
up getting married who met each other through this experiment. Now,

(22:52):
what's special about those questions? Each of those questions was,
in its own way, a deep question that asked people
to reveal something about themselves, and then, because they had
to go back and forth answering them, the other person
could reciprocate that vulnerability. So some of them were simple,
like if you were having a dinner party and you
could invite anyone from history, who would you invite? Well,

(23:13):
that tells you who I admire, right, it tells you
a little bit about my beliefs. Some of them were
really deep, like described the last time you cried in
front of another person. When I do that, I'm obviously
exposing something really meaningful about myself. And if I expose that,
and then you answer the same question and you expose
something about yourself, we are going to feel closer to

(23:35):
each other, even if we have nothing in common. If
you do that in speed date, you're definitely going to
get another date.

Speaker 1 (23:42):
But the key is that we have to respond to
those emotional moments. Well, that's exactly, and this is something
you've also talked about in your book. And some of
the great science on this came from a domain that
I didn't expect. You know, when I was reading your
Super Communicators book. I was expecting to see all these
cool social science studies, but I didn't think i'd be
hearing about scientific work that came out of NASA on
super communication. But it's actually something that folks at NASA

(24:05):
are pretty worried about how to do this emotional connection right,
So tell me a little bit about that.

Speaker 2 (24:09):
So it's interesting. So starting in the nineteen eighties, NASA
realized that they're going to start having these longer space missions, right,
people going into space for six months to a year.
And it became a real problem because they figured, if
you're stuck in a tin can, like surrounded by vacuum
for a year six months with five other people, you
really have to have good emotional intelligence. You really have

(24:30):
to be able to connect with other people. The problem
was that when they interview astronaut candidates like these men
and women, they are at the top of their game.
They know that right answer to every question, They know
how to expose a vulnerability, so it seems admirable they
can fake in emotional intelligence better than anyone else, and
so they couldn't. NASA couldn't figure out who actually has

(24:51):
emotional intelligence and who who's faking it really well until
they were up in space, and the ones who were
faking it ended up being huge problems. So there was
this one guy who was a psychologist there and this
was really bothering him, and so he spent a lot
of time listening to recordings of old interviews, and he
noticed the people who went on to be really good
ass astronauts, really good at emotional intelligence. They laughed differently

(25:13):
than everyone else. They would laugh with the same kind
of energy and at the same intensity as him, regardless
of what that intensity and energy was. So he changes
how he says his interviews. He starts coming in and
he's carrying up a stack of papers and he accidentally
drops them as soon as he walks in, which is
actually on purpose. And he's wearing this garish yellow tie,

(25:34):
and he says, my kid made me wear this tie today,
and now I drop my papers. I look like a
total clown. And then he would laugh really, really uproariously,
and then he would pay attention to see if the
astronaut candidate laughed back with the same energy and intensity
or if they just politely chuckled and it's not just laughter, right.
These are known as non linguistic expressions. Later in the interview,

(25:56):
he'd often tell a story about someone who had died
in his family, and he would pay close attention to
see did the candidate try and comfort me or did
they kind of just step back and say, I'm going
to give him his space to have this emotional moment.
I don't want to get too deeply involved. What they
were looking for is that people who matched him. Now,

(26:18):
some people might laugh loudly and they might laugh quietly.
It didn't matter what kind of laugh they had. It
didn't matter how they comforted people. What mattered was when
he displayed an emotion. Did they try and match that emotion,
show that they were hearing it, engage with it, and
create space for him to discuss that emotion. When we
try and prove that we are listening, this is what

(26:39):
supercommunicators do. When we show that we want to connect,
which is what laughter is, then we start to actually
connect and it makes all the difference.

Speaker 1 (26:48):
And the work seemed to show that there were two
particular ways that it worked well when emotions were matched, right,
So tell me about those kind of two moments of matching.
I like this in particular because it seemed like the
mood and the intensity were ones that like telemarketers use too,
So that's why.

