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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Hi, everybody. David Allen here with someone I've known for, actually several years in very strange context, Charles Duick. And one of the reasons we're doing this is because I just read his new book, which is fabulous. I'll let Charles tell you about that, and we can talk about that later on. But Charles, let me toss it to you. What would you like people to know about Charles doing?
- [00:44]
B
Oh, my gosh. Well, so, David, you and I actually met like a decade ago when I was reading the Power of Habit, my first book. And, and you.
- [00:55]
A
Wasn't that in some sort of a bar or a restaurant somewhere where we were sitting around with a whole bunch of people and getting, you know, slightly inebriated and having a big talk?
- [01:04]
B
Yes, that sounds exactly right. I think, I think it was such a good night that I don't actually remember the details of it.
- [01:12]
A
Yeah. Okay.
- [01:13]
B
But, yeah, yeah. So I, I'm a, I'm a reporter at the New Yorker magazine. I used to be at the New York Times, and I've, I've written three books now. One just, that just came out this week, the Power of Habit, and another one called Smarter, Faster, Better. And my latest book is Super Communicators, which is about the science of communication and connection.
- [01:34]
A
And I got a whole lot of questions to ask about any and all of that, Charles, you know, because first of all, good, you, I, you know, I put you in a cut. There are three, you know, you and Dan Pink and Jim Fallows are our friends. And, you know, you're all such. I have to ask about your research. You know, Yugoa, what, what caused you. We can talk about the book specifically, but what caused you? What causes you to then recognize something that you say, I need to go research that and figure that out. And all three of you do that, do that in spades. And I'm totally impressed.
- [02:20]
B
Tell me a little bit about that. It is entirely rooted in me having a problem that I want to try and solve and looking for an excuse to call experts and ask them for advice. So when it was the Power of Habit, I basically, I was at the Times at that point, and I was sort of successful as a journalist, but I could not lose weight. I could not get myself to go exercise to save my life. And I was like, if I'm so smart, then, like, why is this so hard? So I'm going to call up a bunch of experts and tell them I'm writing a book about habits so they'll help me figure out how to get better at habits. And the same thing was true of this communication book is that I got into this pattern where I just was failing to communicate at work, at home, with my wife. There was just all these times that I really wanted to connect with someone and it just wasn't coming easily. And so I figured, well, if I write a book about it, then I can call up experts and ask them what I should do differently. So it's, you know, they say self help. In this case it's self help really helps. The author of the book.
- [03:22]
A
Yeah, fascinating. Was fascinating. So. Well, let's, let's talk about the book. I just read, Super Communicators and it's such a subtle thing, Charles. I mean, you uncovered a whole lot of the subtlety about what really works when things work, when people communicate. So, so, so give the folks listening kind of a brief as best you can, overview of your conclusions about how do we connect better.
- [03:59]
B
Yeah. So I think the first question is what is a super, super communicator? And the answer is, everyone actually knows this answer without realizing it. Because if I was to ask, say you, if I was to ask you, after a long, tough day when you really just want to call someone who you just know is going to make you feel better, does the person you call, do you know who that is?
- [04:24]
A
Frankly, it'd be my wife. But I've got another couple of people that I, that I could probably talk to in that way.
- [04:31]
B
Yeah, and I've met your wife and she is wonderful. And so for you, your wife is a super communicator and you're probably a super communicator. Back to her, I just heard, by
- [04:42]
A
the way, I heard somebody in our neighborhood say, Catherine, my wife, she said she's so great, she knows how to relate to everybody in the neighborhoods. She does. She makes them all feel great in terms of what they're doing. And. Yeah, and these are all elements I think that you've identified, right? Absolutely. Right, absolutely.
- [05:06]
B
And so what super communicators do, particularly people like Catherine, who are consistent super communicators or like you, is they tend to ask more questions. Right? They tend to ask 10 to 20 times as many questions and they ask a special kind of question that's known as a deep question, which is easier to ask than you think. They tend to, they tend to notice your non verbal or non linguistic cue. So if you laugh, they laugh back and they laugh in the same similar way that you've laughed because that makes you feel connected to each other. And most importantly.
