Greg McKeown:
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Today, we have the privilege of speaking with Charles Duhigg. He’s an author that I’ve been interested in for years and years. He’s a distinguished journalist. He’s someone who, I mean, is a graduate of Yale University, of Harvard Business School. He has this great ability to blend intellectual rigor with great storytelling. He’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for his part in The iEconomy, which was a series of pieces examining the global economy through the lens of Apple. He’s probably best known for The Power of Habit, which spent just 50 weeks or more on the New York Times bestseller list, resonating with leaders worldwide.
But as we sit down with Charles today, we’re not just engaging with a journalist or an author but someone who has a rare ability to try to translate complex ideas into practical wisdom. He’s written a new book called Supercommunicators, which definitely has my attention.
By the end of today’s episode, you will understand what that is, why being one matters, and some very clear and simple things you can do immediately to be able to put that into action. So, with that, let’s get to it.
Let’s start with a succinct summary. What is Supercommunicators, about, and why does it matter so much right now?
Charles Duhigg:
Well, Supercommunicators is about why some people are so much better at connecting with other people, and particularly through conversation. If I were to ask you if you were having a terrible day, who would you call that you know would make you feel better? Did someone come to mind?
Greg McKeown:
Yes,
Charles Duhigg:
Yeah, and I think for all of us, and that person, for you, is a super communicator, and you’re probably a supercommunicator back to them. Some people are consistently capable of doing this. Some people manage to connect with anyone really, really easily. They manage to make themselves heard more easily and, so, they’re more persuasive. As a result, they manage to kind of get through, breakthrough, and develop a relationship with really anyone, and those people are supercommunicators.
Greg McKeown:
And just state the obvious for a second. Why does that matter? Why is that helpful for someone who’s trying to get ahead?
Charles Duhigg:
So, communication is a human superpower. Right? The reason why homo sapiens have succeeded so well is because we have the ability to communicate with you in ways that other species with each other, in ways that other species can’t. It allows us to build families and clans, and societies, and cities.
Communication is the key to how we become successful and, in fact, study after study shows that even if you have great technical skills, even if you’re a great basketball player, if you can’t communicate with the other people on your team, you’re never going to win the championship. If you might be a great salesperson or a great computer programmer, but if you can’t communicate with the others inside your company, you’re never going to rise to the level you ought to be at. Communication is essential for everything.
Greg McKeown:
What’s your sense of what’s happened to social skills over the last 10 years?
Charles Duhigg:
Well, I don’t know that social skills have declined over the last 10 years. I think one of the things that’s happened is that we’re living through a period where there’s much more polarization, right? There are many more people who feel divided from each other on a number of issues, and part of that is because we stopped teaching communication as a deliberate skill. The truth of the matter is anyone can be a supercommunicator. It’s literally just a series of skills that anyone can learn, the same way we can all learn to read. But what’s important is that we have to be aware of those skills. We have to want to learn those skills, and schools did this for a long time. Until the 60s and 70s and 80s, it was very common to receive interpersonal communication training at school, but with the advent of computers.
Yeah, I mean, think about, think about, for instance, you know, this is a long time ago, but the finishing schools that young women used to go to, those basically were schools to teach you how to be a conversationalist, right, how to have a whippy repartee at a dinner party.
Greg McKeown:
But you wouldn’t get that in a normal traditional public high school.
Charles Duhigg:
Well, you actually would, though you would get a lot of education about how to work with each other on an interpersonal level. Now, they might not call it a finishing school, right? They might call it a home-ec or home economics, or they might call it, you know, interpersonal communication class, which used to be on the curriculum at many, many schools. With the advent of computers, we tended to move away from that because it felt like there were other skills we needed to prioritize, and it felt like computers demanded less communication ability. But what we’re finding now is the cost of that.
Communication is our superpower. If you are a supercommunicator, you can do things that other people can’t do.
Greg McKeown:
Like what?
Charles Duhigg:
Well, for instance, you can get invited into conversations. You can make people feel better. Just by just by joining that conversation, you have much, much more influence. People trust you more. They tend to think that what you’re saying represents the consensus view because oftentimes it does. These are the kinds of things you can do. You can encourage people. You can win people over to your side. This is what life is.
