Over a decade ago, I remember reading a story that stuck with me. I think it was connected to the famous Harvard Study on Adult Development that studied a group of men across their lifetimes, but I can no longer find the reference. A much-beloved doctor, upon his retirement, was given a notebook filled with letters of praise and appreciation from his patients. After he received it, he put it up in his attic, and never opened it or read the letters.

I’ve often thought of this story since I first heard it, wondering about what motivated the doctor’s behavior, and the larger question of why praise is typically welcomed and makes us feel good, but can also make people feel uncomfortable or embarrassed.

In today’s episode, I take a stab at answering this question with Christopher Littlefield, a speaker and consultant who specializes in employee appreciation. But first, we talk about the power of recognition, why we can be so stingy in giving compliments, how compliments can go wrong, and how we can offer them more effectively. We then turn to why getting compliments can make you cringe, how people deflect them and how this deflection affects relationships, and how to get better at receiving compliments graciously.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Article: Why and How to Offer More Compliments
• AoM Article: How to Accept a Compliment With Class
• AoM Article: How to Avoid Giving a Backhanded Compliment
• Sunday Firesides: Compliment Deflection Is Gift Denial
• Sunday Firesides: Give Them the Cream
• HBR Article: Do Compliments Make You Cringe? Here’s Why by Christopher Littlefield

Connect With Christopher Littlefield

• Beyond Thank You website
• Chris on YouTube
• Chris on LinkedIn

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Started in 1938, the Harvard Study of Adult Development represents the longest longitudinal study on happiness ever conducted. It set out to follow a group of men through every stage of their lives, from youth to old age, and continues to study their descendants.

The Harvard Study aimed to discover what makes human beings flourish, and its overarching conclusion was this: it’s all about good relationships. The Harvard Study has found that the quality of a person’s relationships has the biggest influence on their health and happiness. 

Robert Waldinger, the current director of the Harvard Study, uses a great phrase to refer to this relational factor: social fitness. However, in the book he co-authored, The Good Life, he never directly explains and unpacks what the concept of social fitness involves.

Below, we’ll take a stab at doing so.  

What Is “Social Fitness”?

We typically talk about fitness in terms of physical fitness, but it’s a very apt way to describe our social lives as well. We’ll get into the parallels between the two concepts in a moment, but let’s first explain what social fitness is.

“Fitness” can refer to a couple of things. 

One is a person’s current state and condition. (“He is fit.”)

The other is a person’s capacity to perform a certain role, task, or function. (“He is fit enough to ____.”)

Physical and social fitness each encompass both of these qualities. 

When you’re physically fit, you’re in good shape. Your cardiovascular system is healthy, your weight is normal, your muscles are toned. You are also sufficiently fit to perform certain athletic activities, like running a certain distance or lifting a certain amount of weight.

Likewise, when you’re socially fit, your relationships are in good shape. You have a sufficient number of ties and a sufficient amount of contact with them. Your relationships are marked more by intimacy and warmth than stress and strain. 

To assess the state of your social fitness, ask yourself how much you agree with statements like:

• I don’t often feel lonely.
• I’m happy with my number of friends.
• If I had an emergency, there’s someone I could call for help.
• If I had a bad day, there’s someone I could talk to about it.
• I feel like I can be honest in most of my relationships.
• I feel generally supported and loved.
• If I need advice on a practical matter, there’s someone I could talk to.
• There is at least one person in my life who challenges me and encourages me to grow.
• There is at least one person in my life who makes me laugh and helps me have fun.
• I’m happy and fulfilled in my romantic relationship.
• There is at least one person in my life who knows nearly everything about me. 

Social fitness not only encompasses the state of having healthy relationships, but also the capacity to show up well in these relationships. 

To assess the “fit for” element of your social fitness, ask yourself how much you agree with statements like:

• I would feel comfortable walking into a room where I don’t know anyone.
• I feel comfortable making small talk with a stranger.
• I can listen intently to someone without getting distracted.
• I am able to cultivate genuine curiosity about anyone.
• I’m adept at reading social signals and adapting my behavior accordingly. 
• I know how to ask questions that facilitate conversation and deepen relationships.
• I am able to offer feedback and advice in an appropriate way.
• I am able to empathize with others in a helpful and comforting manner.

Of course, both of the elements of fitness are inextricably connected. In both the social and physical realms, you become fit by exercising your capacities, and the more fit you are, the more capacities you can exercise.  

The Parallels Between Physical and Social Fitness

To better understand the concept of social fitness, and how it’s developed and maintained, it’s helpful to think through its parallels with something we’re more familiar with: physical fitness.

Physical and social fitness were once defaults, but now require intention to maintain. 

In our primitive past, people had to move their bodies by way of necessity. Physical activity was built into the tasks of daily life. 

In the modern world, it’s possible to perform most of life’s necessary tasks from a seated position. Exercising takes intentional decisions and will.

In the same way, social fitness used to be an automatic part of life. Primitive peoples lived in small communities, which were filled, morning to night, with face-to face interactions. Today, with the rise of technology and work-from-home jobs, it’s possible to go very long stretches without talking to someone in the flesh. 

Just like the physical movements that arise naturally during the day (like walking to and from your car in a parking lot), are not enough to maintain your physical fitness, the amount of spontaneous social interactions that crop up in your routine are typically not enough to maintain your social fitness.

Social health does not happen by default; it requires dedicated effort.

Ignoring your physical and social fitness results in serious health consequences. 

You know the potential health consequences of a sedentary lifestyle: cancer, obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, depression, anxiety. You’ve probably also heard that many of those same maladies are linked to loneliness.

The Harvard Study found that “The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest (mentally and physically) at age 80.”

Thousands of years of human history has designed us to move, and to socialize. If we ignore these hardwired needs, both our physical and our mental health deteriorates.

Physical and social fitness offer freedom from and freedom to.

Related to the idea of fitness as both a state and a capacity is the fact that in both its physical and social forms, fitness offers an individual freedom from and freedom to. It’s both a protective and proactive quality — something that prevents the bad and allows us to do more good.

Physical fitness gives you freedom from diseases, fatigue, poor sleep, and mental malaise, while also granting you freedom to navigate varied environments, play sports, climb mountains, play with your children, and so on. 

Social fitness likewise offers freedom from bodily and mental maladies and also keeps the burdening stresses and sadnesses of strained relationships at bay. At the same time, it provides the freedom to enjoy rich friendships, get ahead at work, feel confident at parties, find love, and experience joy in a happy and long-lasting marriage. 

If you don’t use your physical and social fitness, you lose it.

Have you ever been out to a social engagement after a long hiatus from face-to face interactions and noticed that all your behaviors came out cringe-inducingly creaky? You felt like a social Tin Man who’d gone too long without an oiling. 

Even if you lift weights for years and years, once you stop, your muscles will begin to atrophy. Likewise, if you fall out of the socializing habit, your interpersonal skills get rusty.

Some people are more inclined towards physical and social fitness than others, but everybody needs them all the same.

Some people are more physical. Some people are less. Some people truly enjoy working out. Others highly dislike it. Regardless of what category someone falls into, getting exercise is equally important for their health.

Some people are more social. Some people are less. Some people are naturally inclined towards extroversion; some people are more introverted. Regardless of what category someone falls into, socialization is equally important for their health. 

In the case of both social and physical fitness, a minimum amount of exercise is needed to maintain good health. But the amount someone needs beyond that minimum to be at their best will vary. 

Some people need to work out an hour every day to not go bonkers. Others only need to do 30 minutes of dedicated exercise several times a week to stay trim and feel copacetic. 

Some people need to be out socializing multiple times a week to feel happy; others are content with far more occasional gatherings. 

Dr. Waldinger says that one of the questions he’s asked most frequently is how many friends someone needs to have. He says there’s no set answer; it depends on the person. Some people are perfectly happy having just one good friend; others need a dozen. 

In a similar way, different people are drawn to different forms of social and physical exercise. Just as some people like playing tennis and others like yoga, some people enjoy small talk and others like deep, emotion-exploring conversations. But just as someone who likes running but dislikes weightlifting may need to lift weights in order to stay healthy for running, even people who dislike small talk must engage in it as an on-ramp to more intimate exchanges. 

While the natural desire for socializing, optimal social circle size, need for interactions, and inclination towards certain types of socializing will vary from person to person, everyone needs a quality stream of socialization in their life.

Cultivating physical and social fitness constitutes both a self-interested exercise and an act of service.

Working on your physical fitness offers personal advantages: you look and feel better and are capable of engaging in life’s most fun and adventurous pursuits. But it also confers a benefit on society: you’re prepared to assist others in an emergency, are less of a burden on the healthcare system, and have the vim and vigor to do as much good as possible in the world.

In the same way, working on your social fitness is both a self-interested and an altruistic act. Socially fit people enjoy a richer life themselves, while also benefiting others by providing a listening ear, supportive companionship, and nourishing recognition. 

As David Brooks argues, the moral fabric of a society frays when people stop feeling seen and heard; the resentment that results moves them to act out and act badly. Witnessing this bad behavior prompts people to interact with and trust others less, which only makes folks feel lonelier and less recognized, which leads to more behavioral ruptures, and the negative cycle continues. Being adept at socializing pushes this cycle in the other direction. It’s an act of service.

Maintaining physical and social fitness requires endless monotonous exercise, but when you need it, you’ll be glad you have it. 

You don’t typically see immediate benefits from working out, besides an elevated mood. Health benefits accrue slowly and subtly. You don’t need to typically put the strength and physical skills you’re building to use. You put in hours each week and don’t experience an obvious payoff.

But, when you need your physical fitness for something fun or in an emergency — a friend invites you on a backpacking trip; a family member needs help moving a couch; you have to walk a marathon all over Disney World; you need to run from a burning building — you’re surely glad you have it.

The same thing is true of social fitness. A lot of the conversations and exchanges you engage in may be fairly mundane. But, when you find yourself meeting an important client, going on a date with someone you’re nuts about, or getting to know a friend you can tell will turn out to be special, you count your lucky stars that you’re prepared. 

By consistently exercising your interpersonal fitness in mundane, day-to-day ways, you ensure that you’re socially agile, confident, and adept when the interaction really counts.

You’ve got to regularly exercise your physical and social fitness whether you feel like it or not.

People typically understand that even if you don’t feel like working out, you have to do so anyway, for your health.

Socializing, however, seems more optional — something you only do when you feel like it.  

We recognize we shouldn’t give much credence to our mood when it comes to deciding to exercise, but frequently let our mood dictate whether or not we’ll attend a party.

But the same consistent commitment should prevail in both areas. Sometimes social exercise is something you look forward to, and sometimes it’s akin to eating your spinach — something you do, even though you don’t feel like it, because it’s good for you.

Regularly getting in social “workouts” means saying yes to after-work drinks or a networking event, not because of an innate desire to go, but simply because you recognize you need the exercise to stay interpersonally limber. It means striking up a chat with a coffee shop barista simply to practice your chit-chat. It means asking a couple to go out to eat, even if you’re not terribly excited about their company, to keep your conversational muscles in tone. 

To maintain your social fitness, you’ve got to get in the reps, whether you feel like it or not.

Even when you don’t feel like exercising your physical and social fitness, you’re always glad you did.

When you don’t want to exercise, but get after it anyway, by the time you’re done and all red-faced and sweaty, riding that post-workout high, you’re invariably glad you decided to fight through the inertia.

When you don’t want to socialize, but you put in the effort anyway, you’re almost always glad you did and walk away feeling better and even a little buzzed — a little more human, a little more healthy, a little more fit.

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In resolving hundreds of kidnap-for-ransom cases involving gang leaders, pirates, and extortionists, Scott Walker, a former Scotland Yard detective, has learned a thing or two about how to negotiate and communicate in a crisis. He shares how to apply those lessons to the difficult conversations we all have in our everyday lives in his book Order Out of Chaos: Win Every Negotiation, Thrive in Adversity, and Become a World-Class Communicator, and we talk about his tips on today’s show.

Scott and I discuss what a “red center” means in a kidnap-for-ransom scenario and how to create one in your personal life, the “immediate action drill” that can help you stay in that red center, the importance of separating the decision-maker from the communicator in a negotiation and having a “battle rhythm,” why you don’t give hostage takers the money they ask for right away and how to structure a negotiation instead, and more.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Article: The 7 Habits — Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood
• AoM Podcast #648: Lessons in Building Rapport from Experts in Terrorist Interrogation
• AoM Podcast #234: Haggling and Deal Making Advice From a FBI Hostage Negotiator
• Box breathing
• Physiological sigh

Connect With Scott Walker

• Scott‘s website

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Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. In resolving hundreds of kidnapped for ransom cases involving gang leaders, pirates, and extortionists, Scott Walker, a former Scotland Yard detective, has learned a thing or two about how to negotiate and communicate in a crisis. He shares how to apply those lessons to difficult conversations we all have in our everyday lives in his book, ‘Order Out of Chaos’. Win every negotiation, thrive in adversity, and become a world-class communicator. And we talk about his tips on today’s show. Scott and I discuss what a red center means in a kidnap for ransom scenario, and how to create one in your personal life, the immediate action drill that can help you stay in that red center, the importance of separating the decision-maker from the communicator in a negotiation and having a battle rhythm, why you don’t give hostage takers the money they ask for right away, and how to structure a negotiation instead and more. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/walker. All right. Scott Walker, welcome to the show.

Scott Walker: Thank you for having me.

Brett McKay: So, you are a hostage negotiator. So, you negotiate with people who have taken other people hostage. You also help organizations who have had ransomware attacks. How’d you end up doing what you’re doing?

Scott Walker: Yes, a great question. I don’t actually recall the conversation at school where you sit down with a careers advisor and they say, so what is it you want to do? Do you want to be a train driver? A teacher? A doctor? Whatever? And at no point do I remember them saying, “Hey, Scott, do you want to negotiate ransoms for people?” Because it’s one of those jobs you kind of fall into, so to speak. I was a cop. I was a detective in London, Scotland Yard, for about 16 years. And towards the end of my career there, I got introduced to the world of kidnap for ransom negotiation and operations to help resolve those and get the hostages back. And I did that for a number of years. And when I left the police, I went to work for a consultancy firm that specialized in crisis response, you could call it, which ultimately was about flying off all over the world, working with families and organizations to get their loved ones and colleagues back who’d been taken hostage, had been kidnapped and a ransom was being demanded.

Brett McKay: Are you still working with that company or are you doing it on your own now as a consultant?

Scott Walker: Yeah. I’m doing it more by myself now. And over the last couple of years particularly, it’s taking all those lessons and themes and patterns and tools and techniques that I learned over hundreds of cases over many years into the business world, into the corporate world, and also into people’s personal lives as well. How can you have really difficult conversations? How can you succeed in those and just have better relationships and communicate better regardless of which area of your life really?

Brett McKay: Oh, so you’re taking the lessons you’ve learned as a hostage negotiator and helping people be better negotiators in everyday aspects of their lives?

Scott Walker: Yeah. It’s how to think, feel, and act differently in a better way, particularly in times of stress, uncertainty, overwhelm, conflict, crisis, a bit like the world we’re living in right now. And in a way, it doesn’t really matter what the circumstances, the principles apply, or at least the underlying principles apply. And then you can just adapt accordingly depending on what your needs and circumstances are.

Brett McKay: So, this is a world that is just new to me. I don’t know anything about it. How often does kidnap for ransom cases happen? Does it happen more often than we’re aware of that you see in the news?

Scott Walker: An accurate figure for how many kidnaps take place each year is not really known. Because if you think about it, the places in the world where these kidnappings take place, the government, the tourist department are not gonna say, “Hey, we’re the kidnapped capital of the world. Come and invest your business and your hard-earned money here or will come and visit us as a tourist.” There are probably 40,000 to 50,000 kidnappings a year worldwide. That’s what we estimate. Probably only about 10,000 of those are actually recorded. But when I was working in London in the police, we had about one a week.

Maybe you about 50-52 kidnappings a year there? And then when I worked in the private sector, we were dealing with over 100 a year, just us as a small team doing that. But the chances of the average Joe walking down the street somewhere becoming a victim of a kidnap is really slim. You have to be unfortunate to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Usually, they’re targeted ’cause they’re high net worth, or there’s some kind of, we used to call them bad on bad, where a criminal gang would kidnap another criminal or a family member of another criminal for retribution or to pay off some debt or for lack of respect or whatever it may be. But for the average person, you’ve got to be really unlucky to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Brett McKay: Okay. Let’s talk about how people can apply the lessons that you’ve learned as a hostage negotiator to their everyday negotiations or even just difficult conversations you have at work or with family members. You say and you argue that dealing with kidnappers is easy. And I think when most people hear that, they think, are you crazy? That’s the most… Like you’re dealing with irrational people. It’s one of the most stressful situations you could be in because the person who’s kidnapping is often threatening the life of the person they’ve taken hostage. Why do you think dealing with kidnappers is easy?

Scott Walker: At the end of the day, it’s a business transaction nine times out of 10. They have something we want, the hostages, and we have something they want, primarily money. And it’s coming to an agreement about how much that’s gonna be and when. How they’re going to get it and how we’re going to get the hostages back. I appreciate if you’re the family of the hostages, you’re not going to see it like that, but ultimately that’s what it comes down to. And there’s a bit of leverage we can apply there. And ultimately it’s pretty straightforward. Whereas what the challenge is, is on your own side and this applies to the big business world as well. It’s when the egos and the internal politics and the competing demands and the conflicting arguments and priorities all come into play. We call it the crisis within the crisis. And you can see that in a lot of, as I said, business negotiations where a lot of the time will be spent dealing with internal stakeholders who all want to have their say. They all want a piece of the action.

They all want to feel as if they’re in control or they’re dictating the narrative somehow. And I’d say probably 80% of my time on all of my kidnap and other crisis negotiations around the world, 80% of my time was spent managing the client, managing their expectations, their egos, their emotions, their needs, their wants, the challenges that they were going through. And so at times it’s quite a relief to be able to get onto the phone with the kidnappers and come up with a straight forward negotiation, so to speak. But that goes back to the point you made about irrational actors, irrational people, difficult conversations. And I think one of the most effective ways of dealing with those kinds of situations, realizing that actually it’s not about me, so to speak. I need to be able to understand where is the other person coming from? What’s their underlying needs, for example? And it’s that classic saying, first seek to understand before being understood. And by spending the time, bringing more curiosity than assumption to the table and working out, okay, what’s really going on for this person? Then that takes a pressure off you slightly. And it means you can then tailor your communication style, your part of the conversation to actually address that.

Brett McKay: Okay. So, a hostage negotiation is, it’s a business negotiation. And I imagine that’s the value you bring as a crisis negotiator, is you’re a third party. Of course, you care about this person who’s been taken hostage, but you’re detached, like you’re not as invested as the family members who have their loved one. And so they’re thinking, oh, my gosh, I got to do whatever I can to get this person back home safely. They’re going to get angry when the hostage takers don’t cooperate. They might say something irrational, but you as a third party, you’re able to kind of keep it cool and detached.

Scott Walker: Yes. And I think that’s a great way of highlighting that if you can regulate your own emotions, and identify the people’s emotions, you can go some way to bring in about far more calm and equanimity and balance and groundedness to the situation. And yes, by default, my position is coming in as a third party, so to speak, I bring that naturally, because it’s not my loved one that’s been taken. But even dealing with my own kids or in my own personal life, where there’s some that really triggers me or winds me up. Actually, initially, I’ve now over many, many years of getting it wrong, been able to regulate, understand, okay, what is showing up for me now in my body, my emotions, and then by being able to identify it and name it, that can somehow dissipate the impact it’s having on me, which means I can bring around more objective, rational thinking and decision making, rather than some knee jerk reaction.

