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How to Become a “Supercommunicator”
From Charles Duhigg, writing for The Wall Street Journal…
When Nicholas Epley was in high school, he was such a bad listener that it almost ruined his life. A star football player in a small Iowa town, he was stopped for drunk driving one night and handed over to his parents rather than being arrested. They lectured him, and Epley ignored them. Then he got pulled over again. This time his parents sent him to a counselor who spoke to him in an entirely different way: She asked questions. “Why did this happen?” “What would have happened if you had been arrested?” “How would you feel if you had killed someone?”
For reasons Epley didn’t understand at the time, these sessions seemed to unlock something in him. “I couldn’t pretend I didn’t know the answers,” he told me three decades later. He started having more useful conversations with his parents, decided he would stop drinking and get serious about school. He discovered psychology courses in college and eventually became a professor of behavioral science. And he joined the forefront of a growing field of research into what makes someone an effective communicator: Why are some people better at connecting with others, hearing what’s unsaid and speaking so others want to listen? Can anyone learn to do this?
In recent decades, our understanding of how people communicate has been transformed by advances in neuroscience and sophisticated psychological experiments. One finding is that some of us seem to be what I call “supercommunicators”—people capable of saying exactly the right thing, breaking through to almost anyone, figuring out how to connect in even the most unlikely circumstances.
We all know these people: The friends we call after a tough day, the colleagues we know will make a discussion easier, the neighbors gifted at building community. And we know how elusive those skills can be sometimes. We’ve all felt the sting of failing to hear what’s important, struggling to speak clearly, missing opportunities to connect.
But we can all become supercommunicators. As I’ve studied this subject over the last three years, I’ve learned some important lessons. One is the importance of understanding the different kinds of conversations that can emerge—practical, emotional and social. Each one, researchers say, uses a different part of our brains. If we aren’t having the same kind of conversation as our companions, we’re unlikely to connect.
I recognized this pattern in my own marriage. Some days, I would come home from work upset about something (“My boss is a jerk!”), and my wife would respond with practical advice (“Why don’t you get to know each other away from the office?”). But that would only make me more frustrated—emotional—because we were having two different kinds of conversations. Today we’ve learned the importance of matching each other’s approach, so that when I start complaining, my wife will often ask “Do you want me to help you solve this problem, or just listen?” That helps us become aligned—or, in the words of neuroscientist Uri Hasson at Princeton University, “neurally entrained.”
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