 Nice to have you back on the show, Charles. It's been a while, but again, you have a new book coming out and this one is even more aligned with what we talk about on this show and this book is called Super Communicators. And I'm excited, well, AJ and I both are excited to dive in. So why don't you kick us off and let us know with all the books you've written, what was the genesis of this one? Well, you know, about a decade ago, I wrote this book, The Power of Habit, right? And it's about how we build habits in our lives and how we can improve our habits. And I started hearing from readers who were saying, I used what you wrote about and it's been revolutionary, but a lot of my life and a lot of my success is dependent on working with other people. And so my question is, how do I change their habits? Like how do I make them be better? Which of course is not really a question anyone can answer. And then I actually had this thing happen to my own life which is I fell into this pattern with my wife where I'd come home from work and it would be like a long day and I'd be complaining about my boss and she very reasonably would offer some advice. She'd say like, why don't you take them out to lunch and you can get to know each other better. And instead of being able to hear what she was saying, I would get even more upset. And I'd be like, you're supposed to have my back and you're supposed to be outraged on my behalf and then she would get upset that I was upset. And so I wanted to figure out like, what's going on here? If other people are so important to us and to our success and to our happiness, what is it about communication that sometimes gets in the way of really connecting with other folks? So this brings up a great point before we dive into the meat of the book. But I am curious, you've wrote these great books on all these topics that we benefit greatly of having a better understanding. So with each book, how has your habits or your daily routines changed with the research that you do for these books? Oh, pretty significantly. Like I actually, I mean, honestly, the reason I write the books is because I basically want an excuse to call experts and ask them for advice. And so every single time I write a book, it's because I can't figure out something for myself and I really wanna get better at it. And luckily there's people who are studying it, right? And if I just called and said, hey, will you be my personal therapist? They would say no. But if I say I'm writing a book, then they say, okay, now I'll talk to you. And it has been revolutionary. I mean, honestly, since writing Super Communicators, the way that I communicate has completely changed for the better. It's really gotten a lot, it's a lot easier to connect with people now. Yeah, you know, one of the things that really struck me about the book is how difficult it is to sort of pin down what a Super Communicator is. We've all kind of experienced it and felt it in other people and we could recognize it when we've left a conversation or we feel really connected to someone. So I'm curious, as you sat down to write the book and really think about Super Communicators, was there someone that came to mind for you or you're like, I know this person is a Super Communicator? No, it's absolutely. And I think actually there's someone for everyone. So let me ask you guys a question. If you were having a bad day, like you just, terrible day, you wanted to call someone who you just knew was gonna make you feel better. Like, does the person you had called, do they pop into your mind right away? Immediately. Yeah, who is it? I just spoke to him before this chat actually, his name's Alex. Okay, and John, is there someone like, who do you call when you're having a tough day? I don't, I usually just go straight to music and music is going to be what allows me to just lose myself, forget about things or feel like I'm listening to somebody else who understands me in that weird way. Like, I'm also a musician. So for me listening to music, there's a lot. And that's a form of super communication. And AJ's live with me. So he knows how I deal with it. So yeah, there's a lot going on. And it's, but again, it was the first thing that I thought about when you asked that question. Yeah, the first thing that popped into my mind. So AJ, for you, Alex, this guy Alex you call, Alex is a super communicator for you. And you're probably a super communicator back for him, right? And the reason you are is because you guys know how to listen to each other. You know how to prove that you're listening. You know how to ask the right questions. You know how to match each other. So if you're feeling down, he'll recognize that and acknowledge that or you guys can feel happy together. John, oftentimes we have the same experience with music and the conversation's different, right? Like I'm not necessarily talking to Pete Townsend or to Bono, but I'm definitely like in conversation with them even if they're not aware of it. And there are some people who can be consistent super communicators. So those people that I just mentioned, there are some people who like they are that person for everyone. They can connect with anyone. And what we've discovered about them is they aren't, this isn't something you're born with. Like they're not particularly charismatic. They aren't super outgoing and extroverts. It's just a set of skills that we can learn about how to communicate better. And when we do that, other people want to communicate with us more. They want to bring us into conversations. And that's really, really meaningful. And reading the book, this idea popped into my mind that I couldn't shake. And then of course, as I'm going through the book, I kept coming back to this idea. Now, when I was younger and YouTube was all the rage and I was doing a lot of searching on that. I liked to listen to lecturers and different ideas and stories. And I found myself gravitating to folks that I felt were eloquent speakers. So there's that. And you can understand that, how they're speaking is very fluent and it's nice. And you can lose yourself in it and feel like you're gaining a lot. But as I have gotten older, I found myself listening more so to people that I feel that have my background. Who may not be the more eloquent speaker, but the way that they communicate just makes me feel more comfortable speaking to them. Yeah. No, I think that's that. My guess is what's happening there is authenticity. So there's a couple of things that consistent super communicators do that we