Greg McKeown:
I’m surprised that you said that social schools, from your point of view, haven’t decreased over those 10 years. Help me understand that. If we’re not training it anymore, if we’re not focused on it anymore, if the schools aren’t having it, if we don’t have finishing school, if we’ve overemphasized technology, mastery, and competence, how is it possible that social skills haven’t gone down?
Charles Duhigg:
Well, I would say that we’re maybe not teaching the right skills, but you certainly talked to many more people today than if you had been alive 50 years ago. Right? I mean, you email people, and you text people. You have a podcast. People can listen to you. We can have this conversation even though we’re many miles apart, so our ability to be social has not contracted. However, the value of those conversations, the value of those dialogues, our ability to hear each other and understand each other that has gone down, and that’s because there has been a decline in a specific set of skills communication skills, and now we understand how to teach them much, much better. We understand how super communicators do what they do, and we’re able to share that and instruct other people.
Greg McKeown:
Let me just clarify because that seemed somehow contradictory. But I want to make sure I understand. You’re saying that the appetite for sociality hasn’t gone down, but the communication skills you think have gone down. Is that a fair description of what you said?
Charles Duhigg:
I think that’s fair, and I don’t think that’s true for everyone. Right? There are lots of people who still communicate well, but, yes, one of the things that we see with polarization is that we see a cause of it is people not understanding how to talk with people who are different from them. They tend to seek out people who are like-minded. They tend to enter echo chambers. They don’t know how to cross that chasm and have a conversation with someone who disagrees with them in a way that they both enjoy the conversation, and that’s not great.
Greg McKeown:
Now, in Supercommunicators you identify. One of the key findings over the last few years is about why it is that people miss each other when they’re trying to communicate this idea of three distinct types of conversations. Can you describe what those three are and why it matters if you misunderstand which kind of conversation you’re in?
Charles Duhigg:
Yeah, absolutely. And one of the best ways is just to use myself as an example. You know I would before I wrote this book. I would come home from work after a long day, and I would tell my wife all about my day and complain about my boss and my coworkers, and she would respond very reasonably with good advice, right, like, “Take your boss out to lunch, get to know each other a little bit more.”
And instead of being able to listen to her, I would get more upset, and I would say you know, why aren’t you supporting me? You should be taking my side in this. And then she would get upset because I was passing up her good advice.
And so when I went to researchers, I asked them what’s going on here, and they said, “Well, we tend to think of a discussion as being about one thing,” right? We’re talking about my day, or we’re talking about, you know, Jimmy’s grades. But actually, every discussion is made up of multiple different kinds of conversation, and almost all those conversations fall into one of three buckets.
They are usually practical conversations where we’re trying to solve a problem, or we’re trying to make a plan. There are emotional conversations where I might tell you how I’m feeling, and I don’t want you to solve my feelings; I don’t want you to solve the problem for me. I want you to listen and to empathize. And then there are social conversations, where we talk about how we relate to each other and how we relate to others within society. And they said the most important thing here is all three forms of conversation are valid and all three usually happen in a discussion. But if you’re not having the same kind of conversation at the same time, you can’t hear each other; you can’t connect.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, if somebody wants you to give them sympathy, but you’re giving them solutions, you’re completely missing each other.
Charles Duhigg:
And that’s exactly what happened. Right? I was having an emotional conversation, and my wife was having a practical conversation, and so, as a result, we literally failed to hear each other.
Greg McKeown:
So emotional, practical, and social. Those are the three types that have been identified, right? So, then, the key, of course, follows that what you have to get good at is knowing which conversation you’re in, so that you can match the conversation that you are about. Tell us more about the matching principle.
Charles Duhigg:
Well, that’s exactly what the matching principle is that in order to connect with someone, you really need to understand what kind of conversation is happening, and you need to match the other person and invite them to match you. It’s not a one-way street, and once we’re attuned to look for it, it’s not hard to detect what kind of conversation you’re in. In fact, there’s a technique that makes it pretty easy, which is to simply ask questions and, in particular, ask a special type of question, which is known as a deep question. A deep question is something that just asks me to talk about my values, or my beliefs, or my experiences, and oftentimes, deep questions don’t appear deep, right?