And really, when you think about it, it’s a skill that we’re all capable of, and we get plenty of opportunities all day, every day. It could be the person who cuts you up in traffic, or is rude to you on the subway, or it could be an ego driven boss. There’s all these moments, all these pockets of time and situations where it gives you this great opportunity to practice this regulation. And if you can do that, it’s a real superpower in that actually less and less things phase you.

Brett McKay: So in your book, ‘Order Out of Chaos’, you walk readers through a process and practices that they can implement in their own lives so that they can be more like a hostage negotiator, that sort of objective, third party negotiator in their own personal negotiations. And one thing you talked about at the very beginning is this idea, as a negotiator, you want to develop what’s called a red center. What’s a red center in hostage negotiation? And then how can people develop their own red center in their own difficult conversations?

Scott Walker: A red center, particularly in law enforcement terms, is the physical location where the telephone calls are being received from the kidnappers. It’s where the family member, for example, is receiving the demands and the threats. So, it could be the family kitchen, it could be a hotel room, it could be an office somewhere. And that is the place where we have to bring order out of chaos, which is why I called the book this. It’s a place that’s high emotion, lots of irrational thinking, understandably, and it’s about bringing this calmness so we can actually come up with a proper negotiation strategy and communicate it in the most effective way possible.

And my job was actually to bring about that calm, was to instill that in what is a really challenging situation. And I realized over time in many, many, many cases in many years was, you know what? We’ve got our own red center within us, each and every one of us. And it’s this place that no matter how challenging, how many problems or issues that get thrown at us in life, personally, professionally, we’ve all got this inner ability, it’s like an inner resilience almost, that we have that ability to overcome whatever is put in front of us. And if we can master that mindset, and tap into those resources that we have, then actually nothing is really gonna knock us off our path again.

And just like anything, it’s like working a muscle, it’s muscle memory. It’s like going to the gym. You don’t just go once and expect to get the body of Adonis. You have to practice it and reinforce it daily, which is why I was saying a while ago that every day life presents you with opportunities to practice emotional regulation, getting your mindset to where it needs to be, and developing this inner resilience, this red center that actually you’re gonna find a way through this no matter how challenging or how stressful the conversation, the negotiation, the business presentation, that difficult phone call with a loved one you’ve been putting off, or whatever it may be.

Brett McKay: This idea of a personal red center. It reminds me of the inner citadel that Marcus Aurelius talked about.

Scott Walker: Yeah. Actually I never thought of it like that, but that’s exactly what it is. And do you know what? It’s the only thing really, now that you’ve mentioned it. It’s the only thing, I guess, that you have complete control over. You can’t control the weather. You can’t control the taxes. You can’t control traffic or what someone is gonna do or not do or say or not say. But what you can control is what goes on between that stimulus, that trigger, and your response. And as you described there, the stoic approach, I guess, of this citadel. I control what goes on within these walls here. And that’s what… You can become the master of that domain, so to speak. So, I like that analogy there. Thanks.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So in any difficult conversation and negotiation, you want to develop this red center, this inner citadel where you’re in control, you’re still gonna feel emotions, but you’re gonna…

Scott Walker: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Control them and manage them effectively.

Scott Walker: That’s it.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about how we can do that. What are some things that you do to maintain your cool in a hostage negotiation? Especially, in situations where there are threats about killing the hostage, do you have processes that you go through to keep yourself centered and in that personal red center?

Scott Walker: Yeah. And again these have been developed over time, and these are tools and techniques that I know work when the stakes can’t get any higher, when there’s a mock execution on the phone, the family is in bits, the threats are coming in. The negotiation is not really working that well for a whole host of reasons. The money is not becoming available. The hostages are in poor health. So, anything that can go wrong is going wrong. And as the negotiators, the… As the crisis response consultant, so to speak, all eyes are on me or people that are doing my job to resolve this. And so I can’t afford to let my emotions or mindset be anything other than really, really strong and agile in the moment.

And so the techniques I’ve developed and a sense of discovered that they’re grounded in neuroscience and what have you, I call it the immediate action drill. And this is something that I keep in my back pocket, even to this day. The kids know what button to press or, as I said, somebody on the train tube subway or in the traffic. And the first part of the immediate action drill is interrupting the pattern. It’s so important that, what I mean by that is something is said or something happens, or you get the trigger, there’s a danger, you can just stay so focused on, that you get that tunnel vision and then you just get lost in a negative, disempowering story that plays on loop over and over and over again.

And interrupting the pattern could be something as simple as standing up and going outside for a bit of fresh air, or going for a walk, or going to the gym, or having a glass of water, or putting some music, on. Something to… Or it could be some breathing techniques. It could be something to interrupt the pattern, the situation that you’ve just found yourself in. And from that moment, the second stage is about riding the wave. So, for any surfers, or skiers, or skateboarders, listening, is imagine you’ve interrupted the pattern and now we wanna ride the wave. And this is the wave that happens to us biologically, chemically is for about 90 seconds, two minutes maybe tops, we have this rush of cortisol and adrenaline and other chemicals pumping through our bodies when we face the whole fight, flight, and freeze response. And so that 90 seconds, that two minutes, we wanna ride the wave. We want to feel the feeling and drop the story. It doesn’t matter why we’re feeling this, we just need to tune in and allow that to dissipate. And if after about 90 seconds, two minutes, it’s still going, it just means we’re stuck in a story or some trauma pattern there.

But then, so we’ve interrupted the pattern, we’re really tuning into what’s showing up for us, riding the wave for 90 seconds, two minutes. And then the third step is to ask better questions. And you can only do that when you’ve regulated, when you’ve brought the nervous system into balance and better questions such as, okay, what am I missing here? What’s the opportunity? What’s the learning or insight? What else could this mean? What can I be grateful for? Whatever happens to be. And so it’s asking better questions because if you ask better questions, you’re gonna get better answers. But you can only do that from a regulated state. And if for some reason that’s still not quite working, I’ll just go back to do some breathing techniques such as box breathing, which is quite a popular and an effective one where you breathe in for four seconds, you hold it for four, you exhale for four, and then you breathe in again, you hold it, and then you breath in again for four. So you just repeat the cycle.

Or there’s the physiological sigh where you breathe in through your nose and then before you breathe out, you do an extra little in breath as well through the nose. And then there’s a longer exhale. And again, these are just proven ways of regulating a system. And I would do this every time before I walked into the room where the kidnappers were gonna phone, before I sat down with a family or the client, I would do that so I could regulate my emotions. And if we were using a communicator because of a language barrier who was gonna speak to the kidnappers, I would get them to do that as well. Either box breathing or the physiological sigh or whatever technique worked for them so they could regulate, they weren’t stuck in a pattern and that we were able to ask better questions if we need to. And the same applies to people’s personal lives as well. The techniques work.

Brett McKay: Yeah. If you are dealing with a kid who’s frustrating ’cause they’re not wanting to do their homework, you feel triggered, you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I’m getting angry here.” You can just do this really quickly. Interrupt the pattern. That might just be, I’m gonna leave the room and say, “Hey, we’ll talk about this here in a bit.” And then you can do the process of ride the wave, ask better questions like, okay, what am I missing here about what my kid’s point of view is and how can I better understand them? And then maybe do some box breathing and then you can come back and begin the conversation again.

Scott Walker: Yeah, and absolutely. And dealing with your kids, for example, or a loved one, a partner, a friend, a colleague is, you can look at it for… You look at your hands, look at your both hands. You look at your left hand and you go, “Okay, this is the person, this is their true self, this is their identity, them as a person,” you know, they’re inherently a good person. And in the right hand you look at them and go, well actually this is the behavior that’s showing up. These are the unkind, unhelpful, disruptive, so-called bad behavior. And it’s about separating the two. So, then you can deal with the behavior that’s manifesting itself rather than what we generally do. It’s really both together and we attack the person as opposed to the behavior. And I think by separating that as part of that immediate action drill as well, can go some way to avoiding, you know, us jumping in or making the situation even worse by going into a spiral or a tit for tat, arguing back and forth, which isn’t really gonna resolve anything.

Brett McKay: I can see this happening in a business negotiation. Maybe in a business negotiation, there’s multiple issues being discussed. And let’s say there’s one issue where you can sense that there’s a trigger, like people are uncomfortable, there’s some tension there. You can interrupt that pattern there with that issue by saying, “Hey, I sense we’re reaching an impasse here, let’s table this for now and then we can discuss these other issues that are not as pertinent or not as heavy.” And then you can come back to that one issue once you’ve calmed yourself down.

Scott Walker: Absolutely. Which is why you get saying such as, well, okay, well let me sleep on it, or let’s have a coffee break. Let’s, you know, people can, if you have what I call a sensory acuity, if you can walk into a room or you’re sat in a room for a long period of time and sense, actually this is… We need a break and the tension is getting too much, something is not quite right, people are flagging, the air is getting quite irritable. We just need to interrupt what is going on here. So, we’ll go outside for a bit of fresh air. Let’s grab a coffee and we’ll come back in half an hour. And something as simple as that. You’re right, it may sound really, really super simple, but it works.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Scott Walker: And which is why I always recommend clients now in business negotiations, particularly if they’re face to face, is have somebody in the room on your side whose sole job is to observe. They’re not to actually take upon the negotiation itself. Their job is just to pick up on all the nuances and the context and the body language and what is not being said. And the mood. And the energy. Because so often we can get narrow focus, we get tunnel focused onto the specifics of a negotiation. We can sometimes miss the bigger picture. And those people who are the observers, they’re worth their waiting goal, because they’re the ones who can pick up stuff and go, well actually we’re not in alignment here. There’s a mismatch, there’s an incongruency between what’s being said and everything else I’m noticing we need to take 20 minutes out ’cause we need to have a conversation about this.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show. That reminds me that idea of having an observer in a negotiation reminds me of another point you make as a hostage negotiator, one of the things you do is you have a team, there’s a big team going on in a hostage negotiation. One thing you do is you separate the people who are the decision makers in the hostage negotiation from the person who’s communicating. Why do you do that?

Scott Walker: Commanders command and negotiators negotiate. Absolutely, because if I’m the key decision maker and I’m jumping on the phone with, it could be anybody, it could be kidnappers, it could be in a business deal. I have nowhere left to go. I can’t put any buffer, any firewall. I can’t store for time ’cause I can’t go, well, let me check with the boss if I am the boss. And not only that, it allows… Even if it’s just you, even if you are buying a car for example, you could still separate the negotiating and the decision making yourself. Which again, it goes back to that point I made just now is, well, let me sleep on it. I wanna think about it. Let me come back to you on that. It’s really important to build that buffer so you don’t get caught up in the whole emotion of it. Because we do make decisions emotionally and then look to justify them rationally afterwards. Whereas, because we know that, well, let’s put a bit of time in so we can make sure they have the right emotions. And we are not making a decision in the moment out of fear, greed or whatever it may be. And so by separating that ideally with two or more people, but even if it’s just you, the same principles apply.

Brett McKay: And while what this does, it just helps you bring in that idea of you being a disinterested objective third party. You’re trying to get to that as close as possible by doing that.

Scott Walker: Yeah. It just brings a bit more space and control and enables you to make better decisions that are gonna be in your interest ultimately, rather than agreeing to something, and then you come off the phone or you walk out the room and going, “Oh, we could have asked for more money. Or do you know what? We’ve been ripped off here.” Which happens to all of us because we make those decisions too quickly because we’re caught up in the emotion and the high drama, the negotiation, rather than having some time to think about it.

Brett McKay: And so the idea is you need to have a plan whenever you reach one of those decision points where you could get caught up in the emotions as the communicator and negotiator, you know, doing it by yourself. Have a plan where, “Okay, I reached this point where I can see my emotions are getting the best of me. That’s when I need to separate the two.” The inner negotiator, the inner communicator, and then take a break and then let the decision maker do the decision making and then come back and let the communicator do the communicating.

Scott Walker: Yeah. And that could even be a five minute gap. It doesn’t have to be five weeks, you know what I mean? It’s just separating it. You bring an intentionality to it, I guess, of right, I’m deliberately, consciously putting a firewall in place now between this negotiation. Okay, well let me, I’m gonna go off for half an hour. I’m gonna come back and then I’ll make a decision.

Brett McKay: What do you do in the situation as a hostage negotiator? ‘Cause I’m sure this happens there, ’cause this happens in regular negotiations. Let’s say you do want to put some space, “Okay, I wanna interrupt the pattern here. I want some time to think about it.” But the other party is like, “No. You gotta make a decision now. It’s do or die.” How do you handle that?

Scott Walker: Okay. Well, we would’ve preempted this ahead of time and we can come onto that later about what we call that and how we do that. But in terms of, it’s just explaining, well, if you want me to get the money, we need time to do that. And all the time I’m on the phone to you, I’m not gonna be able to get the money. It’s a lot of money you’re asking for, we’re a poor company, we’re a poor family, whatever. Actually, I need to go and speak to people. I need to try and get the money from them. I need to raise the funds, whatever it is. So, you’re building in a narrative, you’re building in a story, a credible story as to why you need time. And then you can go, well, “Do you know what? Let’s speak again, same time tomorrow.” And that helps with what we call the battle rhythm of being able to manage this over a long period of time without getting burnt out. And so if we can buy time, if we can separate the negotiation from the decision making, and it just means it’s far more sustainable and everybody stays far more alert and in better shape, and they can make better decisions. And ultimately it’s about the safe and the timely release of the hostages.

Brett McKay: Tell us more about this battle rhythm idea in hostage negotiation.

Scott Walker: Yeah. What it is, is when you don’t have an effective battle rhythm, what that looks like is people on edge 24/7, every phone call notification ping on their phone or computer, they think it’s from the kidnappers. They don’t sleep, they can’t eat, they don’t get any rest. And that’s fine for a couple of days, but after week, two weeks, two months, three months, six months, it’s just not sustainable. And the longer that goes on without an effective battle rhythm, people get burnt out and make poor decisions, and ultimately people can die as a result of that. And so what a battle rhythm really is, it’s about a routine. It’s about a structure. Again, this applies to the business world as well. Is, “Okay, we’re gonna sit down and we’re gonna negotiate between 2:00 and 4:00 PM every day.” And outside of that, each side is gonna work on their side of the deal, you know, their offers and counter offers and dealing with all the demands and threats maybe that are showing up. But it also means people get a chance to sleep, to eat, to rest, to think through things, to work out 4, 5, 6 steps ahead, particularly kidnapping. “Okay. Well, we need to start thinking about how we’re gonna get the money together and who’s gonna transport it, who’s gonna carry it to the kidnappers, for example.” So, that’s really what we mean by a battle rhythm.

Brett McKay: It’s interesting, I didn’t know this about hostage negotiations. You’d think hostage negotiations, they’d be resolved really quick. But the way you describe it, it can be a very long drawn out affair.

Scott Walker: Well, it’s worth emphasizing the different terms here, the hostage taking that people think of when we use that term, they think it’s like a bank robbery gone wrong, or it’s in a domestic situation where usually a disgruntled husband is taking the wife hostage because she’s having an affair with somebody. Or the bank robbers are caught in the bank and they can’t escape. Those situations aren’t that common. So, really what we’re talking about is somebody is on the way to the factory in West Africa or Latin America or Southeast Asia somewhere, and a kidnapping gang want to take them. And then we’re gonna ransom the family or the company for money. And that is what we’re talking about really here. And I said that could take days, weeks, or months to resolve.

Brett McKay: So, the battle rhythm is just establishing structure to the conversation that you’re having?

Scott Walker: Yeah. So, you can have a sustainable negotiation, which ultimately is important because if you don’t have it, it can impact the efficacy of the negotiation, which ultimately can impact the chances of the hostages coming back alive.

Brett McKay: And you can do this in your own personal negotiations where you say, “Hey, we’ll discuss this for 30 minutes and then we’ll take a break if it hasn’t been resolved. And then we’ll come back to it 10 minutes later.”

Scott Walker: Yeah. And as I said, we’ll sit down, we’ll meet up here in the meeting room between 2:00 and 4:00 every day and look to work through this. And then in the time outside of that, each side will have their own challenges and issues as I mentioned at the beginning. They’ll have their own crisis within a crisis, so to speak, where they’ll have to brief upwards. They’ll have to come together and work out what they’re gonna do and all the challenges and all the issues and problems that can come from doing these big negotiations. And so it’s in everybody’s interest to do this.

Brett McKay: Well, another aspect of establishing parameters for the negotiation, not only establishing a rhythm, it’s actually establishing who will be doing the talking and who you will talk to. ‘Cause one thing you talk about in the book is a tactic that hostage takers will often use is they’ll go to multiple parties and try to negotiate with multiple parties. Why do they do that?

Scott Walker: To spread fear, distress, dissent, confusion. Which is why one of my key roles at the very beginning is to try and get some control over those communications. And so we say it’s, we want one number, one voice and one message. We want the kidnappers and us to be speaking on one number. We want one voice on either side, and there’s gonna be a clear message, certainly from our side to them, one clear message. We don’t want four, five, six different people all trying to get involved, all trying to have their say, all in these parallel negotiations because ultimately it confuses the situation. It can lengthen the negotiations and ultimately threaten the ultimate outcome, which is the release of the hostages or in a business context, the deal. But you often see that particularly in the business world is where, well actually in kidnapping where people come out of the woodwork, they all feel as if they should have a say or an involvement. And sometimes they’ll open up these parallel lines of dialogue without each, you know, the other… The partner of negotiation realizing this, and it rarely ends up well.

Brett McKay: You know, who does this tactic very well of causing discord and confusion? Kids do this when they go to their parents, they’re like, “Hey dad, can I go to the amusement park?” And then your dad gives an answer, and then they also go to the mom, “Mom, can I go to the amusement park?” And then, they give different answers, kids are… They know about that.

Scott Walker: Yeah. They’re the best, best negotiators going around. And I’ll tell you what, if anyone listening has got kids that realize actually we wanna watch and learn how they do it. ‘Cause kids are masters at it, it must be an inherent thing that as adults, we lose it over time, perhaps. I don’t know.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So, it’s something you can do when your kids do that and they ask you a question where it’s kind of like, “Oh, I’m not sure.” Just be like, “Well, let’s talk about it with your mom as well.”

Scott Walker: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah [laughter]

Brett McKay: Yeah. You just nip that in the bud. Another aspect of prepping for a hostage negotiation is this idea of bunch of fives. What is that?

Scott Walker: Yeah. This is something I was alluded to a short while ago around as part of the preparation for any form of negotiation, if you can come up with a bunch of fives, and again, just imagine your hand, the palm of your hand, if you can think of, okay, what are the top three, four, five objections, challenges, opticals questions, threats, demands, issues, whatever the other side is likely to levy against you, if you can understand and work out what they’re likely to be ahead of time, that’s a great position to be in because you can then preempt, and you can mitigate against them. You could even introduce them yourself, you know, they’re the elephant in the room, so to speak, and you could just introduce them into the negotiation, and it gets it out the way because if there’s a chance that the other side are gonna levy them against you, it means that it’s gonna be playing on their minds somewhere. Which is why if you can have, and we use this in a kidnapped negotiation. We want a conflict call. We call it the conflict call.

