Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection
neural entrainment
The are practical, decision-making conversations that focus on What's This Really About? There are emotional conversations, which ask How Do We Feel? And there are social conversations that explore Who Are We?
Specifically, we want to learn how the people around us see the world and help them understand our perspectives in turn.
[Sievers] found that strong leaders didn't help people align. In fact, groups with a dominant leader had the least amount of neural synchrony. Participant 4 made it harder for his groupmates to sync up. Wheh he dominated the conversation, he pushed everyone else into their own, separate thoughts.
The question they had been assigned. In fact, whichever opinion the high centrality participants endorsed usually became the group's consensus answer.
When [Sievers] looked at the lives of high centrality participants, he found they were unusual in other respects. They had much larger social networks than the average person and were more likely to be elected to poisitions of authority or entrusted with power.
Miscommunication occurs when people are having different kinds of conversations. If you are speaking emotionally, while I'm talking practically, we are, in essence, using different cognitive languages.
During the most meaningful conversations, the best communicators focus on four basic rules that create a learning conversation: 1. pay attention to what kind of conversation is occurring
2. share your goals, and ask what others are seeking
3. ask about others' feelings, and share your own
4. explore if identities are important to this discussion
Until then, many people had assumed that negotiations were zer0-sum games: Any time I gained something at the bargaining table, you lost. "A generation ago, in contemplating a negotiation, the common question in people's minds was "Whos is going to win and who is going to lose?" (from Getting to Yes). But Fisher, a Harvard Law professor, thought that approach was all wrong. As a young man, he had helped implement the Marshall Plan in Europe and later, aided in finding ways to end th eVietnam War. He had worked on the Camp David Accords in 1978 and in securing the release of the 52 American hostages from Iran in 1981.
The challenge is not to eliminate conflict, but to transform it (from Getting to Yes)
We achieve the 4 rules by: 1. preparing ourselves before a conversation. 2. by asking questions. 3. by noticing clues during a conversation.4. by experimenting and adding items to the table
If you choose to embrace the How Do We Feel? conversation, you are harnessing a neurochemical process that powers our most important relationships.
When you are describing how you feel, you are giving someone a map of the things you care about.
Other experiments had revealed a long list of factors that had no impact whatsoever. Researchers had learned that simply because two people had experiences or beliefs in common - they both went to the same church and both smoked, or were both atheists who hated tobacco - these similiarities, on their own, were not enough to foster camaraderie.
In contrast, questions that pushed people to describe their beliefs, values or meaningful experiences tended to result in emotional replies, even if the questions themselves didn't seem all that emotional.
Humans are cognitively lazy: We rely on stereotypes and assumptions because they let us make judgements without thinking too hard.
Ask someone how they feel about something, and then follow up with questions that reveal how you feel.
Asking deep questions is easier than most people realize, and more rewarding than we expect.
Long-term confinement in crowded quarters is generally less stressful for those whose sensisitivty and empathy allow them to recognize human prpoblems earlier and to engage them effectively. (NASA)
Dorothy Thomas once wrote "Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with it"
Among unhappy couples, the impulse for control often expressed itself as an attempt to control the other person. Rather than trying to control the other person, happy couples tended to focus, instead, on controlling themselves, their environment, and the conflict itself. Happy couples, when they fight, usually try to make the fight as small as possible, not let it bleed into other fights.
The self-images we all form based on the groups we belong to, the people we befriend, the organisations we join, and the histories we embrace or shun.
We all contain multitudes that are just waiting to be expressed.
"We can make the bad voices in our head less powerful by remembering all the other voices in there, too"(Gresky)
"adequate performance gets a generous severance package" (Netflix Culture Deck)
2021 Harvard Business Review article regarding eighty thousand people who had undergone unconscious bias training found that such "training did not change biased behaviour"
If a speaker said something that lumped a listener into a group against her or his will, the discussion would likely go south.
ANother study, published in 2016, examined dozens of biomarkers of health, and found that "a higher degree of social integration was associated with lower risk" of illness and death at every stage of life. Social isolation was more dangerous than diabetes and a host of other chronic diseases.
