How to Instantly Connect with Anyone by Charles Duhigg.
I want to ask you to take part in an experiment.
After watching this video today tomorrow, whenever you feel like it, I'd like you to find someone and ask them a question.
It could be a stranger you meet on the bus, a classmate at school, your parents, maybe your friends.
Here's the question.
When was the last time you cried in front of another person?
Now, how many of you are excited about this experiment?
Probably not many of you.
And that makes sense, because it sounds kind of intimidating, even scary, to ask someone a personal question like this and then, even worse, to share your own answer.
But I'm going to try and convince you that this experiment is worth doing, not just once, but whenever you can, because this kind of question has a magic power to it.
It can help you instantly connect with anyone.
To explain how I got interested in this, let me tell you about a bad pattern my wife and I fell into.
I'd come home from work at the New York Times complaining about my day, how my boss didn't appreciate me or my coworkers didn't realize what a genius I was.
And my wife, very reasonably, would offer me some good advice like why don't you take your boss out to lunch, so you can connect better?
But instead of appreciating her advice, I would get even more upset.
I wanted sympathy.
I'd say things like, why aren't you supporting me?
Why aren't you outraged on my behalf?
And then she'd get frustrated because I was attacking her for giving me good advice.
Sound familiar?
This happens in almost every relationship.
And so I asked neuroscientists and other researchers why I kept falling into this trap.
And they told me that I was making a basic mistake.
When we're talking to someone, we think we know what that discussion is about.
But what researchers have found is that every discussion actually contains multiple conversations.
There are practical conversations where we're making plans and solving problems together.
We experience this mindset when we need to make a decision, for example, deciding what time should we have dinner or whose turn is it to walk the dog.
When we talk about next year's vacation or which classes we want to take, a practical conversation is taking place.
And then there's emotional conversations where we describe how we feel.
For example, the heartache of a breakup, or tell stories like that hilarious time you accidentally peed your pants.
An emotional conversation occurs whenever we feel a rush of pride or a sense of sorrow during a conversation.
In an emotional conversation, we don't want someone to solve our emotions.
We want them to empathize.
And finally, there's social conversations, which are about our identities, values and how we interact with other people.
When we gossip about office politics or play the name game or figure out who we know in common, or explain to a friend how our religion or our upbringing or our beliefs have influenced us, made us who we are, at those moments we're engaging in a social conversation.
All these different kinds of conversations are important, and all three may occur during the same discussion.
But problems arise when two people are trying to have different types of conversations at the same time.
With my wife.
I was trying to have an emotional conversation and she was responding with a practical conversation.
Both conversations are valid, but because we didn't match each other, because we weren't having the same kind of conversation at the same moment, we couldn't really hear each other.
We couldn't communicate.
This insight is known within psychology as the matching principle, which says that successful communication requires recognizing what kind of conversation is happening and then matching it, either by matching you or inviting you to match me.
So how do we learn to match other people and invite them to match us?
Well, teachers are trained that when a student comes to them for a discussion, they should start by asking do you want to be helped?
Which is a practical conversation.
Do you want to be hugged, which is an emotional conversation?
Or do you want to be heard, which is a social conversation?
And that works in the classroom but not so much in everyday life, because if you ask someone at work or at school, do you want to be hugged?
They might look at you a little strangely.
So instead, there's another tool for the rest of us. asking deep questions.
A deep question invites someone to share their values, their beliefs, or their experiences.
And it's easier than it sounds.
For instance, instead of asking, where do you work?
You can ask, what do you love about your job?
Instead of asking, where'd you go to high school?
You can ask, what was high school like?
How did it change you?
Deep questions ask people not just about the facts of their lives, but how they feel about their lives.
They invite vulnerability.
And vulnerability, when it's shared, is the key to real connection.
To illustrate this, let me tell you about Dr. Bafar Adai, a cancer surgeon in New York.
Every day, patients come into Dr. Adai's office having just learned they have prostate cancer.
And Dr Adai gave most of them the same advice.
Surgery is risky, he would say, and this kind of tumor grows very, very slowly.
So his advice was usually don't operate, just monitor it.
In fact, pretend you don't even have cancer, he told me he thought these conversations would be some of the easiest discussions of his life.
He was telling patients that they didn't have to have a risky surgery, but again and again the patients ignored his advice.
They went home, talked with their families, and came back insisting on surgery.
Then he realized it wasn't that the patients were ignoring him.
The problem was they couldn't hear what he was saying.
The solution was to ask deep questions.
A few weeks later, when a new patient arrived, instead of explaining treatment options, Dr Adai began the conversation by asking the man What does this diagnosis mean to you?
The man took a pause and then he opened up.
He told Dr Adai that his father had died when he was young and he didn't want to put his wife or his children through that.
What's more, he worried his colleagues might see him as the sick guy and that would affect how he was treated at work.
He was concerned about how his grandchildren would react.
Nothing that he said was about the cancer directly.
The man never mentioned fears of mortality or fears of pain.
But by asking a deep question, Dr Adai learned that what this patient needed right now was not advice but empathy.
The man needed to have an emotional conversation.
So Dr. Adai, in essence, gave the man a hug.
Now you can't really give someone a hug when you're a doctor.
So what he did instead is he listened to him and then he shared a few of his own experiences.
And then Dr. Adai said, do you mind if I tell you about a few treatment options?
In other words, is it okay if we move from an emotional conversation to a practical conversation together?
The patient said yes and within minutes agreed to follow Dr Adai's advice, and he never looked back.
This approach has transformed Dr. Adai's practice.
Most of his patients now follow his guidance, and the only change is that he starts by asking a deep question.
He makes a connection.
So back to that experiment I mentioned.
Your assignment, just to remind you, is to find someone and then ask them when was the last time you cried in front of another person?
Then, after they answer, share your own reply.
Nick Epley, a researcher at the University of Chicago, has done this experiment hundreds of times.
Beforehand, people dread it.
They don't want to do it when he tells them what's about to happen.
But afterward, nearly everyone says the same thing.
They say things like, I felt so connected to that person.
I felt like they really listened to me.
It was one of the best conversations I've had in months, maybe years.
What made it powerful wasn't their partner or where the conversation occurred.
It was powerful because it was the right kind of question, a deep question.
Deep questions help us figure out what conversation we're really having.
Practical, emotional, or social.
Right now, and I'm sure you know this, we are living in a time of polarization and division.
We've forgotten how to talk to each other.
But there's a science for how to do it right.
Super communicators aren't more outgoing or charismatic.
They've just learned skills like asking deep questions that anyone can learn.
That glow you feel after a great conversation, that sense of happiness and satisfaction, that's your brain rewarding you.
It's proof that we're all wired for connection.
So I hope you go out and you find a stranger and then you ask them when's the last time you cried in front of another person?
And then I hope you share your own story.
And afterwards, you'll feel like you've really connected with someone.
Then come tell me how it went.
Thanks for tuning into this episode of After School.
I'm Charles Duhigg, author of Super Communicators, How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection.
I really hope you enjoyed this animation.
If you want to learn more about how to improve your communication skills, check out my website, charlesduhiggcom.
That's charlesduhigg.com.
Or you can sign up for my newsletter at Substack, The Science of Better.
Thanks.
