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10% Happier with Dan Harris
The Science of Conversation: How To Say What You Mean, Be Heard, and Stop People-Pleasing | Alison Wood Brooks
01:19:27
You talk all day. Here’s how to do it better, according to a professor from Harvard Business School. comes from the Harvard Business School, where she teaches a course called “,” which she has now turned into a book, called . In this episode we...
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- [00:00]
Dan Harris
Staying connected matters. That's why AT&T has connectivity you can depend on, or they'll proactively make it right. That's the AT&T guarantee. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com guarantee for details. AT&T Connecting Changes Everything. This is the 10% Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
- [00:32]
Alison Wood Brooks
Foreign.
- [00:38]
Dan Harris
How we doing today? We're coming back to something that I marvel at all the time. You may have heard me say this before, but I'm going to say it again. We are social animals. Humans evolved to thrive in relationship with other people. We're born helpless and howling and we rely on other people to take care of us and then we take care of other people, etc. Etc. We're in a whether we like it or not, in a web. And yet, and this is the shocking part, given how connection is in our DNA, it's shocking to me that we are rarely if ever taught how to deal with other people. We're just kind of like let loose into the world to fuck it up. So specifically today we're gonna talk about this science of conversation. Many of us are talking all day, every day. It's the main sort of unit of currency in human affairs. But how many of us have ever received any training in how best to convey our ideas and needs and absorb those of other people? My guest today is Alison Wood Brooks. She comes from the Harvard Business School where she teaches a course called how to Talk Gooder, which is amazing, which she has now turned into a book called the Science of Conversation, the Art of Being Ourselves. In this conversation we talk about the evolution of conversation, why conversation is a skill, not just a natural talent. How to develop conversational skills, including common conversational pitfalls to avoid granular tactical pieces of advice on how to have a conversation the science behind conversation that may surprise you. Some listening tips Conversational repair strategies how kindness can go pear shaped how to handle difficult moments in conversation. The difference between focusing on other people and people pleasing you want to do the former and avoid the latter. How to integrate all of these incredible learnings into your life. And how soft skills are becoming increasingly valuable in the AI era. Just to say before we dive in, brand new meditation customized for this episode from our incredible teacher of the month, Kyra Jewel Lingo. It's all about the art of listening. I have to say that listening is one of the skills I've worked on quite diligently over the last half decade or so, and it has massively increased my own happiness quotient. So check out the new guide guided meditation over in the AD free podcast feed, which is available in your favorite podcast player as long as you're a paid subscriber to danharris.com we've been doing these companion meditations for all of our Monday Wednesday episodes since June, and we're thrilled to confirm that this is now a regular part of our workflow here. Also, for paid subscribers, there's a big new launch coming in September, a weekly live video meditation sessions. We've been doing monthly and then we moved to bimonthly. Now we're moving to weekly. As you know, if you meditate, it can feel like a, you know, kind of a solo death march. So these sessions are designed to cultivate a sense of community, an HOV or carpool lane. Every Tuesday afternoon you can join us for a live guided meditation and Q and A. The sessions will either be led by me or our teacher of the month, or sometimes both of us together. By the way, our teacher of the Month next month is Vinnie Ferraro, a fan favorite. So come hang out with us. Our first weekly live session is September. That's a week from tomorrow. Head on over to danharris.com to join the party and we'll get started with Alison Wood Brooks right after this. You've heard me mention function before, probably. This is a company that does blood tests and other medical tests for you so you can get a kind of broader picture of what's happening in your body. And I am at this point where I've I had two blood tests and I'm seeing the results come in on the website and I'm waiting for the analysis from the factor physician. And even as I await the analysis, the results are proving useful. I've been having a minor and annoying health problem that I've been talking to both my wife and my physician about. And also when nobody else wants to listen to me, I talk to AI. And some of the results that I got from function have actually really illuminated the discussion and pointed us, I think, in some really helpful directions. Inside function, you can test over 160 biomarkers from heart and hormones and to toxins, inflammation and stress. It's an enhanced view of what's happening inside your body. One angle I want to hit this week is most people think if I have low iron, I'll take an iron supplement, no big deal. But having low iron might not be the issue, and supplementation could actually backfire. Iron plays several essential roles. It's part of hemoglobin, which carries oxygen in the blood, and it supports both energy production and immune function. But in order to be absorbed and transported and stored properly, iron relies on ferritin and copper. Ferritin is your iron storage protein. Think of it like a bank. Low ferritin means the body's reserves are running low. High ferritin can reflect iron overload or other stress in the body, since ferritin also rises during illness or inflammation. Copper, on the other hand, is essential for mobilizing iron from storage. So without enough copper, iron can get stuck in tissues, unable to be used. The best approach to see a more complete picture is test your levels of all three iron, ferritin and copper. Interesting that that's the angle of the week from the folks over AT Function, because iron is one of the issues that I've been looking at, and it's been really handy to have those numbers at hand. Learn more and join using our link. Visit functionhealth.com happier functionhealth.com happier few things feel better than knowing someone's looking out for you. That is the spirit behind the ATT guarantee. Staying connected matters. That's why AT&T has connectivity you can depend on, or they will proactively make it right. That's the AT T guarantee, because connection should be dependable, especially in the moments that matter most. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.comguarantee for details. AT&T Connecting Changes Everything Dr. Allison Wood Brooks, welcome to the show.
- [06:57]
Alison Wood Brooks
Thanks so much for having me. Dan, how you doing?
- [06:59]
Dan Harris
I'm doing great. I'm excited to talk about this. Actually, this is one of my favorite subjects. So you started a Harvard Business School class called how to Talk Gooder, which is amazing. Why did you start that class?
- [07:12]
Alison Wood Brooks
Oh, so many reasons. I was recruited to the business school at Harvard to teach our course on negotiation, which is a course that's existed for many, many decades years, and exists at most business schools and law schools. And it's an amazing class, and I taught it for about four years, and I started to get a little bit itchy, feeling like our students needed something in addition to their negotiation training. The negotiation course sort of presumes that our goal in social encounters and in difficult conversations is to persuade people to agree with us. I kind of started to feel like I don't feel that way most of the time. I have lots of goals, but persuasion isn't often one of them. And so what about a course where we focus on the conversations that people are having all day long, every day that may or may not have to do with negotiating and trying to persuade people to agree with us. And at the same time, I had been doing behavioral science research on conversation, and we had been stockpiling scientific findings, and I felt like, oh, this is great timing. We've now learned enough that I think I can develop a course and share this stuff with our students.
- [08:25]
Dan Harris
Was there any pushback at a business school to teaching the art of conversation?
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Alison Wood Brooks
It's funny, even when you've said that the title of the course, everybody kind of giggles because it's. It is weird. It's weird to have a course called how to talk Gooder in Business and Life sitting next to very serious courses like Capitalism in America and like, private equity and all these finance classes. No one balked at having a class at the business school about conversation, I think because most of the faculty and administration know that we are very good at training people on technical skills, right? Finance, accounting, to some extent, strategy. And we get feedback from all of the employers that are hiring our MBA students after they graduate. And often the chorus of feedback we get about our graduates is that they're all really technically skilled and super knowledgeable. But five years out, 10 years out, what they really need to work on a bit more are their social skills, right? Their ability to relate to people and manage people needs development. And I think this is the kind of feedback that a lot of professional schools hear and a lot of colleges here. And because it's just hard to teach humans how to, I don't know, have better personalities, interact with other people, relate to them better, develop empathy. And it's especially hard among populations who are highly technical, right? Like, they want to learn those quote, unquote, hard skills. And they even use words like, oh, this is soft skills almost in a way that makes it sound like it's less important. And then, you know, 10 years, 20 years into their career, by the time they are executives, they realize the quote, unquote, soft skills are. Are really the thing that mattered the most.
- [10:08]
Dan Harris
I don't know if this is true. It may be too neat of a theory, but. And it's certainly not something that I came up with, but I gravitate toward this. This idea that in the era of artificial intelligence, a lot of these hard skills can become commodifiable, can be done by the robots. The soft skills will become increasingly important. Do you buy that?