know is what makes them so successful. The first thing is they ask a lot of questions. They ask like 10 to 20 times as many questions as the average person. Another thing that they do is they try and figure out what kind of conversation is happening. And there's basically sort of three big buckets that conversations fall into and they try and match you and invite you to match them. But the other thing that they do is that they try and be authentic. And my guess is that when you're talking to folks who you think of them as it being similar to you, but my guess is that they're actually very different from you in a lot of ways, right? You're a musician and they're a lawyer or you live in Los Angeles and they live in New York. There's all types of ways that we could find differences but because they're authentic the same way that you're authentic, because they show you that they're trying to make a connection, you feel close to them. And this is the biggest and most important thing that super communicators do is they show you that they want to connect because oftentimes when we go into a conversation there's this anxiety, right? Like does this person want to talk to me? Is this boring? Like are they just wasting time until someone more important comes in? But when someone shows you that they want to connect with you then it's like suddenly the magic box opens and sometimes it's as simple as just laughing with someone to show them that we want to connect. And this is a key point for me because I think in a lot of our listeners and our clients fall into this trap and they want to improve their communication, they default to mimicry. Whether it's picking up what Johnny and I do or someone else that they view as a super communicator they just go, okay, I need to either mimic them or I need to mimic the person I'm in communication with losing that authenticity and it actually works against them completely. Like we feel disconnected from that person who is mimicking us but there is a matching. So you brought up matching a couple of times now there's a matching that is a key component of this and I'd love to break down the differences between mimicry and matching. And we should note that this mimicry is totally natural. In fact, we know that literally everyone does it. It's kind of programmed into our neurology. If I use an odd word in a conversation or if I have a certain grammatical structure it's much more likely you will say that same word in the conversation. And if I'm big and expansive it's likely that you'll kind of be big and expansive and that's okay. But you're right. There's a difference between mimicry and matching. So to explain one of the big discoveries that researchers have had in the last decade is that we tend to think of a conversation as being about one thing but actually most discussions are made up of different kinds of conversations and most of those fall into one of three buckets. There's practical discussions where we're talking about plans or solving problems. There's emotional conversations when I want to tell you how I feel and I don't want you to solve my feelings. I want you just to listen and empathize. And then there's social conversations which is about how we relate to each other and how our social identities influence how we hear and speak. And what researchers have found is that if you're not having the same kind of conversation at the same moment you're gonna have trouble connecting. And that's what's become known as the matching principle. You have to figure out what kind of conversation is occurring and then match each other. And that's what happened with my wife and I, right? I came home and I was having an emotional conversation. She was having a practical conversation and we just were like two ships passing in the night. Now you're right though that mimicry is not matching. Mimicry doesn't bring any of myself to a conversation. It's me simply imitating you. And when I'm matching it means I have to have the same kind of conversation you're having or I have to invite you to match me in return. And at the core of that is that authenticity that if you start talking about, you know that you gave up drinking and I sobriety has never been an issue for me and I say like, I know, I know what that's like. Like I used to really like jelly beans. That's not matching. That's either trying to steal the spotlight or it's trying to be a mimic. Matching is saying, tell me what sobriety means to you. And as you tell me something I'm gonna hear something in there that corresponds to my own life in a genuine authentic way and that's gonna let us connect. And that example right there evokes a lot of emotion in that question. So a lot of our audience members in technical backgrounds who come to take our programs they default to the problem solving data solution oriented conversation. They're immersed in it daily at work. It leads to compensation and promotion. And then they come to us and they go, well, I'm not picking up on these emotions. You say, I have to be more emotive. You say, I need emotional intelligence but I just wanna get to the solution. So what is the solution to finding that emotion? What is the solution to creating that connection? And what you just shared with us in that question does evoke a lot of emotions, right? What does sobriety mean to you? Absolutely. Well, that's gonna be filled with thoughts, beliefs, feelings about that exact state. And it's gonna invite me to either share those or if I'm in a practical mindset, not to. You're exactly right. And the reason why that question is effective is it's what's known as a deep question. You know, in the book, there's a story about the CIA recruiter who is like the worst CIA recruiter in history. He gets sent over to Europe as his first assignment. He can't recruit anyone. Like the people keep on telling him like I'm gonna report you so you get deported because like you gotta quit harassing me. And he's about to get fired and he's freaking out. And there's this woman that he's been befriending for like six months who works in the foreign ministry of her country in the Middle East. And he's been trying to recruit her and she just gets freaked out and she cries and runs away. And so they have one final dinner and he just gives up. He's just like, this isn't gonna happen. And he just decides to be authentic with her. He's like, look, I understand why you're disappointed about going home because I'm really disappointed in myself. Like I'm about to get fired from the only job I've ever loved. And