Realm of wisdom's Key Ideas from Supercommunicators
by Charles Duhigg

These three conversations — which correspond to practical decision-making conversations, emotional conversations, and conversations about identity — are best captured by three questions:

1. What’s This Really About?

2. How Do We Feel?

3. Who Are We?

Unless we know what kind of discussion we’re hoping for — and what type of discussion our companions want — we’re at a disadvantage.

In a learning conversation, our goal is to understand what’s going on inside others’ heads, and to share what’s happening within our own.

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.

Within every conversation there is a quiet negotiation, where the prize is not winning, but rather determining what everyone wants, so that something meaningful can occur.

The best negotiators don’t battle over who should get the biggest slice of pie.

Rather, they focus on making the pie itself larger, finding win-win solutions where everyone walks away happier than before.

Negotiation isn’t a battle. It’s an act of creativity.

A What’s This Really About? conversation often occurs at the start of a discussion, and so we’re well served to do a bit of prep work before a dialogue begins.

Simply preparing a list, researchers found, made conversations go better.

When we discuss our feelings, something magical happens: Other people can’t help but listen to us.

When we talk about our feelings, we’re describing not just what has happened to us, but why we made certain choices and how we make sense of the world.

Every discussion is shaped by our emotions, and when we bring those feelings to the surface — when we share them and ask others to share with us — we begin to see how we might align.

If we acknowledge someone else’s vulnerability, and become vulnerable in return, we build trust, understanding, and connection.

Asking deep questions about feelings, values, beliefs, and experiences creates vulnerability.

That vulnerability triggers "emotional contagion."

And that, in turn, helps us connect.

If you want to have a successful conversation with someone, 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.

People with emotional intelligence knew how to build relationships and empathize with colleagues, as well as regulate their own emotionality and the emotions of those around them.

Noticing mood and energy allows us to immediately determine whether we should flee or stay, if they’re a potential friend or foe.

Mood and energy are nonlinguistic tools for creating emotional connection.

When we match someone’s mood and energy, we are showing them that we want to align.

This is the real reason why so many conflicts persist:

Not because of a lack of solutions or because people are unwilling to compromise, but because combatants don’t understand why they are fighting in the first place.

They haven’t discussed the deeper topics — the emotional issues — that are inflaming the dispute.

Happy couples, rather than trying to control the other person, tended to focus on controlling themselves, their environment, and the conflict itself.

If we focus on controlling ourselves, our environment, and the conflict itself, then a fight often morphs into a conversation, where the goal is understanding, rather than winning points or wounding our foes.

“There are lots of conflicts that don’t have solutions, but when everyone feels in control, the conflict sometimes just fades away.”

In a meaningful conversation, we bring not just ourselves to the discussion, but everything that brought us to this moment: Our histories and backgrounds, our families and friendships, the causes we believe in and the groups we love or deplore.

We bring, in other words, our social identities.

Social identities can change how we act, even if we don’t intend them to, even if we wish they didn’t.

It’s crucial to remind ourselves that we all possess multiple identities:

• We are parents but also siblings;
• experts in some topics and novices in others;
• friends and coworkers and
• people who love dogs but hate to jog.

Our identities can help us find values we share or can push us into stereotypes.

There was one behavior, in particular, that consistently made people uncomfortable and upset:

If a speaker said something that lumped a listener into a group against her or his will, the discussion would likely go south.

In psychology, this is known as "identity threat", and it is deeply corrosive to communication.

Tough conversations frequently begin on uncertain footing.

We can lessen those anxieties by addressing a few things right away.

1. Establish guidelines.

2. Draw out everyone’s goals.

3. Acknowledge, and keep acknowledging, that discomfort is natural — and useful.

Manage your Environment.

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