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Alison Wood Brooks
I do. Because so much of the way that we conduct our research and the way that we've learned, the way that I've learned, sort of all the stuff that I wrote about in this book and teach in my course is that we record people's conversations and transcribe them and then study, you know, hundreds of thousands of them. It's exactly what machines are doing. It's what AI is doing to try and mimic human conversation, try to become a sort of optimal, shiny version of a person. And so I very keenly see what it's not able to do that humans can do. For example, they're really bad at humor. They're getting better and better. They will someday be great. But there are some really clear things to me that are holding back AI from becoming most human. And those things are all under the umbrella of quote, unquote, soft skills, right? Of, like, relational things and how we relate to other people. One of the things that's on my mind about AI these days is that so much of conversation in particular is about a back and forth between two or more people, and each of them has their own set of goals and needs. Right. Like in this conversation, I want to publicize some of the findings from my book and hope people that buy the book, I hope that they find me, like, smart and charming. And I hope that we have an engaging conversation. So the hour is enjoyable. Right. So I have a number of goals. You have other goals. You want to share useful, concrete strategies for your audience that will help them in their lives. You probably also don't want this to be a horrible hour spent of your life. And so as we talk, we're trying to coordinate whose needs and goals are we going to prioritize? And when, when we think about an AI, it doesn't have its own needs, right? Its only directive is to serve its human user. And it's really good at doing that increasingly. So it's there to give you everything you want from it. And in a way that becomes a sort of like, narcissism machine, because it's sort of like, oh, how can I get this thing to give me more of what I want? And as soon as you turn to a human conversation partner, the mission is exactly the opposite. And we'll get into this more. But what we have found in our research is the best conversationalists, the people who have the best people skills, the best relationships, relentlessly focus on other people's needs, not only figuring out what they are, but trying to prioritize them, trying to truly help other people get what they want.
- [13:08]
Dan Harris
Where do you draw the line between relentlessly focusing on other people's needs and being a sort of calamitous people pleaser?
- [13:17]
Alison Wood Brooks
I think it's a great question. It's one that I grapple with in my own life. I think a lot of us grapple with it. I'm going to cite a finding that has come out recently. This is research by Yao Shishi and my collaborator Michael Yeomans. They've been studying the balance of language and conversation that's self focused. So literally pronouns like I, me, my, mine, and talking about yourself. So telling stories about your own life, talking about your own perspective, self disclosure versus other oriented language, so you, your, yours, and asking questions about your life. So studying the balance between self focus and other focus. When you look at the transcripts of conversations, what they find is really illuminating, very helpful to people who grapple with this balance between being a calamitous people pleaser and trying to sort of relentlessly focus on other people. Here's what they find. The worst case scenario is focusing too much on yourself. So you're in this quadrant where you're really just egocentric, focusing on yourself, talking about yourself. That doesn't go well. The next worst thing though is focusing only on your partner, right? Like if you were to do that in every conversation, you would burn out, you would get exhausted, you would feel like no one knows you because you're not sharing anything of yourself. And what they find is great conversationalists actually find a high level of both. They're engaging in more ping pongy conversation, more back and forth. And both self talk, right? Like self disclosure, self oriented talk and other oriented talk are happening at high levels. They're able to achieve high levels of both. And the question then becomes, how do we do that?
- [15:10]
Dan Harris
You want to answer that question?
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Alison Wood Brooks
I think the answer lies very much in the talk framework that I lay out in the book and teach in my course at Harvard.
- [15:19]
Dan Harris
Great. So we will get to that. She's referring to a framework that is called talk. It's an acronym T, A, L, K. Topics asking, levity, kindness. We'll dive into those very soon. But let me just ask a foundational question. You say, and you've said this already in this conversation, that conversations are like a coordination game. Is it worth saying more about that concept?
- [15:45]
Alison Wood Brooks
I think so, because I think it can be quite clarifying and it's not usually common knowledge what a coordination game is. The idea of coordination games became popular with economists and game theorists in the mid 20th century. It's these little toy games that many of us have heard of, some of them. So like the game of chicken, where two people are heading towards each other and they both need to decide, am I going to veer left or veer right. And what each person chooses independently influences what happens to both people involved. Are they going to collide? Are they going to go past each other successfully? So a coordination game is anytime there are two or more people making independent decisions that affect the other person's outcome. So it has interdependent outcomes, and there are lots of them. Prisoner's Dilemma is a well known non cooperative coordination game. This is where you're questioning two prisoners in jail about a crime that's happened. And they can either choose to snitch or stay silent, and they're not allowed to talk to each other. If both people stay silent, they're going to go to jail, but not for very long. If they both snitch on each other, they go to jail and they both go for a long time. So it seems clear that you should stay silent and not snitch. Except if you snitch and your partner stays silent, you get to walk free. So everybody has this temptation to sort of tattle on the other. And so here is exactly this conundrum that you were describing. It's sort of like, well, do I do what's best for us as a pair or do I do what's best for me as an individual? And the very important feature of these coordination games is that you can't actually talk about things directly. What's so ironic is that I call a conversation a coordination game because we can't actually talk about everything. I can't say to you, hey, Dan, I also brought a list of questions and here are the ones I want to ask you about your life and your work and like, who's your favorite podcast guest? And, you know, how's your kid today? We rely on norms and expectations and sort of reading each other to figure out who's going to do what. I come to a podcast like this and I can assume you've prepared and are going to ask me questions, and I'm going to mostly answer them, right? So at every moment of a conversation, we're making these little coordination decisions. What topic are we going to talk about? What am I going to share on that topic? What am I going to keep private? How are you going to react about it? Are you going to ask a question? So every moment we're making these little games of chicken that we're playing. And it's ironic because, you know, conversation, in theory, we're talking to each other, but in a coordination game, you can't talk about everything. It would ruin the magic.
- [18:39]
Dan Harris
What does the conversation Compass?
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Alison Wood Brooks
Mm, a little bit. We already talked about that. Everybody has a set of goals in every conversation. Some people might sort of bristle at that and say, well, I don't have a goal when I'm just talking to my kid, or I don't have a goal when I'm calling my mom, but you definitely do. We always have at least one goal, otherwise we wouldn't bother talking to somebody. Sometimes your goal is just to be polite. Like a stranger comes up to you on the street and you feel like you have to respond because it's a basic human expectation when you're with your kid, you know, you really care about being responsive to them and hopefully spending time together and teaching them and learning from them, understanding their life. These are all very important goals. In our research, what we've realized is every person is walking around with this vast array of motives that they sort of hold in their mind. And we often don't have great clarity about what our own goals are, what other people care about. And so we came up with this organizing mechanism, this framework called the conversational compass, to help people organize their goals, at least in theory. And so it has two axes. One axis is informational, the high informational end. These are goals that reach for accurate information exchange, which is sort of the most obvious purpose of conversation, right? It's like why humans evolve. The ability to talk to each other is to exchange information. But there's a low end of the informational spectrum that matters just as much, maybe even more, that has nothing to do with exchanging information. These are motives like filling time, not being awkward, having fun together, preserving privacy, maintaining a great reputation, making a good impression on people. So that may not have much to do with information exchange. And keeping secrets is actually like antithetical to exchanging information. The other axis of this compass is a relational axis. So while we're making these little choices about sharing information, we're also thinking, well, am I doing this to pursue goals that are helpful to us, both of us, to you? That's high relational goals, or am I doing things that serve me and me alone? This sort of self interested goals? And the bottom line is that we're constantly sort of navigating, helping other people and helping ourselves. The goal here is not to move to one quadrant of the compass. None are better or more important than the others. But acknowledging that we live in all four quadrants of the compass and that we constantly are like moving and trying to figure out, when do I prioritize you, when do I prioritize me? When do we really need to exchange a lot of information quickly, and when do we not need to do that? So having a little bit more clarity about what we care about and even more importantly, what other people care about makes our conversations a lot better.
- [21:42]
Dan Harris
A couple more questions before we get into the talk acronym. You mentioned evolution. Is there more to say about what we know about the evolution of conversation?
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Alison Wood Brooks
Yeah, there are a lot of great mysteries, and I'm not an archeologist or a historian of language, but I like reading about this stuff, and I included a little bit of it in the book. Estimates of when humans evolved the ability to have dialogue with each other vary widely between 50,000 and 3 million years ago. And we're not sure because words don't leave a trace in the archaeological record, Right? They're in the ether, they're in the air. And so archaeologists and historians and linguists rely on clues that get trapped in the archaeological record, layers of rock. And so they need to look at things like when did they first see evidence that there were necklaces made, jewelry that would have taken longer than a whole generation to create? It suggests that one they were communicating about. This is our group project that we're going to make a necklace out of a tiger teeth, and that they communicated it across multiple generations of people. So it suggests that they had, like, evolved the ability to talk to each other. In the book, I start a little sort of potted history of conversation starting in around the 1700s. I mean, clearly people had been talking for a long time before that. And we trace the history of how our understanding of what conversation is and how we use it and to pursue what goals. We trace that alongside the history of how scientists have studied conversation on that same time scale, the 1700s, there's a pretty logical place to start. It was called the Age of Conversation because it was the first time that people started realizing they could have conversations in the way that they wanted to. Before that, the monarchies, the kings and queens, had put a lot of pressure on people to have conversation in specific ways about specific topics. And it was sort of very tightly controlled. So then we tracked sort of how things evolved as people realize, oh, I have more autonomy here than I thought. We zoom in on Immanuel Kant, who was a very famous philosopher and who used to host dinner parties during the Age of Conversation. And he kind of came up with his own dinner party rules to make sure that this dinner party conversation was mutually enjoyable for everybody who was lucky enough to get an invitation. We go past the Age of Conversation and the Enlightenment and move towards more social mixing. Right. In the end, during the Industrial Revolution, agrarian societies, the people kind of came into cities and there was more social mixing between classes. And so you can see over time, oh, well, now, now what are we going to talk about now? What are we allowed? Who are we allowed to talk to? When I run into somebody on the street, what am I allowed to say? And so the rules and norms and expectations of what conversation was and what you could use it for evolved over time. And now, of course, we find ourselves in a pretty wild digital age of conversation where we're sort of standing in a room the size of the world, right? Like, we can talk to. I'm putting air quotes. Talk to more people in more ways than ever before in human history. And I think that's exerting pretty profound pressure on our brains.
- [25:20]
Dan Harris
I'll plus one that last question before we get into the talk framework. You use this phrase that I really like, the myth of naturalness by which you're pointing to something. I think if I understand you correctly, and you'll correct me if I'm wrong, that we may have a story. We're not a good conversationalist. We're not good people. We're not good with other people, et cetera, et cetera. But actually, this is a skill, not a factory setting.
- [25:47]
Alison Wood Brooks
Yeah, it's a skill, not just a gift. It's not just a natural talent. We watch other people having conversations all the time, even listeners here. They're, like, listening to us having conversation and they're thinking to themselves, oh, this is going well. Or this is not going well, or that bothered me. Or I love that. We're constantly watching and listening and trying to, like, learn, and we're, like, judging people. And so when we see things go well, it's so easy to make that attribution and say, like, oh, that person's just really good at this. They're really good at conversation. They're talented. Not only are they good at it and gifted, it's coming to them on the spot. They're like, spontaneously coming up with great ideas and amazing jokes, and it's just all easy. And like so many other skills, you don't see the little duck feet under the water paddling wildly with how much work is happening right then in the moment, during the conversation, but also the years of skill development than any other human has put into this, that you, you know, the hundreds of thousands of conversations you've had that have led you to the point to conduct a podcast interview in this way and the hundreds of thousands of conversations that I've had talking and thinking about conversation, talking on podcasts, spending 15 years writing a book. Right. Like, none of this comes to us spontaneously. And yet for some reason, conversation gives the impression that it does come spontaneously and that it should come spontaneously. When we stumble and trip and feel awkward and don't know what to say or, like, say stuff we regret, it makes us feel like, oh, I'm just not good at this. It's this myth of naturalness. I'm either not good at conversation, I don't like it, or the person I was talking to isn't good at it, and I don't like talking to them. So we make these sort of negative attributions that often are undeserved.
- [27:49]
Dan Harris
Yeah. I mean, most of us, when we watch LeBron James play basketball, if we ever watch sports on television, we know that he has a mixture of natural skill and an enormous amount of practice. And yet we don't put conversation in the same bucket. I think one of the many services you're providing here is helping us to think about conversation as a trainable skill.
- [28:17]
Alison Wood Brooks
Yeah. And I sometimes wonder why. Why do we think of LeBron James playing basketball differently than we do about conversation? I think there's a lot to it. Right? Like, everybody's doing it. In a way, it feels like it should be second nature. It almost feels like it's this thing that's built into being a human being, and therefore it should be easy and natural, and I should be not only great at it, but almost, like, perfect at it by the time I get to adulthood. When you really look under the hood of conversation, you see how messy it is. It's more like a train wreck. And even the best conversationalists have so much room for improvement. Not even room for improvement as much as, like, they know that it's going to be bad, and they've developed strategies to deal with that messiness.
- [29:06]
Dan Harris
Well said. Coming up, Alison Wood Brooks talks about how to develop conversational skills and how to avoid some common conversational pitfalls, some granular, tactical pieces of advice on how to have a conversation, and some science around conversation that may surprise you. You know those moments when someone just takes care of something for you? That's what ATT is doing with the AT T guarantee. Staying connected matters. That's why AT&T has connectivity you can depend on, or they will proactively make it right. That's the AT T guarantee. Because staying connected isn't optional. It's essential. And AT&T wants you to feel that somebody's got your back. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.comguarantee for details at and T Connecting changes everything. This is always a kind of a poignant time of year for me. The end of the summer. The summer's winding down. There's that first little bite of cool, crisp air that tells you fall is on the way. But it's also kind of an interesting and invigorating time because you get back to your routine and maybe with a fresh POV on said routine. And as the summer winds down, one way to get back into the routine is to turn to our friends over at Wayfair. From bedding and linens to storage solutions for every room in the house, Wayfair is your one stop shop. Refresh your workspace with desks, bookcases, and office chairs for way less. Or maybe make weeknight dinners a thing again with quality cookware that makes meal time a breeze. My wife just ordered these module bookcases, these kind of translucent module bookcases that she's put up in her workspace in our house because she's buying all these books as part of her research she's doing for an upcoming book on imposter syndrome. So she's got just tons and tons of books and she's stacked them up in these translucent modular bookcases that she got from Wayfair and it really looked beautiful. But of course, Wayfair's got a huge selection. Not just bookcases. They've got stuff for your living room, they've got stuff for your home study, kitchen essentials, storage for every space, home decor, kids rooms, bedding and bath basics. There's something for every style and every home. No matter what your space is or your budget, get organized, refreshed, and back to the routine for way less. Head to Wayfair.com right now to shop all things home. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R.com Wayfair Every style, every home. Okay, so we've done a lot of high level table setting here and people are wondering like, well, okay, so how do I develop this skill for myself? And that brings us to your framework, the Talk Framework. Again, it's an acronym, T A L, K and the T stands for topics. So can you talk about what the importance of topics is in developing this skill?
- [32:13]
Alison Wood Brooks
Yeah, the big thing, we all have an intuitive understanding of what topics are, right? It's like the things we talk about. The reason that I, as a behavioral scientist and as A person find this one so exciting is that our brains actually do this naturally. We're really good at taking a conversation or a chunk of text, and our brains sort of naturally catalog it and categorize it into these chunks. So we can look back on any of your podcast episodes, any conversation, any book, and say, oh, yeah, here were the chapters. Or like, here are the five main pastures that they covered in this conversation. And we're all pretty good at that. Our brains were built to do that. What's so exciting about this? Ability to chunk conversation into topics means we can use that ability to help us manage topics better as a conversation unfolds. And so as a scientist who's, like, constantly looking for easy strategies that can help people, this level of analysis, this topic chunking skill, can help us before a conversation starts, during a conversation, and after it. For example, before a conversation. What we have found through experiments is thinking about some flexible topics that you might want to talk about with somebody is incredibly helpful. Not just for podcast hosts who have, like, a list of things they're working through, but literally every conversation that you have in your Life. Spending even 30 seconds thinking about your mom before you call her and saying, okay, what's going on in her life? What will she find interesting to talk about? What do I need to remember to raise in this conversation? What will delight us together in our relationship? Just those 30 seconds makes the conversation so much better. It reduces your anxiety when you very predictably confront moments where you're like, oh, shit, I know I need to talk about something else, but I don't know what that thing should be, because it means you have, like, a little list of options in your back pocket. It helps you remember to talk about stuff that you mean to talk about. So many conversations where you're like, oh, shoot, I forgot to ask them about the guitar lessons they started. Or like, oh, at work, I meant to ask them about this, right? So it helps you remember to do the things you want to do, and it just gets rid of the disfluency. So, ums, uhs, stutters, weird pauses. It just smooths out the boundaries between topics. It also leads us to, on average, discuss more topics because you're able to move more fluidly between them. And discussing more topics is another life hack that, on average, helps people have better conversations. When we ask people, did you talk about the right number of topics after a conversation has ended, about 60% of people say, yeah, we covered the right amount of topics. Among the 40% of people who say, no, we didn't cover the right amount of topics, you are much more likely, about three times as likely to say that you didn't talk about enough things. So the most common mistake is stagnating and staying too long, like circling the drain on a topic and not moving to something else. And I think knowing that is so empowering because as soon as something starts to lag, you should feel very empowered to assertively switch to something else. It's not rude. It's actually helpful to this joint endeavor of conversation.
- [35:50]
Dan Harris
One of your little maxims under the T or topics part of the talk framework is that small talk isn't the enemy.
- [35:59]
Alison Wood Brooks
Yeah, it's very linked to this idea of topic switching. The speed that you're switching topics. I had no idea. Dan, do you hate small talk?
- [36:12]
Dan Harris
I don't love it. I live in the suburbs and there's a lot of like suburban norm core discussions of lawn care and like that.
- [36:22]
Alison Wood Brooks
And that kid bedtimes.
- [36:23]
Dan Harris
Yeah, yeah, that can be hard.
- [36:25]
Alison Wood Brooks
So I actually didn't, on a personal note, didn't realize how much small talk people are having in their lives and how much they hate it until I started teaching this course and had sort of hundreds of students who were like, how do I fix my small talk problem? And I realized, and I know this is like a little bit of an extended humble brag, but I don't really do small talk. My tolerance for it is so low that I just move past it immediately. So what I figured out in my research is like, oh, I need to help other people do that too. It's not that the small talk topics are bad, it's that we stay on them for too long. And that dutiful feeling of staying on, talking about your lawn for too long happens really fast. Like probably one turn in the conversation is more than enough. And then you should say like, oh, like, what are you worried about with your house? How's that? Are you happy with where you live? Right. Like getting more personal, asking follow up questions. So often we'll start with something like, oh, I don't like, I'm not happy with my landscape or whatever. And we fail to ask a follow up question that could actually turn that topic into something much more exciting to talk about by asking a follow up question. So follow up questions help us get away from it. And also personal disclosure. So saying like, you know what? My parents, like, took shit care of my yard when I was a kid and now it actually matters so much to me. It's like embarrassing. Let me tell you the insane things that I've done in my yard to compensate for this trauma from my youth. Right. Like bringing up, sharing something vulnerable about yourself on that topic can help you move away from the boringness of it and move to a more interesting and personalized place.
- [38:17]
Dan Harris
I love that. What is the topic pyramid?
- [38:20]
Alison Wood Brooks
Yeah, so this is exactly so in the book we talk about this pyramid that has three levels. The bottom level are topics that you could talk about with anybody. This is like, how was your weekend? Let's talk about the weather, how are you sleeping? How are the kids? Those topics aren't bad. In fact, it's sort of the ritual we've all developed in order to connect quickly with people we don't know that well, strangers that we know nothing about, people we haven't seen in a while that we need to catch up and we don't know really know where to start again. The problem that we need to be avoiding is getting stuck at the base of the pyramid for too long. So whatever your topic is like, hey, I see you're wearing a black shirt, take that topic and move up the pyramid quickly. The second layer of the pyramid is slightly more tailored topics. So it can be tailored in many ways. It could be, you know, that someone seems excited about this topic, so they're just interested. It could tap into their expertise. Like, oh, someone who likes fashion would really like to talk about the fabric of their shirt and other people don't give a shit. Like, you gotta figure that out. Or it can involve personal disclosure. So making yourself vulnerable, sharing something embarrassing or something you're proud of. Feelings based sharing is often helpful. But getting out of that base of the pyramid, that's mundane small talk to tailored talk. At the top of this topic pyramid is deep talk. And not every conversation needs to get there. I don't actually want to have a deep conversation with my husband the second I get home from work, probably almost ever. But some conversations get to that point and you can feel when you're there, it's like you can only talk about that topic with that set of people in that moment, in that way. And that is just so thrilling. So when you get there, you should try and appreciate like, hey, we did the journey of conversation and we actually found this amazing moment. We're gonna come back down the pyramid, we're gonna keep going up and down the pyramid throughout our conversations, fostering a little bit of more awareness of where you are, appreciating it. And don't get stuck at the base for too long.
- [40:31]
Dan Harris
It's really helpful. I'm Gonna zip through the talk framework because I also have a million questions on the backside of it too. So we talked about T topics A is asking. What should we know about asking?
- [40:45]
Alison Wood Brooks
Great question. Top line advice, ask more questions. It's so basic, it's so fundamental and perhaps not even that surprising, but doing it is so important. Question asking unlocks everything that makes conversations good. Interactivity, that ping pongy sharing of information, showing someone that you actually care to learn what's in their mind, listening to their answers, all of that. If you just say to yourself, I need to ask more questions. It's a little intervention that people can actually do. Like you say to yourself, I need to ask more questions. And people actually do ask more questions. That's amazing. And when they do ask more questions, then you get beyond that top line advice of just ask more. Which already is going to help you get more second dates. It's going to help doctor's appointments go better, you're going to have better relationships, your work meetings are going to go better, you have better friendships, all of it. Just ask more questions, leave no conversation. Having asked zero questions. We call those ZQs zero questioners. It's like the death knell for conversation and relationships. And we've all been in those, you know, like you've all been on a date where nobody asked you something and you go absolutely bonkers. But once you move past this top line advice, there are really super heroic question types. And one of the most heroic question types are follow up questions that follow up on anything that your partner has already said. It shows that you are listening to them. It shows that you want to know more. So curiosity, it's almost a guaranteed way to escape small talk. So if we're talking about your yard, I could say like do you have a landscaper or not? And then from there I don't have a landscaper because I can't afford it. Do you know somebody who's a pretty good price range all of a sudden? We're now out of lawn care and moving into finances and sharing of our personal views on manual labor. That's so much more interesting. And follow up questions help us get there. Another heroic question type are open ended questions that don't constrain your partner's answers to yes, no or some other predetermined set of answers, but let them answer however they want. What we have found in our research is that open ended questions elicit more than twice the word count from your partner. Right. It's so like they are sharing so much More information with you. And a higher proportion of that information is actually useful as well, especially in negotiations. Learning is the whole, the whole game. When we looked at the wording of open ended questions, we found something that I find quite helpful. Questions that start with the word why, like, why are you sitting in that studio? Why do you have that kind of camera? Why do you have. The number of children you have can feel very accusatory. It's almost saying like, there must be something wrong with what you've chosen to do. Now tell me your motives. Whereas questions that start with the word what. What did you think about when you were designing your podcast studio? What were you feeling when you did your first interview there? What are the pros and cons of having one child or three children that is way less threatening and you actually elicit more information from people. It strikes the sweet spot between information disclosure and relational outcomes like likability and safety.
- [44:17]
Dan Harris
This advice of ask more questions is fantastic and immediately operationalizable by people in, in the audience. And I'm sure you're anticipating this question I'm going to ask you. It can go pear shaped, like I have been accused many times of interrogating. So how to avoid that pitfall?
- [44:41]
Alison Wood Brooks
Do you get that accusation most commonly in interviews and in work conversations or outside of work?
- [44:47]
Dan Harris
Outside of work. I mean, when I'm interviewing somebody, that's the deal. So I'm allowed to do that. But it's more like it hasn't happened so much recently. But yeah, once in a while somebody will say like, I feel like I'm being interviewed.
- [44:59]
Alison Wood Brooks
Mm.
- [45:00]
Dan Harris
And I don't think they mean it as a compliment.
