How to Connect With Anyone | Charles Duhigg  🔗 **Source:** [How to Connect With Anyone | Charles Duhigg](https://share.snipd.com/episode/04b4a0d9-2e7c-41d8-a556-359ba61bab60) ## Highlights - **Three Types Of Conversations Determine Connection** - Conversations are actually three overlapping types: practical (solve problems), emotional (share feelings), and social (signal relationships). - Charles Duhigg explains mismatch causes miscommunication: his emotional complaint met his wife's practical advice, so they talked past each other. Transcript: Charles Duhigg What they said is, like, look, most of us, when we think about a discussion, we think it's like one thing, right? It's about one topic. And that's not right at all. Actually, every conversation is usually three different kinds of conversations. And they're happening in sequence and they're mixed together. And so there's usually like a practical conversation, right? A conversation about like, how do we solve this problem? Which is what my wife was saying. And then there's an emotional conversation, a conversation where the goal is not to solve a problem. It's just to learn how each other feels, to express our emotions. So that's, that's the conversation I was having. I was upset. And then there's also a social conversation, which is a conversation about, you know, how we relate to other people and how other people see us. And, and all three of these conversations are equally legitimate conversations. But the, the thing that happens, what's known in psychology is the matching principle is that if two people are having different kinds of conversations at the same time, then they miscommunicate. They fail to hear each other. It's like two ships passing in the night. So when I would come in and I was having an emotional conversation and my wife would respond with a practical conversation and all these, this good advice, the reason why I couldn't hear What she was saying was because we were literally speaking different kinds of languages. We were using different parts of our brains. And so one of the things that we know is that in order to really connect with each other, we have to be able to recognize, A, what kind of conversation is happening right now. And B, we have to learn how to invite each other to have the same kind of conversation at the same time. Because if I say something emotional and my wife responds with an emotional conversation, and then she says something practical, then I'm ready to come back and get into a practical Mindset. ([Time 0:08:17](https://share.snipd.com/snip/81ff4e97-2ace-4b3d-b0b8-a80423b58ee7)) - **How A CIA Recruiter Won Trust By Matching Tone** - Charles Duhigg recounts CIA recruiter Jim Lawler who built trust by matching conversational tone and vulnerability with prospects. - Lawler mirrored a buyer's emotional disclosures, later earning one of the firm's biggest orders and replicating that tactic with overseas assets. Transcript: Charles Duhigg And he was terrible at it when he started, like he was in his thirties, he sent to Europe and he's just, he literally like is incompetent at trying to have conversations with people. And what he discovered was that like, well, he actually told me the story. That's kind of a great story, which is that before he had joined the CIA, he'd been working for his dad in sales and he was like a terrible salesman. His dad had this, they sold metal Joyce and stuff in West Texas. He was just a terrible salesman. And so he would go to places and then try and make his pitch and businesses would just brush him off. And then he went to see this one woman who's a, her son was in the office with her. And she was on the phone when Lawler got there and he was waiting for her to finish. And then, you know, she finishes her phone call and he kind of makes his pitch and she's like, look, I'm not interested in buying any of your Joyce. But then she just starts talking about her life and she starts talking about like how hard it is to be a mom and a businesswoman. And she always feels like she's like, you know, letting someone down. And Lawler, who's like, you know, at this point, like 26, he has no idea what to say right he's like the deer with like like deer in the headlights and he's like uh okay because he doesn't Have kids he doesn't know what to do with some some you know adult suddenly unloading about like their life so he just does the same thing he like starts talking about how like he's not Getting along with his brother because his brother's a better salesman than he is and it's caused all this tension and lawler feels really bad about himself. And, and they just connect because they're having the same kind of conversation, right? Inadvertently, he had matched the kind of conversation that she is having. He had matched her emotionally. She had shown vulnerability and he had reciprocated that vulnerability, which is an important, an important part of how conversation works. And, and then he like says, like, do you want, do you want to buy any steel? And she's like, no, I still don't want any steel. But two weeks later, she calls and she places one of the biggest orders in the company's history. ([Time 0:10:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/490930a0-5a16-42bd-a346-2627c2b1edf5)) - **Ask If They Want To Be Heard Hugged Or Helped** - Ask which conversation someone wants: be heard, hugged, or helped, and match that desire before changing gears. - Use simple prompts (Do you want me to listen, comfort, or help solve?) to avoid misaligned responses. Transcript: Charles Duhigg Or do you want to try and solve this? And sometimes, sometimes that's enough for me to be like, actually, I need you to listen until now. And now that you've asked that question, I'm ready to start solving it. One way that, um, another that people use sometimes is, do you want to be heard, hugged, or helped? They actually use this a lot in schools. Like when a kid is upset, the teacher says to them, do you want to be heard, hugged, or helped? Right? And heard means you're having an emotional conversation. Like, you just need me to hear what you're saying. Hugged is kind of a social thing, right? Like, you need to know that I, another person, care about you and that I'm comforting you. And helped is a practical conversation. ([Time 0:14:59](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bfe8fee6-dadd-4067-bd3a-2076c5970d3d)) - **Use Deep Questions To Invite Vulnerability** - Ask deep, feeling-oriented follow-ups like Tell me more or What do you love about your job to elicit vulnerability. - Duhigg cites Nick Epley's therapy example where questions