Supercommunicators, a Conversation with Author Charles Duhigg

Tips on unlocking connection through conversation

Many people know Pulitzer Prize-winner journalist Charles Duhigg from his writing at The New York Times and The New Yorker and his previous bestsellers, including The Power of Habit. He’s just out with a new gem, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection.

I had the incredible good fortune to discuss this new book with Charles, covering topics like the differences and similarities in communication skills of journalists and therapists, what separates so-so communicators from supercommunicators, interview skills learned from Michael Lewis, Duhigg’s own communication glitches with his wife, and lots more.

I am absolutely taken with Charles’ wisdom and hope you will enjoy this edited and condensed (for clarity and ease of reading) version of our conversation! If you do, I recommend checking out the book for a much deeper dive and wider exploration of skills for connecting through conversation. (Paid subscribers can enter a March giveaway for a chance to win a copy of this book.)

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Yael Schonbrun: I’m so excited to chat with you today. As a clinical psychologist and relationship specialist, I've long thought that journalists have an edge on communication over therapists. So, I love that as a journalist, you wrote a communication book!

Charles Duhigg: That's interesting because one of the reasons I wrote this book is that I have a friend who's a therapist and he listens really, really well. And I was like, ‘I want to be able to listen like him.’ So, I came to it as being impressed by therapists.

Yael Schonbrun: Well, when I listen to interviews with talented journalists, I always think they ask the best questions. Maybe you're interested in the skill of listening, and I'm interested in the skill of question asking. But the skills go together, right?

Charles Duhigg: Actually, I think they're the same thing. If you ask the right question and don't listen to the answer, it's as if you didn't ask the question at all. And being able to listen closely is dependent on asking the right question.

University of Chicago psychologist, Nick Epley, puts it so well, that if you're talking about the right things, listening is not hard. Listening is hard when you're talking about boring things. Nobody ever has to listen closely to a joke. You don't have to remind yourself in a joke or an exciting movie to listen closely. Asking questions is a huge part of that.

Yael Schonbrun: That's so true. And yet, it can be hard to know where to go next with questions. One of my theories is that journalists think in a story format, which I think can be helpful in guiding you to know where to go next.

Charles Duhigg: I think that's exactly right. But there is also a distinction between an interview and a conversation that’s important. When I'm doing my work as a journalist, much of what I'm doing is interviewing. And when I'm bringing myself into the conversation, it's really only to facilitate the other person. Because I'm really there to learn from them. Whereas if I'm having a conversation, there's much more back and forth, right? Like, you might tell a story and then I'll tell a story and we would hopefully have somewhat equal time and speaking. But in an interview, optimally, I'm talking for only 15% of the time.

And I'll tell you my approach to questions when it comes to interviews. So, when I first started actually at the Washington Post, I had just graduated from business school and it was really important to me (this is poor judgment on my part) to impress the people I would interview about how smart I was. It took me a long time to learn that that's actually the worst thing to do.

The way that I do interviews now is I'll read someone's scholarship and I'll set up a time to talk to them. I want to establish with them that I'm not an idiot so, I'll often say, I've read your scholarship and I thought this was interesting. But then I'll say some version of, ‘I actually don't know enough to know what question to ask you right now. What do you think is the most interesting impact or consequence of the work you've done?’

What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to kind of nudge them into saying something that surprises them as much as it surprises me, because then, it's going be something kind of new and interesting.

Yael Schonbrun: It breeds better listening because it's novel for you, too.

Charles Duhigg: That's part of it. You know, I once asked Michael Lewis what's one of the things that he finds he's able to do with his sources because he spends so much time with his sources. And he said that they always say to him, ‘You ask me the best questions. Ask me more questions. They’re just such interesting questions.’

When you ask someone an interesting question, a question they haven't heard before, haven't thought of a certain way, their answer is not only good because it's new and fresh, their answer is good because they're so into figuring out what the answer is. They haven't buffed off all the rough edges. They're thinking it through aloud. That's oftentimes where something interesting happens.