We want that as soon as possible. And this is the phone call with the kidnappers where they’ll ask for, say, I don’t know a million dollars. And the family has got about 20,000. So, there’s a huge, huge disparity between the two. And so that initial conflict call is when we’re looking to manage the kidnapper’s expectations. Our initial offer could I don’t know, $10,000-$15,000. And obviously the kidnappers are not gonna respond too well to that, but it’s far better to have that at the outset than wait till you’re two, three, four, five weeks into the negotiation. And so this bunch of fives allows you to get to that position and have that conversation from a place of strength, because it’s not gonna faze you when the other side suddenly come out with the threat, the demand, the question, the challenge, the obstacle, the objection. And so it’s time spent preparing for that is time well spent in my experience.

Brett McKay: Okay. So, all the things we’ve talked about so far, the immediate action drill where you interrupt the pattern, ride the wave, maybe do some breathing, the separating the decision maker from the negotiator, this bunch of fives, this is all about developing that red center, that mental fortitude that you’ll stay calm when you’re in the process of negotiation. Let’s talk about actually just the negotiation process specifically. You talk about how it’s important to establish empathy with the other party that you’re negotiating with. And I think people can understand that when you’re in a business negotiation, you wanna understand what people’s needs and wants are. Why would you wanna develop empathy with a hostage taker who is threatening the life of somebody?

Scott Walker: I think it’s worth emphasizing what empathy is not at the outset. Empathy is not agreeing with somebody. It’s not acquiescing, it’s not condoning, it’s not even necessarily being particularly pleasant or nice. [laughter] Empathy, it’s a verb, it’s a doing word. It’s what you do to demonstrate you understand where the other person is at or where they’re coming from or what’s going on in their mind or their position. And people have difficulty with that because they bring their own ego to bear in the driving seat. And they allow that to get in the way and they’ll then be judging the other person where again, it’s really worth emphasizing, it doesn’t matter if I disagree with the person. In fact, empathizing with the other side when we do disagree, when we have nothing in common is really, really powerful. But if I can do that, I’ll explain how we can do that in a moment, but if I do that, if I can demonstrate that empathy, it enables them to feel seen, heard, and understood. And this is not some kind of woo-woo, fluffy nonsense.

This is, it’s grounded in neuroscience and it works. I’ve seen it work time and time again, both in situations where high stakes, life or death situations, and in a more benign, let’s say, corporate environment. If people feel as if they’ve been listened to and that the other side gets them, they’re more likely to agree to your terms and suggestions. And actually by empathizing, you’re earning the right, you’re building the trust, you’re earning the right to then look about influencing and persuading the other person to do something that they may not initially wanna do. And the way we can demonstrate that empathy is first of all, remove our judgment and ego out of the way. And it could be something simple as just summarizing where you think that the person is at. It’s like, okay, well, before we go any further, is it okay if I just share with you where I think you’re at with this deal? You think actually this deal, it’s a lot of money. It’s probably more money than you wanna pay right now.

You feel that actually we’re in a stronger position here and you may even feel as if we’re looking to rip you off because we’ve inserted these terms and conditions or clauses in the deal that you probably feel as if they’re not really fair to you. And this isn’t the first time this has happened. This is the third time as two businesses we’ve been in this position. And they’ll go, “Yeah, actually, Scott, yeah, Scott gets me. He understands. Even if I disagree with him thinking, well, actually, this is all above and beyond. It’s a standard contract, standard terms and conditions. And actually you’ve signed this many times before without any problem.” It doesn’t matter about that. I just wander to the side to think, “Ah, they understand me. They get me.” And then you’re almost given an open goal in which you can then start to influence and persuade.

Brett McKay: So yeah, you can do this even when the guy is saying, “I need a million dollars now or I’m killing this person.”

Scott Walker: Yeah. And it’s like, okay, well, “Hey, it sounds like getting a deal here pretty quickly is important to you so you can get back to your family or whatever it is you’re doing. And actually you believe that we’ve got the money at hand to pay you so we can get our loved one back.” And they go, “Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. You’ve got the money we wanted. Otherwise we’re gonna kill them.” Okay. Well, then we can actually at that point go, “Well, please, the responsibility of the hostages is down to you. I know this is important. I know you want this resolved, but you must look after the hostages. And if you do that, we’re gonna do our best to get you as much money as possible.”

Brett McKay: Another thing you do in a hostage negotiation is this idea of decreasing increase. What is that? And how do you use that in a hostage negotiation?

Scott Walker: Decreasing increases how the offer, counter offer, demand, counter demand, et cetera, how that goes. So, say there’s an initial demand for a million dollars and we, the family or the company, they can maybe get quarter of a million. That’s the maximum amount of money they can get. And so we would make an initial offer of, I don’t know, let’s say 150,000. And then each time we make an offer, we would do slightly less than the previous one. So, each time we offer some money, it’s less than the previous offer, which signals to the kidnappers where this is gonna go. Actually, they’re not gonna get a huge jump, a huge increase anymore. And the longer this goes on, the less and less we offer. The challenge comes when sometimes the kidnappers will say, “Okay, okay, this has gone on long enough. We understand where you’re at. You can’t get this much money. But actually, you know what? We’ll settle first.”

Let’s say we’re at $200,000 so far. They’ve declined that offer. And they’ll go, “Okay, actually, if you can get 220,000 to us by tomorrow, we’ll release the hostages.” If our last couple of offers have been in increments of maybe a 10,000, a 5000, and a 3000, and then all of a sudden we’re gonna find an extra 20,000 overnight, the kidnappers are gonna go, “Well, hang on. You’ve been telling me you could only find 3000 for the last couple of days, and now you’ve suddenly found 20,000 overnight? Well, then they’re gonna hold on for more.” And so it’s a way of bringing some discipline, I guess, and some structure to the negotiations. And again, as I said, it manages expectations. It sets the trajectory of where this is gonna end.

Brett McKay: That seems counterintuitive that you wouldn’t to just give the money that you have available, because I’m sure their loved ones are like, “Geez, I want my son back alive. So, just give them the $250,000.” Why wouldn’t you just wanna give the hostage takers the money they asked for right up front?

Scott Walker: That question probably gets asked on every single case. And the reason we don’t do that, the reason we don’t wanna do that, well, you imagine if we paid what they asked for too quickly, what do you think is likely to happen as a result of that?

Brett McKay: I guess they’ll just ask for more.

Scott Walker: They’ll go, “Thank you for the down payment. Thank you for the deposit. Now we’re ready to negotiate. And not only are we gonna keep that money, the poor courier, the poor person who you’ve managed to persuade to bring us the ransom money, we’re gonna keep him as a hostage as well.” And so what we wanna do, and it’s counterintuitive, I get that. But by bringing about this discipline in the negotiation, it actually shortens the amount of time that the hostages are kept for. And so we want the kidnappers to feel as if there’s no more money left. Because in the business deal as well, if you think there’s more money left on the table, you’re not gonna agree to a deal. And the kidnappers are no different to that. And we call it squeezing the orange. We want them to feel as if they squeezed every last drop of juice out of us so they don’t come back for more, so they don’t release the hostage and then they kidnap them or a family member next week, for example.

Brett McKay: So to come back to the decreasing increases technique, this would be like you’re negotiating for a new car and you throw out a low number and then that’s rejected and with your subsequent offers, what happens?

Scott Walker: The money goes up. My offers to pay more money would increase, but the amount that they would increase would decrease each time.

Brett McKay: Gotcha. Well, Scott, this has been a great conversation. I think the big takeaway is from this conversation, in a negotiation or a difficult conversation, you got to keep that red center, that inner citadel. We talked about some tactics you can do to do that. Is there like one thing you think that if someone started implementing today with difficult conversations they’re having, whether it’s at work or at home, where they’d see immediate return on investment?

Scott Walker: I would say it’s the emotional regulation piece. It’s any conversation or every conversation you have now and you can feel yourself getting a bit riled, it’s just pause even if it’s for a split second and just notice, “Actually, do you know what? I can really feel that tension coming up in my body. Okay, well, let me just focus on that. Let me breathe through it and then I can reengage.” And the more you can practice that, this can be a split second or one or two seconds maximum by the time you’ve practiced this. And I would urge people to then seek out worthy opponents, I call them. Those are those people who always annoy you and frustrate you or the situations you know are likely to be testing because it’s just a great practice to work those emotional regulation muscles. And if you can do that, it means you’re never gonna get fazed again in a negotiation when it really counts.

Brett McKay: Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Scott Walker: Yeah. They can go to the website scottwalkerbooks.co.uk and there’s more details on there. Sign up for the newsletter and get a copy of the book and learn about my negotiation workshops and other good stuff.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Scott Walker, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Scott Walker: Thank you.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Scott Walker. He’s the author of the book ‘Order Out of Chaos’. It’s available on Amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, scottwalkerbooks.co.uk. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/walker, you’ll find links to our resources. We delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives. And while you’re there, make sure to sign up for our newsletter. We’ve got a weekly option and a daily option, they’re both free. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on at AOM. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to review our podcast on Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time it is Brett McKay, reminding you to listen to AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

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Have you ever known one of those people who seemed to be able to connect with anyone? The kind of person who had the ability to make others feel understood and smoothly navigate even the trickiest of conversations?

Charles Duhigg calls these folks “supercommunicators,” and he’s the author of a new book by the same name. Today on the show, Charles explains that what underlies supercommunicators’ skill in connection is something called the matching principle, and he unpacks how it works and how you can put it to use in your own conversations. We discuss several techniques for how to figure out what kind of conversation you’re having, so you can align your language and energy with the other person. And because emotional conversations can be particularly difficult, we dig into tactics for successfully navigating them, even when they contain a high degree of conflict. We also get into how to carry the skills of connection into your digital conversations.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Charles’ previous appearances on the AoM podcast:
  • Episode #61: The Power of Habit
  • Episode #196: The Science of Self-Motivation & Productivity
• AoM Podcast #559: How to Handle Difficult Conversations

Connect With Charles Duhigg

• Charles’ website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Have you ever known one of those people who seemed to be able to connect with anyone, the kind of person who had the ability to make others feel understood and smoothly navigate even the trickiest of conversations? Charles Duhigg calls these folks supercommunicators, and he’s the author of a new book by the same name. Today in the show, Charles explains that what underlies supercommunicator’s skill and connection is something called the matching principle. And he unpacks how it works and how you can put it to use in your own conversations. We discuss several techniques for how to figure out what kind of conversation you’re having, so you can align your language and energy with the other person. And because emotional conversations can be particularly difficult, we dig into tactics for successfully navigating them, even when they contain a high degree of conflict. We also get into how to carry the skills of connection into your digital conversations. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/supercommunicator.

All right, Charles Duhigg, welcome back to the show.

Charles Duhigg: Thanks for having me on.

Brett McKay: So the last time we had you on was back in 2016, to talk about your book Smarter Faster Better. It’s all about the secrets of being more productive in life and business. We’ve also had you on to talk about The Power of Habit and The Habit Loop. You got a new book out, though, called Supercommunicator. How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection. I mean, this is all about how to have better, more meaningful conversations. What led you to take a deep dive into this topic?

Charles Duhigg: Well, when I wrote The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better, it’s very much focused on the self, and it’s about how we succeed as individuals, what do we need to do to be successful? But the thing I realized is that a huge amount of our happiness and our productivity and our success, it depends on other people. We work in teams. We have partners or spouses and kids and parents. And so I realized that at the core of dealing with other people, coordinating with other people is communication, it’s conversations. And then when I started doing the research, I learned that we’re living through this golden age of understanding communication, actually for the first time in ways we never have before because of advances in neural imaging and data collection. And I just thought it was fascinating. And more importantly, I thought it could help a lot of people, including myself.

Brett McKay: Was there a moment you had in your own personal life where you realized, boy, I really need to get better at talking because I’m not good at it?

Charles Duhigg: Oh, yeah. There was more than one moment. I think we’ve all had that experience. For me it was, I fell into this pattern with my wife where I would come home after like a long and hard day and I would start complaining to her like, “My boss is a jerk, or my coworkers don’t appreciate me”. And she very rationally would say, “Oh, here’s a solution. Why don’t you take your boss out to lunch, and you guys can get to know each other a little bit better”. But instead of being able to hear what she was saying, I would get even more upset. And I’d be like, “Why aren’t you supporting me? You’re supposed to be outraged on my behalf”. And then she would get upset because I was reacting very poorly to this advice she had given. And so I started going to these researchers and asking them, “Why does this happen?” ‘Cause it’s not just me, this is a pretty common pattern. And they said, “Well, actually, here’s what we’ve learned”.

And this is one of the biggest insight from the last decade is, we tend to think of a discussion as being about one thing, we’re talking about my day, or we’re talking about the kids’ grades or the pets. But actually every single discussion is made up of multiple different kinds of conversations. And in general, those conversations fall into one of three buckets. There’s practical discussions like where we’re solving problems or making plans. Then there’s emotional conversations where, “I want to tell you how I feel, and I don’t want you to solve my problem. I want you to empathize and I want you to listen”. And then there’s social conversations, which is about how we relate to each other and to society. And they said, “The thing that we figured out is if people are having different kinds of conversations at the same moment, then they won’t really hear each other, they won’t really connect with each other”. And so the key is what’s become known as the matching principle within psychology. That in order to communicate with someone, we need to be having the same kind of conversation at the same time, because that actually causes our brains to align.

Brett McKay: Okay, there’s a lot to unpack here, and I hope we can do that throughout this conversation. And to get into this idea of the matching principle, you start off the book talking about this guy named Felix Sigala, who worked for the FBI’s Crisis Negotiation team.

Charles Duhigg: Yeah.

Brett McKay: He’s a master communicator, but from the outside he looks pretty unremarkable. He just looks like a middle aged dude, mustache, maybe wears sweater vest, I don’t know. And so you’d see like, “How is this guy… ” People just relate to him, they connect with him, he doesn’t look charismatic. And so a team of researchers went in to study Felix to figure out what made him so good at communicating. What did these researchers learn about communication from Felix?

Charles Duhigg: So, Felix is a really interesting test case, ’cause you’re exactly right, if you met him, he would not stand out for you at all until he opened his mouth. And what’s really, really interesting is that he’s very typical of supercommunicators. Supercommunicators are not necessarily the most charismatic people. They are not extroverts. Who they are, they’re people who think just a little bit like half an inch deeper about how to have conversations. And as a result, they can connect with almost anyone. And the thing is, it’s just a set of skills anyone can learn, any of us can become supercommunicators. And so in Felix’s case, what happened was these researchers sat down with him and they were like, “Look, tell us what you do that’s so special? Why did so many people tell us that we had to be in touch with you?” And he said, “Well, let me demonstrate. It might be better”. And he just starts asking them questions like, “Tell me about what’s going on in your life”.

Now what’s interesting is that the questions he’s asking are a special kind of questions, but they don’t appear that special. They’re what’s known as deep questions. And a deep question asks us about our values or our beliefs or experiences. But it doesn’t appear to be that deep at first. It doesn’t seem really probing or intrusive. It doesn’t force someone to reveal something. But it’s as easy, like if you bump into someone and you ask ’em, “What do you do for a living?” And they say, “I’m a lawyer”. A deep question would be to say, “Oh, how’d you decide to go to law school?” Or, “What do you love about practicing the law?” Both those questions are pretty easy to ask, but what they do is they ask the other person, provide an opportunity for the other person to tell us about their experiences, why they went to law school, to tell us about their beliefs, what it is about justice and the law that gets them excited every day.

And when they share that with us, then it provides an opportunity for us to engage in what’s known as reciprocal authenticity, where we can share something about ourselves and we’ll feel closer to each other. And that’s exactly what Felix would do. He would ask these questions that were deep questions that didn’t appear that deep, and then somebody would bring up something meaningful. They became a researcher because their parents were researchers, or they… The thing that they love about teaching is to see how students develop. And then he would share something about himself. He’d say, “Oh, that’s really, really interesting, ’cause what I hear you saying is that you love to help other people. And actually that’s why I joined the FBI, ’cause I love to help people too. And I found this way”. So what’s happening there is that almost invisibly Felix is letting people… Inviting people to bring their full self to the conversation. He’s proving to them that he’s listening to them, he’s sharing his own life with them, and as a result, they feel connected. They believe that he wants to connect with them. And that’s the most important thing that supercommunicators do. They prove to us they want to connect.

Brett McKay: So these questions that he asks is this what allows Felix to match up so he’s able to sync up with the person he is talking to. So they’re all on the same page and the person feels like they’re communicating?

Charles Duhigg: That’s exactly right. So, these deep questions, and I will say, so people who are consistent supercommunicators, ’cause we’re all supercommunicators at one time or another, but people who can do it all the time on demand, they tend to ask 10 to 20 times as many questions as the average person. And some of those questions are like throwaway questions. They’re like, oh, what’d you think about her? Oh what’d you say next? We don’t even register them as questions, but they invite us into the conversation. But then about half of them are these deep questions. And the reason why those questions are so powerful is exactly what you just said, is that it allows you to say something meaningful, like something that’s true and authentic about yourself. And it allows me as a listener to engage in reciprocal authenticity without it seeming like I’m trying to steal the spotlight from you. Or I asked where you went on vacation just ’cause I really want to talk about where I went on vacation. They’re really powerful.

Brett McKay: So the matching principle is figure out what kind of conversation you’re having and then match the other person, or invite them to match you. And by asking deep questions, Felix was able to create this matching. And we’re going to talk more about how to create this kind of alignment throughout our conversation today. But besides asking deep questions, how else can you tell what kind of conversation someone wants to have?

Charles Duhigg: Well, you just listen to what they’re saying. Because they’re going to tell you, I mean, they might not say I want to have an emotional conversation, but if they bring up things like feelings, if they mention something that feels vulnerable to you or feels kind of emotionally authentic, then they’re having an emotional conversation. The same way that when I get home and I talk about, my boss is a jerk and he doesn’t appreciate me. It’s not really about what my boss did, it’s about how I feel about it. And that’s obvious, just from listening. On the other hand, if I’m talking to my wife and I say like, “Look, let’s figure out the budget for our vacation next year, ’cause I really want to go someplace exciting, but I don’t want it to be too expensive”. Well, that’s clear that that’s a much more practical frame of mind. So it’s not hard to figure out what kind of conversation is happening, it’s just a matter of listening for it and understanding that there’s these different kinds of conversations.

Brett McKay: Another way you suggest creating alignment is to share your goals for the conversation and then ask others what their goals are. So instead of being opaque and then each person has to decipher what kind of conversation is going on and what it’s about, you’re just upfront about that.

Charles Duhigg: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And think about how helpful that is. I mean, sometimes this happens really naturally. Like we have an agenda, we’re in a business meeting, and we’re, look, we’re here to discuss the budget. So we know what everyone ostensibly wants out of it. But if you even just take half a beat and you start by just saying look, and again, this is a great deep question. “Tell me what the budget means to you. What’s important to you about this budget?” Then what I’m really doing is I’m opening it up. ‘Cause you might say, “What’s really important to me is that we hit our numbers”. Practical conversation. Or someone might say, “What’s really important to me is that I’m worried we’re going to have to do layoffs. And I don’t want to do that to people and their families”. Okay, now you’re signaling that’s a much more emotional conversation. And so simply by asking someone what their goals are, and the easiest way to do that is A, to share your own goals. And B, to simply ask them, “What does this mean to you? Why is this important to you?”

Brett McKay: Okay, so ask people what their goals are for a conversation and tell people your goals. Another suggestion you make in the book that I really like is to come prepared internally for a conversation. Like mentally prepare, think beforehand about what you want to get out of the conversation and what you want to talk about with someone. And that can help you get more out of the conversation.