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A
Okay, yeah, okay. Yeah, no, I guess. There you go. There we go.
- [05:43]
B
You laughed and I laughed. Right. I can't even like.
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A
And.
- [05:46]
B
But think about how terrible it is when you're like. You laugh really big. You're like, ha, ha, ha. And the other person goes, huh?
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A
Yeah. It's funny.
- [05:53]
B
Like. Like, if their energy is different, if their mood is different, then you're like, we're not really connecting with each other. This is not. This is not the right conversation. And in the book, we talk about how NASA, when they started looking for new astronauts for longer space missions, they needed people who had more emotional intelligence. And they started paying attention to how the candidates to become astronauts laughed, because that was one of the best ways to figure out who actually could connect with other people, which makes sense.
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A
It does.
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B
But you.
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A
It does.
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B
You would ask. So the biggest idea.
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A
I'm sorry. Yeah, go ahead.
- [06:31]
B
I was gonna say the biggest idea is that we tend to think of a discussion as being about one thing, but actually, every conversation is actually made up of multiple different kinds of conversations, and most of them fall into one of three buckets. There's these. These practical discussions where we're talking about making plans or solving problems. There's emotional conversations where I want to tell you what I'm feeling, and I don't want you to solve my feelings. I want you to empathize. And then there's social conversations, which is about how we relate to each other and our social identities. And what happens is, if we're having the different kinds of conversations at the same moment, it's really hard to connect. It's really hard, in fact, to hear each other. So part of what we've learned in the last decade, and we're living through this golden age of understanding the psychology and the neurology of communication for really, the first time. One of the big things that we've learned is what's known as the matching principle, that in order to effectively communicate, I need to figure out what kind of conversation is happening here, and then I need to match you or invite you to match me so that. Well, now, the same.
- [07:34]
A
Charles, Wait a minute.
- [07:35]
B
Same moment.
- [07:36]
A
This is as old as NLP was, because that was a lot of what NLP was about, was I need to match. Okay, you're nodding your head. I'm going to nod my head. You know, and if we could just match our sort of physical environment, then there's. But you've taken it to a whole another level, right? Or people have. Right?
- [07:56]
B
Yeah. Because I think the way that it expands beyond nlp is that a lot of what NLP talked about was mimicry. Right. And. And we've begun to learn that matching is a little bit different from mimicry.
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A
And.
- [08:10]
B
And explain. It's helpful to know sort of what happens in our brain when we communicate with another person. We connect with them. Our bodies start to change. So even though you and I are separated by thousands of miles, although we don't notice it, our eyes are, by
- [08:23]
A
the way, Santa Cruz. You're in Santa. You're in Santa Cruz right now.
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B
Oh, actually New York today. New York today.
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A
You're in Amsterdam. So, okay, just. So just for our audience to know a little context here.
- [08:36]
B
Yes, exactly. And our breathing patterns are probably becoming more similar, but most importantly, what's happening in our brains, our neural activity is starting to look more and more alike. And this is known within neurology as neural entrainment. And it's the goal of communication. Because if I describe to you a feeling, an emotion that I felt, or an idea I experienced, if I do a good job describing it to you, you actually feel that same emotion yourself. You experience that same idea. Your brain in my brain becomes increasingly similar. We. It, in fact, on. If we were looked at brain waves, we'd see that they start moving together. And so this is how I saw
- [09:16]
A
that research in your book. That research in your. The research in your book was fascinating. Like, wow, really? Yeah, we do that. And there's. You've got a lot of good, good data in the book about that. Yeah.
- [09:30]
B
And NLP is kind of taking advantage of that a little bit or using that to help you connect with other people. But real connection isn't just mimicry. Real connection is actually recognizing you've said something authentic. And so I'm going to engage in reciprocal authenticity. I'm not necessarily going to tell you the same kind of story you just told me, but I'm going to. I'm going to be authentic back with you. If you say something vulnerable, I understand that it's okay for me to be vulnerable with you in return. That's how we end up feeling close.
