SUPERCOMMUNICATORS

 Never manipulate or threaten.

 Ask lots of questions, and, when someone becomes
emotional, cry or laugh or complain or celebrate
with them.
 Reciprocate everything in different way whatever
you get.
 Create an atmosphere of trust.
 Whenever someone says something emotional—
even when they don’t realize their emotions are on
display—reciprocat by voicing feelings of your
own.
 Who would you call if you were having a bad day?
If you had screwed up a deal at work, or had
gotten into an argument with your spouse, or were
feeling frustrated and sick of it all: Who would you
want to talk to? There’s likely someone that you
know who will make you feel better, who can help
you think through a thorny question or share a
moment of heartbreak or joy. Now, ask yourself:
Are they the funniest person in your life?
(Probably not, but if you paid close attention,
you’d notice they laugh more than most people.)
Are they the most interesting or smartest person
you know? (What’s more likely is that, even if they
don’t say anything particularly wise, you
anticipate that you will feel smarter after talking
to them.) Are they your most entertaining or
confident friend? Do they give the best advice?
(Most likely: Nope, nope, and nope—but when you
 hang up the phone, you’ll feel calmer and more
centered and closer to the right choice.)
 Paying attention to someone’s body, alongside
their voice, helps us hear them better.
 They have determined that how we ask a question
sometimes matters more than what we ask. We’re
better off, it seems, acknowledging social
differences, rather than pretending they don’t
exist. Every discussion is influenced by emotions,
no matter how rational the topic at hand. When
starting a dialogue, it helps to think of the
discussion as a negotiation where the prize is
figuring out what everyone wants.
 And, above all, the most important goal of any
conversation is to connect.


 Our goal, for the most meaningful discussions,

should be to have a “learning conversation.”
Specifically, we want to learn how the people
around us see the world and help them
understand our perspectives in turn.
 Every meaningful conversation is made up of
countless small choices. There are fleeting
moments when the right question, or a vulnerable
admission, or an empathetic word can completely
change a dialogue.
 But not all conversations are equal. When a
discussion is meaningful, it can feel wonderful, as
if something important has been revealed.
“Ultimately, the bond of all companionship,
whether in marriage or in friendship, is
conversation.
 we need to be engaged in the same kind of
conversation, at the same time, if we want to
connect.
 Find ways to connect
 When we absorb what someone is saying, and they
comprehend what we say, it’s because our brains
have, to some degree, aligned. At that moment,
our bodies—our pulses, facial expressions, the
emotions we experience, the prickling sensation
on our necks and arms—often start to synchronize
as well. There is something about neural
simultaneity that helps us listen more closely and
speak more clearly. Sometimes this connection
occurs with just one other person. Other times, it
happens within a group, or a large audience. But
whenever it happens, our brains and bodies
become alike because we are, in the language of
neuroscientists, neurally entrained
 High centrality participants tended to ask ten to
twenty times as many questions as other
participants. When a group got stuck, they made it
 easy for everyone to take a quick break by
bringing up a new topic or interrupting an
awkward silence with a joke.
 But the most important difference between high
centrality participants and everyone else was that
the high centrality participants were constantly
adjusting how they communicated, in order to
match their companions. They subtly reflected
shifts in other people’s moods and attitudes. When
someone got serious, they matched that
seriousness. When a discussion went light, they
were the first to play along. They changed their
minds frequently and let themselves be swayed by
their groupmates.
 But they didn’t merely mirror others—rather, they
gently led people, nudging them to hear one
another, or to explain themselves more clearly.
They matched their groupmates’ conversational
styles, making room for seriousness or laughter,
and invited others to match them in return. And
they had enormous influence on how people ended
up answering the questions they had been
assigned. In fact, whichever opinion the high
centrality participants endorsed usually became
the group’s consensus answer. But that influence
was almost invisible. When polled afterward, few
people realized how much the high centrality
participants had swayed their own choices. Not
every group had such a person—but those that did
all seemed closer to one another afterward, and
their brain scans showed they were more aligned.
 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 positions of authority or entrusted
with power. Other people turned to them when
they needed to discuss something serious or ask
for advice. “And that makes sense,” Sievers told
me. “Because if you’re the kind of person who’s
easy to talk to, then lots of people are going to
want to talk to you.” In other words, the high
centrality participants were supercommunicators.
 So, to become a supercommunicator, all we need
to do is listen closely to what’s said and unsaid,
ask the right questions, recognize and match
others’ moods, and make our own feelings easy for
others to perceive.
 these three conversations—which correspond to
practical decision-making conversations,
emotional conversations, and conversations about
identity—are best captured by three questions:
What’s This Really About?, How Do We Feel?, and
Who Are We? Each of these conversations, as we
will see, draws on a different type of mindset and
mental processing.

 Each of these conversations—and each mindset—
is, of course, deeply intertwined. We often use all
three during a single dialogue. The important
thing to understand is that these mindsets can
shift as a conversation unfolds.
 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 explains why, when you complain
about your boss—“Jim is driving me crazy!”—and
your spouse responds with a practical suggestion
—“What if you just invited him to lunch?”—it’s
more apt to create conflict than connection: “I’m
not asking you to solve this! I just want some
empathy.”)
 Supercommunicators know how to evoke
synchronization by encouraging people to match
how they’re communicating.
 ask each other more questions, repeat what the
other person said, make tension-easing jokes, get
serious together.
 The importance of this insight—that
communication comes from connection and
alignment—is so fundamental that it has become
known as the matching principle: Effective
 communication requires recognizing what kind of
conversation is occurring, and then matching each
other. On a very basic level, if someone seems
emotional, allow yourself to become emotional as
well. If someone is intent on decision making,
match that focus. If they are preoccupied by social
implications, reflect their fixation back to them.
 It is important to note that matching isn’t mimicry.
As you’ll see in the forthcoming chapters, we need
to genuinely understand what someone is feeling,
what they want, and who they are. And then, to
match them, we need to know how to share
ourselves in return. When we align, we start to
connect, and that’s when a meaningful
conversation begins.
 I learned that if you listen for someone’s truth,
and you put your truth next to it, you might reach
them.
 we have to learn to distinguish a decision-making
conversation from an emotional conversation from
a social conversation. We need to understand
which kinds of questions and vulnerabilities are
powerful, and how to make our own feelings more
visible and easier to read. We need to prove to
others that we are listening closely.
 most meaningful conversations, the best
communicators focus on four basic rules that
 create a learning conversation:

 The most effective communicators pause before

they speak and ask themselves: Why am I opening
my mouth? Unless we know what kind of
discussion we’re hoping for—and what type of
discussion our companions want—we’re at a
disadvantage. As the last chapter explained, we
might want to discuss practicalities while our
partner wants to share their feelings. We might
want to gossip while they want to make plans. If
we’re not having the same kind of conversation,
we’re unlikely to connect.

 So the first goal in a learning conversation is

identifying what kind of dialogue we’re seeking—
and then looking for clues about what the other
parties want.
 This can be as simple as taking a moment to
clarify, for yourself, what you hope to say and how
you want to say it