Speaker 2 (27:02):
Yeah, yeah, So the two ways that we need to
match other people, and the two ways that we oftentimes
pick up on other people's emotional signals are through mood
and intensity. So if somebody is negative and they're high energy,
they're probably angry. But if they're negative and low energy,
then they're probably sad. And the difference between interacting with

(27:24):
someone who's angry and someone who's sad is very significant, right,
we want to treat them differently. So our brains have
become designed to pick up on these two things. On mood,
either positive or negative, and on energy or intensity, which
is either low energy or high energy. And so we
notice this almost immediately when we see other people. When
you're walking down the street or you walk into a

(27:45):
coffee shop and you see someone who is positive and
high energy, then there's part of you that says, Okay,
this person is like really like they're enthusiastic, like it's
all righty, Like I'm gonna go over and i'm gonna
talk to my friend and we're gonna have a great time.
If they're positive and low energy, you think Oh, they're
in sort of a contemplative state of mind. They're calm,
and they're relaxed. And so when we are trying to

(28:07):
match with someone, it's key to try and pay attention
to that mood and that energy and sort of align
with it. And in fact, the TV show The Big
Bang Theory, this most popular sitcom in history, was actually
a big flop until they figured out that if they
had the actors match each other's mood and match each
other's energy intensity, then they could show the audience that

(28:29):
they were connecting with each other. And when you think
about it, take laughter. So we know from studies that
about seventy percent of the time when we laugh, it
is not in reaction to anything funny. I laugh because
I show you I want to connect with you. You laugh
back to show me you want to connect with me.
But imagine for a minute that we're talking to each
other and I laugh like that, and you go, h yeah,

(28:55):
I know that we're not connecting with each other, right,
I know because your intensity is very different from mine,
that we're not actually on the same wave of length.
That you don't necessarily want to be on the same
wave of length. And that's really powerful.

Speaker 1 (29:06):
And what's so cool is that so many of these
kind of munication strategies are really ones that are just
like built into us as primates. Right in theory, this
is the sort of real basis of how we've been connecting,
you know, for thousands and thousands of years. But in
the dating world, these days, we're connecting over media that
look really different than the normal in person communication that
we've used forever. Like, these days in the dating world,

(29:27):
people are connecting over apps or over a text message thread,
and so talk about where communication can go awry, how
we might be able to become super communicators when we're
first meeting people in these new kind of domains that
maybe our whole supercommunication system wasn't really built.

Speaker 2 (29:43):
For very well, No, you're exactly right. When I met
my wife, we were in college together, and that seemed
like the most natural way to meet your spouse, right, Like,
you get to spend a lot of time with them,
you know, people in common. And now if I was
suddenly single and having to use apps, I would be
disastrous of this. I would have no idea what I'm doing.
But what's interesting is I would learn. One of my

(30:04):
favorite examples of this is that if you go back
to when telephones first became popular, there were all these
articles that came out that said, no one's ever going
to be able to have a real conversation on the phone, right.
It's going to be useful for sending over grocery lists
or stock orders, but if you can't see the person,
you can't really connect with them. And what's really interesting
is they were right at first. There were all these
studies where they would transcribe phone conversations and they were

(30:27):
stilted and weird and awkward because people didn't know how
to use that channel of communication. Now, by the time
you and I were in middle school, of course we
could have conversations for like seven hours a night. They
were the best conversations of our life on the telephone.
And it's because people tend to learn how to use
different channels, and what they learn is different channels require

(30:48):
different approaches. So you and I can see each other
right now because we're on zoom, But if we turned
off our cameras odds are, we would both even without
realizing it, we would both start enunciating our words a
little bit more. We would start making the emotion in
our voices a little bit stronger because we know that
the other person can't see us, so we know that

(31:09):
we need to do that. Now. The problem is, as
you pointed out, is we've been online for like twenty
twenty five years now, right, Like it's like a millisecond
elationary time a second. Right, There's no evolution that's happened
in our brain around digital communication, and so as a result,
we haven't learned how to use these different channels differently.
And sometimes because it's so fast and we're not thinking

(31:30):
hard and we just are busy, we assume that sending
a text is like sending an email is like making
a phone call. We don't think about the different rules
that different forms of communication require, and so as a result,
I send you a brusque email that you think seems
really like just a short email that you think is
brusque because I'm thinking if I told you this in person,

(31:53):
like you would understand it's not brusque. I'm just busy.
Or I say something sarcastic because I can hear the
sarcasm in my own head and you could hear it
if we were on the phone. But when I type it,
you don't realize it's sarcastic. You think that I'm being
a jerk. And so a huge part of digital communication
is just taking a second and so saying what are
the different rules for this form of communication? Because texting

(32:14):
is different from snapchatting is different from emailing. And what
I noticed I have kids, a twelve year old and
a fifteen year old. They do this automatically. Now there
are things that they do on texting that is completely
different from what they would do on email, which is
completely different from how they talk to each other on
snap which is completely different from how they talk to
me at home. They're learning these different channels and the

(32:35):
rules for these channels, and those of us are a
little bit older. We sometimes have to remind ourselves.

