The author of Supercommunicators discusses how to make conversations work and shares practical strategies for better communication.
Our guest on the podcast today is Charles Duhigg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author of The Power of Habit, Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, and Smarter Faster Better. His writing has won numerous honors, including the National Academies of Sciences, National Journalism, and George Polk awards. Duhigg is a former Los Angeles Times staff writer. In between 2006 and 2017, he was a reporter at The New York Times. He currently writes for The New Yorker magazine and other publications. He graduated from Yale University and earned a Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School. He is here today to discuss his most recent book, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection.
Background
The New Yorker magazine
Books
Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity
Other
“The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings,” by Arthur Aron, Edward Melinat, Renee J. Bator, Elaine N. Aron, and Robert Darrin Vallone, Sage Journals, April 1997.
“Unpacking the 36 Questions That Lead to Love: Why and How They Work,” by Kendra Cherry, verywellmind.com, Feb. 12, 2024.
The Harvard Study of Adult Development
Amy Arnott: Hi and welcome to The Long View. I’m Amy Arnott, portfolio strategist for Morningstar.
Christine Benz: And I’m Christine Benz, director of personal finance and retirement planning for Morningstar.
Arnott: Our guest on the podcast today is Charles Duhigg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author of The Power of Habit, Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, and Smarter Faster Better. His writing has won numerous honors, including the National Academies of Sciences, National Journalism, and George Polk awards. Duhigg is a former Los Angeles Times staff writer. In between 2006 and 2017, he was a reporter at The New York Times. He currently writes for The New Yorker magazine and other publications. He graduated from Yale University and earned a Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School. He is here today to discuss his most recent book, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection.
Charles, welcome to The Long View.
Charles Duhigg: Thanks for having me on.
Arnott: So, before we get into the book, can you tell us a bit about your earlier career after you got your MBA from Harvard?
Duhigg: Well, so before I went to HBS, I started a company in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I grew up. And I decided to go to Harvard Business School because I realized after a couple of years that I did not know as much about management as I hoped that I would know. And then we sold the company during my first semester of business school.
So suddenly, I had this wide-open space in front of me. And I spent the summer between first and second year when you’re traditionally supposed to work with a company that you hope is going to hire you, working with a real estate private equity group. And I was trying to decide between becoming a journalist and going into private equity and politics back in New Mexico where I lived. And I decided that journalism would just be really fun. So, when I graduated from HBS, I got an internship at The Washington Post and then eventually got a job at the LA Times. And I think I was the lowest paid member of my HBS class for like the next seven years. But it was great. It’s a wonderful lifestyle and a wonderful life. And everything ended up working out in the end. I then went to The New York Times and went to The New Yorker magazine where I currently work and wrote a couple of bestselling books. So, it all worked out in the end. But it was an unusual path for an HBS grad.
Arnott: So, you’ve always had an interest in journalism, but you’ve been able to marry that with insights on business and finance and management as well.
Duhigg: Absolutely. And I am a business writer for The New York Times and then now for The New Yorker. I love business stories. I think that business stories are the most exciting and most meaningful stories out there because everybody’s lives are touched by business. Most of what we do every day is the drama of business. And so, I just love the stories and love telling them.
Benz: You published The Power of Habit in 2012, Smarter Faster Better in 2016, and Supercommunicators this year. All three loosely fall under the umbrella of self-improvement. Have you always been interested in these types of practical questions of how to be a better, more productive person?
Duhigg: Yeah, very much so because one of the things that’s really compelled me is that during my lifetime, during all of our lifetimes, we’ve lived through this revolution where because of advances in science, we know so much about human behavior. We know how to improve human behavior, how to optimize human behavior. But for anyone who reads scientific papers on a regular basis or has tried to read them, you know that it’s actually very hard to take this knowledge that’s being created and figure out how to explain it to people in a way that it seems practical and applicable to their own lives.
And so, the science of habit formation is a great example. When I wrote The Power of Habit, one of the reasons why was because I had been a reporter in Iraq, and I had seen that the military essentially is enormously successful in large part because they know how to shape people’s habits. And they’ve made a science of it and researchers with neuroscience research and advances in neural imaging and data collection had figured out how to make this true for everyone. But just because it’s known within the scientific community or it’s known within the military, that doesn’t mean it’s commonly known. And so, one of the reasons I wrote The Power of Habit—and this is true of Supercommunicators as well and obviously a different topic—is because we are living through this golden age of understanding human behavior. But that knowledge is oftentimes locked up or inaccessible until someone comes along and writes a book that explains how to make this applicable to your own life.
Arnott: I think even for someone who understands how you can apply things to your own life, actually doing it is another challenge. So having some really practical guidance is probably helpful for a lot of people.
Duhigg: Absolutely. And in The Power of Habit and Supercommunicators in particular, that’s exactly what we tried to do. There’s a lot of science, there’s a lot of stories, there’s a lot of explaining how your brain works, but then there’s just a lot of practical, this is how you do it. Like these are the three steps to get better at this. This is what you need to think about when you’re thinking about online communication. Because you’re right, it’s that gap between knowing —something being information and something being knowledge, that’s the gap that I try and help people get over.
Arnott: Well, Christine and I both spend a lot of time writing about finance and investing. So, I think we’re always curious about how other people do their writing. So, what does your daily routine look like when you’re working on a longer project like a book?