Charles Duhigg: There was this study that was done by some researchers who went into an investment bank. And this was a place where people screamed at each other all day long. They just got in fights constantly. And they told everyone for the next week before each meeting, write one sentence where you describe what you want to accomplish in this meeting and the mood you want to establish. It took about 10 seconds for people to do this, they would literally scribble down one sentence about the upcoming meeting and then they’d usually just stick the paper into their pocket and walk into the meeting. And people didn’t even usually announce what their goal was. They didn’t announce what they had written down, but the incidence of conflict in those meetings went down by 80%. And the reason why is because everyone knew what they wanted and so they were able to express that to others. Knowing what we want. Just taking like literally two or three seconds before we start a conversation to figure out why we’re having the conversation. It pays enormous dividends.

Brett McKay: No, that’s something that my wife and I do whenever we get together with friends before they come over or before we meet them for dinner on the drive over, we might say, “What are the things we want to talk to these people about? What do we want to catch up on?

Charles Duhigg: Yeah.

Brett McKay: So we make like a list so that whenever we see a friend we haven’t seen in a long time, it’s like, “Oh, I want to follow up with this”. And our friends do the same thing with some really good friends of ours. We call the quality conversations. So QCs. And we only see each other maybe once or twice a year ’cause they’ve moved away from us. But we each come with our list of like, here’s the things we want to talk about. And we don’t get to all of ’em, but because both of us have an idea of what we want to talk about, we can go really deep with our conversations.

Charles Duhigg: Yeah, that’s really, really smart. And in fact, there was an experiment done at Harvard Business School by Alison Wood Brooks, she’s a professor there, where what she did is she had all of her students… She told her students, you’re going to have a conversation with a stranger. And then what I want you to do is I want you to write down three topics you might discuss. And again, this was like 10 seconds of thought, people would write down like last night’s TV show and the game this weekend and where are you going on vacation? And then they would just stick that list in their pocket. And most of the people never discussed one of the topics that they had written down, but almost all of them reported feeling much less anxious during the conversation and that the conversation went much, much better than they expected because they had this list to fall back on just like you and your wife. And my guess is that because you guys are creating a list of stuff you really want to discuss, you do get to a lot of it, ’cause it’s stuff that’s important to you, but just having that list, it makes the entire conversation easier.

And it probably doesn’t take you guys long on the car ride over to come up with what you want to talk about.

Brett McKay: No. Yes. Just a few minutes. Another useful tip you provide to help people figure out what the conversation is about. Because again, everyone could be going into conversation with a different agenda. You might be thinking, I’m just going to focus on just practical things. This person wants to have more of an emotional conversation. You talk about thinking of every conversation as a negotiation.

Charles Duhigg: Yeah.

Brett McKay: How can thinking of conversation as a negotiation help you get that matching principle going?

Charles Duhigg: So this is really interesting and there’s a lot of research on this, and the word negotiation might be a little off putting or misleading to people because within psychology, this is referred to as a quiet negotiation where the goal is not to win anything. The goal is to figure out what each person wants. So think about how most of your conversations start is subconsciously you actually probably conduct a couple of experiments at the beginning of every conversation without even realizing it. Like sometimes when you start talking to someone at the beginning of a conversation, you might try… You might interrupt them just to sort of see… And then you pay close attention to their reaction to try and figure out, are the rules of this conversation that we can interrupt each other? Or is it like, no, we each have to wait our turn. You might make a joke and then you’ll pay close attention to see if the other person laughs to try and figure out is this a casual fun conversation or is this a little bit more serious? We need to be a little bit more formal.

We already engage in this quiet negotiation when we conduct those experiments. The difference is that for supercommunicators, they just pay a little bit more attention to how other people react and they take lessons from them. And most importantly, if they tell a joke and the other person doesn’t laugh, they don’t assume that that means that the other person doesn’t like them. They don’t assume that that means that they made a mistake. Rather what they just did was conduct an experiment and they got data from it. And the thing about experiments is they’re not all supposed to work. Like, my wife is actually a scientist and if every experiment she did was a success, she’d be the worst scientist on earth. Like the reason you do experiments is to learn things. And so supercommunicators treat the beginnings of conversations just a little bit more like a series of experiments to figure out what does this person want?

Brett McKay: So you could… Okay, so you’re going to throw out a question, maybe you throw out one of those deep values questions, we’ll talk more about that. And the person doesn’t bite on it. They don’t really talk about what drove them to become a lawyer. It’s just like, well, it’s more of the practicality. They paid a lot of money. So you can understand, well, this person might want to talk about how to finance a 401 [k] or something.

Charles Duhigg: Totally. Or maybe they don’t even play along at all. Maybe you say like, “Oh, what made you decide to go to law school?” And they just say, “It just seemed fun. It seemed like a good idea”. “Okay”. I just conducted an experiment to figure out is talking about careers a way for us to connect? And the answer, the results you just gave me are, “No”. So then I might try a completely different topic and say something like, “Oh, the Super Bowl’s coming up. Who you’re rooting for in the game?” And then when someone says, “I’m rooting for the 9ers”. “Oh yeah, what do you love about the 9ers?” Like, why the 9ers instead of Kansas, by conducting these little experiments and just paying attention to how people react a little bit more, we figure out how they want to connect with us.

Brett McKay: Okay. So to figure out what kind of conversation you’re having and what it’s about, you listen, you ask questions, you tell the person what your goals are for the conversation. You ask them what their goals are. You think of the conversation like a negotiation. You throw things out there, maybe you throw in a joke and see how they respond to that. If they respond to the joke, maybe they just want to connect.

Charles Duhigg: Absolutely.

Brett McKay: So you’re going to…

Charles Duhigg: Or sometimes you don’t even have to throw out a joke, you could just laugh, 80% of the time when we laugh in conversations, it is not in response to something funny. It’s to show the other person we want to connect with them. And then the most natural thing to do is to laugh back, they’re showing us that they want to connect with us. So, I mean, think like, I’m laughing right now. Think about how many times in a conversation you laugh, but nobody’s told a joke. That’s a little experiment.

Brett McKay: Okay. We’ve talked about how to tell what conversation you’re having, and emotional conversations are some of the hardest. I’d like to dig in more into that. If you’re having an emotional conversation, your advice is to ask about other’s feelings and share your own.

Charles Duhigg: Yeah. Once we’re in emotional conversation, once I’ve said, you’ve brought up something that seems clearly to have to do with feelings, and the most natural thing for me to do is empathize. Oftentimes people are very scared of asking about this question. The best example of this in my life was that about six years ago, my dad passed away and I came back to… I was living in New York at the time. I came back to New York from the funeral, and like this was the most meaningful thing that had happened in a long time. The most profound, experiences of many people’s lives. And I would tell people I bumped into, they’d say like, how are you doing? They said, my dad passed away. I was there last week for the funeral. And they would usually, they would almost always say like, oh, I’m so sorry, or, my condolences.

And then because it felt uncomfortable to them, they would go on to something else. They would be like, I’m so sorry to hear that. But thank you for coming in today, ’cause I wanted to talk about the budget, but for me, this was the most profound thing I had been through. I was desperate to talk about it. I didn’t want to talk about anything else. And if somebody had said to me like, I’m so sorry to hear that. Tell me about your dad. What was he like? I would’ve appreciated that so much. And exactly what you said when we were having emotional conversations, oftentimes instead of asking about people’s feelings, we avoid asking. And as a result, we deny ourselves that opportunity to connect on an emotional level, which often is one of the most profound connections we can have.

Brett McKay: I’m curious, do all conversations have an emotional undercurrent even when it’s brass tacks, where going to go for vacation? Or who’s taking the kids where? Is there typically?

Charles Duhigg: Absolutely.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Charles Duhigg: Absolutely. From the second you open your mouth, emotions in some small way are shaping what you say and how you hear other people, going on vacation. I say to my wife, I’d really like to go to Hawaii. [laughter] And she says, I’d really like to go to Japan. And suddenly I’m like, Japan’s twi… In my head I’m like, Japan’s twice as expensive as Hawaii. And that makes me anxious. And also, we went where you wanted last time. It seems like fairness would dictate I get to choose this time. Those emotions are all there. Now that doesn’t mean that we have to make this into an emotional conversation, but it does mean that if we’re having problems connecting with each other on this practical discussion of where to go on vacation, it might be because we want to have an emotional conversation and we need to recognize that and let that out.

Brett McKay: Sometimes too, people don’t even know when there’s emotion tied to something they’re saying. They think it’s…

Charles Duhigg: Yeah.

Brett McKay: They think it’s completely practical. You might see this in, I dunno, it could be a business meeting or a meeting that you have with a group you belong to, and you’re trying to make a decision that’s seemed… On the surface seems very brass tacks. What are we going to do for the budget? Who are we going to assign to this task? Whatever. And whenever you see people coming at it just loggerheads, it’s butting heads. In my experience, there’s always been… There’s some emotional hangup there.

Charles Duhigg: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Someone feels strongly about this. It’s not even logic, it’s you have to dig deep. Why is this person so stubborn about this thing? Or why am I so stubborn about this thing? And then once you get that on the table things, it might not resolve right away, but at least you know where everyone’s coming from.

Charles Duhigg: That’s exactly right. And one of the things you said is really important is listen for conflict. Listen for, this isn’t going the way I planned it going. Listen for, I just feel like we’re not connecting with each other. We all know when that happens. When we’re in that meeting and we’re discussing something that seems practical and you can feel at the table like, we’re not on the same page. Something’s happening here. We’re not agreeing with each other. We’re not building on each other’s ideas. That is a great clue, that you’re having a practical conversation and there’s something emotional that you need to discuss, that you need to shift a little bit so that you can get those emotions on the table. ‘Cause oftentimes, once we simply acknowledge them, they become much less powerful. Once I say, look, I know that you are worried, I hear you saying that you are worried that we’re going to have to lay people off, and that’s going to be incredibly stressful. And so I want to say, if it comes to that, you and I will be in this together. We will do this shoulder to shoulder. Now all of a sudden that anxiety is gone. Now we can talk about plans, but if we don’t even acknowledge the anxiety, then it’s hopeless.

Brett McKay: And the reason why people don’t acknowledge it ’cause they feel uncomfortable about talking, about emotions.

Charles Duhigg: Yeah. Or they simply don’t recognize.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Charles Duhigg: That this is an important part of conversations.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Going back to this idea that, you gave that example your father died, you get back and people are, I’m sorry. And then they just moved on to business as usual. And you talk about people do that ’cause they just… Yeah, they don’t know what to say. They feel uncomfortable.

Charles Duhigg: Yeah.

Brett McKay: They feel awkward. And a technique that I found really useful, I got from your book and we… You mentioned it earlier, this idea of deep questions is turning what are typical shallow questions into deep questions. I want to go into this deeper.

Charles Duhigg: Okay.

Brett McKay: What are some more examples of turning shallow questions into deep questions?

Charles Duhigg: The basic principle of a deep question is instead of asking someone about the facts of their life, ask them how they feel about their life. And anyone who’s listening who has kids knows how true this is. I have kids myself, if when my son comes home from school and I’m like, what’d you do today? That’s a facts question. He’ll be like, nothing. What did you learn today? Nothing. [laughter] It’s like pulling teeth. Whereas, when he comes home and I’m like, Hey, I was wondering what was the best part of your day? Or, I saw that you hung out with Jasper after school. What do you like about Jasper? What do you think is cool about him? Suddenly it’s like opening the flood gates because instead of asking him about facts, I asked him how he felt.

And this is the principle that underlies every deep question. The question doesn’t have to be very profound, and the question doesn’t have to be very specific, it has to be some version of, tell me what you make of that. What does this mean to you? Why is that important? Instead of asking someone like, Hey, where’d you go to college? You can ask them like, what was the best part of college for you? What you’re really asking them there is what was important to you about college? And it’s easy once you shift your brain a little bit to look for these opportunities. Deep questions are incredibly easy to find and they’re so much more fun to talk about.

Brett McKay: Yeah. You talk about, you get some other examples instead of asking where are you from? What’s the best thing about where you grew up? And…

Charles Duhigg: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Someone might talk about their friends and playing in the fields and memories with barbecues. And some people might say, it had a… I don’t know, a nice park system. You’ll be able to figure out what people value with their answer.

Charles Duhigg: That’s exactly right. What they will tell you is they’ll tell you what matters to them. I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, so if someone says, what’s the best part of growing up in Albuquerque, what I’d say is, it’s just, I had a lot of family around me and it was really easy to see them. It’s not a fast paced, high pressure place. And so what I told this person is I told them family is important to me. And so that’s something we can dive into. I told them that, I was born into a place where it was a slower pace, which also implies that maybe I’ve lived other places that are faster paced. I told you so much about myself simply by telling you what I liked about growing up in Albuquerque. And it gives you a chance to tell me about yourself to be like, I grew up in Boise. And, same thing. It was like slow paced and now I live in New York, it’s a little bit more fast paced and I like that too. Now we’re having a conversation where we can get real with each other and get deep.

Brett McKay: So you didn’t value Blake’s Ladi Burger? Green chili burger?

Charles Duhigg: [0:27:01.5] ____ You know Albuquerque.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Charles Duhigg: [laughter] I will say a Blake’s green chili cheeseburger is a pretty good way to go.

Brett McKay: It’s a good one, yeah. Okay. Ask those deep questions. You figure out what they value. And you can even do this with things that are practical. If you feel like there’s an emotional undercurrent here, you can turn these shallow questions into deep questions. I’ve been doing this with my kids, before we go to bed at night, we lie down next to ’em. We talk about the day with each of them. And I’ve been trying to ask these deeper questions instead of asking like, what’d you do today? What was… I asked, What was the best thing you did today? Or What’d you like about that?

Charles Duhigg: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And it opens up some great conversations. Another part of having these emotional conversations is we need to start paying attention to, how the other person feels during this conversation. We gotta pay attention to their mood and energy.

Charles Duhigg: Yeah.

Brett McKay: What do you mean by paying attention to mood and energy in the other person?

Charles Duhigg: Okay, when we’re kids, we do this almost automatically. Babies almost from birth, if you smile at a baby, they’ll smile back at you. But as we get older, instead of paying attention to nonverbal communication, we start focusing on people’s words. We ask someone like, Hey, how you doing? And they say, I’m fine, but their arms are crossed and their voice sounds really like lethargic and their eyes are downcast, but we pay attention to their words rather than how they look to us, the signals they’re sending us. And so a big part of this is, making ourselves a little bit more open to noticing what’s going on, beyond the words coming out of someone’s mouth. Are they leaning in towards us? Are they interrupting us? Interruption? We think of interruption as being a bad thing, but oftentimes when we’re interrupting each other, it shows that it’s a good conversation because it means that both of us really like what we’re talking about.

We really want to connect here. Or are they someone who’s just sitting there listening? Are they kinda like looking away? It’s really easy to ignore all of those signals, but once we train ourselves, and again, this isn’t hard, it’s a habit that we can develop really easily. Once we train ourselves to notice how people are behaving, how much energy is in their voice? Are they high energy or low energy? Do they seem upbeat or glum? That tells us almost everything we need to know about what’s going on inside their emotional mind, even without them saying a word about their emotions.

Brett McKay: And should we match them? If they’re high energy, should we respond by being high energy as well?

Charles Duhigg: It would feel pretty good if we do. Think about how, again, going back to laughter. And in fact NASA uses this to figure out which of their astronaut candidates or applicants have high emotional intelligence. Think about if you tell a joke and then you go, ha ha, [laughter] and you laugh really big at it and the other person goes, [laughter] Yeah. It’s funny. You don’t feel like you’re connected. [laughter] You like the fact that you’re high energy and they’re low energy. They’re laughing back. They’re doing the same thing you are. They’re matching you. But because our energy levels don’t match, we know that we’re not connecting. Whereas if we chuckle a little bit and the other person chuckles with us, then we’re telling each other, we’re on the same wavelength.

Brett McKay: Yeah. That story about NASA, there’s this guy, it was, Terrance McGuire.

Charles Duhigg: Yeah.

Brett McKay: NASA started putting astronauts up into space stations and so they’re going to be up there for months, even years, a year at a time. And instead they had to figure out how can we make sure these people don’t kill each other while they’re up there? And like, ’cause they’re annoyed, and the thing they found, he started studying their conversations, looking at psychological profiles. And the thing he found that determined, it wasn’t the determining factor, but a sign that someone had emotional intelligence and could get along with other people, [laughter] was laughing when other people laughed.

Charles Duhigg: And laughing the same way they laughed. What’s really interesting is when you make it to the final rounds of like astronaut, interviews, everybody there knows how to fake into emotional intelligence really well. These are the people who have the right stuff. They’ve practiced this for years, but the difference between someone who can fake emotional intelligence and someone who has emotional intelligence is pretty big when you’re like nine months into a mission and you’ve been living in a tin can for the… With five other people. And so you’re exactly right. What McGuire did was he changed how he interviewed people. So he’d walk into these interviews carrying a bunch of papers, and he would spill the papers as if on accident, but he would do it on purpose and he would always wear this yellow garish tie.

And he would turn to the person who he hasn’t even met yet who’s about to interview, and he’d say, my gosh, my son made me wear this tie today and I dropped all these papers. I look like a clown. [laughter] And he would laugh at himself in this big energetic laugh. And then, without the applicant realizing he would pay close attention, did the person laugh back politely? Or did they match his energy and his intensity of laughter? Because if they’re matching him, that’s someone who takes emotional intelligence seriously. That’s someone who has thought about how to connect with other people, and to that person it just feels like a habit. They’re doing what feels natural. But we develop those natural instincts by thinking at some point in our past about how we want to be in a conversation.

Brett McKay: Some of the most emotionally laden conversations are high conflict conversations.

Charles Duhigg: Yeah.

Brett McKay: And you, talk about this tool that can help you navigate these high emotion, high conflict conversation is the loop of understanding what is the loop of understanding?

Charles Duhigg: Yeah. And it’s looping for understanding, when we talk about how people do it. One of the interesting things is that when we are in a conversation that has any tension or conflict in it, even if it’s small, we’re disagreeing about something, we hold different political opinions, there’s this thing in our head that immediately makes us suspect that the other person is not listening to us, but they’re waiting their turn to speak. And that can be really frustrating and that makes us less likely to listen to them. The way we overcome this is this technique known as looping for understanding. And there’s three steps to it. The first step is, ask a question. The preferably a deep question. The second step is once a person is answered the question, repeat back what you just heard them say in your own words.

And then the third step, and this is the one most people forget, is ask if you got it right. And the reason why this is so powerful is because what we’re trying to do is prove that we’re listening. We want to prove to the other person that we’re hearing what they said, that we want to understand what they say. That we’re not just waiting our turn to speak. And this looping for understanding, it becomes real. It’s like a second nature. I do it all the time now. I’m like, what I hear you saying is, and tell me if I’m getting this wrong. And then I repeat what they said in my own words. And it’s important that it’s in my own words. I’m not mimicking them, I’m proving to them that I’ve heard what they said and processed it a little bit. And study after study shows, if you do this in a tough conversation, in a tension-filled conversation or discussing politics with like your uncle, it changes the entire dialogue for the better.

Brett McKay: Another, idea you talk about to navigate high conflict conversations is, try not to control the other person. ‘Cause that ratchets up the tension.

Charles Duhigg: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Why do we have a tendency to want to control the conversation and the other person, and what can we do to counter that?