about feelings led the client to self-discover causes of behavior. Transcript: Charles Duhigg And deep questions are actually really, really interesting. There's a guy named Nick Epley, who's a psychologist. And one of the things I love about Nick is he has studied conversation and questions most of his career. And he comes to it pretty honestly. When he was in high school, he, he was pulled over twice for, for driving while intoxicated. And he was like the, you know, the quarterback of the football team and Mr. Popular on campus. And the second time he's pulled over, his parents are super freaked out. And they're like, look, man, there's a problem here. And he didn't hear them at all. They were like, tell us what's going on. Like, why are you feeling this way? Like, why do you feel like you need to drink and drive? Why are you being, why are you being a jackass? And he's like, you guys don't understand me. I hate you, et cetera. And so they're like, look, you got to go talk to a therapist. So they sent him to this therapist and the therapist, instead of lecturing him or interrogating him or anything like that just says, look, I just want you to tell me, why do you think this Happened? Like, what were you feeling right before you had that drink and got into that car? Not like I'm going to judge you for it. Just literally like, I'm just curious what you were feeling. And then Nick would answer that question and she would ask another question, a follow up and again and again. And eventually Nick started listening to himself and he realized what he was saying was, I drink because I feel uncomfortable. And then once I, then I have to get home and I don't have another option. Nick says, like, actually, like, now I understand why I'm doing this thing. Not because the therapist told him what he was doing, not even because she led him down like a garden path towards it. She just asked questions that asked him how he felt. And this is what we know about deep questions is that deep questions invite us to expose vulnerability, because they ask about something about our beliefs or values or experiences. And what's crazy is they don't have to seem that deep, right? Like if you meet someone and you ask them instead of what do you do for a living, you say to them, what do you love about your job? That's a deep question. You're inviting them to tell you something about how they see the world and what they enjoy about life and how they see meaning in their own work. ([Time 0:18:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/47e84948-7e6c-41f6-b230-c59cf2ddf7ac)) - **Use Looping For Understanding To Prevent Conflict** - Use looping for understanding: ask, paraphrase what you heard, then confirm you got it right. - Duhigg notes this simple three-step technique prevents conflict by proving you're listening and prompting reciprocity. Transcript: Charles Duhigg And in particular, there's this technique known as looping for understanding, which is, it just has three steps. It's like the simplest thing on earth. Ask someone a question, tell them what you just heard them say, and then ask them if you got it right. Right. So like somebody says, like, you know, I, I think that none of us should vote in the presidential election. Say like, you know, why do you think that way? And then repeat back to them in your own words, what they just said, and then say like, am I understanding you correctly? Did I get that right? That's how we operationalize this reciprocity, this, this reset, listening receptiveness. And it's very, very simple, right? It's stuff that we learned to do. Like when our parents told us to do when we were like five years old. And it turns out if you do this in a conversation, it transforms hard conversations. ([Time 0:35:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e9a95391-41bb-4bbb-b5db-8b8c4f14bbe5)) - **Connection Syncs Brains Through Neural Entrainment** - Successful communication creates neural entrainment: matched eye dilation, breath, heart rate and brain patterns between speakers. - Duhigg argues disrupting internal stories and repeating the other's words is how we re-entrain and truly connect. Transcript: Charles Duhigg So there's been these experiments again in the last decade that have shown that when you and I connect in a conversation as we are now, if we had the ability to measure all these things, What we would see is that our eyes are starting to dilate at the same rate. Our breath is starting to match each other, even though we're not aware of it, even though we're not in the same room, our heart rates are starting to match. If we could measure it, the electrical impulses on our skin are similar. And most importantly, and the reason why this is happening is because if we could get, see inside both of our brains, what we would say is our brains beginning to synchronize, right? That's what communication is. Communication is me having a thought, saying it, and you basically experiencing the same thought, understanding it. And this is known as neural entrainment in the psychological and neurological literature. And so the point that you just made, when we're having a conversation in conflict, we're not entrained, right? Because instead of hearing what you're saying, what I'm doing is I'm, I have a story inside my head. I have, I have a series of thoughts or brainwaves within my head and I'm investing in those ones instead of listening to what you're trying to tell me. And you're doing the same thing. And so the question is, how do we break through? If communication is about us becoming entrained about having the same thought at the same time, really clicking, right? That's why we call it clicking. How do we do that? The number one step is to disrupt that story that's inside our head, like to put us in a place where I can actually listen to you. And if I say to myself, instead of like my job being to respond to the attacks you're making, or my job being to defend myself, if my job is to just listen as closely as I can and try and repeat Back in my own words, what you just said, I'm going to entrain with you. And more importantly, I'm going to invite you to entrain with me. ([Time 0:40:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f8de2219-1fca-4868-a5e5-4136eb33f81c)) - **Online Conversation Lacks Old Subtle Cues So Over-Explain** - In-person cues and subtle signals make online conversation harder; online is a new language needing over-explaining. - Duhigg notes a guns-debate workshop succeeded face-to-face but turned hostile on Facebook within 45 minutes. Transcript: Charles Duhigg There's this group that wanted to try