Duhigg: So, it’s pretty boring. If I’m in the reporting stage, I wake up and I have a call list of people who I think I want to talk to, and I just call them, and I have these kind of meandering pointless conversations where basically what I’m asking them is, what questions should I be asking you? Because you’re smarter—if I ask you a question you’ve already answered before, I probably have found the answer. I probably read what you had to say. So, I’m trying to figure out like how do I get you to work on my behalf to start thinking on my behalf?
And then the goal for everything that I write is to find a story and preferably a story about a person or about one idea and really trace the evolution of that person or that idea as it goes through changes. Oftentimes when we think about stories, we know that it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And it’s our natural inclination to focus on the beginning and the end, but it’s actually the middle where we learn the most. It’s watching someone who has a goal fail at that goal once and twice and three times and seeing what they learn from those failures that eventually allows them to succeed that is the really meaningful part. So, once I have something I want to write about or an idea that I think is interesting, I’m always looking for a story or a narrative or something with suspense and a character that will help me make that idea become real.
Benz: Speaking specifically about Supercommunicators, can you talk about the genesis of the book and why you decided to learn more about communication and connection?
Duhigg: Absolutely. So, it actually started with this bad pattern I got into with my wife. We’ve been married for 20 years, and this thing started happening that I’m absolutely certain is familiar to anyone who is listening who is in a relationship, which is, I would come home from work after a long day, and I would start complaining about my day and my boss and my wife would offer some really useful advice. She would say something like, “Why don’t you take your boss out to lunch and you guys can get to know each other better.” And instead of being able to hear what she was saying, I would get even more upset. I would say like, “Why aren’t you supporting me? You’re supposed to be on my side. Why aren’t you outraged on my behalf?” And she would get upset because I was attacking her for giving me good advice.
And so, I went to all these researchers, and I was like, look, I’m a professional communicator. This happens to me all the time. This happens in every relationship all the time. What is going on here? And what the researchers said is they said, well, actually, for the first time, we kind of have an answer because of all these advances and how we can study the neural activity of people as they speak, we see what’s happening. And what’s happening is when most of us go into a conversation, we assume that we’re having a discussion about one thing. We’re talking about my day, or we’re talking about your financial plans if I’m coming in to you as my financial manager or advisor, or we’re talking about where to go on vacation next week or next year. And they said, what’s actually happening though is that every discussion is made up of multiple kinds of conversations.
And in general, those conversations, they tend to fall into one of three buckets. There are these practical conversations, where we’re making plans or solving problems. I’m coming up with a budget for you. I’m helping you figure out where to allocate your investments. That’s a practical conversation. But then there’s also emotional conversations. And in an emotional conversation, I don’t want you to solve my emotions. I want you to empathize. And as everyone who is a financial advisor or thinks about money knows, oftentimes those clients come in and they think they want a practical conversation, but actually, it’s an emotional conversation because they’re feeling anxious and they’re feeling uncertain and they’re feeling a chagrined that they don’t know everything they should know about money. So that’s the second kind of conversation. And then the third kind of conversation is a social conversation, which is about how we relate to each other and how we relate to society.
And what the researchers told me was they said, look, what we figured out is all three conversations are important and all three of them are legitimate. But if you aren’t having the same kind of conversation at the same moment, it’s really hard to hear each other and it’s really hard to connect. Which of course is what was happening with me and my wife, right? I was having an emotional conversation. She was having a practical conversation, so we couldn’t hear each other. And within psychology, this is...
Arnott: I was just going to say, I think that can be extremely frustrating.
Duhigg: Oh, absolutely.
Arnott: Not only are you not really communicating, but I think you can get really irritated with the other person because you feel like you’re not on the same page.
Duhigg: Yeah, and they’re just trying to help. They’re just saying, here’s a solution to your problem. And you’re saying, I don’t want a solution. I want you to empathize and tell me that it’s OK to feel this way. No, it happens all the time. But if we match each other, then oftentimes those frustrations go away.
Arnott: You write that anyone can become a super communicator, but do you think that great communication comes more naturally to some people than others?
Duhigg: This has actually been studied extensively and the answer is no. There seems to be no personality characteristics that make you better or worse at communication. What does make a huge difference is whether you recognize the skills involved in communication and practice them. And it might be worth just defining what a super communicator is. And a really easy way to do that is to ask you guys a question, which is if you were having a terrible day and you went home and you wanted to call someone who you know would make you feel better, do you know who you would call? Does that person pop into your mind?
Arnott: I think my default would be my husband since he is there.
Benz: Same.
Duhigg: OK, right. Yeah.
Benz: But a few others, definitely more than one.
Duhigg: So, for you, your husband is a super communicator and those others that popped into your mind, this is the person I call who I know just makes me feel better. Those people for you are super communicators and you are probably a super communicator back to them. We are all super communicators at various points in our lives and with certain people. But what’s interesting is that there are some people who are consistent super communicators. They can have that kind of connection and that kind of conversation with anyone. And it’s not because they’re more charming or outgoing or an extrovert. It’s because they’ve recognized that the skills that your husbands are using with you are skills that are fungible that can be used with anyone. Like, let me ask you this. When you have those conversations with your husbands, why do they feel so good? Like, what are your husbands doing?
Arnott: I think sometimes he will even ask specifically, well, do you just want to vent, or do you want ideas for how to fix it? And I don’t think he always did that. But I think through the course of our relationship and reading various books and so forth, we’ve both gotten a little bit better about trying to understand what the other person is looking for.
Duhigg: Yeah. And what I hear you saying is that he is asking you what kind of conversation you want to have.
Arnott: Right.
Duhigg: OK, so let me ask you this. What else has your husband been doing? I’m guessing, does he ask you good questions?
Arnott: He does, yeah. And usually, if he is in the middle of making dinner or working on something, he will ask if we can talk later, which is something that I try to do also because I tend to be extremely focused in whatever I’m doing at the moment. So, it’s hard for me to switch gears and start listening to someone if I’m worried about I have to get this work done in the next 30 minutes or something like that.
Duhigg: And my guess is—and tell me if I’m getting this wrong—that when he does have that time to listen to you, he shows you that he is listening, right? He is paying attention to you. He is asking follow-up questions. He is making it obvious that he is actually paying attention and that he set aside time, at least in his brain to pay attention to you. Is that right?
Arnott: Right. Yeah.
Duhigg: So, these three things that we just mentioned, asking the right kind of questions, which are known as deep questions within psychology, proving that we’re listening, trying to choose the right environment for a conversation. Those are just basic skills. And those are skills that your husband or you or anyone else could use with anyone. But oftentimes, instead of recognizing those as skills, we just think like, oh, that person is a good communicator, or I like talking to that person. But what super communicators do is they recognize this thing that I do that works really well with my wife or my husband, I can do it with anyone. And it’s the recognition of that skill that makes it into a habit.
Arnott: And is part of that the recognition that those types of skills are transferable to different areas, like, not just a conversation with your spouse or your friends, but coworkers or doctors or other people that you might encounter in daily life?
Duhigg: Absolutely. Or your clients or CEOs that you’re asking questions of because you’re trying to figure out what’s going on with their company. These are completely fungible skills. They work with everyone. And it’s once we recognize that that we can make a big change. And it might be worth talking about what those skills exactly are because we know a lot about them with precision. Would that be helpful?
Arnott: Sure.
Duhigg: OK. So, the first one is one of the things that we know about consistent super communicators is that they tend to ask more questions than the average person, like 10 to 20 times as many questions. And some of those questions are just questions designed to invite us in. Like, oh, would you think about that? Or, oh, would you say next? But some of the questions are special questions. And they’re known, as I mentioned this, as deep questions. And a deep question is something that asks others about their values or their beliefs or their experiences. And that can sound a little intimidating. But it’s actually very easy to do.
So, for instance, if you meet someone who is a doctor, the natural thing to ask is like, oh, where do you practice medicine? But if instead you ask a deep question, you were to say something like, oh, what made you decide to go to medical school? Or what do you like about being a doctor? When I ask that question, that doesn’t seem overly intimate or intrusive. But what I’m doing is I’m offering you an invitation to tell me something about yourself that’s actually meaningful. To tell me about the experiences that led you to becoming a doctor. What medical school was like for you? What your beliefs and your values are that pushed you into medicine? And then I can reciprocate really easily and say, oh, you became a doctor because you saw your dad get sick when you were a kid. That’s interesting. I became a lawyer because I saw one of my uncles get in trouble with the law when I was a kid. Now we’re having a real back and forth and an exchange that’s rooted in something that feels real.
Arnott: It opens up the door to sharing instead of just being on the surface level of how is the weather or things like that.
Duhigg: Exactly. And one of the ways to think about this is that when you meet someone or you’re talking to someone, instead of asking about the facts of their life, ask some questions about how they feel about their life. Instead of saying, oh, what part of the heights do you live in? Say, oh, what made you decide to move to the heights? Like, what do you like about living up there? That’s when we’re inviting them to say something real about themselves. And so that’s the first skill, is not only asking questions, but asking deep questions, which is easier than you might think it is.
Benz: I heard you interviewed about this, and I was so compelled by this idea because I do not like small talk and I’m introverted, but I love deep talk. I can talk to someone I love to talk to for a long time and just love every bit of it. So, I love that it’s a way to get yourself away from that small talk that feels awkward into a real conversation. It seemed like just a beautiful technique.
Duhigg: Yeah. And what’s interesting is that when we practice it, it becomes a habit really quickly. And that’s in part because of how our brains have evolved. If you think about it, communication is homo sapiens’ superpower. Communication is the thing that’s allowed us as a species to succeed so well, to build families and communities and countries and aircraft carriers and video games. Communication is our superpower. And as a result, our brains have evolved to be really good at communication. And so that means that when we recognize a skill and when we practice it a couple of times, it might feel a little awkward to practice it the first time or the second time. But usually by the third or fourth or fifth time, it’s become a habit. It happens almost automatically. And that’s what I love about these deep questions is that once you start thinking in terms of, I want to ask a deep question, what you’ll find is within a week, you’re doing it without even thinking about it. And that’s when you get to have those real conversations.
Arnott: When you talk about the three different kinds of conversations, is it helpful for friends or partners to develop a routine or a ritual around having different types of conversations?
Duhigg: I think what’s really helpful is, particularly with friends and partners, is just asking. You mentioned this before, when I come home and I start complaining about my day, my wife will often say, do you want me to help you figure out a solution for this? Or do you just want to complain? Like you just need to vent? And it’s actually really nice when she asks me that. Because usually, I hadn’t thought about it myself until that moment. And I say like, no, no, no, this isn’t a big deal. I just want to get it off my chest. I just need to complain about it. And then if I complain for a little while, she might very well say, “I hear what you’re saying and I’m sorry, you feel that way. Do you want to talk about solutions? Should we figure out a plan?” And what she is really saying is like, instead, I want to invite you to move from an emotional conversation to a practical conversation. And again, that feels really good.
And so, when we talk about the rituals of communication that we have with friends and with family, and this is also true at work, with people that we talk to on a regular basis. One of the things that’s really, really useful is to talk about communication, to talk about, like, what kind of conversation are we having right now? What do you want out of this conversation? What can I do to make this better for you, to help you? When we get comfortable with that, that’s when we really have great conversations.
Benz: In the book, you talk about three conversation types, which you referenced earlier: the conversation about what’s this really about, how do we feel, and who are we. So how do you think financial advisors could use the three conversation types to develop better relationships with their clients?
Duhigg: I think there’s a huge number of opportunities to use this. So, there’s a couple of stories in the book. There’s a story about the CIA officer who is trying to recruit an overseas agent, and he is just terrible. He is really bad at recruiting. This is his first job, and he can’t figure it out. And there is this story about a doctor, a surgeon who kept on telling his patients, I don’t think you need surgery. And his patients would just insist on the surgery. And I think that’s similar to what financial consultants and financial advisors face, which is oftentimes you have a client who comes in and you give them great advice. And it’s just as if they cannot hear your advice. Or it seems like they’re distracted or you’re not having the conversation with them that it seems like they want.
And I think what often happens in those situations is that we go in assuming that they want a practical conversation. They came to me for advice. I’m going to give them advice on whether to get the surgery or not. I’m going to give them advice on what to do for retirement, how to structure their portfolio. And they’re actually saying I want advice, but actually if we ask a couple of questions, what we discover pretty quickly is they need to have an emotional conversation first. Because before they can have that practical conversation, before they can hear that advice, they need us to acknowledge their feelings and they need to voice their feelings: “I’m feeling anxious because retirement is coming up and I’m not certain that I’ve saved enough, and I don’t know what my life is going to be like, and I don’t know if I’m going to be able to provide for my kids as they get older and help them buy a house.” Or, “I’m feeling chagrined because it’s embarrassing—we’re supposed to know about money and the fact that I don’t know some basic stuff and I’m coming to you and asking you for advice. I want to prove to you first that I know what I’m talking about. I’m smart. And we’ve got to get that off the table before I can hear your advice.”
The more that advisors or surgeons or experts, the more that we have the ability to try and figure out what kind of conversation this person wants to have, the better we can serve them and the better we can get to the stuff that’s really important. So, the surgeon that I mentioned, what he found is that rather than giving people advice as soon as they came into his office, if he started the conversation by saying—he is a cancer surgeon, he works on prostate cancers—if he started the conversation by saying his first question was, tell me what this cancer diagnosis means to you? Oftentimes people would open up and they would start talking about things like watching their parents get sick or being concerned about the financial impacts of getting sick or just concerned about the state of the world. What kind of world are we leaving for our children with climate change and everything? They would talk for 10 minutes without mentioning their cancer or medical questions or concerns about pain or questions about treatments because they wanted to first of all have this emotional conversation. And when he matched them, when he would talk about his own father getting sick and what that meant for him and his family, then he was able to say, can we talk about some treatments that I might suggest? And the other person was ready to listen to them.
So, for financial advisors who are listening, I think one of the best things we can do is start that conversation by inviting folks to answer the broadest question possible, which is when you came in today, what does this meeting mean to you? What are you hoping to walk away with? What is it that’s keeping you up at night that I can help you with? Because oftentimes the answers are going to surprise us.
Arnott: You also talk about the idea of adding new items to the table as a way of testing out how the other person might like the conversation to unfold. Can you give us an example of how that might work?
Duhigg: So, what often happens, particularly at the beginning of a conversation, is something that’s known as a quiet negotiation. And a quiet negotiation is interesting because the goal of a quiet negotiation is not to win the negotiation. The goal of a quiet negotiation is to figure out what the other person wants. And sometimes they don’t know what they want, or they don’t know how to elucidate what they want. And the way that we get to that is by running little experiments.
So, take the financial advisors meeting. You come in and you say, “I’m here to talk about my retirement. But it just doesn’t seem like—the conversation just isn’t moving forward. I bring something up and you don’t seem to really click with it.” I might want to add something to the table and say, “Look, in addition to retirement, can I just ask you what kind of legacy do you want to leave for your kids, like, when you think about how you want to help them as they get older and maybe inheritance?” OK, I’m going to add that to the table. I’m going to see if that resonates with you because it might set off something where suddenly I see actually the big issue here is that you’re worried that your retirement is going to drain the accounts and you won’t have anything to leave for your kids and leaving something for your kids is really important. Or I might ask you, “Tell me about, how do you think about philanthropy? Is it important to you? Is it something that you’ve benefited from? Is it an important part of how you see your place in the world?” And again, what I’m doing is I’m adding items to the table and I’m seeing if they spark anything within you.
Someone might very well say, I give plenty of money philanthropy. I don’t really care about it that much. It’s not something I need to think about. OK, now I know. Now I know that that is not part of the set of issues that you’re thinking about. But when I add items to the table in a way that is open-ended that says, basically, tell me what your thoughts are about X. Tell me what this diagnosis means to you. Tell me about how you think of yourself as a financial creature. What I’m really doing is I’m saying, tell me what you want from this conversation. And that’s really powerful.
Arnott: And it seems like it might be hard for people to do that, especially if it’s someone like a doctor or a financial advisor who is an expert and has probably ideas in mind for what that person needs in their particular situation. But it sounds like you need to take a step back and before presenting a solution based on your knowledge, just making sure you understand what the other person is really looking for from the conversation.
Duhigg: That’s exactly right. And I think that’s what the best advisors do. The best advisors aren’t the best advisors because their advice is so good. Their advice is good. But advice is something you can get from anyone. The best advisors are so successful because the people that they’re talking to feel listened to. They believe that their advisor understands them. And in part, they feel like the advisor is customizing their answers to their unique problems, as opposed to just trying to give them the same advice that they give to everyone. Even if it ends up being the same advice you give to everyone, it feels personalized because I feel like you’ve listened to me.
Benz: I wanted to ask about the role of devices and technology in all of this, because as you’re talking and I’m reflecting on my failings as a communicator, I think it’s probably distracted communication, like I’m doing something else while I’m trying to listen to someone, and I am being very subpar as a listener, as a communicator. So, do you have any advice for like— obviously put down your device and listen to the person who is speaking to you—but any other techniques, things we should think about in the realm of juggling?
Duhigg: Yeah, absolutely. And let me just say, you’re a great communicator. But you’re exactly right. When we set ourselves up to be bad communicators because we’ve got three things going on at once, and we’re trying to listen out of the corner of our ear to someone, then no matter how great a communicator you are, it’s probably not going to go that well.
And so, you’re exactly right. You mentioned devices, and oftentimes we frame this conversation in terms of how does it have to change when I go online, digital communications? And what’s interesting is the rules of communication don’t change, but the rules that are specific to that format often do change. So, a good example of this is that about 100 years ago, when telephones first became popular, there were all these studies that appeared that said, no one will ever have a real conversation on the phone. Because remember, up to that moment, all conversations had happened face to face. And they said, look, if you can’t see the person, if you can’t see their gestures and their facial expressions, if you can’t with perfect fidelity hear the emotion in their voice, you’re never going to have a real conversation. And what’s interesting is that at that moment, those studies were actually right. If you look at early transcripts from telephone conversations, people use them as telegrams. They didn’t know how to have conversations on a phone.
But then fast forward to when you and I and everyone listening was in middle school, we could talk on the phone for like seven hours a night, and they were the most meaningful conversations of our lives. So, what changed? The thing that changed is that we learned how to have phone conversations. Without realizing it, when you’re talking on the telephone, you will over-enunciate your words by about 20%. There will be about a third more emotion in your voice. Because almost subconsciously, you know that the person can’t see you. You need to show them what you’re feeling through your voice, rather than your expressions. We have learned the rules of phone conversations without even realizing that they were rules, without even realizing we were learning them.
There’s a whole bunch of new forms of communication. Texting, email, DMs, slacking, and those also all have their own slight variations on the rules. I know that if I’m going to say something important, it’s probably better to do it in an email than over a text. But I also know, if I talk to my 13-year-old, that you can actually have an emotional conversation over text if you use emojis. Emojis are a form of emotional communication that kids have learned to use.
And so, the answer to your question is yes, you should absolutely not allow yourself to be distracted. If you’re going to have a serious conversation, you should set aside some time and a place to do that, much as your husband said, let’s put this off until I’m done cooking dinner. But equally, you should figure out what form of conversation is best for this particular topic. If it’s something kind of easy and fun, text works. If it’s something serious and meaningful, maybe I want to do it by phone, or maybe I at least want to send an email. When we get into trouble is when we forget to remind ourselves of those rules that we’re aware of.
Arnott: If we go back to the three different kinds of conversation, you mentioned in the book that how do we feel conversation is the most important conversation to have. Can you expand on that a little bit?
Duhigg: Well, I think it’s not necessarily the most important conversation as much as it’s an acknowledgement that emotions shape all of our conversations, whether we want to admit it or not, whether we’re aware of them or not. Again, a conversation about finances is a great example. Anytime people are talking about their own finances, anytime I’m talking about finances with my wife, there are lots of emotions underneath the surface. Some of those are happy emotions. I can’t believe that things have turned out so well, and we get to take these vacations. There are negative emotions, like I’m kind of worried that this vacation is too nice, and a year from now we’re going to regret taking it.
There are emotions that shape every conversation, particularly financial conversations. And oftentimes it’s our instinct to pretend that those emotions don’t exist. But the problem is what happens is that they leak out in other ways. I bring something up and suddenly you get more upset than I expected you to get about some proposal for the budget. And I can’t figure out why, because it makes logical sense to me. That’s probably because there’s an emotional issue there that we’re not acknowledging or we’re not recognizing. And what’s important in those cases is to simply acknowledge it. Because oftentimes we take the power away from it by acknowledging that it’s there.
One of the ways to do this, particularly in conversations that are conflict conversations, where we disagree about something or we’re talking about something that’s challenging, like our finances, is a technique known as looping for understanding. And there’s these three steps to it. The first step is that you should ask each other questions, preferably deep questions. We need to set up a budget for our next vacation. Tell me what you’re worried about and what you’re excited about. OK, that’s a deep question. Then after you’ve answered that question, I’m going to try— and this is step two—I’m going to try and repeat back what you told me in my own words. I’m going to show you that I’ve been listening to you, but more importantly, I’m going to show you that I’ve been processing it. I’ve been thinking.
And then the third step is—and this is the step we usually forget—I’m going to ask you if I got it right. Because one of two things is going to happen. The first is you’re going to say, no, you didn’t understand what I was saying, and that’s useful to know. Or the second thing is that you’re going to say, yeah, I think you heard what I was saying. And what actually happened in that moment is that I just asked you for permission to acknowledge that I was listening. And when you believe that I’m listening to you, you become more likely to listen to me. And so, in a hard conversation, a conversation where we have to disagree with each other, where we do disagree with each other, where we’re talking about something where we don’t see eye to eye, or just something that causes tension within our relationship, when we use this technique of looping for understanding, we make it much, much more likely that that conversation doesn’t get sidetracked by emotions, but that rather we show that we’re hearing the full panoply of what we’re talking about with each other.
Benz: Psychology textbooks often recommend trying to take the other person’s perspective to have more productive conversations. But you think that this can also backfire. Could you talk a bit more about why?
Duhigg: So, the research is actually pretty robust on this. It’s known as perspective-taking. If I want to understand your problems, what I should do is I should imagine myself in your shoes and see the world through your eyes. The problem is all the studies have shown, it doesn’t work very well. It doesn’t work very well because I actually have a really tough time putting myself in your shoes. Even if I say, oh, this client is coming in and I know that they’re 65 years old and they retired last year, I’m going to try and see the world through the eyes of a 65-year-old who retired last year. The truth is, I’m 45 years old, and I’ve got another 20 years of career in front of me. I can’t imagine myself into your shoes. I just don’t know enough.
So, instead of perspective-taking, what people recommend is perspective-getting. The way that we get perspectives is we ask those deep questions. We take the thing, and we say, look, you just retired, you’re 65 years old, tell me how you see the world. Tell me how you see the world differently today than you did five years ago and 10 years ago. When you start answering that question, I’m going to be able to put myself a little bit more in your shoes because I’m not assuming I know what it’s like to be you. I’m asking you, what is it like to be you? And that’s really, really powerful.
Arnott: Another thing you write about is The Fast Friends Procedure. And you have a list of 36 questions that can build closeness and understanding in the appendix of the book. Do you think that financial advisors could perhaps use an abbreviated version of that list when they’re trying to get to know their new clients?
Duhigg: Well, I think that they could use a list that’s similar and designed by them. So just for folks might have heard of this list because it’s sometimes called “the 36 questions that lead to love.” These two researchers at one of the CUNY colleges, they wanted to try and figure out if they could come up with a technique for making strangers into friends. And so, they tried a bunch of different stuff. They had people do puzzles together, or tell each other stories, and none of it really worked until they came up with this list of questions. And what they would do is they would bring two strangers into a room, and they’d sit them down, and they would have them ask these questions back and forth. And some of the questions were things like, if you could have a dinner party with anyone, who would you have a dinner party with? Which is kind of interesting, a little deep. And some of the questions were like, tell me about your mother, or when is the last time you cried in front of another person?
And I’ve actually done this experiment myself with audiences. I give a lot of speeches, and I’ll use that question. I’ll tell them, look, in about 30 minutes, you’re going to have a conversation with a stranger next to you about when is the last time you cried in front of another person. And I asked them, how many people are excited about this? And nobody is excited about this. Nobody thinks this is a good idea. And yet, then I spent 30 minutes explaining why I think it’s a good idea. And then we’ll do it. We do it. Two-and-a-half minutes per person, and they have the conversation. And afterward, everyone says, this is one of the best conversations I’ve had in the past month. I loved having this conversation. Like, I feel so close to this person that I didn’t know just five minutes ago. And it was so much easier than I thought it was going to be. And that’s what these researchers found, is that if you ask the right questions, people feel very close to each other. And sometimes those questions can seem scary. But once you ask them, they’re actually very, very easy to answer and very pleasurable to be asked.
And so, I would think for a financial advisor that finding those questions—and literally, all you have to do is just Google “36 questions that lead to love” or The Fast Friends Procedure, you’ll find them online. I think it’s worth looking at those questions and then adapting them to your particular setting. Because you probably don’t want to ask 36 questions, all right? That’s a little bit too long. But there are some of those questions that you can adapt to people’s financial lives that I think would be really meaningful.