- [45:03]
Alison Wood Brooks
No. It's so interesting. Of all people in the world, I think journalists are really great question askers. It's like the number one skill that they have learned to do well. And so when they found out about our question asking findings, they were like, yeah, of course. Isn't everybody asking tons of questions? And we were like, no. Come to find out, no. But then the next follow up question, of course is, where does asking lots of questions become asking too many questions? Is there a tipping point? Of course. Yes, there is a tipping point. Let me bring some data to this answer. I worked with a company called Gong that records sales calls. And so what they find is the same thing we find in all of our data sets. Salespeople who ask more questions, convert more calls into sales, they do better, et cetera. There is a tipping point on sales calls because sales is an annoying domain by definition. You're like Sort of there to persuade people to agree with you. And as soon as persuasion or sales becomes part of the mission, people are on the lookout, like, are you trying to get information out of me that you're going to exploit? Are you going to take advantage of me? Like, your goals are more confrontational there. And so we see a tipping point at the very extreme end on these sales calls that were on average, likability and effectiveness of questions starts to go down. When you're asking more than three questions per minute. It's a lot of questions and that's spread out across a 20 or 30 minute sales call. That's a ton of questions. It's very extreme. And what's so fascinating, even though likability goes down at that extreme level, it's still higher than moderate level of question asking and way higher than asking very few. So, like, you do see this curv. Linear shape, but it's still much better to ask too many than too few. Even in this sort of confrontational, conflictual environment and in many cooperative environments, like going on a first date or hanging out with friends, we actually don't see a tipping point. There is no end to the number of questions you can ask and their benefits. So your question of like, why is it feeling interrogative? May have less to do with the number of questions you're asking and more to do with how you're asking them. Are you touching on topics or information that's sensitive to someone? Are you framing them in ways that feel accusatory? So are you asking why questions to get at their motives? Are you asking things about topics that they're really not ready to share about? And are you doing it repetitively? Right. So if you ask a question and they clearly don't want to answer it, asking about it again very quickly becomes unpleasant.
- [47:55]
Dan Harris
Yeah, sometimes I shine a very bright light in people's faces and pound the table. I don't know why that doesn't go well.
- [48:04]
Alison Wood Brooks
That's so amazing. Oh my gosh.
- [48:07]
Dan Harris
There's another pitfall here, something called boomerasking, which I had never heard of before. What is boomerang?
- [48:14]
Alison Wood Brooks
Yeah. So boomerasking is a pitfall that is actually more common than the asking too many questions mistake. Boomer asking is something that most of us do and we should avoid it. So I want you to imagine the arc of a boomerang. It's named after the arc of a boomerang. So you throw the boomerang out, it flies around and then it comes back to you. So that would be like me saying, hey, Dan, have you ever shined a light on someone while you were asking them a question? And you're like, as a matter of fact, I have. I'm like, well, let me tell you about me doing that this weekend. You're gonna die. Right. Like, I take this question that seemed to be about me asking you about your experience, and I bring it back to myself immediately in the arc of a boomerang. And so people do this all the time, Right? Like, they ask a question, but it's not actually a sincere out of sincere curiosity or interest in the other person. It's just as a way to license them to talk about themselves. Any move and conversation that clearly reveals that you just wanted to talk about yourself is not going to be received very well by your partner, and that includes boomer asking. So it's seen as very insincere. You're actually better off just bragging or complaining or sharing your story than asking a question under this thin veil that you were, like, interested in your partner's answer. Better to do it just in a straightforward way.
- [49:35]
Dan Harris
Yeah. Or just you did it earlier, like, hey, I'm just going to give you a long, humble brag, and then you do it, and it's endearing instead of sneaky.
- [49:44]
Alison Wood Brooks
Yeah, exactly, exactly. Don't boomerask.
- [49:48]
Dan Harris
Okay, so we've talked about the T and the A of the talk format topics, and asking the L is levity, which apparently AI is not yet good at. Why is levity so important?
- [49:58]
Alison Wood Brooks
Levity is so important. I mean, to me personally, levity is like oxygen. And I think a lot of people feel this way and maybe can't verbalize it. Here's why it's important. I think often people think of levity, humor, warmth as, like, these extra bonus things that happen at little fleeting moments during conversation. And they're like, oh, that was pleasant. I'm glad that happened. But it's not the actual work, it's not the real part. So it feels almost ancillary to the conversation. What you see is actually this endeavor of conversation is really messy and hard, and it requires a lot of effort and attention from everybody involved. And what levity is doing is pulling our engagement back to the conversation. It's helping us feel like, oh, we're safe here. I'm interested in what's happening. I'm not bored. I'm not angry. I'm not distracted. I'm here with you, and we're going to continue this coordination game together. And so because levity has the power to Sort of disrupt boredom and bring us together. It is in service of every other goal that we're pursuing. Like every other much more serious thing that we're pursuing, no matter what it is brainstorming, making decisions, exchanging information, and having fun together. All of that is helped by these moments of levity. So they're really not a sort of extra sparkly bonus. They are core determinants of our ability to succeed, to achieve any of our goals.
- [51:27]
Dan Harris
In conversation, some people listening to this may be thinking, okay, well that sounds easier said than done. You thankfully have some pretty granular, tactical pieces of advice. One of them is find the fun instead of trying to be funny.
- [51:44]
Alison Wood Brooks
It's so fun. On the first day of this levity module in my class, I start by saying, you guys, I can't make you funnier if you're not funny. Like, I'm not sure I'm gonna be the one that makes you hilarious today. But we can adopt mindsets that funny people inhabit. We can learn from them and we can try strategies that we see other people doing that seem to work well. And this mindset shift is really powerful. Dan. This idea of a lot of people put a ton of pressure on themselves to be funny. Like, oh, I want to be that guy. I want to be seen as the funny guy or the funny girl. I want to make everybody laugh and so I want to be funny. Trying to be funny is very self focused. It's about you and it's a lot of pressure. You're not going to turn into a standup comedian for a brief fleeting moment in one turn of a conversation. Instead, a much healthier mindset is how do I make this situation whatever it is, a work meeting, a date, a dinner with your spouse, hanging with your kids, how do we make this fun? And that relieves the pressure on you to turn into a standup comedian and almost turns us all more into like stewards of our relationships, right? Like we're all collectively responsible for making fun and we can all do it. You don't actually even need to be funny at all to make conversation more fun.
- [53:10]
Dan Harris
I'm thinking about a friend of mine, Rupica. Shout out to Rupica Malhotra. I don't know if she does this anymore, but she used to back in the day walk around her office with a really sort of elegant plastic tray filled with cupcakes. And she would just walk around good, vibing people with cupcakes. So she's not a standup comedian. She can be funny, but like, she was just dropping Cupcake bombs on people. And that was a lot of fun.
- [53:35]
Alison Wood Brooks
That's an amazing example. And there's so many things that you could fill in that story with the word cupcake and it would do the same thing. She's bringing good vibes. One cupcake at a time, one compliment at a time, one expression of gratitude, one shift to an off the wall topic that no one was expecting by showing up with a pizza or a six pack of beer. Right. Like, there's so many little moves that people can do to bring positive vibes and more levity to our conversations. And often we, like, dismiss those things. We dismiss cupcake rupica because we're like, oh, like, how sweet. She brought her, like, baked goods. No, no. That is fundamentally going to change how everybody is feeling in that moment and how they feel about each other. Right. It makes you feel more safe. It feels like it gives everyone permission to play and eat in front of each other. Everything of the social world is about giving each other permission to be honest, to be weird, to have fun. Whether it's cupcakes or a good joke or even just a really great laugh, those little moves give us all permission to have fun.
- [54:47]
Dan Harris
Just to be clear and make sure this just doesn't slip by unremarked upon. Compliments are also part of this.
- [54:55]
Alison Wood Brooks
Huge part of it. Yes. And for whatever reason, I think often people think nice things about other people and often don't voice them. Right. Like they don't say them out loud. There's been great research on this by psychologists named Erica Boothby and Vanessa Bonds at Cornell, where people have fears about giving too many compliments. They think that it could be, like, embarrassing to the person, or it might make the compliment giver look incompetent by comparison, or it might feel inappropriate for some reason. And so we hold them back. And this is a huge mistake because we underestimate how powerful just saying a silly compliment is. Not only does it make the recipient feel terrific, like, everybody wants to hear how smart and kind and especially in concrete ways, like, oh, I love your last slide in your slide deck. It was so beautiful. Right. Everybody wants to hear that silly compliment, but it also makes the compliment giver feel better. Right. Like you have now given a gift to somebody else that actually made them feel better and you feel better about it too. So flattery is really a pretty profound mechanism for levity and warmth in conversation.