they, and instead of trying to cheer her up or instead of trying to like convince her that this is the right thing to do, he just says something real. And that's when she can hear him and she agrees to become an asset and she becomes the best asset in the Middle East for the next 20 years. And the reason why is because he started asking her a certain kind of question, deep questions. And a deep question is something that asks about our values, our beliefs, our experiences. And they're really easy to ask. If you bump into someone and they say, what do you do for a living? I'm a lawyer. Oh yeah, what made you decide to go to law school? Like what's it like being a lawyer? What do you love about your job? Those are super easy questions to ask but they're all deep questions because they ask and invite the other person to tell you something real about themselves. And that's how a conversation starts. And with that, there is a level that we need to then match in that vulnerability. So if you ask just deep questions, one after the other, after the other. And I know Brene Brown has this jelly jar metaphor. If you're asking the other person to throw jelly beans into this jar and you're not responding with any vulnerability back, well, you're gonna actually break that trust. You're gonna break that opportunity for connection. And that's not a conversation. That's an interrogation, right? Nobody likes being interrogated for any reason. You're exactly right. So how do we do that? How do we match them instead of just asking questions? There's a couple of things. The first thing is to listen closely to what they're saying and get on the same wavelength with them. I had this experience recently where I was at a meeting and before the meeting started, we were just kind of chatting and I asked some guy, how was your weekend? And he said, oh, it was great. I went to my son's graduation. And it would have been really easy for me just to say, oh, congratulations, that's amazing. Okay, so let's get down to the agenda. But instead I just took a second and I was like, oh, you know, that must have felt amazing. What did it feel like to watch your kid walk across that stage? And he told me and then I said, I answered the same question I asked, which is a virtue of deep questions, is that we can answer them ourselves and it doesn't seem weird. I said, my kids are in middle school and high school and I think about them going to college and I'm so excited for them. But I'm also kind of worried because it means they're gonna leave home and I really like them. Right now we've both shared something about ourselves. It's not an interrogation, it's us sharing who we are and matching each other, matching each other in an emotional conversation about our pride and our children. And at that point, like, we're fast friends. We're gonna be able to hear what each other is trying to say. And a nuance there that I wanna pick up on for the audience is it doesn't mean that you're matching the exact emotion. So he might have been elated that his child is graduating and you have a sense of sadness that there's emptiness that's about to happen. But it's the fact that you were able to contextualize what that feeling is like for you. That's the matching that we're talking about. That's really, really well put. And you're right. When we talk about matching what we're talking about is is it a practical conversation, an emotional conversation, or a social conversation? I'm gonna meet you on that wavelength. I'm not gonna match everything about you. That's mimicry. But if you indicate to me that you're sort of an emotional, you're thinking about emotional things, like to ask and to share something emotional of myself, even if it's very different, that feels like we're connected. Yeah, it can be tricky when we again want the formula. We want the shortcut to the solution. And oftentimes we'll default to, oh, you said you were happy. Now I'm gonna share a time that I'm happy and look for those connections, which can actually be disconnecting if you guess the emotion wrong or you then change the subject completely to you. Or you steal the spotlight. It's even worse when someone says something sad and then you come in with your own, right? You know, it's a tough weekend because my aunt passed away. Oh, I totally know what it's like to have your aunt pass away. Seven years ago, my pet dog died and it was just really, really hard. That's not me trying to connect with you. That's me trying to steal the spotlight from you, right? And that doesn't feel good. But the way that I can connect, the way that I can match you is to ask a question and say like, oh, I'm really sorry to hear that. Like, what was she like as a person? Then I'm showing them that like, actually I want to have this conversation that they just introduced. I want to meet them where they are. And after a while, I can say like, you know, like she sounds like a really amazing person. My own dad passed away about six years ago and he was kind of amazing the same way. That's how we really get to know each other. And for our clients, they usually work in analytical fields as AJ was saying. So they're in their head a lot working things out. And so when it comes to connecting with people, we're already programmed to be able to do that. We're social creatures, but in order for that to activate, we have to work on our presence. And if you work in an analytical field, which you are very comfortable being in your head, you have to learn how to be present. But all of the keys to be able to make these connections, you have in you. But if you spend all of this time in your head, those muscles aren't being used. So I think it also scares some of our clients because the transformation that they're gonna be making into being better communicators is going into an uncomfortable place. Because they're unable to work through things in their mind in order for all of those, the matching and synchronization to happen. The good news is what you're really talking about is you're saying like we have this group of people who sometimes are their habits have gotten rusty around communication. And the nice thing is our brains are actually designed specifically to make communication habits and to make them easier. If you think about it, communication is Homo sapiens superpower. It is the reason our species has succeeded so well. That's the way we're able to form families and then villages and then nations. And as a result, our brain has evolved to be really, really good at communication. However, our