(c) Charles Duhigg - "Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection"
The are practical, decision-making conversations that focus on What's This Really About? There are emotional conversations, which ask How Do We Feel? And there are social conversations that explore Who Are We?
Specifically, we want to learn how the people around us see the world and help them understand our perspectives in turn.
[Sievers] found that strong leaders didn't help people align. In fact, groups with a dominant leader had the least amount of neural synchrony. Participant 4 made it harder for his groupmates to sync up. Wheh he dominated the conversation, he pushed everyone else into their own, separate thoughts.
The question they had been assigned. In fact, whichever opinion the high centrality participants endorsed usually became the group's consensus answer.
When [Sievers] looked at the lives of high centrality participants, he found they were unusual in other respects. They had much larger social networks than the average person and were more likely to be elected to poisitions of authority or entrusted with power.
Miscommunication occurs when people are having different kinds of conversations. If you are speaking emotionally, while I'm talking practically, we are, in essence, using different cognitive languages.
During the most meaningful conversations, the best communicators focus on four basic rules that create a learning conversation: 1. pay attention to what kind of conversation is occurring
2. share your goals, and ask what others are seeking
3. ask about others' feelings, and share your own
4. explore if identities are important to this discussion
Until then, many people had assumed that negotiations were zer0-sum games: Any time I gained something at the bargaining table, you lost. "A generation ago, in contemplating a negotiation, the common question in people's minds was "Whos is going to win and who is going to lose?" (from Getting to Yes). But Fisher, a Harvard Law professor, thought that approach was all wrong. As a young man, he had helped implement the Marshall Plan in Europe and later, aided in finding ways to end th eVietnam War. He had worked on the Camp David Accords in 1978 and in securing the release of the 52 American hostages from Iran in 1981.
The challenge is not to eliminate conflict, but to transform it (from Getting to Yes)
We achieve the 4 rules by: 1. preparing ourselves before a conversation. 2. by asking questions. 3. by noticing clues during a conversation.4. by experimenting and adding items to the table
If you choose to embrace the How Do We Feel? conversation, you are harnessing a neurochemical process that powers our most important relationships.
When you are describing how you feel, you are giving someone a map of the things you care about.
Other experiments had revealed a long list of factors that had no impact whatsoever. Researchers had learned that simply because two people had experiences or beliefs in common - they both went to the same church and both smoked, or were both atheists who hated tobacco - these similiarities, on their own, were not enough to foster camaraderie.
In contrast, questions that pushed people to describe their beliefs, values or meaningful experiences tended to result in emotional replies, even if the questions themselves didn't seem all that emotional.
Humans are cognitively lazy: We rely on stereotypes and assumptions because they let us make judgements without thinking too hard.
Ask someone how they feel about something, and then follow up with questions that reveal how you feel.
Asking deep questions is easier than most people realize, and more rewarding than we expect.
Long-term confinement in crowded quarters is generally less stressful for those whose sensisitivty and empathy allow them to recognize human prpoblems earlier and to engage them effectively. (NASA)
Dorothy Thomas once wrote "Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with it"
Among unhappy couples, the impulse for control often expressed itself as an attempt to control the other person. Rather than trying to control the other person, happy couples tended to focus, instead, on controlling themselves, their environment, and the conflict itself. Happy couples, when they fight, usually try to make the fight as small as possible, not let it bleed into other fights.
The self-images we all form based on the groups we belong to, the people we befriend, the organisations we join, and the histories we embrace or shun.
We all contain multitudes that are just waiting to be expressed.
"We can make the bad voices in our head less powerful by remembering all the other voices in there, too"(Gresky)
"adequate performance gets a generous severance package" (Netflix Culture Deck)
2021 Harvard Business Review article regarding eighty thousand people who had undergone unconscious bias training found that such "training did not change biased behaviour"
If a speaker said something that lumped a listener into a group against her or his will, the discussion would likely go south.
ANother study, published in 2016, examined dozens of biomarkers of health, and found that "a higher degree of social integration was associated with lower risk" of illness and death at every stage of life. Social isolation was more dangerous than diabetes and a host of other chronic diseases.
(c) Charles Duhigg - "Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection"