Supercommunicators

“Mutual playfulness, in-group feeling and positive emotional tone—not comedy—mark the social settings of most naturally occurring laughter,” Provine concluded. Laughter is powerful, he wrote, because it is contagious, “immediate and involuntary, involving the most direct communication possible between people: Brain to brain.”19

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. These kinds of questions were powerful because they often prompted people to reveal vulnerabilities.13

during the most meaningful conversations, the best communicators focus on four basic rules that create a learning conversation:

many discussions are actually three different conversations. There 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? We are often moving in and out of all three conversations as a dialogue unfol

Has someone told a story or made a joke? If so, they might be in an empathetic logic of similarities mindset. In this mindset, people aren’t looking to debate or analyze choices; they want to share, relate, and empathize.

Put another way, if you want to have a successful conversation with someone, you don’t have to ask them about their worst memories or how they prepare for telephone calls. You just have to ask them to describe how they feel about their life—rather than the facts of their life—and then ask lots of follow-ups.

“Do you want to be helped, hugged, or heard?”

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. (This

What’s This Really About? has two goals: The first is to determine what topics we want to discuss—what everyone needs from this dialogue. The second is to figure out how this discussion will unfold—what unspoken rules and norms we have agreed upon, and how we will make decisions together.

Elite diplomats have explained that their goal at a bargaining table isn’t seizing victory, but rather convincing the other side to become collaborators in uncovering new solutions that no one thought of before. Negotiation, among its top practitioners, isn’t a battle. It’s an act of creativity.