Speaker 1 (32:39):
So what are some of the specific things we can
remind ourselves, Because I feel like this comes up all
the time, both in like my marriage and my relationships,
but also just in friendships and with work colleagues and
so on, What are some of the really specific strategies
so we.

Speaker 2 (32:52):
Know that when you go online, basically everything that seems
polite should be done a lot more. There was a
really interesting study that looked at on Wikipedia editors who
would like get in these fights with each other, and
they found that if just one person started saying please
and thank you, it lowered the temperature of the conversation
by like fifty percent. Everyone else would suddenly become more

(33:12):
polite and more understanding. One first thing is that you're
more polite, like overemphasize the polite. It's never going to
come across as obsequious. It's just going to come across
as as understanding and comforting. And then the second thing
you do is read back what you've written, not with
it the words playing in your head, but actually looking
at what's been said. So a really important thing that

(33:35):
happens is I mentioned we tend to rely on vocal
tone enormously when we're talking to each other. Right, you
can tell if it's a joke or I'm serious based
on the tone of my voice. But we can't do
that in written text. And so sometimes just taking a
moment to reread the thing without letting the voice in
your head read it for you will tell you what
you're about to send is going to come off sounding

(33:56):
so different from what you intend. Really, the tips are
basically just to kind of overdo it a little bit,
and that's especially true for online dating.

Speaker 1 (34:09):
It's certainly not bad dating advice to make a point
of being considerate and kind. But after the honeymoon is over,
a lot of us stop being so careful around our partners.
Charles says, that's not what we should do if we
want to act more like a super communicator. More on
that when the Happiness Lab gets back from the break.

(34:34):
We often talked to dozens of people in the course
of an ordinary day. We might order coffee, or buy
a train ticket, or ask our neighbor to trim back
their hedge. We have simple interactions and trickier ones. But
if you think of a time when your own communication
went awry, my guess is that it probably happened not
with some stranger, but with someone who is near and
dear to you. It was this realization that pushed author

(34:55):
Charles Douhig to investigate the habits of so called supercommunicators.
He hoped that he, too, could learn to interact better
with the people whose feelings mattered to him the most.

Speaker 2 (35:04):
I was working the New York Times and they made
me a manager. And when they made me a manager,
I was like, oh man, I'm going to kill this.
I'm going to be so good at this, Like I've
had lots of managers, and I got an MBA from Harvard,
and I was okay at the like the logistics in
the strategy part, and it was terrible at communicating, Like
people would come to me with problems and I'd try

(35:26):
and solve their problems rather than listen. They would come
to me and say this is really important to me,
and I would downplay it and try and help them
by showing them that it's not that important instead of
actually listening to them saying it's important. And so one
night I went home and I sat down and I
wrote a list of all the times in the last
year that I could remember being bad at communicating, like miscommunicating.

(35:47):
It was shockingly long, particularly for someone who's a journalist
whos supposed to be a professional communicator. And a lot
of them were with my wife and my kids. And
this happens again and again and again, where the people
that we love the most are often the ones we
communicate with the least and the worst because they're around
all the time. Right, Because there's so many opportunities, I

(36:09):
feel like we have to seize them. And so that's
why I started writing supercommunicators, is I really wanted to
learn how to get better at this myself. And it
turns out that oftentimes that people we have conflict within
our life are the people who are most important to us.
We fight with our partners, and learning how to navigate
through those is really really important because that's what makes

(36:29):
a relationship long term successful.

Speaker 1 (36:32):
So one of the things you talk about in the
book is that the first step to kind of doing
conflict better is to recognize what the real goal is
of conflict. And it's often not what we think, which
is like I want to win, you know, I want
to show my husband that he was wrong about the
dishwasher or something like that. What's the real goal of
conflict If we're trying to kind of act more like
a super communicator, the real.