Charles Duhigg: A lot of this research and insights comes from looking at marriage counseling and how married couples talk to each other. Everybody fights. Every married couple has arguments. Some of those arguments almost seem not to matter at all. People, they have an argument and then the next, 10 minutes later they’re fine. Some of those arguments become toxic every single time. And so researchers started looking, trying to figure out what’s the difference between these two groups. And what they found is that in the toxic conversations, the toxic fights, what happens is that we’re trying to control each other. And when we’re feeling attacked or when we’re discussing something that’s tense, it’s very natural to want to control something. We have inborn instincts to try and control a situation when we feel anxious.

And the most obvious thing to control is the person I’m talking to. And that control can be like, if I can get you to listen to me, then you’ll agree with me. If I can just get you to see things from my perspective or I can try and control your emotions, I might say, you shouldn’t feel that way. That’s not such a big deal. You’re making too big a deal of this. When people try to control each other, it becomes toxic. But we have this instinct for control and we can’t just repress it. What we should do instead is we find things we can control together. And there’s three things in general that even if we are in a fight with each other, we can control together. The first is the environment. If this fight starts at two o’clock in the morning, we can agree, okay, let’s wait until tomorrow when we’re both well rested and we’ve gotten a chance to think on this a little bit.

Let’s not talk about this until 10:00. That’s controlling your environment together. And that’s really positive. The second thing you can control is yourself. And you can make this obvious. You can say things like, look, I hear what you’re saying. I just want to take 10 seconds to think about what you said before I respond. That’s something that shows that we’re trying to control ourselves instead of the other person. And the third thing we can control, is the boundaries of the fight itself. There’s this pattern in a lot of marriages called kitchen sinking. That’s one of the most toxic things that can happen, which is, we’ll start by arguing about where we’re going to spend Thanksgiving and it becomes, your mom hates me and we don’t have enough money. [laughter] A fight about one thing becomes a fight about everything.

That’s terrible. Oftentimes you see what the best couples do is they say, okay, look, we gotta figure out where we’re spending thanksgiving. Let’s focus on the Thanksgiving question. I don’t want to talk about your mom, I don’t want to talk about money. We can talk about that stuff, but that’s a different conversation. And what happens is, when we try and control our environment and ourselves and the boundaries of the fight itself, what we’re doing is we’re introducing control that we can share, places where we can cooperate with each other. And instead of controlling each other, we’re controlling these things together. And again, that doesn’t mean that the fight disappears, but it makes it so much easier for us to get through it.

Brett McKay: No, you mentioned earlier, I’ve gotta watch myself for that ’cause I’ve done that a few times. I do that a few times is where you’re having a conversation and someone’s saying, someone says something and I’m like, you’re not listening to me, but they are listening to me.

Charles Duhigg: Totally.

Brett McKay: They don’t want to do what I…

Charles Duhigg: Exactly.

Brett McKay: They don’t agree with me, but I project on them and say, you’re not listening. No. And there’s times where people will tell me something and, I understand completely what you want. I just don’t agree with it. Yeah.

Charles Duhigg: And think about how good it would feel if you’re in that conversation and that person says, okay, look, I might disagree with you, but I want to repeat back what you just said to me to make sure I understand it and tell me if I’m getting this right. And that takes like 30 seconds to repeat that back. If they did that, then you would not say, you’re not listening to me. You would say like, no, you heard what I’m saying. And we might disagree with each other, but you heard me and this is hardwired into our brains that would make you more likely to listen to them. When we prove that we are listening through looping for understanding, we make the other person more likely to listen to us.

Brett McKay: A lot of this looping for understanding, it’s easy to do in person, ’cause you can do it real time.

Charles Duhigg: Yeah.

Brett McKay: But it gets hard when you take that conversation online. And so online conversations can become really fraught. Dumpster fires as people say.

Charles Duhigg: Immediately.

Brett McKay: Immediately.

Charles Duhigg: [laughter] There’s a story in the book about, this experiment that was done where they brought together gun control enthusiasts and then gun rights activists. And the goal was to have like, teach them how to have a civil conversation. And so they taught them looping for understanding and a couple of other skills and it worked really well face to face. And then they go home and they had created a private Facebook group for them. And within 45 minutes people were calling each other jack booted Nazis. [laughter] It fell apart immediately. [laughter],

Brett McKay: Why is that? What’s going on?

Charles Duhigg: Well, I think what’s happening there, and this gets to everything else we’ve been talking about. ‘Cause you can do looping for understanding online. You have to think about how to do it a little bit differently. One of my very examples of how technology changes these conversations is if you look at when telephones first became popular about a 100 years ago, there were all these studies that were written that basically said, no one will ever use a telephone for a real conversation. Because we can’t see each other, we’re not going to be able to discuss real things. And in fact, the researchers were right at that time. There were all these studies where they would transcribe people’s phone conversations and they’re stilted and weird. People used phones as telegraphs to send grocery lists or stock, news of the day.

But of course, by the time you and I and everyone listening were teenagers, we could talk for like seven hours a night and they were the most meaningful conversations of our lives. And the reason why is because we learned how to speak on the telephone differently than we learned how to speak face-to-face. And in fact, one of the things we know is that without realizing it, when you talk on the phone, you tend to enunciate a little bit more than you would face-to-face. And because you know the person can’t see you, we tend to put a little bit more emotional signals into our voices. We do this unthinkingly. Now, when it comes to online communication, most people have only been emailing for like 25 years at the most. Slack, we’ve been slacking for four or five years, texting each other using emojis to text each other.

I still don’t know how to do that. And so we make this mistake when we go online, which is that we assume online conversations are like offline conversations, but they’re not. They have their own rules and we know those rules. We intuit those rules, but sometimes we just have to remind ourselves that if I’m talking to you over the phone and I say something sarcastic, you will hear the sarcasm in my voice. But if I email you and I can still, when I’m writing the email, I can hear the sarcasm in my head. You can’t hear it. And so you’re going to read that as being serious and you’re going to get upset. I need to use a different way to signal to you, I’m being sarcastic. Either not be sarcastic or maybe I put one of those little winking emojis at the end. Something to show you that I’m being sarcastic, which I don’t have to do when we’re talking to each other. And if we just take a second before we hit send to say like, what are the rules of email? What are the rules of texting? How are they different from the rules of making a phone conversation? Then we tend to communicate much better online.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you have some other rules. Overemphasize, politeness.

Charles Duhigg: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Express more gratitude, deference, greetings, apologies, and hedges.

Charles Duhigg: And studies back all of that stuff up. Study after study shows that like, in fact there was this interesting study of Wikipedia editors where people would be fighting with each other all day long online. And they just asked… They told one person to start saying, please, and thank you every other comment. And like everyone else stopped fighting. It’s like we start mirroring each other, we start matching each other and being a little bit more polite online, it has these totally outsized impacts.

Brett McKay: And you can use looping for understanding to deescalate these high conflict online conversations. If you see someone.

Charles Duhigg: Totally.

Brett McKay: Throw something out there, a total flame. They knew it was like a grenade is going to cause everyone to get angry. You can ask, you can get curious and be like, all right, it sounds like you feel passionately about this. Tell me why is that instead of responding with an immediate barb.

Charles Duhigg: Yeah.

Brett McKay: And you might find that it…

Charles Duhigg: Absolutely.

Brett McKay: It forces the person to get outta their own limbic system, their…

Charles Duhigg: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Reptile brain and start thinking like, a homo sapien.

Charles Duhigg: That’s exactly right.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Charles Duhigg: It takes advantage of those parts of our brains that have evolved to be good at communication.

Brett McKay: Charles, where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Charles Duhigg: Yeah, absolutely. The name of the book is Supercommunicators. You can buy it at Amazon or anywhere else that you, get books. If you want to reach out to me or learn about me, if you just Google my name Charles Duhigg, I’m the only Charles Duhigg on Earth, [laughter] D-U-H-I-G-G, or if you Google the Power of Habit or Smarter, Faster, Better, my website will come up and I’ll mention on my website is my email address, which is Charles@charlesduhigg.com. And I read and reply to every single email I get from a reader. It might take me a couple of days, but I want to connect with you and have a conversation. And so if you send me a note, I will read it and I will reply.

Brett McKay: Well, Charles Duhigg, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Charles Duhigg: Thanks for having me on. This has been so much fun.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Charles Duhigg. He’s the author of the book Supercommunicators. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, charlesduhigg.com. Also, check out our shownotes at aom.is/supercommunicator where you find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.

That wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website theartofmanliness.com. Find our podcast archives. And while you’re there, sign up for a newsletter. We got a daily option and a weekly option. They’re both free. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on at AoM. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to get your view off a podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member. Who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, is Brett McKay, remind you to listen to AoM podcast, put what you’ve heard into action.

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Brian Grazer is a Hollywood producer whose films and television shows have been nominated for 43 Academy Awards and 217 Emmys and grossed $15 billion worldwide. He’s produced everything from my favorite TV show of all time, Friday Night Lights, to critically-acclaimed and Oscar-winning films like Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind.

Grazer credits much of his success to his commitment to a practice he calls “curiosity conversations.” Today on the show, I talk to Grazer, who’s also the co-author of A Curious Mind Expanded Edition: The Secret to a Bigger Life, about why he considers curiosity conversations the “superpower” that fueled his rise as one of Hollywood’s leading producers. We talk about how these curiosity conversations are beneficial to have with everyone from VIPs to ordinary folks, how the ideas and connections they foster can enhance both your personal and professional life, what makes a curiosity conversation effective, and how to make them happen.

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Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Brian Grazer is a Hollywood producer whose films and television shows have been nominated for 43 Academy Awards and 217 Emmys and grossed $15 billion worldwide. He’s produced everything from my favorite TV show of all time, Friday Night Lights, to critically acclaimed and Oscar winning films like Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind. Grazer credits much of his success to his commitment to a practice he calls curiosity conversations. Today on the show, I talk to Grazer, who’s also the co-author of A Curious Mind Expanded Edition, The Secret to a Bigger Life, about why he considers curiosity conversations the superpower that fueled his rise as one of Hollywood’s leading producers. We talk about how these curiosity conversations are beneficial to have with everyone from VIPs to ordinary folks, how the ideas and connections they foster can enhance both your personal and professional life, what makes a curiosity conversation effective, and how to make them happen. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/curiosity conversations. All right, Brian Grazer, welcome to the show.

Brian Grazer: Well, thanks for having me on. I was thrilled to be on The Art of Manliness. Can’t go wrong with that. That’s an awesome site.

Brett McKay: Well, thank you. I really appreciate that. So you are an Academy Award-winning movie producer, and your credits include some classics like Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind. You got Splash, among many other films. And you’ve published this book called A Curious Mind, where you share how the virtue of curiosity has played a pivotal role, not only in your professional career, but also just in your life of living a flourishing life.

Brian Grazer: Yeah.

Brett McKay: And I want to start off with this, where you really learned the power of curiosity, and it’s how you got into the film industry in the first place. So how did curiosity lead you from going to law school to working in the film industry?

Brian Grazer: Basically, graduated from USC undergraduate in psychology, applied to USC Law School, got in, planned on going. And as the semester and graduation came to a close, about the first or second day into the summer only, I overheard a conversation in my apartment complex with three law school grads talking about the easiest summer job they ever had. And so, of course, I leaned into that conversation, and I closed my drapes in my little apartment and opened the window further so I could eavesdrop on these three guys discussing the virtues of their easiest job of all time. And one of them sounded awesome because it came with a company car, it was available today because the guy just said, “I just quit my job, but it was the cushiest job of all time.” And I thought, well, what could that be? And so I overheard he said, it was to work at Warner Brothers in the legal affairs as a law clerk. So I thought, I’m gonna call up immediately. I called 411, then 843-6000, asked for the legal department at Warner Brothers.

And sure enough, they said, “Come on in today. We do need a law clerk.” And I got the job that day. Now, I didn’t really want to be a law clerk, but I thought, well, that’s the field that I think I’m going into, or at least planned on going into. And so now I’m in this little desk, I’m in the office, a tiny office with a desk, and nothing to do the whole week, like literally no jobs, no assignment, no filing. And he was right. It was the easiest job of all time. I mean, on the verge of being the most boring job. But then the following week, they said, “Deliver some papers.” And I had to deliver these papers for what was gonna be the movie Heaven Can Wait that would star Warren Beatty. So the papers were to go to Warren Beatty. And I then, as I was delivering the papers to Warren Beatty, an assistant said, “Just hand me the papers.” At 21, I had the presence of mind to just say, Well, the papers will be invalid unless I hand them directly to Mr. Beatty. And so I just invented that on the spot. And eventually, I got up to Mr. Warren Beatty and I spent an hour with him. And that was the beginning of my very first conversation.

Brett McKay: What struck me from your story about how you went from going about to go to law school to becoming a law clerk, where you’re able to rub shoulders with actors and producers in Hollywood, was, you had that curiosity, but you took action. Like you actually did something about it. You called information and you said, I’m gonna actually gonna do something. I think a lot of people, they stop at the interest and that’s as far as they go. And it’s always like a bunch of what ifs, but it seemed like you had this sort of carpe diem, Well, what do I got to lose by trying to talk to Warren Beatty?

Brian Grazer: Yeah. I did think that as long as I’m polite and I’m thoughtful, it shouldn’t be too much of an imposition. I just think that if you come from a place of the generosity of spirit, that people won’t deny you or be offended or cut you short. And I’ve found that that is true. Even when I had absolutely no Hollywood power and no Hollywood identity at all, I just found that if you reach out to people with genuine interest, the worst that’ll happen is you’re just being polite. And that’s not such a high bar. It’s not a function of religion. It’s not a function of anything other than simple things like the golden rule or simple things like having trust in your fellow brother, brother or sister. It’s just really that.

Brett McKay: So you get to have a conversation with Warren Beatty. How did you get him to talk to you for an hour? And what did you ask him? What did you talk about?

Brian Grazer: Well, in order for your curiosity to be effective, and effective means where you get to learn the most about a person, means where you have, I would say a soul connection. You have to have eye contact. You cannot be distracted. You can’t be looking around. You have to be in a peaceful state, looking and communicating eyeball to eyeball with another human being. And literally, as the adage goes, use the windows of their eyes, is the window into their soul. And so I found that by being genuinely curious, not by asking a series of mechanically driven questions, but by just allowing yourself the freedom to just be. And by just being, you’re going to find your way into questions and conversations that are actually real. And the more real you are by the connection of no distraction and eye contact, the better your date will be with that person.

If you have interested eyes, and you’re a good active listener, most successful people want to talk about themselves. And look, you’re a master of it. You get important people on your show and you get them to talk about themselves. Because you have a reputation as someone that approaches things through an attractive thematic, and you have credibility and you ask good questions and you’re a good listener. So it’s as simple, but as hard as that.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Brian Grazer: So with Warren Beatty, I was able to… I knew enough about by reading the trades, even as a little law clerk, I would read the trade publications. By reading the trade publications, it’s somewhat demystifying ’cause you’re getting to understand… You’re getting through the language of Hollywood, ’cause just like every business has a language and the language makes the heartbeat of the business complicated or more complicated than it has to be because it’s the language barrier. Do you ever try to talk to a composer? It’s very hard. It’s very hard to talk to an engineer. And that’s a lot of it is language. But if you can get through the language and become somewhat adept, then you will understand what the goals of that person are. What are their goals? What are the things they are moving towards? What are the things they’re moving away from?

Brett McKay: Oh, yeah. I love that idea of eye contact. I wanna talk more because you have some great advice on eye contact and the power of having these conversations with people in person. But that first conversation, you caught the bug and you started to systemize this, right?

Brian Grazer: Yes.

Brett McKay: That Warren Beatty conversation happened spur of the moment and you were like, this is amazing. I want to do this more.

Brian Grazer: I’m gonna do this all the time.

Brett McKay: All the time. So you made a goal for a while. There was like one a day, right?

Brian Grazer: Yes. So I made a goal that I would do everyone that Warner Brothers had me. They sent me out on a mission, deliver papers to the author of the movie Exorcist. The Exorcist or Barbra Streisand or Mama Cass or I can name a lot of people. So they sent me out on these missions and I would turn the mission into a… Of curiosity conversation. And then I realized I can do this with people that that I don’t even have a mission. I can reach out and say, hi, my name is Brian Grazer. I work at Warner Brothers Legal Affairs. This is not associated with studio business. And I’d love to meet your boss for five minutes. And I’ve researched them thoroughly. And after five minutes I will leave and I won’t make any requests. I will not ask for a job. And every person said yes, every single one.

Brett McKay: And then you also, you started to expand after a couple of years, you started expanding to people outside of the film industry. Like you had a conversation with the guy that invented the hydrogen bomb.

Brian Grazer: Yeah. Jonas Salk, who created the polio vaccine, Princess Di, Henry Kissinger, 100s of Nobel laureates, including John Nash, which became a beautiful mind, astronauts, CIA directors, which later became the television series 24, the rockstar Bono, Mick Jagger, of course, all the tech founders, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Page. I mean, I made a point to meet all of those people and presidents of the United States.

Brett McKay: And how did you decide like, I need to talk to this guy? What was going on in your life where you’re I need to have a curiosity conversation with Bono?

Brian Grazer: Well, I’m a restless person. So what goes on in my life is a constant flurry of activity, intellectual and emotional energy. So I burn a lot of energy, just thinking, like many people, I’m not a special, but I’m a learner. I’m a lifelong learner. And the way to learn is to import people or subjects into your universe, your mental universe, ’cause you if you’re have an actual day job, which I did, even as being a movie producer, television producer, I had a day job that was to do that. But I was never going to give up on these curiosity conversations. I found them literally the most fulfilling thing I was doing… That I’ve done in life. I found that they served as a greater constellation of dots and experiences with new worlds and people, and that they often connected and proved to give me a very competitive advantage in storytelling and movies and television, I was able to sign Denzel Washington or Tom Hanks or Eddie Murphy, Steve Martin, so many of these people that everybody wants or Russell Crowe to three movies and Jodie Foster, everybody wants those actors, everyone, I was able to get the best talent.

Brett McKay: But the thing is, that wasn’t a side effect. Like, that wasn’t your goal going into this…

Brian Grazer: No, that was a side effect. That was a side effect.

Brett McKay: Okay. So curiosity got you from law school to the film industry as a law clerk, but how did you go from being a legal clerk, where basically you were just a gopher? You’re just delivering papers.

Brian Grazer: I was just a gopher.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Brian Grazer: I was just to file papers periodically and go for things around. Yeah.

Brett McKay: So how did you go from that to producing Apollo 13?

Brian Grazer: Oh, okay. Oh my God. How did I do? Okay. So that was quite a distance.

Brett McKay: Sure.

Brian Grazer: But basically the way it started is, I realized I had no resources, no money, but I had a very active imagination and I was a doer. So I would act on things quickly, well-intentioned, but act, do things, do, do, do. And I started writing short stories, just could be one page. It could be two pages or 10 pages, no longer than that really. And with these stories that I wrote, I would protect myself by copyright and I’d go pitch them. And eventually two of them became movies for television that I produced at 25 years old. One was called Zuma beach, the day in the life of Zuma beach, kind of American graffiti at the beach, 24 hours. And where you break down the beach and the culture and the people in it, and it got very, very high ratings. And then the other one was a 20 hour mini series on the 10 commandments, using each commandment as an underlying theme in a contemporary story. So now I have some credibility, my imagination and the doing-ness, acting got me to a place where I was now produced two high quality projects.