Yael Schonbrun: Interesting!

Okay, so let me get into the origin story of this book. You write that as a journalist, you communicate for a living. And yet there were these pockets, specifically in your managerial role and in your marriage, where communication wasn't going as smoothly as you thought.

Charles Duhigg: Yeah, and it totally caught me off guard. I mean, to be honest, I think all of us are accustomed to having like some miscommunications with our spouse. But it felt this like plague I could not get rid of. And then at work, when they made me a manager, I was so arrogant about it. Like, ‘I'm gonna be great at this.’ I have an MBA from Harvard; I know what I'm doing.’ And the fact that I was so bad at it just caught me completely off guard.

This gets to one of the distinguishing characteristics of supercommunicators: they think just a little bit more about communication and they show people that they want to connect with them. The source of my arrogance was honestly also the source of my downfall, which is I just wasn't thinking about communication. I just assumed that I'd be able to do it well. If I had just stopped and said, ‘Even if I think I'm gonna be good at this, let's think through how to do it.’ I think it would have made a huge difference.

Yael Schonbrun: Overconfidence is toxic for communication, isn’t it? And yet it's just a part of how our brain is wired. We think we already know how the conversation is going to go, we assume we both have the same communication goal. But, as studies show, overconfidence is inherent, especially in our close relationships.

Charles Duhigg: Oh, absolutely. In fact, someone told me that at one point in the CIA, one of the ways that they would test who were the best communicators and who would do really well at recruiting overseas assets among existing officers or people who are already in the CIA doing field work was to ask them to evaluate their own communication. Like on a scale of one to 10, how good a communicator are you? Anyone who said eight and above they knew was going to be a terrible communicator. The people who were the best communicators said, ‘Well, on a good day, I'm 7 and on a bad day I'm 6.’

The great communicators are thinking about it more.

Yael Schonbrun: Coming back to psychologist Nick Epley’s work, his closeness communication bias study just blows my mind (discussed several weeks ago in Relational Riffs, this bias is an overconfidence that we understand people who we are in close relationships with). It comes up often in couples therapy because people think that they know exactly what their partner thinks. But it's the people who are more likely to check it out that actually get the more accurate information.

Charles Duhigg: Totally. Those who engage in perspective-getting rather than the perspective-taking.

My wife is a wonderful communicator and a super communicator and she does a really good job when we're in a conversation where I'm not listening of very pleasantly reminding me that I don't know what she's thinking. That's a real talent to, in an unoffensive way, say, ‘I think you might be making an assumption that might not be true.’ When we question the assumptions, it saves so much grief.

Yael Schonbrun: Yeah, that is a skillful way to do it because it doesn't feel like an attack. It's more a questioning of this assumption as opposed to a questioning of you, as a partner.

Charles Duhigg: And I think it's something we try and attack together, right? Now we're on the same side trying to figure out if this assumption is true.

Yael Schonbrun: Yes!

One of the things that people disagree on while assuming they are agreeing is what kind of a conversation they're having. A central thesis of your book that runs throughout is the value in setting clear communication goals with a conversation partner. This comes up often in couples therapy—that if one person wants to have a conversation to deepen understanding and the other wants to problem-solve, it creates misunderstanding and conflict.

Charles Duhigg: Is it because one person wants to try and solve the problem and the other person wants to talk about the problem?

Yael Schonbrun: Yes, exactly. Another common issue is the tendency to drop into problem-solving very quickly. If you go into problem solving too quickly and you haven't diagnosed what is the problem, you're sometimes either solving different parts of the problem, or one person thinks there's a problem and the other doesn’t. You're not on the same page in what it is that you're trying to do with the problem.

Charles Duhigg: Are you familiar with Sheila Heen’s work? Her book, Difficult Conversations, is one of the best communication books out there. And, and the way she puts it, which I think corresponds to what you were just saying, is she talks about the stories inside people's heads. She basically says, whenever we sit down, particularly in a difficult conversation, we think we have an idea of what the story is in the other person's head. It's this assumption, right?