Speaker 2 (36:51):
Goal of conflict is to understand what the other person
is telling you and to help them understand you. Right.
There's oftentimes this thing that's owned as the quiet negotiation
that at the start of a conversation, and the quiet
negotiation sort of has two goals. The first is to
figure out what we're going to be talking about, and
the second is to figure out the rules for talking
to each other. Right. Is this a formal conversation or

(37:14):
a casual one? Can we interrupt each other or do
we need to wait our turn? There are no right rules,
but what's important is that we're on the same page
about what the rules are. And the way to do
this honestly, particularly when we're in conflict with someone, is
most frequently simply to ask them. So when I come
home now and I'm upset, my wife will often say

(37:34):
to me, look, do you want me to help you
solve this problem? Or do you want me just to
listen to you? Because you need to get this off
your chest. In schools, they often teach teachers when a
student comes up with something that's really bothering them or
something meaningful, to ask do you want me to hear you,
do you want me to help you, or do you
want me to hug you? Which, of course are the

(37:56):
three kinds of conversations, right, the practical, the social, and
the emotional.

Speaker 1 (38:01):
It also means that when we go to a conflict conversation,
we ourselves probably need to know what our goal is.
And this is something you saw in your research that
like figuring that out ahead of time seems to actually
be really helpful.

Speaker 2 (38:13):
Too oh enormously helpful. There's work done by a woman
named Alison wood Brooks at Harvard Business School where they
asked students, before having a conversation with a stranger simply
to write down three topics that they might discuss in
simple stuff. It took ten seconds, like the movie we
saw last night and you know the game this weekend.
And they found that doing that, people would write it

(38:35):
down that stick it in their pocket. Those topics almost
never came up during the conversation, but people felt so
much less anxious because they knew what they could talk about,
and doing that had forced them to think about what
they wanted to talk about. This is, I think kind
of the goal is that, again, this doesn't take much time.
It takes like ten seconds. If we know what we
want out of a conversation before we open our mouth,

(38:56):
then we're in a position where we can communicate that
to the other people, and when we do, it invites
them to communicate with us what they want. Another study
that I love was done at this investment bank. This
was like a place where people like screen at each
other all day long, and they told everyone before each
meeting for a week, write down one sentence about what

(39:19):
you want to accomplish in this meeting and the mood
you hope to establish. So people would write down like,
you know, I want to choose a budget together, but
I want everyone to be on board and be happy
with the result. And then people would like again, stick
the cards with the sentence on it into their pocket.
They would walk into to the meeting. Most people wouldn't
say what was on their card, but because they knew,

(39:42):
and they knew that everyone else in that room also
knew what they wanted, they would just tell each other
and the incidents of conflict went down eighty percent during
that week.

Speaker 1 (39:51):
Yeah, So this act of just like knowing what you
want ahead of time, even if it doesn't come to
that is really powerful. Another suggesting you had in your
book which I loved, which is to like acknowledge that,
like the discussion might be awkward, like that there's conflict
and obstacles might come up. You know, talk about why
that can be so helpful.

Speaker 2 (40:07):
And this is particularly true conversations that, for instance, have
to do with identity, like if we're talking about race
or we're talking about gender, is something that we're scared
about talking about, but it can also just be true
for any tough conversation we're going to have, like in relationships,
you know, in relationships, exactly, if I need to bring
something up, like about the dishes, and I know that, like,
you're probably going to not like hearing this. Oftentimes, one

(40:31):
of the things that stops us from having that conversation
is that we're worried about how awkward it's going to be.
But of course the true of the matter is it's
going to be awkward. So if we start the dialogue
by acknowledging, look, this is going to be an awkward conversation.
I'm going to say some of the wrong things. Also,
I'm going to make some mistakes, Like I'm going to
say some things in ways that I don't mean to

(40:51):
say them. So I'm going to ask for your apology
in advance, because I'm going to screw this up. And
it's okay if you screw it up, it's okay if
you have a tough time. Simply acknowledging that awkwardness is
enormously powerful in helping us move beyond it, or recognizing
that the awkwardness is actually part of the conversation. It's
one of the reasons we're having it. Then you also

(41:11):
mentioned that these obstacles right, that oftentimes in a conversation,
these obstacles pop up and they create anxiety themselves because
I said the wrong thing, or it's clear that I
just said something that offended you, or you're getting defensive,
or I'm getting defensive. These obstacles are oftentimes easy to
anticipate if we think about them, but we usually don't, right,

(41:34):
We just sort of jump into a conversation I've got
something to tell you about the dishes, rather than sitting
down and just thinking for ten seconds, like when I
bring this up, is he going to get defensive? When
he gets defensive, what am I going to do? So
anticipating the obstacle and coming up with a plan for
what to do when you encounter it is enormously powerful.