And then from there, I just… My career began. And I then wrote the story and script to a movie called Splash, just a man… Tom Hanks falling in love with a mermaid. And that was really just about Brian Grazer finding the perfect girl. And then I defined what that would look like. And then to get us to Apollo 13, which is quite a distance, I spent 10 years writing and producing comedies like that, produced the Nutty Professor and Liar, Liar and Parenthood and Kindergarten Cop, many of these movies. And then I realized you can make a lot of money, but you don’t get enough respect producing comedies. So I thought I’m gonna do a drama. I want to do something that’s really thoughtful and is taken seriously. And I learned through my curiosity conversations, the expertise of space and traveling into space and who does that, but an astronaut, I learned about astronauts. I learned of Jim level, who was the captain of the flight of Apollo 13.

I learned that he had written a 10 page outline, not so different than what I used to do on his failed mission to travel around the moon, to get to the moon and travel around it. And then I said, I reached out to Jim level and said, I’d really like to make this into a movie. And he had belief and trust that I could do that, because I had prior success. And I was earnest in my conversation. And that became the beginning of what became the movie Apollo 13, which got nine Oscar nominations. And that’s what that was.

Brett McKay: Well, one of the stories that stuck out to me in the book, you mentioned when you’re telling your shortened version of it, that you started writing stories, writing scripts, but it was a curiosity conversation that got you writing scripts. You talk about how you got a meeting with Lou Wasserman, who was the head of MCA. And this guy has been in the… He was a legend. He was in the movie industry since 1936, like head of MCA.

Brian Grazer: Oh, my God.

Brett McKay: And you somehow get in I’m gonna get in a meeting with this guy. I wanna talk to him ’cause I want to know how, so what he does and how I can become a producer. And I love the story. He says, “Look, buddy, you somehow found your way into this office. You’re basically full of it. I can see that. There’s two ways you become a producer. You got to have money and you got to know people.” And he says, “You don’t have any of those things. So the only thing you can do is you can write, you gotta own the stuff.” And he handed you a legal pad and a pencil. He’s all right, start writing. And then you wrote those TV scripts.

Brian Grazer: Correct. That is exactly what happened. He spoke the truth that I had nothing, ’cause no one had like just said that directly to my face. And I acknowledged that that was truthful. And so I thought, well, then I better find… Be really, really, really resourceful and figure out what I might have. So what I did have was a tremendously an active imagination like many other people. But I knew that I had to write those ideas down and turn them into either stories and in many of the cases into screenplays. And that’s how it started, because one man with a lot of wisdom cut me off from going into his office and said, Stop right here and told me I was full of shit basically. And you better have something the next time you walk into this office.

Brett McKay: Another important relationship that you develop because of these curiosity conversations was with Ron Howard, right? So Ron Howard directed Apollo 13, but you all have done lots of movies together. How did your curiosity start that relationship with Ron?

Brian Grazer: Well, I still had… That was the early stages of my curiosity conversations. And in that discipline, I would sentence myself to doing one per day. And they could know a whole variety of types of people at that time. They weren’t always Nobel laureates or Henry Kissinger or Edward Teller, who was the father of the hydrogen bomb. They could be anybody. That piqued my interest. I’m on my office at Paramount as the 25, 26 year old producer of television shows. I look out my window and I see Ron Howard, Richie Cunningham on Happy Days. And I thought, I have got to meet Richie Cunningham. He’s an American icon. He’s right in front of me, basically, and I’m going to call his office and set a meeting.

So I do. He reluctantly comes to my office because he’s quite shy. And as he entered, energetically, I felt a different person than I had ordinarily felt. In other words, energetically, he exuded an energy of goodness about him, which translated to me that whatever he tries to do, he will succeed at it. So whatever he wishes more than ever, he could become, in this case, was to be a theatrical movie director, which he wasn’t. If he wishes for that to happen, and that’s his obsession, I bet that will happen.

And that’s how that all came together. And I sort of trusted his soul and his energy, and I told him the three or four ideas that I had written, and he loved the one that was an R rated movie called Night Shift, which later starred Michael Keaton and Henry Winkler. And then at that moment where he wanted to do the R rated movie, I said, Well, I also have a PG rated movie that would be my preference. And he says, well, I promise you I’ll do it after? And that was called Splash, about a man, a regular guy who falls in love with a woman and later learns she’s a mermaid.

Brett McKay: Why did Ron want to do the R rated movie? What was going on there?

Brian Grazer: Well, what was going on there is that was the time where he was the very wholesome image of Richie Cunningham. And of course, he was also Opie in the Andy Griffith show. And so he wanted to get rid of that image, that super wholesome, squeaky clean image, and turn the dial a little. He wanted to reveal that he had more edge and that’s what his goal was. And that’s why he said he wanted to do the R rated movie.

Brett McKay: When you first had that meeting with Ron Howard, did you go into it thinking, Okay, I want to have this conversation, so we work together, or you just wanted to know what was going on with him.

Brian Grazer: No. I just wanted to know what was going on with him, what made him tick. All these meetings, I defined these meetings for me, that I would not ask for anything. I wouldn’t have an agenda and an ask. That I would permit myself to just have a pure conversation about that person, what they do for a living, what they’re passionate about, what they think their superpower is, and get to the root of who they were as people and how they were able to optimize what they were or that superpower into their professional power.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show.

Something you talk about in the book. When you have these conversations with people, you are curious in a specific kind of way. You call it emotional curiosity. What do you mean by emotional curiosity?

Brian Grazer: Well, simply that would be, as we all talk about it as EQ. I basically want to know what drives them. Often there’s an injury, an emotional injury in their life that drives them. And it doesn’t have to be grand. It could just be being cut from high school football, which was mine, in front of 200 kids. And that makes you… The emotional injury either causes you to get through the emotional injury to attain your potential, to attain your goal. The movie 8 Mile, which I produced with Eminem, was really about that. His emotional injuries as a young kid living in a trailer park with an abusive mom, an abusive, irresponsible mom, caused him a lot of problems early in life in the movie. And it caused him a problem of not being able to even look at the audience when he was supposed to rap to the audience. And that is a huge barrier. And in that movie, it’s about getting through those barriers and to liberate yourself from those issues that are holding you back.

Brett McKay: Okay. So, yeah, when you have these curiosity conversations, you’re not going to Ron Howard and ask him, Well, tell me about your technical approach to filmmaking. You want to know, why does Richie Cunningham want to make an R rated movie?

Brian Grazer: Exactly. That’s 100% right. Why does Richie Cunningham now want to make an R rated movie?

Brett McKay: Or you had one curiosity conversation with the guy who developed the hydrogen bomb. You’re not asking him, Well, tell me about the science. You want to know the story behind the story. Like, how do you deal with grappling that you created this weapon that can kill 10s of 1000s, 100s of 1000s of people.

Brian Grazer: Yeah. You’re 1000% right. It’s just I want to know what drives people.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So with these curiosity conversations, you’re still doing them? Do you still go for just, like, regular people? Like, you’re not going for the big names. Do you have curiosity conversations with, I don’t know, the waiter or a barman at a hotel you’re at?

Brian Grazer: A 1000%. Only just recently, I took an Uber car, and the driver, I spoke to him, and he sounded Russian. He said, No, I’m Serbian. I said, Okay, what’s it like? And I started talking to him about Serbia, what it was like. What did he do? He was in the military, then in security. I said, Do you still do security? I do part time. And then I asked him, Well, you must do a form of martial arts. Which one? I bring up Krav Maga. I bring up Wing Chun. I bring up several of these aikido karate… Several of these disciplines that, in fact, I’ve tried myself also through curiosity. And he said, No, I do one called systema.

And I thought, what is systema? I got super excited, and so he drops me off the house. I said, Show me what systema looks like. So he shows me what it looks like. And I said, Can I pay you to teach me this art form? He said, Sure. And so I started paying him by the hour to teach me this art form. So the answer is yes, yes, yes, I do this with regular people.

Brett McKay: No. Yeah. I think Uber drivers are some of the best people to have these curiosity conversations. I do this. Not all the time. You put the feelers out, and maybe the person wants to talk, maybe they don’t. But I’ve had some great conversations with Uber drivers during my time. I had one. My wife and I were in LA a couple months ago, and she was a taxi driver. It wasn’t an Uber driver. She was a taxi driver. But she was from Jamaica, and she just started telling us about, Oh, yeah, I was born in Jamaica, but then I lived in the United States, and I went back to Jamaica to take care of my mother, who was old, and it was amazing.

She just talked nonstop, and we just kept asking her questions and just learning some really cool stuff that I otherwise wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t had this taxi drive with this woman.

Brian Grazer: Yeah, I agree with you with taxi drivers and Uber cars. Not long ago, I was making a movie in Hungary, in Budapest, and I was supposed to that night have dinner with the ambassador to Hungary, the US ambassador to Hungary, which I did. And on the drive there, the Uber driver told me so much about what was going on in Hungary and the refugee crisis, and it made me smart for that dinner that I was having, like, 15 minutes from then.

Brett McKay: You’ve done 1000s of these curiosity conversations and you talk about lots of them in the books. But have any conversations been duds? And if so, what makes them a dud?

Brian Grazer: Yeah. Okay, I’ll tell you. Duds would be… Well, I’ve done a lot of research and I have expectations based on the research of learning something new and being mystified a little bit because all these conversations should be mystifying as I should be mystifying to them. So you lean in, things are being revealed. So that was someone that created a natural foods. He’s famous, so I don’t want to say his name, a natural foods brand. And he was a dud because he wasn’t really into it at all. I think he just wanted to own a rest… I don’t know. He just wanted to own a restaurant. And his motives were impure, I thought. I don’t now.

Brett McKay: Well, another one that stood out to me was Isaac Asimov.

Brian Grazer: Well, Isaac Asimov, who was the most prolific science fiction writer, that was a dud, but I was the dud. Because it reads as though he was. But he wasn’t. He was an expert in science fiction and this tremendous writer. And he and his wife met with me in New York and after less than 10 minutes they just got up and left. They said, We’re leaving. We’re afraid you’re not… They didn’t feel intellectually stimulated by me. And I say they’re right. Because I probably didn’t know science fiction well enough to attract his interest and that he didn’t have outside interest, really. Those were his interests. You got to be prepared.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Got to be prepared.

Brian Grazer: You got to be prepared.

Brett McKay: And then also make sure that the person you’re having this conversation with understands what you’re doing. I imagine what happens, oftentimes you’ll set this curiosity conversation with an important person. There’s all these gatekeepers and you get on the schedule and the person’s schedule is just set by a team of people. They have no clue. They’re going to sit there like, Okay, talk to Brian Grazer. Who’s Brian Grazer? I don’t know. I got 15 minutes with him. And they have no clue what’s going on. They’re just trying to get through with this so they go on to the next thing.

Brian Grazer: Yeah, I mean, I met with, I hope my assistant’s taking some notes, but I got to meet with the CEO of Sequoia Ventures, John Leone, or could be Leone. Oh, it’s Doug Leone. Sorry, Doug Leone. And I swear I think he thought I was the CIA and I said to him, because he was so guarded, unbelievably guarded. He said, What are you doing? What are you driving at? He said to me, I said, Well, you seem very guarded. You’re like a mafia boss or something. And that was enough to get him to understand what I was trying to say and flatter him at the same time because he’s a serious guy, man. He’s a really serious. And he looks like a formidable guy to me. He looked also like a bodybuilder. Now, he’d probably laugh if he heard me say this. I say it only as a compliment. And then the walls came down and we had a great conversation.

Brett McKay: So you’re big on having these conversations in person.

Brian Grazer: In person.

Brett McKay: And you’ve been talking a lot about eye contact. And in fact, you wrote a whole book about the importance of eye contact.

Brian Grazer: Yes. Which is incorporated into my new book called A Curious Mind. So hopefully people will be… It’s New York Times bestseller, I hope people go see it and read it.

Brett McKay: What is it about the in person aspect? Why can’t you do this on Zoom. Did you do these things on Zoom during the lockdowns, during the pandemic? And how are they different?

Brian Grazer: I did do them on Zoom when we couldn’t meet at all during COVID. They were not very satisfactory because you can’t see people’s… There’s no… You can’t study their body movement, so you can’t feel their energy or chemistry in any way. You can only kind of learn in the same way you might learn it through a textbook or a video.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And the eye contact is important, too.

Brian Grazer: Super important.

Brett McKay: And on Zoom, you can’t look people in the eye.

Brian Grazer: You can’t look people in the eye. And you never, almost never laugh on a Zoom. There’s very little humor on Zoom. There’s very little Zoom humor.

Brett McKay: No. It’s why I don’t use video on my podcast because of that reasoning. I can’t look people in the eye. And for me, it’s distracting. I’d rather just hear your voice and make it almost like a phone call than have to deal with looking at the screen, than looking up at the camera and looking back down. I don’t like that. So I just go, audio only.

Brian Grazer: Really interesting.

Brett McKay: But speaking of eye contact, you’ve got some tips on how to get the most out of eye contact. How can you do eye contact? I think a lot of people are uncomfortable with looking people in the eye because they don’t want to be creepy. Any tips on eye contact without being a creeper?

Brian Grazer: Yeah. Look, you know if somebody could think you’re a creeper or they’re leery… What you do is you look at them briefly so they see that you’re seeing them as a person. But then you do divert your eyes down submissively so you’re not trying to have power over them in any way.

Brett McKay: So something I’ve read is that you want to keep eye contact for about five seconds. So that’s about as long as it takes to speak a sentence. So you’re looking in the eyes or the eye. I mean, I think you can really only look at one eye at a time. And something else I read is that looking at the right eye is best. And then you look down for a beat, then you look back in the eyes. So you’re not locked in, you’re not staring them down.

Brian Grazer: No, don’t stare them down. You make sure you blink. Don’t do anything that could seem to be aggressive.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And you had to learn how to use eye contact. You tell a story where I think you had like an assistant or somebody tell you, Hey, Brian, you know, you don’t look at people in the eye when you talk to them. And you’re like, I had no clue.

Brian Grazer: Yeah, it was actually Ron Howard.

Brett McKay: It was Ron. Okay.

Brian Grazer: He said… Because I have a little ADD. And so my tendency is to bounce around. And I was talking to the writers, the very, very successful writers of all of our successful comedies, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel. And Ron said, when you talk to Lowell and Babaloo, I don’t think they feel respected by you. And I go, Well, why? He says, Because you don’t look at them. I go, But I already know what they’re saying and I’m paying attention, [0:34:10.6] ____ He says, You are, but you’re not looking at them. And I know they don’t feel respected. I said, Okay. And I changed that immediately.

Brett McKay: Let’s say someone’s listening to this and they love this idea of curiosity conversations, just having a conversation, having that emotional curiosity, wanting to figure out what drives people, what makes them tick. How do you recommend getting started? I imagine it’s not try to get a conversation with the president of the United States. Who’s that first rung in the ladder, do you think?

Brian Grazer: Anyone that you think is authentically expert at anything. You could just be… I love this one guy so much. He was the best dad I’ve ever met. I mean, there were so many more successful people that are around me. And this guy, he was an assistant caterer. No, he was the number two caterer on the Amtrak that goes from LA to San Diego. And he was just a great father. First had a conversation with him, and then we became friends. And I was always proud to have him as a friend because he was such a good dad. It could be as simple as that. Someone that’s a really good parent or a good teacher or your martial arts instructor or your trainer, ask your trainer a question. You go to a gym, there’s probably a trainer there. Ask them. It’s so easy.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Well, that guy who was a good dad, what made him a good dad?

Brian Grazer: What made him a good dad is beyond just that he spent a lot of his time… He spent time with his kids. He understood what they were interested in and became interested in it himself. He became really interested in skateboarding or wildposting stencils. He would have shared interest. They’d listen to songs together. They’d both sing to songs. So they’d put on a playlist and they’d both sing to songs. And there was actually three kids, so he would do it one on one or one on two or one on three. But he was always that person. He was very in the moment.

Brett McKay: Okay, so starting your social circle, you have right now, if you see someone that’s got some kind of quirky interest that they’re an expert at, find out what got them into it, what drives them to do that, and it requires you to pay attention. That’s another thing that curiosity requires.

Brian Grazer: Yeah, pay attention.

Brett McKay: It requires you to pay attention. So when you’re at work, if your coworkers work at cubicles, they probably got pictures or tchotchkes set up there that say a lot about them.

Brian Grazer: No. Good point point.

Brett McKay: Like, well, they coach baseball or they love this film genre, I don’t know. And then you can use that as well. Tell me about that. Tell me more about it. What do you know about that? So, yeah, pay attention. Let’s say people start doing that. How do you go about setting up a curiosity conversation with VIPs? How do you make the pitch?

Brian Grazer: You always pitch to their staff. Or if you meet some VIP, you might say, version of, Oh, my God, I’d really love to have a conversation with you. I’d really like to have five minute conversation with you and with a disclaimer that I don’t want anything, I just wanna… But some kind of… You have to come up with something, and then don’t ask them for their contacts, ever. And then you have to find them, and they’ll be impressed that you found them and you did it through the channels, through their assistants. Then you befriend the assistant. That’s easy to do. Just treat them respectfully, like human beings and usually… Try to make people laugh, ultimately. Get to know the assistants.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Okay. So I think that’s some good advice there. Respect the communication channels.

Brian Grazer: Yes.

Brett McKay: And then also just make it very clear you’re not looking for anything. You have no ulterior motives, you don’t want a job…

Brian Grazer: You don’t have an agenda.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you don’t have an agenda. Because I’m sure these VIPs, they’re constantly dealing with people with an agenda, which is why they put gatekeepers in front of them, because they just want to avoid that stuff.

Brian Grazer: Yeah, exactly.

Brett McKay: Okay, so how do you prep for a curiosity conversation? So you can have these on the fly, right? You can have them with your Uber driver, etcetera. But let’s say you set something up because you want to talk to, I don’t know, the head of the wildlife department in your state, for whatever reason. I’m just coming up with this. How do you prep for that sort of conversation?

Brian Grazer: Well, it’s not hard. You would search them and you try to find out what their interests are. You go to social channels, you go to Instagram, you might go to Twitter. But I like Instagram because it’s visual. You learn a lot. And if the person’s well known, I always go to YouTube. I love YouTube.

Brett McKay: Are there any starter questions you recommend to help people get the conversation going? Do you have any default ones you like to go to?

Brian Grazer: I usually try to learn something about the person as we’re talking about. And I would ask them a question that they wouldn’t expect. So you don’t ask a scientist about science, really. You’d probably go to their sports or what are they obsessed with doing that is in the non science world or what’s an offshoot of that? Or what got them into it? But you try not to ask them… You try not to get the keys to the kingdom, like, immediately.

Brett McKay: Yeah. You know who does a really good job at this…

Brian Grazer: Who?

Brett McKay: Is Tyler Cowen. He’s an economist at George Mason University. He’s written a couple books, but he has a podcast called Conversations with Tyler where he has different people from all walks of life. But he asks the weirdest, obscurest questions, but he does it in a way that it digs out a lot from the person he’s talking to. So I think if you are wanting to look for some examples of some really good kind of oblique questions or off the wall questions that can get to some bigger things, check out Tyler Cowen’s podcast, Conversations with Tyler. So okay, you have the conversation and of course you want to be paying attention and then you want this to be an organic thing. You ask follow up questions and say, tell me more about that. And then the conversation is over. Do you do anything after the conversation to process it?

Brian Grazer: I write notes or I have somebody write notes for me. Or sometimes I will ask very seldom, but I might say, Can I record this? And they’ll say, Yes. That’s what I do.

Brett McKay: Okay, so you write notes. And what’s interesting, you talk about with a lot of these conversations. And you write the notes. You often don’t take action on it right away. Sometimes you sit on it. You don’t even know what you’re going to do with the stuff for a long time.

Brian Grazer: A 100%, I don’t know what I’m going to do with it. That’s exactly right.