- [56:07]
Dan Harris
It has to be sincere, though.
- [56:08]
Alison Wood Brooks
Oh, yeah. It actually doesn't really. Yeah. Even obviously insincere flattery still makes people feel great. There was this great study where they, they sent out mailers, like from a company that said to people they obviously had never met. And they're saying, like, you're so chic, you have great taste. You know what, you have your finger on the pulse of fashion. And then they ask people, how did this mailer make you feel? And they were like, you know what? It made me feel pretty great. So even when compliments and flattery are very obviously insincere, they still can have very positive effects on people around. That's how powerful flattery is.
- [56:53]
Dan Harris
Coming up, we continue to dive into Alison's talk rubric. We get some listening tips, some conversational repair strategies. We talk about how kindness can go pear shaped and how to handle difficult moments in conversation. This is always a kind of a poignant time of year for me. The end of the summer. The summer's winding down. There's that first little bite of cool, crisp air that tells you fall is on the way. But it's also kind of an interesting and invigorating time because you get back to your routine and maybe with a fresh pocket, be on said routine. And as the summer winds down, one way to get back into the routine is to turn to our friends over at Wayfair. From bedding and linens to storage solutions for every room in the house, Wayfair is your one stop shop. Refresh your workspace with desks, bookcases, and office chairs for way less or make weeknight dinners a thing again with quality cookware that makes mealtime a breeze. My wife just ordered these, these module bookcases, these kind of translucent module bookcases that she's put up in her workspace in our house because she's buying all these books as part of her research she's doing for an upcoming book on imposter syndrome. So she's got just tons and tons of books and she's stacked them up in these translucent modular bookcases that she got from Wayfair and it really looked beautiful. But of course, Wayfair's got a, a huge selection. Not just bookcases. They've got stuff for your living room, they've got stuff for your home study, kitchen essentials, storage for every space, home decor, kids rooms, bedding and bath basics. There's something for every style and every home, no matter what your space is or your budget. Get organized, refreshed, and back to the routine for way less. Head to Wayfair.com right now to shop all things home. That's W A Y-F A I R.com Wayfair Every style, every home I just got back from my annual 10 day silent meditation retreat which I do with Joseph Goldstein up at the Insight Meditation Society, which is in central Massachusetts. This year the cottages where I stay were booked up for the first part of my retreat date. So I actually got an Airbnb in town nearby and it was a super successful, easy experience. I found a place that was perfect. My friend and I were staying there together. During the retreat, the host and I messaged back and forth. She was incredibly kind. The house was called the Purple Rooster, was super idiosyncratic and perfect for a retreat. I think the neighbors, when they saw us doing hours and hours of walking meditation, might have thought we were little weird. But anyway, just another example of why I love Airbnb. It's super easy to use their app to find the right place for you and then you can chat directly with the host. And this was definitely the case at the Purple Rooster. And if you think about it, there are really two opportunities here. It's great to stay in an Airbnb when you're traveling and your home could go on Airbnb. You've put a lot of time and attention into making your home comfortable. So why not host your home on Airbnb while you're traveling? Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much@airbnb.com host one last question. Under the L rubric here, you say that self deprecating humor needs to be done in moderation.
- [60:32]
Alison Wood Brooks
Yeah, this one's a little bit trickier. There are always status dynamics at play. Right? Even in a one on one conversation, everybody's trying to signal to each other. Like all humans, it's part of being a human being. We're all striving to be liked and admired and to sort of climb the status hierarchy in the world. One of the things that we've learned from our research is that status dynamics can change at the topic level. You know, we talk about journalism and the news. I'm going to be really low status compared to you. I don't have very much expertise. I don't know that much. And that should affect who's asking questions, who's making jokes, who's revealing information. As soon as a topic switches to basketball or being in a band or having three kids, like I am going to crush on those topics. Or behavioral science or Harvard. Right. Like lots of things that I might know more about. And so as these status dynamics are shifting, we have to modulate our behavior. And levity is one of the things that you need to modulate. So when you're in a low status position, it is actually a harder, shittier, more anxiety inducing position to be in. You have fewer jokes available or moves available to you that will be viewed as appropriate. And if you don't say anything at all, which is what most a lot of people in a low status position opt for, is to be quieter, then no one can learn about you and about your ideas. Right? So it's this weird, very challenging position to be in. And self deprecating humor falls into that category. If you're high status and everybody knows it and you make fun of yourself, everyone's like, ha, ha ha, that's so sweet and charming and vulnerable, but also we know they're a badass. If you're low status and you're like, oh, I'm not good at this thing, or you make fun of yourself, people will actually question if you're competent. If you haven't proven yet that you have expertise or skill or knowledge in a certain way, making fun of yourself about it probably isn't going to help.
- [62:39]
Dan Harris
So I'm guessing if you're on the low status side of a conversation and you have limited moves available to you, a really good move might be to express sincere interest and ask interesting questions.
- [62:54]
Alison Wood Brooks
Another fabulous effect of question asking. You can ask a question. You're almost better at question asking when you don't have that curse of knowledge, right? Like you have sincere curiosity and space to learn. I think a lot of people go into conversations feeling like, oh, well, I can't talk about this. And I can't talk about this because I don't know anything about them and I want to like shake them and say like, no, that's even better because it opens up this huge wellspring of questions that you could ask about it. And if someone else actually knows the answers to those questions, your conversation will be awesome.
- [63:28]
Dan Harris
Yes, you are in a band?
- [63:30]
Alison Wood Brooks
I am currently in a band, Dan. That's how I met my husband in college and we now play in a band. I sing and play piano. I play my oboe a little bit and just very recently started playing a little bass guitar.
- [63:44]
Dan Harris
What's the name of the band?
- [63:45]
Alison Wood Brooks
Our band's called the Lights. We're a pop folk band and we play around Boston. Two of my Harvard colleagues are in the band and my husband is the drummer and it's the best.
- [63:55]
Dan Harris
So you were in prior bands?
- [63:57]
Alison Wood Brooks
Yeah. So my husband and I played in a band in College. That's how we met. And then we played a bit after college and then we went on a little hiatus and now we're back together. We've been playing together with the Lights for probably almost eight years. And we have a new album coming out soon. I'll send you one.
- [64:14]
Dan Harris
All right, we'll drop a link in the show notes. Okay, we're now at K. So it started with topics, then asking, then levity, now kindness. Hold forth, please. You can even sing it if you want.
- [64:30]
Alison Wood Brooks
What do you want to know about kindness, Dan?
- [64:32]
Dan Harris
Why does it matter? I mean, this is such an fucking obvious question. But yeah, why does it matter?
- [64:37]
Alison Wood Brooks
It does seem like an obvious question because we are all taught that kindness is a virtue is important, starting as soon as we start school or as soon as we start breathing. But I spent a lot of my life really honestly wondering, like, what does that mean? Like, what do people who are kind, what do they actually think about privately and what do they do for other people? There are obvious things that are like extreme and extremely generous and selfless. There are also extreme examples of unkindness where people are hateful and unkind and dangerous and violent. But like everything in between. I always felt like for normal people going about their normal day to day lives, what should we be saying to each other that is more and less kind? And how can I do the better ones? How can I push myself in these little micro moments to do the good ones, to be the kindest person that I can be without being boring? And so in the book and in my course, we really tackle this question concretely. We focus on the language that people use when they're talking to other people and about other people. So focusing on like respect, respectful. What does respectful language look and sound like? And then we focus on the receiving end of conversation, which is listening. And it's so ironic that the book is called Talk, my course is called Talk, because really it probably should be called Listen. The best conversationalists are incredible listeners. And we've just made some very helpful discoveries just in the last few years about what it means to be a really kind, effective listener.
- [66:23]
Dan Harris
Okay, tell us. I want to know. I'm sure everybody wants to know.
- [66:26]
Alison Wood Brooks
So we all know this phrase, active listening. There have been decades of work on active listening and active listening is really important. It mostly focuses on non verbal cues. So making eye contact, nodding and smiling, making sure you're looking at your conversation partner when they're talking. Often it's like leaning forward, trunk lean. It's all these nonverbal cues to show your partner that you're engaged with them, that you care about them. And for decades, it has been measured in the mind of your partner, saying, like, did you feel like Allison was a good listener? Did you feel like Dan was a good listener? So our own perception, what we realized is that's completely untethered to what is actually happening in someone's mind while they're listening. During a live conversation, you could be smiling and nodding and leaning forward and making incredible eye contact, and your mind is completely elsewhere, right? Like, you're thinking about your grocery list. You're thinking about what you're going to text your kid back. You're ruminating about your work. And so we really wanted to see if we could figure out this connection between what people are doing outwardly and what's actually happening in their. The privacy of their mind as conversations unfold. What we found is fascinating. We did it a number of ways. One of the ways was we had people have conversations. We interrupted them every five minutes and just asked them, were you just listening attentively to your partner? 25% of the time when you ask that question, people say, no, I was not. My mind was wandering. A very high number. That's a quarter of the time you're not listening. And we think it's an underestimate because there's social desirability concerns about saying, I wasn't listening. To me, this is really helpful because, one, I'm not alone. I'm not the only one whose mind is wandering constantly while I'm engaged with other people and pretending to listen and doing all the active listening cues of smiling and nodding. But also, if you come from a place of, oh, well, everybody's mind is wandering a lot of the time. It empowers us and opens up the possibility to overcome it and correct it and give each other grace when you, like, haven't heard stuff that the other person said. So you can lean into repair strategies. You can say, like, oh, I just missed what you just said. Do you mind repeating it? Or when you said black, I thought you meant this. I thought you meant race. These little tiny sidebars of repair sequences are, one, they take courage right to your kind of in the moment, acknowledging you misunderstood someone or may have misunderstood someone. And two, they're so helpful for creating an accurate shared reality with someone, shared understanding with someone. It also just makes people feel safer. It's sort of saying, like, you have permission for your mind to wander. I don't expect you to be hanging on my every Freaking word. That would be crazy. The human brain was built to wander and they all wander. So let's work together to like create this amazing thing of conversation together. And if I have to repeat myself sometimes, great. If you don't remember the, you know, 9th out of 12 thing we talked about, great. Follow up with me. Shoot me an email afterwards. I think it's a good way to give each other more grace for not having perfect information exchange all the time. The other thing, the important thing that comes out of it is that we learn that active listening cues, so non verbals are sort of the starting point for listening. It's like listening 101, but listening 301-401-51 is actually using your words to show someone that you've heard them.
- [70:05]
Dan Harris
Yes, that's where I was going.
- [70:07]
Alison Wood Brooks
Exactly. So like affirmation, repeating what you've heard, trying to say it in your own way. Follow up questions, paraphrasing what multiple people in a group have said to just be checking in on that shared understanding with each other. My favorite verbal expression of listening is callbacks, where you call back to something you talked about earlier in the conversation. Like the bright spotlight that you shine on people when you're interrogating them at dinner parties. I can only do that because I was listening to what you said earlier. Right. You can only reference back verbally to something that you actually heard and processed and are able to raise again. Often. Callbacks are funny and fun because they feel clever, but they're always wonderful signal that someone was listening to you.
- [70:54]
Dan Harris
I want to emphasize something and then do a callback. The callback is not going to be funny, just spoiler alert.
- [71:00]
Alison Wood Brooks
I get to be the judge. Dan.
- [71:02]
Dan Harris
All right. Just want to emphasize this idea of restating something to your interlocutor in your own words. The communications coaches with whom I've worked for many years and about whom I talk probably too much on this show. So with apologies, I'll just point out that Dan Clerman and Mudita Nisker, my longtime coaches and friends, talk about something called reflective listening where. And I do it all the time here on the show and I do it in conversation and out in the real world where somebody said a bunch of things to you and you just sum it up. You give the headline in your own words. This is the most benevolent manipulation technique I have ever found. And it is a cupcake that you are handing out to people. There's a callback.
- [71:48]
Alison Wood Brooks
It is. It's a very cute one. It is. It's incredibly Benevolent. How often do you do that? Reflective listening. And your version of what you heard is slightly incorrect. Like, do people often correct you?
- [72:03]
Dan Harris
Yes. And then, well, two things to say. One, I play a little game, like, how often can I get people to say the word exactly back to me in a conversation? The other thing is that sometimes I do get it wrong, and then I reflect the correction.
- [72:18]
Alison Wood Brooks
That's very nice. It's very nice. It makes you feel so sturdy, right? Like you're really, oh, we just did a thing and we corrected it, and now we're really together in this. We're definitely on the same page. I dare say most of the great conversationalists that I know all do this. It is like the thing they have in common.
- [72:38]
Dan Harris
Okay, so here's the callback. Early in the conversation, we talked about being relentlessly focused on the needs of others without falling into what I just kind of off the cuff called calamitous altruism or, you know, people pleasing. And so now that we're talking about kindness and we've worked our way through the talk framework, let me go back to that question.
- [73:02]
Alison Wood Brooks
Love it. So I'm going to incorporate a callback too. When we think back to that conversational compass, the relational axis of the compass. At one end, high relational goals are squarely focusing on the other person, right? Or on you as a unit, you and your relationship. It's very pro social. The low relational end. Our goals are focusing on our needs, and maybe our needs are in conflict with what another person needs. I want to give you advice. You don't want to hear it. I want to make a decision. You do not want to make that decision. You just want to hang out. I just want to hug you, want to tell me everything that you think I should do. When our needs and what we want truly collide, that's where things get tricky and require, I think, often selflessness. Being able to say in this moment, I'm gonna suspend my own needs and try and give this person what they need because I care about them and because I think being in a relationship matters more than what I need right now. That, to me, is what it means to be in a rewarding relationship. A great relationship is both people are willing to sort of sacrifice their own fleeting self interest and focus on the other person and at times give them what they need. But over time, like every relationship is just a repeated sequence of conversations. And so over time, ideally, you're both doing this generosity for each other. The reason I think kindness is the final maxim of the Talk framework and why it's so important is because the human brain was built to be self interested, to be egocentric and focus on your own needs and your own perspective. We know everything about our own perspective. Right. We have perfect information about our own selves and we have very sort of limited intermittent body information about other people. I have an identical twin, even my identical twin, her name's Sarah. We had the same upbringing, we have the same brain, same body, same DNA, all of it. But I don't know everything about what she's experienced every day. And so in order for me to figure out how she's feeling, what she needs, what she's going to find funny, what she's excited about, I got to ask questions, I got to raise topics, I got to remember to focus on her and not just myself. And that's true for everyone that we encounter. And so the reason that kindness matters is it's easy to focus on those self interested goals. It's much, much harder to focus on the pro social ones because it goes against human nature. We have to overcome our natural egocentrism in order to do it.
- [75:50]
Dan Harris
Well, you're describing certainly applies to me. My default mode is definitely self interested and yet I am surrounded by people on my team and in my family who can get themselves into trouble because they're not advocating enough for their own needs. And so I just want to advocate for their needs in this conversation because I can see how kindness can go pear shaped for those people.
- [76:17]
Alison Wood Brooks
Yeah, it can go awry. Imagine an existence where you're completely living for the needs of other people. It leads to burnout. It's stressful also in the context of conversation, not just about like serving their needs, it's also about sharing your own perspective. Right. It's self disclosure. We know that self disclosure feels good if in the brain it feels as pleasurable as sex, as eating chocolate. Like sharing about yourself is highly pleasurable. And if you're never doing that, if you're only asking questions and listening to other people and helping them, it will lead to burnout and exhaustion and, and not being known. Right. Like people aren't going to get to know what your unique perspective is. And so I think great conversation. On a conversation by conversation basis, you can think of good ones as being sort of ping pongy and balanced between both speakers. But over time and on the scale of a relationship, you can also think about sort of keeping the ledger balanced from one conversation to the next. Maybe one person has really acute needs right now. And so that conversation is going to be fully about them and someday you hope that they will return the favor and focus entirely on you. And if not, right. If you're existing in that totally people pleasing world and nobody is doing it reciprocally for you, then some changes need to be made. You might need some new.
- [77:41]
Dan Harris
Some new friends and the gumption to speak up for your needs, which is.
- [77:46]
Alison Wood Brooks
And not only to others, but even to yourself, right? Saying I matter too, my needs matter too, and they're not being met. And giving yourself permission to matter and that your needs matter too. We have to live in all four.
- [78:00]
Dan Harris
Quadrants of the compass in our remaining time. I want to cover, to the extent that we can, a big topic which is how to handle difficult moments in conversation. You've got something called the receptiveness recipe. Can you describe that?
- [78:16]
Alison Wood Brooks
Yes. I think there have been decades of books and courses and wisdom literature about how to have difficult conversations. Most of that is not based on scientific evidence. And it's been very exciting in the last decade to see new evidence emerge that actually does. Look at these difficult moments that crop up in conversation. And let's see, what are good conversationalists doing? What are they saying? What are they thinking about in those moments? And so receptiveness is this really groundbreaking research by Julia Minson and Mike Yeomans looking at the language that people use during difficult moments that prevent the conversation from getting overheated and derailed, that keep you on track while also not feeling like a doormat. Right. Like you can always not voice your opinion in order to avoid conflict. You can always just walk away. But what they're saying is how do we have conviction for our own views and also remain open and encouraging to other people's differing viewpoints? And that's what receptive language can do. There are lots of components of the receptiveness recipe, a couple of the ones that I find most helpful. Many of them are counterintuitive, by the way. When we find ourselves in these difficult moments, often we have our instinct is like, I need to prove that I'm right. And so to do that, I need to be strong and articulate and decisive and have the best data, all the best arguments. In reality, when you realize, oh, but there's a human mind sitting on the other side, there's someone needs to be able to listen to what you're saying and feel good about it. And actually how persuasion actually works is like over time, over the course of many conversations in good relationships, people might slowly change their views based on the gentle pressure of your Differing view. They're not, like, going to turn on a dime because of one amazing argument you make. You realize, oh, it's really important to maintain, make sure that we feel safe with each other and are having a good time and are not yelling at each other about whatever, politics, family, whatever. One thing that I have found helpful, one element of this receptiveness recipe is qualifying language. So instead of trying to be so resolute and decisive, you use words like maybe, sometimes I wonder if they hedge your claims. Right? It's saying, I, I don't have certainty about this, but I wonder if in some cases immigration could be helpful. Let's think about that together. Instead of, like, here are all the reasons that immigration is good or immigration is bad. That's much more pleasant to engage with than the sort of more decisive route. To me, that's counterintuitive because you're saying, like, express uncertainty when you have uncertainty. And by the way, we almost always have uncertainty about everything in life. So that's one. The other one that I find very concretely helpful is that you can divide yourself into multiple disagreeing parts. So I can say, hey, Dan, as your friend, I totally can imagine why your dating life is so hard. And that sounds really stressful. And I can see that you're getting really anxious for your dates and you've had really bad luck and rejection sucks. Let me put on my, like, dating coach hat and let's imagine what if you thought about prepping topics before your dates next time? Do you think that would help? And so you're able to express both, like, understanding and empathy and also tougher feedback or like, more direct communication in the same breath. And that's so much easier for people to receive than just saying, like, well, you didn't think about any topics beforehand. Of course it didn't go well. And so dividing yourself into multiple parts in the moment can be very, very helpful.
- [82:11]
Dan Harris
What is situation modification? That's another thing you recommend when shit gets tense.
- [82:18]
Alison Wood Brooks
Yeah. Situation modification is a fancy phrase that just means, like, change something, change anything about the environment. Invite a third person to pull up a chair, dim the lights, put on some music, walk outside, take a break. Any little modification that you can make in the situation will change the timbre of the interaction. And these small changes have a bigger effect on our mood and how safe we feel than you think. So situation modification is something that psychologists talk about with emotion regulation. How do we regulate our emotions? How do we change our environment to make it a more conducive place to talk? About the things we need to talk about. I had a colleague who would get really uncomfortable with students, came to their office and would cry. They're in their formative years of their lives, so they come and talk to us about all kinds of hard things. And he was like, I never know what to do and they cry in my office. And I was like, here's a situation modification. Try and have a box of Kleenex on your desk. And if they start to cry, you could ask them if they need one. Like that's a pretty good way to make them feel more comfortable. And like crying is normal, like you're ready for it. And so he does that now. He has found it quite helpful picking.
- [83:38]
Dan Harris
Up on that word helpful. You have given us an enormous number of helpful tips and tactics and techniques, and there are many, many more inside the book. So let me ask a final, very practical question. Given the sheer volume of ideas that you've shared with us, how do we start integrating this into our lives?
- [84:00]
Alison Wood Brooks
This was the biggest challenge in developing this course and writing the book, is that it really is a sort of compendium of ideas of like, tactics and approaches and mindsets and tools. And I feel very overwhelmed when I see, like, Here are the 36 things that you need to do to get better at conversation. And that's why we've boiled it down to just four things. Right? That's why. And it's why the talk framework seems so simple on the outside, but when you dive into it, there's like a lot going on under the hood. My students at Harvard ask this question at the end of the course. How do I remember all of these things? I give them silicone bracelets to wear that say topic asking levity and kindness almost as an associative memory, a reminder of what we've learned together. Short of wearing a physical reminder of them, I think the best thing you can do is practice. And that's what's so beautiful about conversation. We get opportunities to practice all day long, every day. And so in your next conversation, I challenge you or anyone to try prepping two or three topics and see how it goes. When you're prepping those topics, try making them more personalized about the person you're going to see in the conversation. After that, try just asking more follow up questions, right? Like each time, if you give yourself a little challenge and see how it goes, you can run these little experiments in your own life and see what works for you and what doesn't.
- [85:32]
Dan Harris
Great stuff. Before I let you go, can you just remind everybody of the name of your new book and anything else including records by the Lights that we should know about and access.
- [85:42]
Alison Wood Brooks
Maybe I should do a Tucson. The book is called the Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves. There is a workbook that you can download for free from my website. AlisonWoodBrooks.com has lots of conversation topics and exercises to do with your colleagues and family members. And I play in a band called the Lights based in Boston. Come check us out. New album coming in a couple months.
- [86:07]
Dan Harris
Are there existing albums that we can find on Spotify right now?
- [86:10]
Alison Wood Brooks
Yeah we are. We released our first one last summer. The website is the Lights Band.
- [86:15]
Dan Harris
Such a pleasure to talk to you. Dr. Alison Wood Brooks. Thank you for your time.
- [86:19]
Alison Wood Brooks
Dan, you're amazing. What a question asker you are. Thanks for having me.
- [86:23]
Dan Harris
I appreciate that. Thanks again to Alison Wood Brooks. Love that conversation. Before we go, just a quick reminder. If you sign up@danharris.com you will get a companion meditation for this episode on the Art of Listening and companion meditations for all of our Monday Wednesday episodes henceforth. And you'll also get the ones that we've created for all of the episodes dating back to June. And if you sign up@danharris.com you will get invited to our soon to be weekly live guided meditation sessions which I'm very excited about. One other thing, I'm doing an IRL in person meditation session for a whole weekend in October October 24th through October 26th. We call it Meditation Party. We do it at the Omega Institute which is north of NYC and you can sign up@eomega.org there's of a lot link in the show notes and I do this with 7A Selassie, Jeff Warren and this year Ofosu Jones Corte so would love to see you there. Eomega.org meditation party 10-24- finally I want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan and Eleanor Vasily. Our recording and engineering is handled by great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager, Marissa Schneider is our senior producer, DJ Cashmere is our executive producer and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.
- [88:03]
Alison Wood Brooks
Shopify helps you sell at every stage of your business. Like that. Let's put it online and see what happens.
- [88:09]
Dan Harris
Stage and the site is live that.
- [88:11]
Alison Wood Brooks
We opened a store and need a fast checkout. Stage thanks. You're all set that count it up and ship it around the globe Stage.
- [88:18]
Dan Harris
This one's going to Thailand and that.
- [88:21]
Alison Wood Brooks
Wait, did we just hit a million orders? Stage Whatever your stage, businesses that grow, grow with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 a month trial@shopify.com listen.