(41:55):
The plan is usually obvious, you know exactly what to do,
but in the moment of panic, when you hit that
obstacle without having thought about it at all, you overreact.
But if you just take ten seconds and say, and
you can actually announce the obstacles, you can say, look,
I'm going to bring this thing up, and in addition
to it being awkward, I'm going to work really hard
not to be defensive myself. If I'm getting defensive, please

(42:16):
let me know. The thing about tough conversations and conversations
and conflict is there is no magic bullet to make
them easy. So just embrace that they're going to be challenging,
and once you acknowledge those challenges, oftentimes the challenges become
less scary and they actually become opportunities for us to
connect and understand each other. So me and my wife,

(42:38):
this happened like ten years ago. We went on this
vacation without our kids to Florida, and we were staying
at this spa, and like, this is supposed to be relaxing, right,
I managed to screw it up completely by bringing up
money and whether we're spending too much money or whether
it's not going well, and like she got really like upset,

(42:58):
and then I got super upset, and we were like
screaming at each other in the hallway of the spa,
like this is like the worst possible way to spend
a relaxing vacation. And so when I look back on that,
I think to myself, like, how different would it have
been if I had said to Liz, like, you know
what I think we're spending too much money. We need
to talk about that. And she said, Okay, here's the

(43:22):
things that I need to spend on, and I think
we need to spend this much on food, and we
need to spend this much on school. If instead of
just responding and being like no, no, no, no, you're wrong, which
is what I did, if I had said, Okay, what
I hear you saying is there are some things that
are priorities for you that might not be priorities for me,
but that we have to listen to each other's priorities.
And for you, being able to buy organic food is

(43:43):
a real priority, even if it isn't for me. Am
I getting that right? Then what she probably would have
said is either yeah, yeah, I think you're hearing me,
or she would have said, no, it's not actually the
organic food. It's that I feel like you're trying to
control how I spend You're trying to control the money.

Speaker 1 (43:59):
And that's the beauty of why this is looping. For understanding,
you need the loop to come back to.

Speaker 2 (44:03):
You need the loop. So when she says no, no, no,
you're got you got it a little bit. But let
me tell you they're part of this. Then I just
loop again and I say, Okay, what I hear you
saying is and we do this again and again and
again until we all agree that we understand each other.
And the reason why this is so powerful is in
a lot of this draws on the work of Sheila

(44:24):
Heen and her colleagues at the Harvard Negotiation Project. Whenever
we go into a tough conversation, whenever we go into
a conflict, everyone involved has a story inside their head
about why we're here. And the only thing that's certain
is our stories are different. Right, They might be similar,
but they're not the same. And I'm operating from my story.

(44:47):
I'm saying, like, the reason we're talking about this is
that you're spending too much money and you don't appreciate
how hard it is for me to go earn that money.
And from Lizz's perspective, it's I'm taking care of the
kids and also I earn my own money, and I
don't understand why you keep insisting that like you should
have any say and how I spend when I'm not
trying to control how you spend. We both have a
story inside our head, and as long as we're operating

(45:09):
from that story, it's really hard for us to hear
each other. But when we start looping for understanding, what
we're doing is really saying, here's the story that I
hear you telling me, am, I getting that story right,
And oftentimes it is a looping. Oftentimes they have to say, no,
you didn't get it exactly right. Let me help you
out understand. And once we understand the other person's story,

(45:32):
that's when we can really hear what they want to say,
and we know how to say our own piece so
that they can hear it.

Speaker 1 (45:39):
So I'm guessing that knowing how to do this well
has meant that there's like not more like SPA blow
ups and tries, you know, but it does this really
change your life?