Brett McKay: And so, yeah, you had a conversation with the director of CIA, had no intention of creating a TV series out of it, but like 24 came out of it.

Brian Grazer: Yeah, well, 24 was influenced by it.

Brett McKay: Influenced, right. Yeah, but it’s there. And so when you’re out living your life, you’re working, you can be like, Oh, I had this conversation. There’s this nugget there. Maybe we can use that stuff.

Brian Grazer: Yeah, exactly.

Brett McKay: And I imagine these conversations, they beget more conversations like you talk to Warren Beatty and then that can lead you to talk to some other person.

Brian Grazer: 100%. Because then he’ll have a point of view about why he makes movies or his sense of pur… If he is purpose driven, what is the purpose? And then someone else is going to be of similar levels of accomplishment. You’re going to ask them and see if they’re motivated by the same things, or you just look to constantly expand your mind, bombard your mind with new things.

Brett McKay: I really love this. So I hope people, after they listen this podcast, they’re going to go out and have a curiosity conversation. Uber driver is a great way to start, barista, person on the checkout line, start practicing. But where else can people go to learn more about the book and your work and how to have more curiosity conversations?

Brian Grazer: Well, you can order the book and I think you probably could order it on Amazon, I’m assuming, and you can buy it. There’s a bunch of places. All you have to do is look it up. A Curious Mind. You can order it on Amazon and I would suggest they just do that.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Brian Grazer, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Brian Grazer: Yeah, it’s been a privilege. I’ll talk to you again, I hope.

Brett McKay: My guest today is Brian Grazer. He’s the co author of the book A Curious Mind expanded edition. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Check out our show notes at aom.is/curiosityconversations where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives as well as 1000s of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you can think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it.

As always, thank you for the continued support. And until next time, it’s Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to AoM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

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Note: This is a rebroadcast.

Charisma can make everything smoother, easier, and more exciting in life. It’s a quality that makes people want to listen to you, to adopt your ideas, to be with you.

While what creates charisma can seem like a mystery, my guest today, communications expert Vanessa Van Edwards, says it comes down to possessing an optimal balance of two qualities: warmth and competence.

The problem is, even if you have warmth and competence, you may not be good at signaling these qualities to others. In Vanessa’s work, she’s created a research-backed encyclopedia of these influential signals, and she shares how to offer them in her book

Cues: Master the Secret Language of Charismatic Communication. Today on the show, Vanessa and I discuss some of the verbal and nonverbal social cues that make you attractive to others, and keep you out of what she calls the “danger zone.” She explains what the distance between your earlobes and shoulders has to do with looking competent, how using uptalk and vocal fry sabotages your ability to convey power, how to put more warmth in your voice, how to trigger the right response with a dating profile picture, and more.

Resources Related to the Episode

• AoM series on the elements of charisma 
• AoM Article: Gut Check — Are You a Contemptible Person?
• AoM Podcast #72: The Charisma Myth
• AoM Article: How to Use Body Language to Create a Dynamite First Impression
• AoM Podcast #694: The Fascinating Secrets of Your Voice
• JFK vs. Nixon presidential debate
• AoM article on the generational cycle

Connect With Vanessa Van Edwards

• The Science of People Website 
• Vanessa on Twitter
• Vanessa on IG

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Charisma, can make everything smoother, easier, and more exciting in life. It’s a quality that makes people wanna listen to you, to adopt your ideas, to be with you. While what creates charisma can seem like a mystery, my guest today, communications expert Vanessa Van Edwards, says it comes down to possessing an optimal balance of two qualities: Warmth and competence.

The problem is, even if you have warmth and competence, you may not be good at signaling these qualities to others. In Vanessa’s work, she’s created a research-backed encyclopedia of these influential signals, and she shares how to offer them in her book, Cues: Master the Secret Language of Charismatic Communication.

Today on the show, Vanessa and I discuss some of these verbal and nonverbal social cues that make you attractive to others and keep you out of what she calls the danger zone. She explains what the distance between your earlobes and shoulders has to do with looking competent, how using uptalk and vocal fry sabotages your ability to convey power. How to put more warmth in your voice. How to trigger the right response with a dating profile picture, and more. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/charismacues.

Vanessa Van Edwards, welcome to the show.

Vanessa Van Edwards: Oh, thanks so much for having me.

Brett McKay: So you have made a career researching, writing about, teaching how to be effective communicators, how to be more charismatic. And a book I just recently read, I really enjoyed, it’s called Cues: Master the Secret Language of Charismatic Communication. So let’s start off with definitions. How do you… As a researcher, how do you define charisma?

Vanessa Van Edwards: So the good news is, is that charisma can be learned. So we can define it, and we can learn it. So that’s a good thing. And I always was perplexed by charisma, because one thing we found in our lab… Many, many years ago, we were doing a little experiment, and we were surprised because we asked two questions in our experiment. The first one was, “Who is the most charismatic person you know?”

You’re listening to this, just think about that person for a second. We timed people on their answers. People could immediately tell us the most charismatic person they knew… It took about three seconds. The next question we asked was, “What is charisma?” Trying to get them to define it.

So interesting. We had just had them define or think about the most charismatic person. This question completely stumped people. It took an average of about 15 seconds for people to answer. And typically, they could not come up with a good answer. And we realized, charisma is one of these few traits that we know the moment we see it. We know when we see someone walk into a room who has high charisma, or a pop-on video. We’re drawn to them, yet we have a very hard time defining it.

So when we go to the research, we find that very highly charismatic people, the reason that they are so magnetic and so unique is they have a perfect blend of two specific traits. And the key here is they have to have these traits in equal measure. They are warmth and competence. So highly charismatic people, what they do is they’re signaling warmth, trust, likeability, collaboration, but at the very same time, they’re signaling competence, capability, power, efficiency. And so we love charismatic people because they’re both likeable and respectable. You know, warm and credible. So that’s the actual definition is warmth plus competence.

Brett McKay: Okay, so you can be exceedingly warm and not be charismatic, correct?

Vanessa Van Edwards: Yes, so that’s the key is… What most people have… And this research comes from Dr. Susan Fiske… Is most of us have an imbalance. Most of us have a little bit too high of warmth or a little bit too high of competence. Or we’re signaling too high warmth or signaling too high competence. And what happens with this is, you can be very likeable, friendly, collaborative, but if you have too much warmth, people don’t respect you. People don’t take you seriously. People interrupt you.

If you have too high competence without enough warmth, people see you as a very credible, very powerful, but without the warmth, they see you as intimidating or hard to talk to. Or the one that we hear a lot is cold or stoic. And so the key is, why that blend is so important is you have to have a balance, that I’m approachable, but I’m also credible.

Brett McKay: And are there people who have neither warmth nor competence?

Vanessa Van Edwards: Oh, yes, that’s… That I call the danger zone. And by the way, this is where I was in purgatory for many, many, many years. So I’m a recovering awkward person. The reason that I’m obsessed with charisma is I don’t have it naturally. I was that kid in school who sat in the corner of the cafeteria and looked and watched all the cool kids with their amazing charisma, and I was always amazed by how they’re able to bottle it.

And so, the danger zone is when you’re not signaling enough warmth nor competence. And what research has found is folks who are overly stoic… And by the way, this doesn’t mean you don’t have warmth and competence. It means you’re not signaling warmth and competence. And this is, I think, the mistake that most of us face is, the reason I wasn’t signaling anything is ’cause I was afraid. I was terrified of being rejected or disliked. So what did I do? I shut down. I shut down all my cues. I tried to be invisible.

And so what research finds is if we don’t signal enough, humans don’t know what to do with us. Our cues tell others how to treat us. And so people who don’t have enough of either signal, they’re pitied. They’re dismissed. They’re ignored. And mostly, they’re underestimated. And this is, I think, a big problem for very smart people. Is very smart people, they rely so much on their technical skills, their book smarts. They think, “I’m prepared. I have knowledge. I have expertise. I don’t need to worry about these cues or signals. I don’t have to worry about warmth and competence. My knowledge will speak for itself.”

And so what happens is they show up with all those technical skills in their head, but what the research found very clearly is if you don’t have enough cues, specifically, you don’t have enough warmth cues, people do not believe your competence. Competence without warmth leaves people feeling suspicious. And that’s why you have such smart people… Most of our students are high-achieving professionals, and they cannot get enough credibility. They cannot get people to believe their competence.

Brett McKay: So another way I’ve heard this idea, the danger zone, described is as a way to describe somebody who’s contemptible, right? I think all of us have someone in our life who we think about and we think, “Oh my gosh, that guy, he’s just really contemptible.” And if you ever wonder why that is, it’s because they lack warmth and they lack… They’re not competent.

So you know, you don’t enjoy being around them. They’re just not likable. But then also, they can’t do anything really well. They don’t… They’re not competent, right? They’re not good at anything. And that’s why we find them contemptible, like, we just… We find them really annoying, and that’s the danger zone.

Vanessa Van Edwards: So annoying is a good one. I… So… Also, people don’t wanna catch it, right? We’re very, very contagious, emotionally contagious as humans. So if you have someone who is not signaling enough… If that contemptuous person… We don’t wanna catch that kind of anxiety, that kind of lack of warmth or competence. And so the reason we’re drawn to charismatic people, but not drawn to danger zone folks is because we wanna be around people who are positively contagious. We wanna catch what they have.

Brett McKay: Okay. So this is important stuff… Like learning… Thinking about being charismatic a lot of people may think, “Well, that’s just superficial. That’s what shallow people do.” But you’re making the case that this can help you get ahead in your career and in your personal life as well.

Vanessa Van Edwards: And luckily… I was shocked by this research. So I was in that first category where I doubled down on my test scores and my GPA and my resume… That was what I thought was really important. And I was failing at life. I could not communicate well with people. I was forgotten. I was dismissed. And the research actually has found very, very clearly that when we are more charismatic, people are more likely to take us seriously.

We like to listen to ideas from very charismatic people. So the way that I think about this is you’ve spent a lot of years likely… People who are listening, investing in your expertise, whatever that is. Whether you’re a creative or you’re a technical person, you have developed this skill set. Charisma is like the social lubricant that you need for people to adopt it. It makes everything smoother.

Brett McKay: So the book’s called cues. And the idea is that there are these social cues that we give off. And usually we do this unconsciously. Like we don’t even think about it. But in the book you’re making the case that we can be more intentional and thoughtful about these social cues that we display so that we can influence how people think about us in a more positive way. So what are social cues and how much do they influence how people see us?

Vanessa Van Edwards: Yeah. So cues are the social signals that we send to each other. And what most people don’t realize is actually, there’s two sides of cues. There’s decoding. And this is the thing that most people think of. So you spot a cue on someone else, maybe an eye roll or a smile. Those are all different cues. They tell us what the other person thinks. They tell us how they wanna be treated, but there’s also encoding. Those are the social signals we send to others.

So a lot of the times we only focus on one aspect. We think about decoding cues are being sent, but actually there’s a loop happening. Not only are our emotions contagious, our cues are contagious. So research on this is so interesting. It finds that we tend to subconsciously mirror the people we’re with. Another reason why we wanna be around people with great cues is ’cause we catch them.

Confident people make us look more confident because we tend to copy things. What I really was fascinated by is there… We’re sending hundreds of cues to each other every day. We do it on video. We do it on the phone. We do it in our emails. There are actually four different categories of cues. It’s not just our body language. There’s our non-verbal. So our body language, our facial expressions, our gestures, our posture. That’s one big bucket.

Research finds that’s at a minimum about 60% of how we communicate our message, which is a massive amount of… It affects us in a massive way. The second one is our verbal. So the words we use, right? Even the cues that we send in our emails and our texts and our profiles tell people how to treat us. And we can talk about, how that works specifically, if you want. I find that research fascinating.

The third one is voice tone. So our volume, our pace, our cadence. And the last one is ornaments. The colors we wear, the jewelry we wear, the car we drive. So on… In this medium, the only cue channels I have are verbal and vocal, but that means I have to work really hard on making sure that I’m as contagious as I can through my verbal and my vocal cues, because they’re affecting not only how you think of me. That’s actually less important, more how you feel about yourself and how you take this advice.

Brett McKay: So let’s talk about some of these cues that… This encyclopedia of cues that you developed with your team. Let’s talk about some nonverbal stuff first. What are some powerful charisma cues that ’cause people to pay attention to us when we’re talking?

Vanessa Van Edwards: All right. So I’m gonna start with the ones that I think are the quickest. And the reason for this is because I like to start off with the beginner stuff then move to more advanced. My favorite charisma cue is actually the lean. And this is a really, really simple one. And the reason for this is because it actually creates a very interesting brain activation.

So research found that when participants in their lab, leaned forward slightly… So I’m gonna lean forward right now. If you’re listening to this, I’d love if you just lean forward for me like an inch or two, whether you’re seated or standing or running… When you lean forward, they found that it activates a very specific part of your brain, that is pre-action. The reason for this is because when we’re about to activate one of our five senses, we lean in. We wanna see something better, we lean in.

We wanna smell something, we lean in. We wanna touch something, we lean in. And so interestingly, this is also a nonverbal cue of activation. So when someone is really into something, they’ll lean into it. When someone really agrees with you, they’ll lean into it. Very highly charismatic people cue you to lean into their very most important points or a deep thought by leaning in themselves.

And so if you watch Ted speakers, you’ll notice that when they’re at the most important point, they give a little lean and it actually makes you wanna lean in too. So leaning is a really easy one. You can do it on video. You can do it in person. You can even do it I think over audio to like give that, we’re inside something. We’re talking about something really good. It’s a really simple one, but it’s so effective.

Brett McKay: Another one you talk about that I thought was ingenious, is fronting. What is fronting?

Vanessa Van Edwards: Yes. Okay. So when you think about space… So with non-verbal, we’re constantly trying to interact with other humans in space. And so fronting is when we angle our body, our entire body, toes, torso, and head towards the person we’re speaking with. Ideally… And this is a interesting one. When we are on parallel lines with someone else… So if you imagine like railroad tracks, we like in the perfect scenario to be on the same track as someone else. Our feet are aligned, our hips are aligned, our head is aligned.

And when we do this, our body and our brain think, “Ah, we’re aligned. There’s something in between us. I’m gonna speak more. I’m gonna speak in longer sentences.” We’re more likely to say yes, if we’re fronting with someone. The reason why this is important is because I notice we accidentally don’t front when we are on our computer, we’re taking notes, we kinda call over our shoulder. I even noticed of how people with their Zoom set-ups will have their camera off to the side or over one shoulder while they’re typing on their computer.

It is physically hard for someone to open up, collaborate, or connect when you are not being fronted with. And so one of the doctors we interviewed for the book, he found that when he angles his… He swivels his entire stool towards someone, he can actually get the patient to talk more, open up more. So this is a very simple one, that always try to make a point of angling your entire body towards someone.

Brett McKay: Well, I think we intuitively know this, right? If you don’t wanna talk to somebody or if you’re on the subway or a bus, you’re sitting next to somebody you wanna show, “I don’t wanna talk to you,” you kinda shift the other way away from the person.

Vanessa Van Edwards: Yeah. And decoding is a great point here is all of these cues have both encoding and decoding. We can send the signal. We can also decode the signal. If you’re looking for who should I approach in a bar, who should I go up to at this networking event, you wanna look for people who are more open to fronting. I jokingly call it croissant feet. Any reference to a croissant is a good reference for me.

So what I mean by this is if someone doesn’t want you to interrupt their group, like you’re in a networking event or you’re at a bar, they will be fully fronting with the person they’re talking with. They have no opening. If someone is in croissant feet, in other words, their foot is angled out, their torso is angled out, they are literally saying, “I am physically open to being approached.” And so you can also decode who wants to talk to me and who doesn’t wanna talk to me based on fronting.

Brett McKay: Okay, so two things there, if you wanna seem more charismatic, signal that you’re charismatic, lean in, and you can do that via audio as well. And then the fronting, just turn towards people, and that will… People… I think one of the things I’ve heard about charisma is that charisma is making someone feel like they’re the most important person in the room, and fronting does that.

Vanessa Van Edwards: Yes, exactly, because you’re literally saying, “I respect you so much. I’m going to give you my full non-verbal attention.” Very rare thing to think about, and that’s how we think about it as humans.

Brett McKay: Well, a point you make, I think we should talk about this. This warmth, competence, dichotomy, you point out that if you wanna be charismatic, you have to understand that some situations might require more warmth and some situations might require more competence signals. It’s not like in every situation, you wanna be perfectly aligned with warmth and balance. In order to get that balance, it’s gonna depend on the situation, correct?

Vanessa Van Edwards: Yeah. The metaphor I like to think of is like a thermostat, right? So if you think about a thermostat in your home, you probably have an ideal range that you like… Let’s say between 68 and 72. So 68 might a little on the cooler side, it’s a hot summer day, 72 might be in the winter. Above 72, you’re hot. That’s too warm. Below 68, you’re cold. That’s competent. Too competent. In the 40s, it’s a danger zone.

So this range… You actually have quite a bit of flexibility. Very highly charismatic people, you leverage this range. So if they’re going into a meeting where they’re negotiating, they need to be taken seriously, they’re selling, they don’t want any push back, they will dial up their competence cues. They’ll use more power gazing. They’ll use more purposeful hand gestures. They’ll be more still in their body posture. Those are all competence cues.

On the other hand, let’s say that you’re going to a happy hour, you are with colleagues, you’re in a creative brainstorm session, and you want everyone to be open. You want everyone to feel welcome. It’s not about your ideas, it’s about the team’s ideas. Well, in that situation, you’ll be best served just to show more warmth cues, more nodding, more smiling, more social gazing. Those cues are literally sending signals of warmth.

Again, we’re still in that 68-72 range. You don’t wanna have too much of one, but that’s what really highly charismatic people do. And you… And the example I give in the book is Jeff Bezos. There’s two different interviews of him. One in 60 minutes and one with a Business Insider interview, and it’s the same person, but he looks completely different.

On the 60 Minutes interview, he’s clearly going for warmth, being relatable, being kind of friendly, it’s a more casual interview. In the Business Insider interview, he’s super high in competence. He’s trying to really talk about his business, be taken more seriously, talk about his growth. And he uses cues differently to come across as slightly higher in warmth versus competence, but depending on his goals.

Brett McKay: Okay, so we just talked about some cues of charisma that you found that these just show charisma, the lean in and the fronting. But let’s say you’re in a situation… You kind of… You briefly touched on some… I’d like to flush some of this stuff out. Let’s say you’re in a situation that requires more warmth. Like you gave an example of a doctor who is trying to develop a rapport with a patient, that needs more warmth. What are some cues that you can use to display more warmth?

Vanessa Van Edwards: Yes. So warmth is all about encouraging collaboration. So my favorite warmth cue that I like to start off with… Most people start off with smiling. That’s actually not my favourite warmth cue, and the reason for this is because in a lot of professional settings, it would be weird to maniacally hold a smile on your face. So I actually don’t recommend smiling first, especially because smiling can also be a submissive gesture.

So my favorite warmth cue is a triple nod or any kind of nod. And the reason for this… And this is in Western cultures, and I should make a cultural note. I always try to make a cultural note if there’s anything different. A lot of these cues are universal, but nodding in Bulgaria, India, and Pakistan can be different. So if you’re not in Bulgaria, India, or Pakistan, these tips are for you.