Here’s the important thing. You have to ask it and then answer it as well. They did the same experiment where instead of having people go back and forth and ask and answer these questions, they gave them the same lists and they would say, okay, one person answer all 36 questions, the other person listens, and then hand them the list and switch places and answer all 36 questions. That doesn’t work. Nobody feels closer afterward. They said it feels weird. There’s something important about reciprocity in a conversation. So, if I ask you, what are your biggest economic goals? What are your biggest financial goals? What are you proudest about? What are you proudest about in your life? And you answer that question in a meaningful way, I should at least try and reciprocate that. And that might be by asking follow-up questions or that might be by saying something like, “You mentioned that your kids are your proudest accomplishment. I feel the exact same way. I have two boys that are teenagers and I feel like they are the best thing I’ve ever done.” When we reciprocate someone’s emotions, someone’s authenticity, someone’s vulnerability, that’s when we feel close to each other.
And so, as a financial advisor, I think it’d be great to get those questions and adapt them to your use. But also, to remember that a real relationship is a two-way street. And if someone is sharing things about themselves, then oftentimes you should share things about yourself.
Benz: So that makes me think—one thing that I’ve encountered is, I’ve always heard you should be interested—and I am interested in people, so I ask a lot of questions, and I don’t get that reciprocity. Like, sometimes I’ll come home from something, and I’ll be like, oh, no one asked me, no one at that thing knows that I’m working on a book right now or it didn’t come out, because no one asked me. So, people will just keep answering your questions and not turn it. What do you do in that situation where you don’t feel very seen? You’ve been asking a lot of questions, but nobody seems to really care where you’re coming from.
Duhigg: Well, usually in those situations, it’s not that they don’t care. It’s that they’re not as well trained as you are at asking questions. And in those situations, what you can do is you can just answer your own questions. If I asked you, like, why did you decide to become a doctor? And you answer that question, I say, “Oh, that’s interesting. I decided to become a lawyer because X.: That feels pretty graceful. That doesn’t feel like I’m suddenly trying to force something on you. This is the awesome thing about deep questions is that not only do they invite the other person to say something meaningful, it makes it very easy to answer your own question and reciprocate that way.
Sometimes though, we’re in a situation where the other person just isn’t doing any work. I actually know a couple of people like this. You ask them a question, they answer it, and then they just go silent. And it’s like, OK, now I need to ask you another question. And there’s a bunch of things you can do. In those situations, what I often do is if I’ve asked three or four questions and you haven’t asked a question back, I often say something like, “Oh man, I’ve been asking you so many questions. I don’t mean to dominate the conversation. You probably have some questions for me. I want to give you a chance to ask me some questions.” And what you’ll find is that they actually have lots of questions for you. They’re just more socially awkward than you are. They need to be given an invitation or permission to ask those questions. But there’s a really graceful way of doing that. In fact, there’s a graceful way for almost all conversational dilemmas that we encounter.
Another one that comes up a lot is that people will say, “You know, I’m really anxious about having conversations at a party because I don’t know how to end them. I don’t know how to walk away without feeling like weird and awkward.” And actually, there’s a fantastic technique for that, which is if you feel like it’s time to walk away, like you want to wrap up the conversation to say, “Look, I got to go refresh my drink or I want to let you play host. But before I let you go, let me just ask you one other thing.” Because when you’re doing that—and then ask some stupid question, and they’ll answer it in like 15 seconds—what you’re really doing is you’re saying, look, we both need to have conversations with other people, but I want to make this easy for you, and I want to signal to you that I like you, that I connect with you, that you’re so interesting that I can’t possibly let you get away without asking you one more thing. Oftentimes in a conversation, what’s hard is the anxiety we bring to it. And the more that we make it comfortable by saying to someone, “Hey, do you have any questions for me?” Or, “I want to let you go, but I have one more question for you.” The more that we are showing them, this is how I want to connect with you. And everyone loves for someone to say, “I want to connect with you.”
Arnott: So related to that issue of anxiety, I think this often comes up if you’re talking to someone who is going through a serious illness or has lost a family member, you give the example in your book of when your dad passed away. A lot of people expressed their condolences but didn’t ask you about what he was like. And I’m guessing that’s because maybe they didn’t want to bring up painful emotions for you, or they were afraid of saying the wrong thing. Do you have any suggestions for getting around those types of issues if you’re trying to connect with people, with someone but are worried about saying the wrong thing?
Duhigg: Well, let me ask you guys. So, I imagine you guys have experienced losses in your life or sad moments. When those happened, how did people react? When it was something that they knew about, you mentioned, oh, my father passed away recently, or I have a kid who is sick and they’re in the hospital right now. How do people usually react?
Benz: Platitudes.
Duhigg: Yeah. Now, what about your best friends? How do your best friends react?
Benz: Well, so related to losing my, I guess, one of my parents—I’ve lost both my parents—but the best thing anyone said to me was, “You were a great daughter.” And that was a way to say, “I saw what you did for your mom and dad.” It meant everything to me. And so much better than saying “sorry for your loss.” It wasn’t generic. It was like, you get me.
Duhigg: It was real.
Benz: Yeah.
Duhigg: And that’s probably someone who saw you be a good daughter, right? Like it wasn’t like they were just sort of saying this because it’s polite. It was something that actually was true that they had seen you to. Is that right?
Benz: Exactly. Yeah. Or they knew our story. And yeah.