brain evolved in a very different time, right? When we were on the planes. It was not a time when there was Twitter and there was Slack and there was emojis and there was that. So oftentimes we have forgotten how to listen to those instincts. And what super communicators do and what the book does is it says, look, here's a list of exercises you can do. And it's gonna reawaken those instincts. It's gonna reawaken those habits because once you get into the habit of asking deep questions, it's gonna feel very, very natural. Like you're gonna think back and be like, didn't I do this all the time? Like this is just how I am because our brain is designed to do that. Well, this is why I love it so much because with some simple tools, they're gonna see their communication skills skyrocket. And all they need is that guidance in order to use those tools to unlock that because it's there, it's inside of them. But you brought up an interesting point and this is the other thing that I was thinking about in reading the book that kept coming up, which is we're now finding ourselves going from a in real life to the virtual world and asynchronous communication and communication that is not guided on being present, right? We're now chatting with somebody who may be chatting with 500 people at the same time and thinking that there's an actual connection because they answered my chat, right? But at the same time with that, our communication in that virtual world is getting more and more prolonged. And what I'm seeing from earlier generations, I'm Gen X, so there is an AJ as a millennial and we're both seeing now that the Zoomers, of course, are coming up with their own issues in communication due to being in the virtual world prolonged. And of course, now I see all of the kids walking around with the goggles on and so we're gonna have communication issues where it's not only are we trying to match and synchronize with each other, there's also grammatically things are changing due to being walled off into a world with its own communication, its own slang. And signals are missing when we look at nonverbal communication and some of the subtleties that go along with listening. And in those worlds, it speeds up the process of communication where it evolves into its own thing. That's exactly right. And I saw this very dramatically. One of the chapters in the book is about this experiment where they brought in a bunch of gun rights enthusiasts and a bunch of gun control activists. And they taught them basically some techniques for face-to-face communication. Most importantly, this thing called looping for understanding to prove that you're listening to each other. And it was fantastic. People walked away saying like, I never thought I'd have a conversation like this with someone that I saw as an enemy. And then they set up a private Facebook group for them and everyone goes on the Facebook group to start chatting, continue the conversation. And within 45 minutes, they're calling each other jackbooted Nazis. It was like immediate, right? And so there's an interesting question, what's going on there? Like why, and I'll say I'm Gen X too and I love Gen X rules. Sorry, AJ, millennials are great too. I have kids who are Zoomers and so I see this with them. One of the things that's happening is that we tend to forget that different forms of communication have different rules. And it's particularly easy to forget that now. A favorite example of this is that about 100 years ago when telephones first became popular, there were all these studies saying no one will ever have a real conversation on the telephone because they can't see each other. And what was interesting is if you look at the transcripts of early telephone conversations, they were right. People would basically have these like stilted weird conversations. They didn't know how to do it. Now of course by the time you and I and AJ, by the time we were teenagers, we could talk for like seven hours a night on the phone. And it was like most meaningful conversations of our lives. That's because we learned the rules for phones are different from the rules for face to face. And in fact, even though you're not aware of it, when you're talking on the phone, you'll over enunciate your words. You'll put more emotion into your voice because you know that the other person can't see you. The thing is when we go online, the same thing happens but sometimes we forget to do it. Telephones have different rules than speaking. Email has different rules than telephones. Texts have different rules than emails. Sending like a snap with a bunch of emojis has a different rule than a text and a slack and an X and a Y and a Z or tweet. And oftentimes we're so busy, we're so overwhelmed that when we sit down to write that email, we forget to remind ourselves of what the rules for email are. And we say like, oh, I can hear the sarcasm inside my head. And if I was speaking, you could hear the sarcasm. But when I type it out, I forget that you can't hear that sarcasm. And so you read it as being serious and suddenly you're upset. And what we find that super communicators do, particularly with the online education or communication, is that they just take half a second to say to themselves, I'm sending a text instead of an email, how is a text different? And once we start doing that, it becomes very automatic. And then we become like our kids and we learn how to do it just intuitively. And that's the thing, this communication, we've now quadrupled the forms of communication just in this conversation we've talked about here, sending photos with emojis and vision pros. But with that, the speed also loses what we have from the in-person communication where you're sitting down to coffee with a friend. You're slowing down, you're taking in all of the signals, whereas Slack is fast, text a couple emojis, let's move on to the next thing, we're multitasking. Like I would never go meet a friend for coffee and have my laptop open and my Slack and my phone digging and checking my Apple Watch. So we're robbing ourselves of the ability to process all of the signals that are a big part of communication. And we hear from our clients, I wanna be a better listener, AJ or Johnny. And I laugh because it's like, well, we already know you're a great listener, you listened to the podcast and now you're here on our doorstep. Like you tell me you listen to the podcast over and over and take notes on what we're sharing and you tell me your favorite guests. So I know you're listening, you already have the