So if I meet someone and they say, I say, “What do you do for a living?”
And they say, “Oh, I’m a lawyer.”
And I say, “Oh, did you always want to be a lawyer? Like, do you love practicing the law? What made you decide to go to law school?”
Those three questions they’re easy enough to ask, and they don’t seem overly intrusive, but they’re inviting that person to talk about the values that brought them to their career, what experiences they have in their background that led them to law school as opposed to something else, the values and the beliefs that they work with every day. They’re telling me so much about who they are.
And just to give you an example, if I ask that question and someone says, “Oh, you know, I wanted to become a lawyer because I really wanted to have a steady paycheck for my family.” I know they’re in a practical mindset; they’re talking about practical stuff. If, on the other hand, they say, “You know, I became a lawyer because I saw my dad get arrested, and I wanted to fight for the underdog.” Now I know that, actually, this is a more emotional conversation, and I need to match them there.
Greg McKeown:
So, it makes sense to me practical versus emotional. The social is a little more ambiguous for me. How do you know you’re in a social conversation? What is that exactly?
Charles Duhigg:
So, a social conversation, and it’s interesting because most of our conversations are actually social conversations. A social conversation is when we’re talking about how we relate to other people and how we relate to society. So, if we’re having a conversation and you’re obviously British, where did you grow up? What city did you grow up in?
Greg McKeown:
Born in London, yes.
Charles Duhigg:
Okay. So you’re from London, and I grew up in New Mexico. So the fact that we came from different places and have had these different experiences, that we’ve been socially shaped by slightly different societies, that has a bearing on how we communicate with each other, and it’s actually interesting. Now that becomes even more important if, for instance, we’re talking about okay, so how do we work with Fred at work, because Fred gets really, really upset whenever anything changes. Let’s figure out what we need to do. How do we recognize who Fred is and what he needs? If you’re having a conversation about race, you know, if I’m black and you’re white, and we’re discussing race, acknowledging that the color of our skin gives us different experiences, different identities, and that shapes how we see issues and how we discuss them. That’s an important thing to acknowledge because it helps us understand each other.
Greg McKeown:
So when you talk about the social conversation, you’re really just describing. What kind of relationship do we have?
Charles Duhigg:
Yeah, I mean between you and me, but also, what kind of relationship do we have with the rest of the world, right? The social conversation is about how we relate to each other, and you know, when you gossip, when you share office gossip, when you talk about what you think is going to happen, whether these people are dating or they’re not dating, or would they be right for each other those are all social conversations and what we’re really doing is we’re trying to figure out how does this person relate to the world? What do I need to know about them? That helps me understand what they bring to different situations.
Greg McKeown:
You use a simple, almost mnemonic device for separating these three types of conversations. You call it helping, hugging, or hearing. Can you unpack that for us a little bit?
Charles Duhigg:
Yeah. So this is something that schools often teach teachers to do, which is that if a student comes up and they’re upset, or even if they just want to have like a real conversation, oftentimes it’s good to start by saying do you want to be helped, do you want to be heard or do you want to be hugged?
And those are the three types of conversations: the practical, the emotional, and the social. And think about it. You know now, when I talk to my wife, oftentimes if I’m complaining to her, she’ll take a moment, and she’ll say, “Look, do you want me to solve this problem with you, or do you want me just to listen to what you’re saying?” Right?
She’s asking me do you want to be helped, or do you want to be heard? And then sometimes I say, “No, actually, I want to be hugged.” Like I want you to tell me that I’m right and make me feel better. Just understanding what people want out of a conversation is incredibly powerful.
Greg McKeown:
I think that simple question, the addition of that language, do you want to be helped, hugged, or heard right now? What’s the priority? What’s the first thing? I think it’s a very simple way to be able to quickly and, let’s say, in not really too conceptual a way, get to the heart of which conversation we ought to be in right now. I think that’s a great addition and help for us. Was there any research that you have based these findings primarily in? Was there like a single piece of research that you go, “That one really unlocked this whole subject?”