- [10:02]
A
That's. So that was such a critical element of the book, I think, was that people don't have to agree with anybody else. You don't have to be exactly like them. You just need to be authentic like they are, or authentic so that they can be right. I think authenticity is. People have often asked me, gee, David, what's the best success or for speaking or doing anything else? Let's just be authentic. You stand up there and Go, I'm friggin scared, guys. You know, I don't, I've never given a speech like this. Hope I'm gonna do okay. And then everybody goes, ah, God, I felt that way too. So now you've got connection, right?
- [10:46]
B
And think about how often that happens where the person might be speaking about something that you don't agree with them on. Right? They stand up and they say, I was really nervous and I just want to let you know how I feel on this topic. And maybe you feel differently on this topic, but you still feel sympathy for them, you still feel that connection. And you're exactly right. For a lot of us, we think that the goal of a conversation is to convince the other person of something or to get them to change their mind. But actually the goal of a conversation is just to understand each other. For me to understand you and you to understand me. If we've done that, the conversation is a success. Because even if we walk away from that conversation still disagreeing, and we probably will, by understanding each other, by connecting, we trust each other a little bit more. And it's that trust that will eventually allow us to come to a consensus or to work together, even if our opinions are different.
- [11:43]
A
Wow, you really unpack something that's, that is both obvious and quite subtle. Which is what I loved about the book, by the way, because I went, oh yeah, oh, I write oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah, oh, I could do that more, I could do that better. Or there is a way I could then change my reaction, reflection on what's going on, assuming that I'm interested in the outcome, which is connection, which I think was, you know, a whole lot of the powerful message of your book. It's connect. Yeah, yeah.
- [12:24]
B
Well, and it's interesting because I, I have been thinking about GTD lately because, you know, there's a story in the book about this guy, Jim Lawler, who's a CIA agent and it's or officer, and his job is to recruit overseas spies. And he's just terrible at the job. Like, he just, like, guys keep on saying to him, like, look man, you got to quit bugging me or else I'm going to report you to the authorities and you'll get deported. Like, you're not good at this. And eventually he finds this one woman who he wants to recruit and he takes her to dinner and she freaks out when he asks her to work for the CIA, but he convinces her to come one last dinner and he just kind of gives up. And he is authentic. He's Just honest. He says, look, I understand what you're feeling right now about going home to this Middle Eastern country because they're going to send me back to Texas because I'm so bad at this job, I'm going to lose it, and I'm so disappointed in myself. And as soon as he was honest with her, she was honest back and they could hear each other. And that's when she decided to work for him, and she became the best asset in the Middle east over the next 20 years. But what's really critical is this authenticity and this connection and prioritizing that. Oh, so I was going to mention. So this is how GTD came up for me regarding this is a lot of what he would do is just spend five minutes before a conversation thinking, just coming up with one sentence for himself about what he hopes to accomplish in this conversation and the mood he hopes to establish, and then just basically putting it in his back pocket and forgetting that idea. And I think in a lot of ways, GTD does the same thing. When I have my review on Sunday and I think about the past week and look forward to the next week, when I'm. When I'm looking at my list and I'm trying to figure out what's essential and what isn't, it's that same act of reflection, and it's the reflection that really makes us powerful.
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A
True. It's really true. Most people think that weekly review is some sort of a, you know, mundane sort of just recalibration of stuff, but it's not. It's like, it's thinking time. It's reflection time. It's like, wow, how important is that? Oh, geez, that reminds me, you know, here's something I could do. And that's the kind of process I think that reflection, you know, creates. Certainly in the GTD context anyway,
- [14:53]
B
I think you're. And I think that's so valuable. There was one experiment that was done where they went into this investment bank where people were fighting with each other all the time, and they told everyone for one week, before you go into a meeting, just write down a sentence. And it's what I just said. It was, what do I hope to accomplish in this meeting?
- [15:10]
A
What.
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B
What mood do I hope to establish? And then basically it took like, seven seconds. People would scribble this down, put it in their pocket, forget about it. The incidence of conflict in those in that week went down by 80%. And the reason why is because when we do have that time to reflect and we can figure out what we want. And we all go into a room where everyone's prepared to say this is what I want and need. It's so much more productive.