skills to listen, but we're distracted, we're not paying attention in these key moments that super communicators slow down, recognize that those things get in the way of communication and become more present to be better listeners. And I think a really important aspect of that, I think that's really, really well put is recognizing for ourself the difference between a conversation and not a conversation. There are some times, if I'm on Slack, I probably don't wanna have a conversation. Sometimes I talk to my kids and I'm like, we need to have a conversation about cleaning your rooms. I don't actually want a conversation about like, I just want them to go clean their damn rooms, right? So what's important though, is that there are these times when we just wanna transmit information, we just wanna basically kind of have this like back and forth that's like sort of like side by side monologues. But there are times when we want to have a conversation and we have to remind ourselves that when I sit down at that meeting, it's not about me just transmitting information, it's about me getting to know this person and giving them space to get to know me. When I go to coffee with my friends, it's not about us getting caught up on every single thing in each other's life, it's about us having like a real conversation, even if it's just on one topic. And reminding ourselves before we go into a discussion, this is a conversation versus this is something where we need to exchange information, that's really powerful and that's something that super communicators do and it becomes a habit. Well, one point before we get into what you've learned in the research for this book is 30 years ago, maybe they're getting together with somebody for coffee would be more indiscriminate. It's like, oh, I need to get out of the house, we're gonna go out or let's meet up for some coffee. Where now it's you better, you have better earned my time for that coffee day. And perhaps the conversation is something that we need to have in person and not over Twitter or we have earned each other's trust enough where it's like, you know what, you're pretty cool. We should, we should hang out face to face and solidify this relationship. And it's really important that we do that. If you think about just even 50 years ago, most Americans, they belong to a church. They might belong to like a rotary club. They had like their bowling league. We saw people all the time and we talked to them. And now like I can sit in my house and basically not talk to anyone besides my family for like a week if I want to without any, without anyone noticing. But the problem is that when we are doing that when we're not investing in relationships we're robbing ourselves of something. The best example of this is this thing called the Harvard study of adult development which has been going on for a hundred years now. And they followed thousands of people around and trying to figure out what makes them healthy and successful and happy as they get older. You guys know the study. Yeah, we had Dr. Waldinger on. Oh, great, right. So yeah, so the big takeaway is there's really only one thing that matters which is your health, your happiness and your success at age 65 is entirely dependent on having at least a handful of close relationships at age 45. Which of course means you've had those relationships for longer than just the last year, right? And it's because connections with other people, you don't have to have a ton of them but you have to have people that you have a real connection with and you have to create time and space to nurture that connection. I have a friend, I've not seen this guy, he's one of my closest friends, I haven't seen him in three years. We probably talk on the phone like every five or six months. So it's not like we spend a lot of time but I make time for that phone call. I set aside two and a half hours to talk to him on the phone and we have a real conversation and I feel so connected to him. I know that he's got my back and I've got his. If you don't create that time to make a relationship, to make a connection, you're robbing yourself of something really, really valuable. And you mentioned this earlier, you are each other's super communicators. So what that Harvard study is saying is that find your other super communicator. Maybe you have a different style of communication and you bring up in the book the story behind the Big Bang Theory. And we look at this group of friends who is terrible on the emotional intelligence front but they communicate and they're each other super communicators around physics and science and how they see the world. So I think a lot of times we get a little too caught up in having everyone like us and being everyone's super communicator and not enough time and energy spent with doubling down on the people that we're close to being super communicators with that as Johnny said, have that same background, have that feeling that we wanna spend more time with them instead of chasing all the connections that social media tells us are important, collecting those numbers and likes and followers, et cetera. And there's another aspect to that as well. And this is something that we see from our clients time and time again, which is they become isolated and maybe the one super communicator that they do have in their wife is their significant other. However, there's still the dynamic of man and woman, husband and wife, head of household and a matric of the household. And that dynamic has to play out or the relationship begins to teeter and wane and dilute itself. So you're going to need that super communicator outside of that. So the relationship can remain intact and be strong as it needs to be for everything else that goes on. And AJ and I hear it all the time where people had gotten isolated, they hadn't done much since things had opened back up because they had gotten comfortable or maybe they're, well, yeah, they had just, they had gotten content in that lifestyle and then have recognized all of a sudden that their marriage is in trouble and it's been rocky where it never was in the past because there was those outlets. If your partner is also your shrink, you're in trouble, right? And that also indicates why we need different kinds of super communicators in our life. Like I need, I need, there's some things I've discussed with my wife that I don't want to discuss with anything else. But when I want to talk about politics, I call my friend Greg. When I want to talk about business, I call my friend