Charles Duhigg:
Oh no, I’m not into this. I spoke to over 300 researchers. I read over 4,000 studies. No, I would say what’s happening right now, and this is typical of when you have an explosion and kind of an understanding is that there isn’t one study that tells us everything we need to know. In fact, there are dozens or hundreds of studies, and it’s putting them all together, which is what I tried to do in super communicators. That’s why I wrote the book that tells us the most important insights.
Greg McKeown:
Nevertheless, I’ll still push one more time on this. So there are a few that when you look back, you say, okay, these were the ones that if somebody wanted to go beyond the book, here are the points of research that I think are a good place to begin, a gateway to reading the original research that I was reading and writing this.
Charles Duhigg:
Sure, and there are extensive end notes in the book that can sort of lead them to those papers. I mean, there’s a series of studies that were done by a guy named Beau Sievers at Dartmouth University with his advisor, Talia Wheatley, that looked at taking groups of people who were strangers and putting them together and asking them to answer questions together and they found that some of the groups were able to answer the questions much more deeply and much more intimately and it was because they had a supercommunicator in their group and they looked at what those supercommunicators were doing and they saw something interesting.
They found that the super communicators asked about 10 to 20 times as many questions as everyone else.
Greg McKeown:
Unbelievable.
Charles Duhigg:
But other people hardly registered them as questions because they were things like, “Oh, what’d you think about that?” Or, “Oh, yeah, what’d you say next?” Or you know, “Why does that seem important to you?”
These little questions that serve to invite others into the conversation. They asked deep questions about these values, and these beliefs, and these experiences. They tended to laugh more, and when somebody got serious, they would match their seriousness and people.
When the researchers asked the participants afterward who was the super communicator in your group? Oftentimes, the participants themselves they would know, but they wouldn’t be able to tell you how they knew. They wouldn’t be able to say this is how I knew this guy was, or this gal is such a great communicator, but that’s because what they were doing was so graceful that it made everyone else feel like they had a voice in that room.
Greg McKeown:
Well, first of all, they were micro questions, and secondly, the very nature of the questions got people thinking about themselves and opening up about themselves. So let’s say a supercommunicator does not bring attention to their communication prowess because the whole art of it is opening up other people and then syncing with them in a way that feels something like effortless.
Charles Duhigg:
Yeah, I think that’s right. I think that’s one of the skills that super communicators develop. There’s another study that I love, which is called the fast friends protocol or the fast friends procedure, where these two researchers, the Aron’s. They were a married couple. They would bring strangers into a room two by two, and they would give them a list of 36 questions to ask each other. And what they found is they found that if they asked a certain kind of question, those deep questions that we were talking about, questions that asked me about my values or my beliefs or my experiences, and if one person was vulnerable and then the other person reciprocated that vulnerability, then those people would feel close to each other, even if they had nothing in common.
So I think that’s an important study because one of the things that tell us is that when we’re having a conversation with someone, and they say something vulnerable that it’d be easy to gloss over, right, they say you say, “What did you do this weekend?”
And they say, “You know, my son graduated, and it was wonderful.” Or they say, “You know it was, yeah, I had some stuff going on, it was, it was not a great weekend.”
It’s very easy to gloss over that and be like, “Oh, that’s good to hear. Like, you know, I’m sorry, like, let’s talk about next year’s budget.”
And if you just take a beat and you say, “Oh, like, clearly you want to have an emotional conversation, I want to match you.” You don’t necessarily say that part aloud, but you say, “You know, tell me about your son, like, what was the graduation like? What were you thinking as you saw him cross that stage?” Or, “You know, I’m sorry. I’m sorry it was a tough weekend. I know how that is. I’ve I’ve been there myself. If you ever want to talk about it like, I’d be happy to do so.”
Those things take about 30 seconds to say, but when we match someone when they give us a hint of emotionality, emotionality or vulnerability and we reciprocate it, we can’t help but feel closer to each other.
Greg McKeown:
You’ve just covered two pieces of research. Is there a third? Is there another that sparks your mind? Another piece of research that was particularly interesting to you?
Charles Duhigg:
I mean, there’s a ton of it. There’s a guy named Nicholas Epley who’s a professor at the University of Chicago, and one of the things he’s done is try to figure out how quickly people can get deep. And so he has. He has a room full of rooms full of hedge funders who ask each other questions like “When’s the last time you cried in front of another person?”
And he’s found that people love these conversations, right? Beforehand, they think they’re going to hate it, but then they sit down, and they have these amazing conversations with someone where they really open up, and that person opens up in return, and you feel close to each other, and it just shows, and Nick’s done this in dozens of different settings Having a real conversation feels wonderful. In fact, our brains have evolved to feel wonderful when we have a real conversation.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, this is in the chapter where you’re talking about listening as a cure, as a healer. Let me just put the question to you that you just posed from Epley: When was the last time that you cried with someone?
Charles Duhigg:
Oh, that’s a good question. So you know, like, like a week and a half ago, I went to this, to this conference where we had these conversations, and people just told these amazing stories about things that had happened that had changed their lives, and they were so touching everyone in that room was crying, like someone told a story about, you know, being a pudgy kid and the popular kid came and took him running every day and how that that changed his life, like it gave him so much more confidence and gave him so much sense of agency and just how powerful this was. And just to think that, like, there are these things that we do that we don’t understand how much they affect others. It was I got, I got, I got teary. It was really, it was really powerful.
Greg McKeown:
What story did you tell?
Charles Duhigg:
I told a story about working at the New York Times and how challenging I found that to be. And, again, others had shared with me, and I shared with them, and that’s kind of what’s important, right? As I mentioned, communication is a human’s superpower. The reason our species has succeeded is because we can communicate in a way that’s different from every other species. We can share ideas and emotions, we can pass on knowledge, and when we share those things, it’s important that we know that the other person has heard us and has received that information and that knowledge and our brains have evolved to love that feeling. We love to feel the feeling of connection.
You know, just think about how you feel after a great conversation. You feel fantastic, and that’s actually a product of evolution.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, or the, or the opposite of that, which is, if you feel disconnected from somebody, if you feel deeply misunderstood in an interaction, how utterly awful that is.
Charles Duhigg:
It can be really frustrating and really painful.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, a primal and almost primal fear seems to be there.
Well, in a situation where you want to be able to connect, for a whole series of reasons, someone doesn’t want to share; they don’t feel like this is the time or place to do it. How can you still connect with somebody like that? It seems like some of the toughest communication challenges we have are with people who, for, let’s say, very good reasons, don’t want to be vulnerable, don’t want to open up, or don’t want to share. How can you be a super communicator in that situation?
Charles Duhigg:
Well, and this happens a lot in conflict, right? When we’re having a conversation with someone that we’re fighting with or when we’re talking about a topic where we disagree with each other, it’s very typical, and the number one thing is to prove to each other that we’re listening. And there’s actually a technique for this, known as looping for understanding. And what looping for understanding says is to do three things: First, to ask a question. Second, to repeat back in your own words which you just heard the person say. And thirdly, to ask if you got it right.
And the reason why this is powerful is because it shows the other person you genuinely are listening to them. You genuinely want to understand what they’re saying to you.
So, for instance, if we’re talking about gun rights, there’s a chapter in the book about bringing together a group of gun activists who are fighting to control guns and others who believe that everyone should own guns. And by looping for understanding, they didn’t convince each other to change their minds, but they understood each other.
Again, this gets back to the matching principle that when I feel like you are listening to me, and you feel like I’m listening to you and we’re trying to match each other, that’s what allows vulnerability to come out. Now. Vulnerability doesn’t mean you can demand to ask me something, and I have to answer it. Vulnerability means, instead, creating space for people to share what they want to share with each other.
Greg McKeown:
What are the best questions that you came across in your research, like the golden questions, to be able to, you know, unlock another person?
Charles Duhigg:
So, again, deep questions. There are no golden questions, right? There’s no one question that kind of like does everything, just as there’s no one study that sort of explains everything, but, in general, questions that ask people about their values and their beliefs and their experiences that draw them out. Those are questions that tell me how to see this other person, how they see themselves, what’s important to them, and that can be a question about anything I can ask you. You know, let me ask you, where are you right now?
Greg McKeown:
I’m at home with my family.
Charles Duhigg:
Okay, okay, and do you have kids?
Greg McKeown:
Four children.
Charles Duhigg:
Four children, that’s a lot of children. Are you glad you had kids?
Greg McKeown:
I’m glad I have kids.
Charles Duhigg:
Yeah, yeah, like, why? What is it about kids that you find? I mean, because I have kids, and it’s hard to have kids, right? I only have two, but, like you, obviously really enjoy it. What do you, what do you love about being a father?
Greg McKeown:
You know, the idea of what do I like about it doesn’t quite capture it. You know it’s not, as everybody knows who has children; it’s not like you have children in the same way as you go; let’s go on a vacation because it’s fun to go on a vacation, right? It’s got nothing to do with liking or having fun. It’s way deeper than that, right? It’s like the point of it all, the heartbeat, of meaning and purpose. It’s to develop these little people to become who they can become and to build relationships with safe attachment, deeply connected emotionally, emotionally responsive so that you can grow Into an intergenerational family.
Charles Duhigg:
So think about how much you just told me, right? You told me. You told me what’s important to you that connections with other people are important to you, forming relationships that are safe and secure, something that you value enormously. That guiding your children into the world is something that you probably feel a sense of accomplishment from. You also told me that deciding to have kids wasn’t like a cavalier decision. It wasn’t necessarily even an easy decision or something that you’ve enjoyed every day of. You’ve told me so much about who you are, and the golden question I asked, the magical question, was just like, why did you decide to have kids? Like, do you like being a dad? Like that doesn’t seem like a magical question, but any question can be a magical question if it’s a question that asks the other person to talk about their values, and their beliefs, and their experiences.
Greg McKeown:
Any question can be a magical question if it asks people to talk about their values and their experiences. Yeah, I mean, the question you asked was a why question. That seems to be a clue into something like a golden question. It’s a why. It’s something beyond the surface. I mean, something that I’m with you on here is that asking even a single follow-up question, actually asking a single question that you’re genuinely interested in, I think is above something like above average. Yeah, you know, like if you ask somebody, “Well, how are you?”
I mean, that’s it. Nobody means the question, at least, to be frank, in the US. Nobody means the question. So you’re supposed to just say, fine, good, and how are you? Yes, good, fine, and move on. It’s a little less like that in England, where I grew up. But here, if I add to the question of I say, “Well, how are you really?”
It’s a completely different exchange that takes place. Yeah, you get beyond people starting to go, oh, you really want to know, oh, you’re really interested in it. So, it does seem to me that asking just even a couple of extra questions starts to change the nature of the value.
Charles Duhigg:
Or if you ask someone how are you and they say I’m great, and you say what’s the best thing that happened in the past week, that’s an opportunity, that’s an invitation for them to tell you about, about what they’ve been doing and why it’s important to them.
Greg McKeown:
What is, for you, the hardest part of the skills and approach that you write in this book? What is the least comfortable part of it for you?
Charles Duhigg:
I think this is true for me and for many people, which is understanding that the goal of a conversation, the goal of communication, is not to persuade the other person, it’s not to win an argument, it’s not to, it’s not even to represent yourself well; the goal of a conversation is to understand what the other person is trying to tell you and to share in a way that they can understand you. Right?
If I have a conversation and we disagree about something and we both walk away still disagreeing about it, which is likely right, I’m not going to change your mind. You’re not going to change my mind on questions like abortion or politics with just one conversation. But if I understand where you’re coming from, why you believe what you believe, and I believe that you understand me, then that conversation has been a success. And that’s hard because it often means that when we’re talking to someone who we’re very different from or someone who we disagree with, our instinct is to try and persuade them, right? To say like, “Look, if you just see enough evidence, you’ll agree with me. Or if you just listen to me, if you just listen to me, you’ll hear what I’m saying.”
But the goal of a conversation is not to be right. The goal of a conversation is to understand what the other person is saying.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, there’s a huge difference between trying to be right versus trying to get it right. Yeah, it seems to be a big shift in the subject matter.
There’s something that I thought was particularly interesting. It’s pages 166 and 167. It’s the section in which you’re talking about social identities and how our social identities shape our worlds. There’s a great graphic here, which I try and describe it for those that haven’t got the book in front of them yet. There’s a circle of me and then the sister, employee, student, and volunteer. So it’s a very simple network, let’s say. And then there’s a second image, which is the same idea, but instead of it being just four tiny data points, there’s something like 20 different data points. So, the network is much more complex. Can you explain a little more about what’s behind that graphic?
Charles Duhigg:
Yeah, and so it’s not so much a network as it is identities that are important to me. Right, one of the things that happens in a social conversation that makes it really hard is that oftentimes, we tend to focus on just one identity. Right, you’re the capitalist, and I’m the underclass, you’re black, and I’m white, you’re a man, and I’m a woman, and what happens is that when we collapse everything down to these very binary identities, to very simple identities, it can be very hard to find common ground, to find a way to connect with each other. But the truth of the matter is every single person contains dozens of identities. Right, I might be a white man, but I’m also a father, and I’m a journalist, and I live in California, and I love to surf, and I like to cook, and like sometimes I cry at conferences.
I have all these different identities that are important to me, and if we can bring all those identities into the conversation, we will have a much richer discussion. We will be able to hear each other much better because, instead of just listening to one identity, we’re going to be seeing the entire person, and so what’s really important is to remind people of their many identities in a conversation, particularly a social conversation. So when I’m talking to you about, you know, police violence, I might say, “Look, I’m wondering, as a lawyer, you might feel one way about police violence, but as the father, as a black man who’s the father of sons, you might feel another way about police violence. Like, tell me how you think about that. Like, where do you come out on this question?”
And what I’ve done is I’ve just acknowledged these two distinct identities and said, I see you, I see that you’re not just one thing, and that introduces an element of complexity into the conversation, that makes it more real and authentic and meaningful.
Greg McKeown:
At the time of this recording, it’s just past Martin Luther King Day, and it seems like what you just described is something like part of that. You know, I have a vision speech given in Washington DC at the Capitol, that we will see people not by the color of their skins but the content of their character. What, in a sense, I think you’re saying is try to communicate in a way that acknowledges and even deliberately taps into the complexity, the kaleidoscopic version of a person, instead of seeing them through a single lens.
Charles Duhigg:
That’s exactly right. Yeah, and Dr King, you’re exactly right. In his I Have a Dream speech, dr King talks explicitly about this, about the need to see each other not as just black and white but to see each other as complicated, complex, full people, because in that humanity, we can find a way to live with each other and to prosper together and to love each other.
Greg McKeown:
So, let me ask you a question that’s just popping into my mind right now. I’m not trying to make a political point in asking this question. Is it your sense that what would be called now sort of a wokest agenda has made us see more complexity and kaleidoscopic view of people, or do you think it has dumbed down the conversation unintentionally?
Charles Duhigg:
I don’t know what a wokest agenda is, to be honest with you, and I think this is part of how communication can go awry, right? If we use words or phrases that mean different things to us, then we think we’re talking about the same thing, but we’re not, and so is there a particular instance that you’re thinking of?
Greg McKeown:
Well, it’s hard to. It’s hard not to think about the rise of anti-Semitism since July 7th. It’s hard not to think about that right now and these sort of bombastic statements that have been made, and very publicly made, for example, coming out of Harvard, where, whatever the number of groups were that came out and made these group statements you know what I mean.
Charles Duhigg:
Yeah, but I think what you’re talking about there is you’re not talking about conversations, right? And it’s important to acknowledge that sometimes we don’t have conversations, and we don’t want to have conversations.
If I feel strongly about a political issue, I might not want to have a conversation with someone about it, but when we do want to have conversations, when we think that it’s important for us to understand each other and perhaps try and come to a consensus or make a decision together, as we do in a democracy then entering that conversation with the goal of trying to understand what the other person is saying, rather than viewing it as something you’ve already decided is right or wrong, or bombastic or not bombastic, if you really want to have a conversation, in the book and in the literature, this is called a learning conversation, where my goal is to learn how you see the world. That means that I come into it saying I’m not going to try and convince you that you know one side or the other is right. I’m going to understand why this is so important to you, and I think what you’re seeing on campus is a lot of people not having conversations, where one side is shouting, and the other side is shouting, and sometimes that’s appropriate.
Greg McKeown:
But why do you think that’s happening in the way it’s happening, Like on this particular issue? You asked me an example. Why do you think it’s happening more now than it did, let’s say, 10 years ago?