Duhigg: Yeah. I think that when we talk to a good friend about loss, what they often do is they say, “I see you. I see that you’re going through this thing.” And that doesn’t mean that I can solve it for you or that the pain is going to go away. But being seen feels really meaningful. Sometimes if you do meet someone and they mention last week I was at my father’s funeral, one of the best things that we can do is to say, “I’m so sorry. What was your dad like?” And what’s important there is that’s an invitation. It’s not a mandate. I’m not saying, “Was your dad a good dad?” I’m not forcing you to share something with me, but I’m saying, “What was your dad like?” And I’m opening up a possibility that if you do want to share what he was like, you can share that with me or you could just say, “He was really a wonderful guy. I’m really glad he was in my life.” And you know that I’ve seen you. You know that I’ve seen that you’re going through something, and I’ve acknowledged it and that feels really meaningful.
Arnott: And again, it’s more open-ended. So, you’re not just saying something like, “Oh, you must feel terrible. I’m so sorry,” which is kind of assuming that you know exactly how the other person feels.
Duhigg: Right. Or saying something like, “What did he die of?” Which can feel like you’re being curious, but actually, again, it’s a mandate for the other person as opposed to an invitation.
Benz: You include some examples from The Big Bang Theory, which is funny partly because some of the characters are extremely smart but also very bad at communicating. Is there any truth to the notion that people who are super smart may have more trouble connecting with people?
Duhigg: No, not necessarily. There’s a bunch of cultural myths. Like if you’re an introvert, you have trouble communicating or if you’re super smart, you have trouble communicating. And what we found is that’s not actually true. What is true is that we get into habits, and if you’re super smart and you’re someone who nobody really like engages with because they assume you’re off doing your own genius things, then you get out of the habit. You get into a habit of being quiet. Or if you’re an introvert and people don’t make space for you, you get in the habit of avoiding the conversation.
The same thing is true—there’s this myth that men and women communicate very differently and experiment after experiment has shown that’s not true. What is true is that men often learn very different communication habits as kids than women do and that we often fall back on those habits unthinkingly. So, if you’re super-duper smart or if you’re an introvert or if you’re a man or you’re a woman, that does not mean that you are condemned to one kind of communication or being good or bad at communication. What it does mean is that when you start to think about communication as a set of skills, when you start saying, I want to practice asking deep questions. I want to practice looping for understanding and showing someone that I’m listening to them. I want to practice showing someone that I want to connect with them. Recognize that some of those things, they might be a little bit different from the habits you’ve built up and that doesn’t mean that you’re bad at them. That doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. It just means it might feel uncomfortable the first couple of times because it’s not your habit. The same way when you go to the gym and you start working out on a new muscle group, it’s uncomfortable at first. It feels awkward at first. It’s supposed to because we’re building a new habit. But as I mentioned, our brains form these habits around communication very, very quickly. So, once we start practicing it, we get really good at it.
Arnott: We’ve covered a lot of different topics. I’m sorry we didn’t get to cover the whole book, but I’m curious, have you changed anything about your own communication style since writing the book?
Duhigg: Oh yeah. No, absolutely. Absolutely. I try and communicate very differently. And I will say I do not succeed all the time. Just the other night, I was monologuing at the table about this movie and my wife was like, you know, there’s this book you might want to read that came out recently. So, I am not perfect. But yeah, I do. And I think the biggest thing is that I spend a lot of time thinking about it. The book closes with the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which most people are probably familiar with. It’s a very famous study. For 80 years, they’ve been following around thousands of people trying to figure out what causes them as they get older to be healthy and to be happy and to be successful, however you define success. And the only thing that they found as a consistent predictor of that is that you will be happy and healthy and successful at age 65 if you have at least a handful of close relationships at age 45 and you maintain them.
And the thing that I carried away from that is our relationships are the most important part of our lives. Like literally it makes us healthier. The surgeon general has said, being lonely is the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. And 15 cigarettes a day is a lot of cigarettes, right? We are happy and we are healthy, and we are successful because we have relationships with other people. And that means, for instance, that if you haven’t talked to someone in a year or two, sending them an email and saying, “Hey, can we set aside half an hour? I just want to catch up. I don’t have anything important to talk about. I just want to hear what’s going on with you.” That’s how we maintain those relationships. So, calling someone and saying, “Hey, let’s go to lunch. Well, I haven’t seen you in a little while. It’d be fun just to catch up.”
What I try and do in my own life is I try and be much more deliberate about connecting with other people and maintaining those connections. Because I know that the connections I am building right now are the things that will sustain me. When I get older, when I get sick, when I have a spate of bad luck, when I’m just feeling down, it’s those connections that make our lives meaningful. And so that’s how I’ve changed.
Arnott: Well, thank you so much for all your time today. And I really enjoyed reading the book. I feel like it’s the kind of thing that you can read once, but then come back to a few months later or a few years later, just as a reminder to think about how you’re communicating and try to continue improving. And I think there’s a lot of really thought-provoking ideas. So, thank you.
Duhigg: Thank you. Thanks for having me on. This has been a lot of fun.
Benz: Thanks so much.
Arnott: Thank you for joining us on The Long View. If you could, please take a moment to subscribe to and rate the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can follow me on social media at Amy Arnott on LinkedIn.
Benz: And @Christine_Benz on X or Christine Benz on LinkedIn.
Arnott: George Castady is our engineer for the podcast and Kari Greczek produces the show notes each week.
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