Donan. When I want to talk about sports, I have like a thousand different people I could call, right? Depending on who's up and who's down in the leagues. But the point being that the reason why each of those relationships work is because we actually want to connect with each other. We show we want to connect with each other. And more importantly, we ask each other questions, we prove that we're listening and that's really, really important. You had mentioned before sort of this example of the experiment with these gun advocates and these gun control folks. And the thing that made the big difference face-to-face was this technique called looping for understanding. And it's built on this theory that we've been talking about fun conversations, but sometimes we have tough conversations, right? Sometimes we go in and we just know like, I'm not looking forward to this because I disagree with this person or I have to sit next to my uncle at Thanksgiving. And so we get anxious about it. And in those conversations, what happens is in our head and their head, there's this little suspicion that this other person isn't listening to me. They're just waiting their turn to speak, right? Whether we want it to there or not, it's there. So what we have to do is we have to overcome that. We have to prove that that's not right. And the way to do that is to looping for understanding has three steps. Number one, ask a question, preferably a deep question. Number two, repeat back in your own words what you just heard the person say to show them that you've been processing it. And step number three, and this is the one people usually forget, ask if you got it right. And when you do that, you prove to that other person, I am listening to you, but you also hack your own brain because sometimes we wanna listen and we just get two inside our heads. As Johnny just said, like you say something and I start like coming up with counterarguments in my head and suddenly like three minutes have passed and I didn't, I don't know what you, but if my assignment for this conversation is to be able to repeat back to you what you're saying, I'm hacking my own brain to pay close attention to you and to put those other voices out of the way. There's another interesting point to that as well with more of a question of sometimes I will ask people to define a word that they are using to make sure that we both understand that word on the same page. Due to being walled off in all these different communities, communities use words differently. And a better way of understanding people was if I hear one of those buzz words, like, hey, I know that you just used this word. I have a working definition or we use it in the house as well. I just wanna make sure that we're on the same page as we move further in this conversation. Can you let me know how you are using it? I'm sure they appreciate that so much, right? Because you're exactly right. We fall into these, the point of language is to communicate what we're really trying to say. So there is no right or wrong definition of a word. There's what the word means to me and can I get and hopefully it means the same thing to you. And think about some of the phrases like DEI or far right or MAGA, like those mean so many different things to so many different people. And if you just throw it into a conversation without sort of saying like, look, here's what I'm actually talking about. Cause once I usually say, here's what I'm actually talking about, usually we get aligned, usually we can connect. But if I throw in some catchphrase, then the person on the other side is thinking like, oh, like he's one of those people. Right, social identity becomes part of the conversation. And now we're juggling different social identities. And if we might be using language from a certain social identity that the other person doesn't fully understand or sees it in a different manner, well then we're actually having a disconnect that's gonna lead to distrust and not the whole point of communication which is trying to build and foster that connection. That's exactly right. Which doesn't mean we have to have the same social identities to connect. In fact, what we know is when we're having a social conversation, when we're talking about how we relate to society, how our backgrounds influence us, oftentimes the most important thing to do is to acknowledge our differences. But it's not to acknowledge just one difference. If I start a conversation, I say, well, you're black and I'm white. So we probably see policing differently. Then what I've done is I've shoved you into this stereotype and I've shoved myself into a stereotype. But on the other hand, what's true is that every single one of us has many identities, right? We contain a multitude of identities. And if I say to someone, look, I'm wondering, as a father, you probably feel strongly about policing, but I know you're also a lawyer and that probably gives you different perspective on it and you're a black man and that probably means you have different experiences with cops than I do. And I know that you mentioned that you had an uncle once removed, you got arrested once. Given all those different hats that you wear, how do you think about policing? At that point, what I've done is I've acknowledged all the differences between us. I've brought them on the table, but I've made it so that these are not oppressive identities. These are rather an opportunity for me to bring my full self to the conversation, to invite you to bring the full self to the conversation. And so when an identity comes up, what's important is don't just make it one identity, make it multiple identities. And I think that opportunity to clarify is also so important, right? If we default to internal stereotypes and our internal picture of that identity, and we're then communicating based off how the other person across from us appears or acts with ever clarifying is this identity really? How you experience things that is even an important identity to you? Because there are situations where people grew up in completely different neighborhoods where their experience of what you think their social identity is has nothing to do with actually how they experienced the world. So by acknowledging it, we're giving an opportunity to actually clarify. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And it's really powerful. And we're certainly multifaceted, right? The identity that I might be public facing, right? Is one facet of a multifaceted identity that you're only seeing one glimpse of. Yeah. And when we only see that one glimpse, that's when we fall into stereotypes. Like Johnny, you're a musician. You're a business person. You're a podcast host. You're probably a sibling, right? You're a child to your parents. You probably have a partner who you bring a lot of like nurturing and sustenance to. All of those are who you are. And if I just say, oh, Johnny is a white guy. What do you think about this? It doesn't give you a chance to bring your full self. And it makes you feel like I've unfairly niched you into a stereotype that doesn't really apply. And why would I want to speak for all white people? Exactly. I don't do my best. That's a lot of conversations. That's a lot of tasks. I don't want to upset anybody, but I do my best. Now, we started this conversation with you being vulnerable and sharing communication with your wife and how you're having two entirely different types of conversations and that was leading to miscommunication. I'm curious after researching the book, talking to all of these researchers and professors around communication, how do you now suss out or what do you use to actually realize and recognize, oh, I'm having this type of the three types of conversations? So the first thing that I do is I just ask questions, hopefully deep questions, like taking me and my wife, now when we start that conversation, she or I will very often say, look, do you want me to help you solve this problem or do you just need to vent and get this off your chest and you just want me to listen? And actually in schools, they teach teachers to do this. They teach them that if a student comes up and they're upset to ask them, do you want to be helped? Do you want to be heard or do you want to be hugged? And then of course, this is the three kinds of conversations, the practical, the emotional, and the social. And the reason why that's really powerful is because we often like being asked what kind of conversation we want. Or I just ask another deep question, like tell me what you make of that. Like it seems like to my kids, it seems like you're really proud of that RPC you did. Tell me why you're proud about it, like what did you like about it? And they're gonna tell you what kind of conversation they want, whether this is an emotional conversation or a practical conversation. You're gonna know right away if you listen for it. But then the next thing that is important and the thing that I've tried to bake into my own life is this looping for understanding, proving to the other person that I'm actually listening to them. And sometimes you can do that just through it. Sometimes it's like, hey, what I hear you saying is tell me if I'm getting this wrong. And sometimes it's just asking a follow up question, a follow up question that like clearly shows I was paying attention to what you were just telling me and I wanna draw on that. That, those two things, asking deep questions, proving that you're listening, they're really powerful. And what happens is that when we use those techniques, the other person wants to listen to us more as well. So it's not about us giving up our agency in this conversation. It's not about us like not being able to say what we believe and what we think or even trying to be influential. But it's about setting the stage that both of us know that we wanna listen to each other and evidence that we wanna connect. And I know for myself and the way I was raised, emotions were seen in almost a negative light as a guy. Hide those emotions, why are you crying? Be more in my dad's definition of masculine around showcasing my emotions, recognizing other people's emotions. And I've talked to many of our listeners and our participants, our clients and they feel very similarly in their experience. So what I've recognized in the men's work that I do that there's a broader range of emotions and it can be difficult at first if you aren't really used to sharing your emotions to really describe them and understand them and then even harder to pick them up in other people. So when we talk about the emotional conversation and the communication around recognizing these emotions, how do you build out that skill set to be more comfortable, to actually express the vulnerability of saying, hey Charles, I feel like you're saying this or I feel like this is the emotion that I'm recognizing in you. So it's a really, really good question. And the truth is that oftentimes we have habits, right? It's not that men are less emotional than women. It's that men are much more comfortable with a certain kind of conversation in general, according to studies. And they fall back on those habits. So I might have something emotional I wanna talk about, but I'm gonna talk about it as if it's a practical topic because my habit, I'm much more comfortable talking about practical things. That doesn't mean the emotions aren't there. So how do we bring those out? Particularly if we don't wanna like have like big kumbaya circles and really cry on each other's shoulder. You don't have to do any of that. You don't even have to talk about emotions when you're having an emotional conversation. It can be as simple as seeing that someone else is laughing and laughing with them. In fact, in the book, there's a story about how NASA changed how they were looking for astronauts because they needed to find astronauts with more emotional intelligence for longer missions in space. The problem was that astronauts, by the time they get to the final round of interviews, they're really good at faking emotional intelligence, right? It's really hard to tell who actually has it. So one of the interviewers, the psychologist, he started doing his interviews where he'd walk into the room and he would spill all these papers all over the floor as if it was by an accident. And then he would laugh like this big laugh. And then he would pay attention to how the candidate laughed back because some people, they know that they're supposed to laugh along with him. So they'd go like, that's funny. Yeah. And then some people, some people would match him and they would go, let me help you pick up those papers. This is crazy. The people who matched him, they were showing him that they wanted to understand what he was thinking and feeling. And we can do the same thing with our friends. When we're in a conversation and someone says, man, I went to see my son's graduation and I was so proud, that's an emotional conversation. Ask him, what did it feel like to watch your son walk across that stage? You're engaging him on emotional