Charles Duhigg:
I don’t know that it is happening now more than it did 10 years ago, right? I mean, 10 years ago, we were leading up to the end of the Obama years and the beginning of the Trump administration. I think it was happening a lot 10 years ago. I think 20 years ago, it was happening, right? We’ve seen polarization be a trend for decades.
I think that the key is whether can we inspire people to want to speak to each other. You know, that’s ultimately what Reverend King was talking about is he was talking about coming together and having a conversation where we can recognize each other’s humanity. That does not mean we agree with each other. It does not mean that I agree with you about Israel, and you agree with me about Gaza. It does not mean that I agree with you about race relations and you agree with me about police, but it means that we define success not as agreement but as understanding.
And I don’t know. I mean, obviously, there are people who are saying things on campuses that are bombastic. I don’t know that that’s the mainstream. I think there are a lot of people who want to have conversations about this. I hear from people who want to have conversations about this, and the cameras tend to train on the loudest voices and the most strident arguers. But if you go into this classroom, my wife is a professor. If you go into those classrooms, what you find are a bunch of students who say, “I’d never thought about Israel in Palestine before. Like, I don’t understand what’s going on. Will someone explain to me like why this is in the news all the time?”
Now, what they want is they want to understand, and providing them with understanding and understanding how they see the world in return is really powerful.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, no kidding. Maybe a second attempt at this, in a way, this graphic that I’m describing here, that isn’t it an attempt at pushing as past group identity, where we’re saying let’s not judge people by a bold single group first, instead, recognize, my goodness, everybody is a multiplicity of many, many different things that give them their unique identity. Isn’t that the very point you’re making?
Charles Duhigg:
Yeah, that’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. And that doesn’t mean we ignore those identities for those groups, right? It’s not fair. If someone is a black man living in America, it’s not fair to say to them I’m just going to; I’m going to, I’m going to ignore that you’re black because being black might be very important to their experiences; it might be very important to how they see themselves. But it’s about saying I’m not just going to see you as just a black man. I’m going to see you as a black man and a father and a coworker and a thought leader who I turned to when I needed advice on something, and a pastor in the church and someone who helps coach Little League. You have so many different identities that one of them cannot capture who you are, and it’s in the totality that we will find a way to communicate with each other.?
Greg McKeown:
Well, what is your highest aspiration for what this book could do? Like, give me your greatest, grandest hope.
Charles Duhigg:
Well, what I’m hoping is that is, you know, there’s a basic insight here, which is that anyone can learn to be a supercommunicator.
Like nobody’s born a great communicator. Nobody. It doesn’t have anything to do with your personality type or whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert. What matters is, do you just learn a set of skills? In the same way, anyone can learn to read; anyone can learn to be a great communicator, to be a supercommunicator. And what I’m hoping is that people will read this book and they’ll see an opportunity in their own lives to connect better with the people who are most important to them, to have conversations with meaningful conversations with their co-workers, with their families, with their partners, with their kids, with their friends, that allow them to see each other more clearly and to feel seen in return because nothing feels better right Then, having a conversation with someone that you love or someone you admire and respect, and feeling like you understood what they were trying to tell you and they heard you, they listened to you. The key to that is just a set of skills that anyone can learn.
Greg McKeown:
Charles Duhigg, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Thank you for your new book, Supercommunicators, but also for the tremendous contribution that you’ve made through other books, through your journalism, and beyond. Thank you.
Charles Duhigg:
Thanks for having me on.
Greg McKeown:
If you haven’t already signed up for the new and completely free Less, but Better course. This is your invitation to do it. You go to gregmckeown.com, and right there on the homepage. In 10 seconds, you can sign up. It’s a 30-day class. It’s designed to take the ideas from Essentialism and Effortless and help you know where to start.
Well, there it is. There is the wrap. What is one thing that stood out to you in today’s conversation with Mr Duhigg, and what is one thing that you can do differently, immediately, today, to be able to start putting this into action? And who is somebody that you can share this conversation with so that the conversation continues now that this podcast episode has come to an end?
Thank you really. Thank you for listening, and I’ll see you next time.