and figure out how to help people have conversations around conflict. And the conflict that they chose just kind of by chance was the guns debate. So they invited all these people who were pro-gun and all these people who were anti-gun to Washington, DC. And they sort of, at the Newseum, they met for three days and they trained them in communication methods. And even though these people basically were like enemies when they walked in, everyone walked away saying like, this was so meaningful. I learned so much about the other side. This was so great. And then to keep the conversation going, they move it online. They had a private Facebook page and like literally within 45 minutes, well, all these people who like walked away being like, you know, this is great. I love you. This is fantastic. Within 45 minutes, once they were online, they were calling each other like jackbooted Nazi thugs, right? And like, and like, you know, trying to own the libs. And, and, and so there was this interesting question, like, what happened? Why, why did this work so well in person? And then it fell apart once it went online. And what the researchers found figured out was that we have been talking to each other for roughly about two millennia, right? So we have worked out a whole series of cues and signals and ways of transmitting communication that are so subtle that we can't even notice them at this point that have to do with verbal Communication or in-personal communication. But, you know, a phone conversation is really rich, right? You can still get, you can get deep with someone on the phone. On the other hand, we have only been talking online since 1983. And so as a result, there's a bunch of like little things that like are still getting worked out about how to do this online. And as they're getting worked out, the problem is it's fine to work them out. But the problem is that when we don't say, oh, look, we're at the beginning of this, we got to, there's going to be mistakes. We, I need to over explain to someone what I'm thinking or feeling when I'm typing, as opposed to when I'm talking. When we don't realize that we're, that we need to overemphasize, that's when something bad happens. ([Time 0:48:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/604ef663-bacf-4100-87b4-fc291344df34)) - **Reveal Small Vulnerabilities To Create Audience Safety** - Expose small, genuine vulnerabilities as a speaker to invite audiences to connect and give you permission to lead. - Duhigg explains vulnerability can be simple (gratitude, modesty, a tentative joke) and still power one-to-many rapport. Transcript: Charles Duhigg So I think part of a big reason, and there's a lot of research that has looked at that. And the most consistent finding is that two things are happening that that speaker is doing, that the audience is giving the speaker permission to do. The first is that the speaker is inviting the person to connect with them, And the way that they do that is by exposing a vulnerability. Now, when, when I say exposing a vulnerability, most people think of that as like getting up and being like, you know, my father beat me when I was a child. That's not, you don't have to do that to expose a vulnerability. Sometimes exposing a vulnerability is getting up and just saying like, Hey, it is so great to be here. Thank you so much. I've been looking forward to this for a long time. Right? When I say that, I'm signaling to the audience, like, I really want to entertain you. I really want you to enjoy this. I hope that you enjoy this. And that is a vulnerability because it puts the power in the audience's hands to decide whether they think I'm doing a good job or not. And when I do that, I'm inviting them to connect with me. I'm inviting them to, to remember those times that they have given a speech and that they really wanted it to go well and that they tried hard. It's also why when I think I'm giving a speech and I assume this is true for you and for a number of people, the thing that makes it successful, like what you didn't say is you didn't say, I was so polished. I hit my lines so well. The timing was exactly right. That's why people connected with me. It's not about being polished. Jonathan Fields Yeah, I've never had that experience, by the way. Charles Duhigg It's about being genuine, right? It's about being real on that stage. It's about exposing something about yourself. ([Time 0:59:06](https://share.snipd.com/snip/045fdf71-fd81-4e6d-8a7f-ccb6d4b3166e)) - **Deep Conversations Are Central To A Good Life** - The Harvard happiness study shows life satisfaction hinges on depth of connections, not number of contacts. - Duhigg concludes that sustained, deep conversational bonds are central to a good life and enduring happiness. Transcript: Charles Duhigg And most people are familiar with this. It's the largest longitudinal study that's ever gone on to try and figure out why some people end up being happy as they get older and others don't and successful. And what's interesting about it is that the language that those researchers have used, because it's been a long time now, has changed quite a bit over time. They talk about connection now. They used to talk about love. They're like, the secret was love and they didn't mean romantic love. They meant the love between friends. But the thing that's been consistent is that if you look at why people are happy, they're happy because they have connections with other people and the connections that we have with Other people, it doesn't have to be a huge number of people. The number of people doesn't matter, but the depth of the connection does. And the way that we create deep connections is through conversation. On a walk. But the times that I remember most are the conversations that we've had. And that's probably true for all of us. So when I think of like what the good life is, what I think of the good life is for me, at least is having people around me, whom I love, who I'm having conversations with, where we can actually Connect with each other. And that gets harder and harder as we get older, right? Because we, we get inside our own heads and we, we start deciding that some people are worth talking to and others aren't, and that person's never going to change. And it doesn't matter what I say to that, to that guy is not going to listen to me. But if we try, if we understand how to have different kinds of conversations and to invite people to match us and to match them, then we can have those conversations that make us feel really Connected. ([Time 1:07:26](https://share.snipd.com/snip/25ae0dc9-a106-4608-b227-b0a4971e90cc))