- [15:38]
A
But Charles, I have to say one of the things I've been very lack in in my career is focusing on the emotional aspect of all this stuff. I figured emotions could. They go up and down, you know, come on, manage your life and your emotions will come into line. And yet what you've done and what you just said emphasizes how critical. Like what a great question. What mood would I like to create in this meeting? That's. I've never, I've never actually even thought about that myself. And how many people have probably never even thought about that? But how important that might be, right relative to the interactions and. And so forth that go on there?
- [16:26]
B
Well, absolutely, absolutely. And the truth of the matter is that emotions influence all of our conversations whether we're aware of them or not. Right. Think about. And not necessarily in these heart rending, cry on your shoulder ways, but just think about. I'm sure you've had this experience, I certainly have. Where you're waiting for a meeting to start and you turn to the person next to you and you say how was your weekend? And they say something like oh, I went to my kids graduation, it was great. Now what they're doing is they're telling us kind of an emotional experience that they had. And it's very easy for us to just say, oh, congratulations. Okay, now let's get down to the agenda. But if you were to stop for a minute and just say to the person like oh, what did it feel like watching that kid, watching your kid walk across that stage? Was that amazing? Now we're actually engaging with these emotions that we know are there. This guy is proud. He wants to share something meaningful that happened in his life. Emotions don't have to be trekly, they often are very practical. But they're there. And if we don't acknowledge them sometimes, then a conflict starts to emerge because people think they're talking about practicalities, they think they're talking about the budget. But what they're really doing is trying to figure out how to manage their own fear and anxiety that they might have to lay people off.
- [17:50]
A
Wow. Yeah. No, I'd never given the emotional aspect of this, the credence that you did in the book and you make that number two principle in the book, you know, of, of establishing communication and the way the example you just gave what a great instance to ask the right questions. How did that feel when you did that. How cool was that? So that you get them to be able to acknowledge that and not feel like you didn't hear them or weren't. Weren't accepting of whatever they were presenting at the table. So brilliant stuff. Wow.
- [18:33]
B
Thank you. And it's interesting because there's actually a name for those kinds of questions, which are deep questions. And I've actually noticed since we've known each other for a while and we've gone to dinner before, you're very good at asking deep questions. And a deep question is something that just asks the other person, invites the other person to talk about their values or their beliefs or their experience.
- [18:55]
A
I just like stories. I just go, give me your story. What's your story? So that's one of my favorite questions. But I guess what that does is then that elicits what you're talking about.
- [19:08]
B
Exactly, Exactly. And oftentimes deep questions don't appear deep. It can be as simple as saying, what's your story? Or you meet someone who's a lawyer and you say, oh, what made you decide to go to law?
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A
Law school?
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B
Or what do you love about practicing the law?
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A
Right. When.
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B
When you ask me, what's your story, what you're really asking me is, tell me how you see yourself and how you hope other people see you and the experiences that have led you to today.
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A
Right.
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B
Well, I asked you that question.
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A
I asked you, why did a journalist come up with this kind of stuff? So that. Then you told me, you know, oh, because I had a problem and I tried to solve it. Oh, cool. Now I understand.
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B
Exactly.
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A
That's cool.
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B
Exactly.
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A
Okay.
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B
And I think in many ways the lesson here is don't ask people about the facts of their life. Ask them what they think about their life, how they feel about their life.
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A
Right.
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B
Instead of asking a fact question, ask a question that invites them to say something deeper. And that's why they won't. But most of the time, they actually will.
- [20:12]
A
Yeah. And I often forget, but when I love to remember. Tell me what you want people to know about you is. Yeah. Is it triggers. That triggers some sort of response in that way? Right.
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B
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. It's really powerful. And so now we've gotten. I've gotten us completely off topic.
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A
There is no topic here other than, hey, that's true.
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B
That's true.
- [20:46]
A
Charles Doig, my friend and an incredible journalist and an incredible writer, has now written the third book called Super Communicators, which I can do nothing but highly recommend to anybody hearing this, that it's going to give you some awareness that you did not have before as it did me. I'll bet. And it's great stuff, so. Yay. Thanks, Charles. Yeah. Yeah. No, good for you. And where have you gotten any feedback yet aside from me about the book?