But until we actually vocalize the stories and get aligned, problem-solving is pointless.

Yael Schonbrun: Right! So, how do you articulate why distinguishing between conversation goals is so very important for people having communication?

Charles Duhigg: There's a couple of reasons. The first one is neurological. We know that when we're connecting with someone, we're becoming neurally entrained. Our brains are literally becoming alike.

And these major types of conversations use different parts of the brain. If I'm in an emotional mindset and I'm having an emotional conversation and my amygdala is firing and inner core structures of the brain are active. But if you're in a practical mindset and you're trying to solve the problem, you're using your prefrontal cortex. It's unlikely that we're going to become neurally entrained because we're literally using different parts of our brains.

But the second thing is that it's very difficult to prove to someone that we're listening when we're having different kinds of conversations. If I say, ‘You made me feel sad,’ then you say, ‘Okay, so let's go wherever you want on vacation rather than where I want to go on vacation.’ Even if you are listening to me, it's very hard for me to believe that you're listening to me.

The demonstration of listening and demonstration of wanting to connect is critical to actually making the connection. And if we're having different kinds of conversations, it's hard to signal that I want to connect with you.

Yael Schonbrun: Yeah. An even more subtle point from your book is that we get overconfident that our communication partner will be able to understand what it is that we're hoping to get out of the conversation. Being able to name it just makes it so much easier for everybody to get on the same page.

Charles Duhigg: Totally. In fact, there was one guy in Texas, and I can't even remember his name now because he's not in the book, who studies goal declaration and conversation. I asked him, ‘How has doing this work impacted you?’ And he said, ‘I actually start every conversation by declaring a goal now.’ It's so powerful.

But just because I've said a goal doesn't mean that we have to have that kind of conversation. Oftentimes, I find out that my goal is different as the conversation unfolds. But just lowering the bar to say, ‘Look, I'd really like to talk to you about this one thing. And I'm hoping that we can resolve it and walk away friends.’ Saying that just removes so much anxiety.

Yael Schonbrun: It gets you both rowing in the same direction.

Charles Duhigg: Exactly.

Yael Schonbrun: Given that the origin story of the book is difficulty that you had in the workspace communication and with your wife, how has learning about conversation matching changed how you communicate?

Charles Duhigg: There's two things. One is that I now frequently ask what kind of conversation we're in. I'll say, ‘Look, I understand you had a tough day. Do you want me to help brainstorm solutions? Or do you just need to get this off your chest and tell me how you're feeling?’

You would think that people would get offended by asking that, but actually everyone loves being asked that because oftentimes we haven't stopped ourself to figure out what we actually want. And when someone asks you, ‘what do you want,’ it's kind of nice, right? It shows that they care about what you want.

And the second is asking deep questions, particularly with my kids. Do you have kids?

Yael Schonbrun: Yeah, I have three kids.

Charles Duhigg: How old are your kids?

Yael Schonbrun: They are 7, 11, and 13.

Charles Duhigg: My kids are 12 and 15 and you're probably entering the same zone where it's like, ‘What did you do today?’ ‘Nothing.’ ‘What'd you learn in school?’ ‘Nothing.’ ‘Was it a fun day?’ ‘No.’

With my younger son, I’ve started saying things like, ‘Hey, so you hung out with Jasper after school. I'm just wondering, what do you admire about Jasper? Why do you like to hang out with him? What's cool about him?’ And, it's as if I unlocked this chest. So, asking deep questions, particularly when it's not obvious that you should ask deep questions, has been really powerful.

And then finally, just trying to show people that I'm listening. Repeating back what they're saying, asking follow up questions.

Yael Schonbrun: Thank you so much. It was such an incredible gift to get a chance to access your wisdom, I really appreciate your time.

What communication insights, ideas ,or strategies from Duhigg stick out as being particularly interesting or helpful to you? Which ones seem most challenging?

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If you enjoyed this conversation about having conversations, check out the book in its entirety (link below).