Speaker 2 (45:49):
Oh my gosh, it is. It is like magic. It
has transformed not just with Liz and not just with
my kids, but like with everyone. Because the thing is
all of these skills, looping for understanding, asking deep questions,
all of those are things that become instinctual once you
start thinking about them. They become habits. And what you
discover is that like all these problems that I used

(46:10):
to create for myself have just disappeared. It's not like
Liz and I agree with each other more. It's not
like we're like suddenly on the same page about everything.
But as long as we're like actually communicating about it
and we understand our goal is to understand each other,
not to win, then we end up feeling like we're
both in control. And this control is really important because

(46:32):
when we are in conflict with someone, when we're fighting
with our partner, when we're having a tough time, when
we're negotiating the start of a relationship, we have this
instinct for control. It's very human, and so it's very
natural to try and control the thing that's right in
front of you, the other person. Right, if I can
just get you to listen to me, you'll agree with me.

(46:53):
If I can just get you to see things from
my perspective, or when you say I'm really upset about X,
if I can just convince you like you shouldn't be upset,
that's not a big deal, Like you're making too much
of it. Right, If I can control the importance you
place on things, it feels like that will work, But
of course it never does. All it does is create
more conflict. So instead, if we can find things to

(47:15):
control together, control the environment, for instance, like if we're
having a fight at two am, to decide we're going
to wait until we're both well rested in the morning
to talk about this. If we can control ourselves by saying, look,
I'm going to take a couple of minutes just to
calm down before I answer, if we can control the
fight itself and say, you know, instead of like arguing

(47:35):
about where we spend Thanksgiving and it becomes a conversation
about your mother and how she hates me, and we
spend too much money you don't earn enough. If we
just say, look, we're just talking about Thanksgiving, we're going
to keep it to Thanksgiving, then we're controlling things together.
In marriages, I know that you had talk to the Gotmans.
There's this line that I love from one of John
Gotman's studies, which is the key to success in a

(47:58):
marriage is symmetry. And what he means is not necessarily
we agree with each other. It's that we match each other.
That when you get serious, I get serious, when you
go light, go light. And part of that is saying
I'm going to share control with you. We're going to
control this together.

Speaker 1 (48:14):
So we've covered tons of ground in this conversation so far,
but just as a final thought, like, why should we
really copy what super communicators are doing when it comes
to relationships, and just kind of generally so I.

Speaker 2 (48:25):
Mentioned before this Harvard study, this Harvard Sudy of Adult Happiness,
and it's the largest and longest latitudinal study that we have.
They've followed around thousands of people trying to figure out
what determines future longevity and health and happiness. And the
only real thing that they found that seems to be
predictive is people who have deep and meaningful relationships when

(48:46):
they are forty five will be healthier and happier and
more successful when they're sixty five. And of course there's
nothing special about forty five, right. If you can make
it to forty five and you have some deep relationships,
it means you've been building them for a while. You
probably also had them when you were twenty five or
thirty five. And so the lesson to take from that
is it doesn't matter how many relationships you have, it

(49:07):
matters how deep and important they are. And a huge
part of that is just having conversations with them. Right.
But when it comes to romantic relationships, I think the
lesson here is it can get really discouraging, right, Like
I have lots of friends who are on the apps
and they go on date after date after date. Half
the dates are terrible and then the other half they

(49:27):
like them, but then they ghost each other. And like,
it can be brutal out there. But the thing is
that it's it's worth persisting in. It's worth spending that
energy to find the right person because when we connect
with someone, when we find someone that we can have
conversations with, even if we don't end up mirroring them,

(49:49):
if they just become a friend, that is the thing
that gives our life meaning year by year by year.
And the people who at forty five have deep, meaningful
relationships and therefore it's sixty five, are happier and healthier.
They are the people who spend time and energy and
put up with the disappointment trying to find someone when

(50:10):
they were younger. It's worth investing in. It's hard, but
it works out in the end and it pays off.

Speaker 1 (50:18):
If Charles has helped to convince you that you need
to invest more in your intimate relationships, then be sure
to check out his book Super Communicators. How to unlock
the secret language of connection. But we haven't finished with
the topic of love and happiness just yet. In our
next and final episode of this special season, we'll challenge
some of the love rules we get from fairy tale romances,

(50:38):
movie rom comms, and Instagram influencers. We'll even ask if
it's about time that we settled for a good enough lover.

Speaker 3 (50:44):
You know, we don't need one hundred percent. We don't
need our partners to be perfect. We need them to
be there for us most of the time. We need
a relationship that's good enough. That doesn't mean an unhealthy relationship.
It doesn't mean an abusive relationship. It just means a
relationship that's mostly satisfying.

Speaker 1 (51:00):
So don't miss the next episode of the Happiness Lab
with me Doctor Laurie Santos,