level. You don't have to say like, you know, I cried when I saw my kid graduate. The emotions aren't about negative, hard, big things. Emotions are just about acknowledging that sometimes we feel things. And if we're talking about the budget, for instance, which seems like the most practical thing on earth, saying, look, asking a deep question, saying like, what are you worried about when we're in discussing this budget? You're gonna hear people say things like, actually, like, I think the budget's fine. I'm just anxious because if it doesn't work, I'm gonna have to lay people off and like, that's gonna be awful, right? I'm not asking him, how do you feel? I'm not asking him to bear his soul. I'm asking, what does this mean to you? And they're telling me, this is a practical conversation, but there's also an emotional element to it. And we need to put that on the table too. It's such an important clarification for those of us who default to the practical conversation in almost every context. And the last piece that I just wanna discuss from the book that I thought was really helpful for our audience members is this idea of preparing for conversation and how a little bit of upfront preparation can actually impact small talk, interviews, your ability to connect with friends, and even have difficult conversations. I know for a lot of our listeners, they're probably in a place being growth-minded that they prepare for speeches or for really difficult conversations that they know ahead of time. But preparation really goes a long way and super communicators leverage it to their advantage. So what's a quick guide that our audience can use to better prepare themselves for conversations? And what's fascinating is when we talk about preparation, we're talking about seven to 10 seconds of work. So it's not like, it's not like, so there was this experiment that was done at this investment bank where this was a place where people screamed at each other like all day long or fights constantly. And these researchers came in and they said, okay, look, for the next week, what we want you to do is before every single meeting, everyone needs to write down just one sentence on the next card. Write down what you hope to accomplish in this meeting and what mood you hope to establish. And so people would take this and it literally took seven seconds. People would just scribble something down, they'd shove it in their pocket, then they'd go into the meeting. Nobody ever told anyone else what they had written. Nobody ever like said, like, well, I want us all to be happy. But the incidence of conflict went down by 80% that week in those meetings. And it's because people knew for themselves what they wanted to get across and what their aspiration was for how this meeting is gonna go. Think about how often we walk into a meeting and we haven't spent that seven seconds writing a sentence. We walk into a meeting and we're like, I'm not sure what I want out of this. Now I'm gonna let other people set the tone. If we just take a second and we're like, look, here's the thing I'd like to come out of this with. Like I wanna know like what the questions are we need to address. And like, I know that this is a tense time but I want everyone to remember that like we're on the same team. If you just take four to seven seconds and tell yourself that, that meeting is gonna go better. But it's a habit we have to get into. And it's not even something that has to be shared publicly. I think that's really important for the introverts. You don't come in with your little post-it note shoving it at everyone's face. You can keep it in your pocket but it does clarify for you in those moments where we might default to being in our head. We might get flushed with the motion and not find the words that we need to communicate effectively in those moments. We've got something to fall back on. There was this other study done by Harvard Business School where they took a bunch of students and they told them, you're gonna have conversations with strangers. Which of course is like the most like anxiety producing thing on earth. And then they were like, okay, beforehand, we want you to write down three topics you might talk about. And like dumb topics, like last night's TV show and this weekend's game and like, where'd you go to high school? And then they told everyone, okay, stick them in your pocket. They went and they had the conversations. They found that almost no one talked about those three topics, right? Even though they had written them down, nobody. But everyone said that they enjoyed the conversation so much more. They felt so much more confident. They felt so much less anxious because they knew that they had this safety net in their pocket if they needed it. And it's sometimes just feeling like we have that safety net that means that we don't need it. Yeah, I encourage our clients just to have a few stories like have a mission statement, have your origin story, have your dream story of what you would like to accomplish. And those are not gonna come up in every conversation. However, when you have it in your back pocket, you feel so much better. And then when it does come up, you're prepared to hold court and have some fun. Absolutely, particularly if you're focusing on making authentic, right? I'm not trying to shoehorn my mission into this conversation, but like we're talking about our company's values. And like the fact that I can recite our mission is pretty impressive. Thank you for stopping by Charles as always a fun conversation. Where can our audience find out more about this latest book? Yeah, so it's called Super Communicators. It's on sale now in all the bookstores where you normally go. And if you wanna get in touch with me, if you just Google my name, Charles Duhigg, I'm the only Charles Duhigg on earth, or the power of habit or super communicators, my website will come up. And I'll mention that on my website I actually list my email address, which is Charles at CharlesDuhigg.com. And every email I get from a reader or a listener, I respond, I read it and I respond to it. Cause I feel like again, like connections are what matter. And if someone's gonna take the time to reach out to me, I wanna honor that and reach out back out to them. So if anyone has on any like thoughts or suggestions or insights of your own, Charles at CharlesDuhigg.com, I can promise you I'll see it. And I would encourage you to buy Super Communicators. Thank you Charles, we're excited for your next book. Thanks guys, have a great day.