- [21:24]
B
Yeah, well, so, so the book just. The book just came out today. It's in bookstores and, and we sent out some copies and it got like a review and the places you're supposed to get starred reviews. And so, you know, when I wrote the Power of Habit, this thing happened that I'm sure you've experienced tenfold, which is I started getting these emails from people saying, like, I read your book and I've been struggling with drinking for years and it helped me. Or I, I read your book and I've been like, dealing with procrastination or I wanted to start. Start exercising and thank you for writing this book. And of course I felt like it's not really me, right? It's that there's this, this copus of knowledge. Like it's all these other people that we've benefited from. And yet it is so rewarding to hear from people that something you've worked on has, has made it their life a better place. Right. And I know that there's so many people who feel that way about gtd and I'm sure have written, reached out to you. And so that was kind of my goal, is that Power of Habit is really about looking inward.
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A
Right.
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B
It's about how do I change myself. Super Communicators is about how do I work with other people? How do I bring that same change that I love about myself to the world? By being able to interact with other people, by being able to connect with them, by being able to share who I am and listen to who they are. And once you do that, you create these profound, meaningful relationships that they last a lifetime.
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A
How did you feel when you finished the book? Or did you ever feel you finished?
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B
I just, I just felt like I had a deadline. I'm sure. I don't know. I'm curious if you feel the same way. I, like, literally, if you give me a chance to edit the book another hundred times, I will edit the book another hundred times. And at some point my editor says, that's it, we're done. So it was. But I actually spent three years on this one and full time, I wasn't doing anything else. I stopped writing for the New Yorker while I was writing it. And you know what? Like, this is the first time I've written a Book where I didn't have another job in journalism. And it was so satisfying to be able to dive deeply into these stories and find the right story and really explore these ideas. It was, it was, it was a big part of, it was just this, this gift of being able to immerse myself. Because we're living through this golden age of understanding communication.
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A
Right?
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B
The, because of advances in neuroimaging and data collection. There's so much good research going on right now. And, and to be able to have the time to actually read it and talk to everyone, it was like such a gift.
- [24:12]
A
And these are such great stories. Charles. By the way, if any of you don't have the book, do not Pass go collect $100. Go get the book. Go, go get, go get super communicators and find out how good you are already at it. You just didn't know you were good at it. And the ways you could then improve how much better you could be at it. Fabulous stuff, Charles. Great. Yay.
- [24:41]
B
Because anyone can become a super communicator. This is the other thing that we've learned is that, is that, and I'm curious. I, I, I, I'm gonna ask you a question on this because what we know is that anyone can learn to do this. It's just a set of skills. It's not that you're something you're born with. It's not something you have to be charismatic or extroversion. And I've always thought of you as a super communicator. Let me ask you, was there a time in your life where you felt like you were bad at communication? Like it was something that, that you actually had to think about?
- [25:12]
A
No, not that I can remember. Okay. I just tended to hang out and, you know, I was a serious approval suck. So, you know, that was the negative side. That was sort of the positive side. It's called. I just always wanted to know what other people wanted and what they wanted of me and how I could be something that they liked. So I was a serious approval suck. It took 30 years of personal growth training to discover that didn't matter. That, that, that. So what, so I'm an approval suck. Life's like that, right? And so to being able to accept the fact I just wanted approval from people. But that's why I guess about. And I suppose that in a positive way, that's part of what the super communicator does, is just be aware of people around them and the context around them and how to then make that comfortable, make that attractive, make that enter, make that interesting, make that engaging in some way. So I guess I. I've always sort of. Well, I've had that from a child because I never liked arguments. I would get sick and throw up if I had relatives that. That argued at the bridge table. You know, I just couldn't stand conflict in that way. So I was always so interested in. In making sure. How can I stop conflict from happening here? Because I can't stand it. Charles, thank you so much. So we'll sign off, everybody. Hopefully you all got all the information you needed to take some next action about any of this, and we'll see you all later. Thanks, Charles. Ciao.
- [27:19]
B
Thank you.