So nodding, a vertical nod, up and down nod means yes, and a horizontal nod means no. And we recognize this, in these cultures as encouragements, agreement, and so what they’ve found is that when someone does a slow triple nod, “Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm,” the other person speaks 67% longer. It’s kind of like a non-verbal dot, dot, dot, that’s actually how you can think about it, and this is super helpful. If you’re on video, even on the phone, by the way, even national hotline callers are trained to nod. It literally is telling someone, “Please, tell me more. I’m here. I’m listening. And that is a very subtle way to encourage more warmth. So nodding is one… Another kind of head one that you can try is a tilt. So this comes from an evolutionary. So this is across cultures, that when we try to hear something better, like if I were to say, “Do you hear that dog barking?

Usually, we tilt our head over to the side and expose our ear. That’s a universal response. And so we recognize if we’re in conversation with someone and they tilt their head, they are deeply trying to listen, which is also another warmth cue. So I love those, because if you’re on video call or you’re in-person, you’re trying to offer someone encouragement, make them feel the warm and fuzzies, a tilt and nod are super non-verbal subtle ways to be like, I’m here, I’m listening. Really good interviewers, Oprah Winfrey does this really well. That’s, I think, how she gets people to open up so much.

Brett McKay: So that’s interesting about the head nod, the slow triple head nod. There was this guy at my church a couple years ago, where you would talk to him and then he would just sit there in silence. And it would be so intimidating, I was like, Oh my gosh. And you start nervously filling in the space. But one thing he did too, now that you mention it, he would do the slow three nods while being in silence. It was not just me. It was other people too. It’s like, Man, whenever I talk to this guy, I just blabber incessantly and I feel dumb. And I don’t know if he intentionally did this or he just kinda picked up on it, but it was effective. So those are the slow three nod and just being silent, that can get people just to spill the beans about anything.

Vanessa Van Edwards: I know we’re not talking about vocal yet, but there is some really funny research on vocalizations along with some of these nonverbal cues. So I know exactly the type you’re talking about, that strong silent type, and you just wanna divulge your deepest secrets. I call that a verbal vomit, where they just… You just wanna tell them everything. And a lot of it is because we’re being cued to do so. The other thing that research found is that this is the difference between men and women. Women find men more attractive if they vocalize… Oh, mm-hmm, ah.

Along with a nod or a tilt. So if you want to be more attractive, this is one study specifically for women to men in heterosexual relationships, you might also add in a, Mm-hmm, oh, ah.

And women just love it.

Brett McKay: They love it. Alright. So those are some warmth cues, tilting, nodding, the slow triple nod. But there’s other things you mentioned too. You can do a smile, but you don’t want it to be like a crazy smile. You call it a savor smile, so it’s just like you’re really enjoying what you’re seeing and interacting with, it’s just not like the fake smile thing.

Vanessa Van Edwards: Yeah. And the researchers actually looked at types of smiles. I love this research. They found that a slow, what I call savor smile, a smile that spreads across your face is actually the best kind of smile. So it’s not holding the smile, and that is the worst. And this is important ’cause I think that we can get really serious, especially in our professional settings, or even with our partner, we’re talking about logistics and the kids and pick-up times, and we forget that there’s some joy there. And so it’s looking for opportunities to have either mutual laughter, oh, my goodness, there is nothing happier for the brain that two people laughing at once, or showing a savor smile. So especially in the beginning of a call or beginning of an interaction, if someone’s like, Oh, it’s so great to see you, I try to think of what is one thing I could say verbally that will give me warmth, so… A warm word, Happy to see you, so great to be here, oh my goodness, it’s so nice to finally give you a hug in-person, whatever those words are, and pairing it with a slow savor smile. That is like a bonus points in the charisma scale, because it aligns our verbal and our nonverbal, and we love it.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Alright. Let’s talk about situations that require more power or competent social cues. And you… I love this. You use the JFK, Richard Nixon debate as a way to a highlight the power of power cues. So what can we learn from that debate on how to utilize power cues?

Vanessa Van Edwards: So that debate… So Nixon versus Kennedy was a very interesting point in our history. And from a nonverbal perspective, it was the first time where people realized there was something happening with our cues. During this time, part of the population watched the debate on television, part of the population listened to the debate on the radio. What was fascinating is this was the first time in US history where there was a discrepancy between the winners or in the perceived winners. So everyone who watched the debate was sure that Kennedy won. Everyone who listened to the debate was sure that Nixon won. And when you analyze just the first 30 seconds of this debate, and I highly recommend, go on YouTube, search it, it’s up for free, if you watch the first 30 seconds of the debate, you will see Nixon gives away non-verbally all of his power.

First, he immediately looks over at Kennedy and the moderator. And as humans, we are very attuned to gaze cues. We want to follow other people’s gaze. They’re telling us what’s interesting. So I think that while Nixon was trying to be polite, he actually gave away all of his power in the first three seconds of the debate by looking over at Kennedy. It literally told the audience, Don’t look at me. Look at Kennedy. He also was not fronting. So he took away that… So fronting is our toes, our torso and our head, he took away fronting from us, which suddenly makes the audience feel disrespected. The second thing that he immediately does, he grips the side of his chair. You could actually see he’s white-knuckling. I don’t know if he did this ’cause he was nervous or he was trying to still himself, but when we see that white knuckle grip, it makes us think, They’re closed. They’re nervous. The first evolutionary… From an evolutionary perspective is our most protective gesture. When we’re angry, we tend to clench our fists because it’s our most powerful weapon against someone else. So that white knuckle made him look angry, it made him look closed.

And interestingly, if you watch the very first few seconds, he’s in what’s called a runner’s stance. He has his knee pulled back. And some interesting historical fact is he had injured his knee on the campaign trail a week earlier. So I think he was actually nursing his injured me. But what happened was, is because if you think about a runner about to take off on a race on the starting block, they have one leg back. This is a universal readiness position. When someone is about to run away or flee, they instinctively go into this position. Well, we don’t like leaders who are about to run away from us. And so in this one little snapshot, we see a clenched fist, someone not fronting with us, and literally looking like they’re about to run for their lives.

Brett McKay: And then Kennedy is like pretty the opposite. He was looking at the camera, looking at the audience, he just looked cool, calm and collected, like he was in charge.

Vanessa Van Edwards: He was not only calm, he was broad. So I think there’s a little bit of a myth I would love to bust, if we can.

Power posing had a moment in 2010 where it was in like every show, everyone was power posing. I love a power pose. It’s very high power, high competence, but it’s also socially aggressive. So you’re not gonna walk into your meetings with your hands above your head. What power really looks like, is what Kennedy looked like in the first second of this debate, nice and relaxed shoulders, a maximized distance. This is the weirdest distance, but it’s incredibly important for perceived confidence. The distance between your earlobe and your shoulder, really highly confident people. They maximize this distance because their shoulders are down and relaxed and their head is held high. When people are not confident, you see this distance shrink, they turtle their head down. They pull their ears up, their shoulders up towards their ears. They hunch their shoulders in. And so he had that distance maximized. He was nice and relaxed and it made us want to catch that calm confidence. Oh, he also did a nod in the first 30 seconds when he was introduced, he gives a very subtle calm nod. So he balanced out that competence with the perfect warmth cue.

Brett McKay: So you mention some power cues there. Don’t be scrunched up. Be relaxed. Be big. Be open. Doesn’t mean you have to put your hands up in the air and do the power pose, but just powerful people take up space and they’re comfortable taking up space around them. And some other interesting ones that you talked about in the book that I thought were interesting was the steeple fingers. And I think on the cover of your book you’re doing the steeple fingers, correct?

Vanessa Van Edwards: [laughter] that cover was, we argued a lot about that cover. We ended up with me doing a steeple. Yes. A steeple is if you wanna try this with me, actually there’s an interesting loop here. I’m curious. So if you’re listening, put the tips of your fingers together into like a little church steeple, don’t press your palms together, leave space within your hands and just hold it for a second. This position should actually make you feel quite calm and collected. It’s kind of like a power pose for your hands. The reason for this is because when our hands are open and relaxed, especially if our palms are open and showing, right, you can still see our palms when we steeple and our fingers are together, it’s as if we’re thinking, oh, I am calm, cool, and collected. And so that steeple gesture is you’ll notice it on Shark Tank, Kevin O’Leary loves to do it.

Political leaders have been taught to do it. Now I always say with cues, you have to try them on. Not, there’s 96 cues in the book, right? Some cues are going to feel great. You’re gonna be like, oh, I already do that. Yes. Amazing. You already do one of those cues. Fantastic. Some cues you might have to try a couple times and be like, oh, you know what? This one works for me. And there’s gonna be some cues that you’ll feel absolutely ridiculous. The steeple is one of those cues. You have to try it on in a couple different situations either you’re gonna love it and it’ll be part of your hand gesture repertoire, or you’re gonna be like, I feel so silly. Do not do it. If you feel silly, I want only, you’d only use cues that make you feel authentic.

Brett McKay: So, well you mentioned charisma cues, so the leaning and the fronting, warmth cues, the head tilt, the head nodding, competence cues, power posture, so that distance between ears and shoulders, the steeple pose, what are some nonverbal cues that people should just avoid? So they don’t go in that danger and contemptible zone.

Vanessa Van Edwards: Oh yes. This was one of my favorite chapters to write. It was actually the longest chapter. I called these the danger zone cues. And what’s interesting about them is they are the nonverbal cues that you both don’t wanna show, but you also want to watch out for, because if you see them, they can be signals especially of more negative emotions. So fear, shame, anger disgust. And so not only do you wanna avoid showing these, but you also wanna make sure that you are on the lookout to make sure if you see them. That means, okay, I gotta dig deeper. Someone might be hiding something. And I’m always careful to say that they’re bad. And the reason for this is ’cause there’s also times where you do wanna show danger zone cues to shut down a connection. So if someone’s challenging you or you don’t wanna build rapport. You can even save these danger zone cues for I’m out. I wanna set up boundaries, and I don’t wanna talk to you. So very, very powerful cues.

Brett McKay: So what are some examples of ones that you focus a lot on in the book?

Vanessa Van Edwards: So one that I love is called the lip purse. This is a universal gesture. So when we press our lips together, so if you just wanna mash your lips together, like make them into a hard line, can we kinda make that mmmh, uh, sound that is a universal withholding gesture. It’s as if as humans, when we’re trying to keep something in or keep it together or hold back our mouth presses in to say, don’t say that, stop that. And we do this when we’re trying to withhold, this could be something that we’re ashamed of, something we’re embarrassed of. It could be even a lie or a deception. So one of the things we did in our lab, I love this experiment. We played two truths and a lie, You know that game where you say two true statements about yourself and one lie with hundreds of our participants.

And what we had participants do is we had them submit videos of themselves sharing two truths and a lie. And the lip purse was the most common cue that we saw right before, or right after a lying statement. The reason for this is because we know as humans, that lying gets us into trouble, right? It, we don’t like to lie. It makes us feel sort of dirty. And so we noticed that people would say, their true statement, true statement, and then, mm, quick lip purse and the lie. There’s like their body going. Don’t say it, don’t say it or don’t give anything away. And so a lip purse is a great cue because it lets you know, I have to give this person permission to tell me more. So when I see a lip purse, I’ll say, hey are we all good? Do you have any questions for me? Anything I’m not hitting? Does this all make sense? So that’s the way that I think when we see a danger zone cue, it gives us an opportunity just to open up the communication more.

Brett McKay: Okay. So that’s a great example of being on the lookout for a cue and someone else that is, that’s the decoding part, right?

Vanessa Van Edwards: Yes. Yes.

Brett McKay: Okay. So we talked about non-verbal cues, let’s shift over to verbal cues and you talk about in the book, our voice can convey social cues. How can we use our voice to sound more confident, more warm?

Vanessa Van Edwards: So we have so much that we’re conveying in our voice and that’s because when we’re listening to someone, we are listening for their confidence, we’re listening to how open they are. And what research has found is actually we decide how confident someone is within the first a hundred milliseconds of hearing them speak. And so one thing that we noticed right away is there’s two different cues that we should listen out for vocal power. The first one is uptalk or the question inflection. So when we are speaking, and we’re confident in our words, we use a neutral inflection or a downward inflection. So right now I’m speaking in a neutral inflection. If I’m really powerful about something, I’ll sling my words down at the end. So I’ll go down in my inflection. Uptalk is when we go up in our inflection, it’s when we’re asking a question. So we’ll say my name is Vanessa.

What research has found is that when we accidentally use uptalk on a statement, it literally triggers the other person to think they’re questioning themselves. Should I question them? So we do tons of sales analysis for companies, and we found that when people get the most pushback or negotiation on their numbers, especially their prices, it’s ’cause they deliver their number in uptalk, they’ll say, We’d love to have your business.

We’d love to work with you. And the price of our service is $5000. When we ask, you are begging someone to question you, you’re begging someone to negotiate with you, so the first thing is making sure on your video calls in person in your voicemail, that you are using a neutral or downward inflection, especially on the important statements, your name, your price, advice, timelines, it’s critical that that actually triggers confidence ’cause it shows… I feel confident. I’m not questioning it and neither should you.

Brett McKay: All right, so avoid the uptalk. Another one, you talk about is vocal fry as well, right?

Vanessa Van Edwards: So vocal fry typically affects women more than men. They’ve actually found this in the research that because women wanna be perceived as more likeable, typically are seen as higher in warmth, they will use more question inflection as if to say, Do you like the statement? So it’s actually questioning in their statement, and they also tend to have vocal fry, Vocal Fry is when our voice goes into a kind of wavery. So you hear it’s sizzling bacon in a pan, that kind of wavery, if I were to talk like this in my entire interview, it would drive you crazy. The reason for that is because as humans, we know that if someone’s in vocal fry, they are likely vocally anxious, vocal fry happens we don’t have enough volume, we don’t have enough breath and our vocal cords tense. So right now, I’m working very hard to keep my vocal power in the lowest end of my range with consistent volume, but right now what I’ll do for you just so you can hear the difference is I’m gonna tighten my vocal cords, so you can hear what anxiety sounds like, so when I’m a little bit anxious, I tend to go a little bit higher in my range and I also lose volume, and you can hear that I have a lot more vocal fry, and that is because when we are tense, we lose breath and it’s hard for our vocal chords to rub together.

Now, the moment I relax the vocal cords, ah, it sounds so much better. So we have to be really aware of is the moment you hear yourself go into vocal fry… Speak louder. The fastest way to fix Vocal Fry is to speak up the moment we have volume, we add more breath, if you’re with someone and they hear using vocal fry, ask them, Can you speak up? I can’t hear you. It is the fastest way to fix a vocal fry and also take a deep breath, use the lower end of your voice, and it makes you feel better. And I now I felt terrible by just doing that little five-second demo. It actually makes me feel more anxious, even just doing the vocal fry.

Brett McKay: You mentioned Vocal Fry is more common with women, but I’ve been hearing a lot of, a lot more dudes with vocal fries, I think it’s becoming more common with men, so I think it’s something everyone should be aware of and avoid if you wanna sound more powerful. Same thing with uptalk, avoid that. Another thing we already mentioned is the guy who uses… Let’s call them power pauses right. That’s another thing you do to sound more powerful. It’s you take up space, conversationally by being silent.

Vanessa Van Edwards: And a pause doesn’t have to be long, actually the perfect pause they measured it is about a half of a second, so it’s just enough time to take a breath in and this works, right? We think, Okay, if someone is willing to take a breath, they feel confident that I’m not gonna interrupt them, and it also keeps our vocal power low. So a mistake that can happen is when we’re anxious, we speak faster, which makes us not to pause, which makes us sound less conversationally confident, it makes us run out of breath, and so you’ll notice that people hit vocal fry at the end of their sentence and that’s because they’re trying to get it all in. So they speak really fast. They don’t pause it all. And then by the end of their sentence they don’t have any of the breath left and so they are in vocal fry. So pausing is like a double punch where it allows you to take in a deep breath, and also it makes it prevents vocal fry at the end. Really, really charismatic people we coded TED Talks in our lab, and we found that the most charismatic people use pausing to create drama in their sentences, so they’ll say, today I have a really big idea.

I’m gonna share it with three different ways that are gonna change your life, right? That’s that TED talk speak. There’s a reason we like it is because it’s actually… The pausing is creating drama in a really good way.

Brett McKay: What could we do with our voice to sound more warm.

Vanessa Van Edwards: So warmth is the… This is actually… You always wanna pair a vocal warmth with verbal warmth, what I mean by this is it’s really easy to add vocal warmth when you’re talking about things that make you feel warm. So specially the first 10 seconds of interaction. Are you happy to be there? Are you happy to collaborate? Is it a good morning for the team? I think the biggest enemy of vocal warmth is we go accidentally negative, so we’re starting a call or we’re hopping into a meeting and we say, Oh, I’m so sorry, I’m late. The traffic was terrible. Oh my gosh. It’s so hot. It’s so cold. It’s been so busy, right? When you do that, you can hear my vocal tone also goes more negative and we don’t like hearing negativity. So what you’re better off doing is, What is something positive you can say in the first 10 seconds, that you can match with vocal warmth, your voice can smile, and that sounds crazy, but I’ll do two demos for you, so I’ll do a hello, just one word, this is your vocal first impression, we found in our lab that people could hear the happy hello.

So which one sounds happier to you? Hello. Hello.

Brett McKay: Second one.

Vanessa Van Edwards: Second one.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Vanessa Van Edwards: Yeah and we can hear that happiness, so if you can pair it with a verbal happiness, it makes it more authentic.

Brett McKay: Okay, so that’s a weird… So smile when you say… Like when you answer the phone, smile, when you say hello.

Vanessa Van Edwards: Yes, and deliver whatever that good thing is that you are ready to give you know, oh I’m so happy to be here a while. It’s such a beautiful day. I’ve been looking forward to this all week. It’s so much easier to naturally smile and it actually changes the way your voice sounds.

Brett McKay: And I’m gonna let people in… Vanessa did this when we first got on. She did that, she was… You could tell she was smiling and she brought in that, that warm stuff and it worked. I was like, Man, I wanna talk to this person. I can’t wait to talk to her.

Vanessa Van Edwards: And I had thought about before our call, I was like, Oh my gosh, I have to tell him about my favorite art of manliness article. I can’t wait to tell him, and so I was waiting with that good piece of news, which made it super easy for me to smile.

Brett McKay: And your favorite articles are the generational cycles article, that you wrote a long time ago.

Vanessa Van Edwards: The cyclical history of men is the single best article on the internet, I literally send it out every two to three weeks, and if you have not read it, you must go read it it’s fascinating.

Brett McKay: Well, thank you so much for that, I really appreciate that. So let’s talk about imagery cues. Alright, so we talked about our voice, the words we can use can make us feel more warm, what are some ways that we can use our image to appear more competent or more warm?

Vanessa Van Edwards: So imagery cues are really important because they typically create neural maps, and what I mean by this is one single prop, color, image, pin can trigger all kinds of feelings, so I always like to use dating profiles, as an example. This is the easiest way to think about it. If you are skimming through dating profiles and someone is holding a snowboard, that might activate a whole series of other feelings for you. If you like snowboards, adventure, vacation, fun memories with your family. If you don’t like snowboarding, it triggers a whole different set of things cold, hurting, hauling. And so we use imagery already subconsciously, but I wanna make it more conscious, where in your profile pictures what you’re wearing, what’s on your desk, what’s in your zoom background, all of those things are triggering neural maps for people, you wanna make sure they’re triggering the right things.

Brett McKay: What are some things that guys can do in particular to think about how they dress, ’cause I think a lot of guys are, well, how you dress is so superficial, but in your research and your coaching, easy things that guys can think about in terms of dress that can up their competence or their warmth.

Vanessa Van Edwards: Yes, so for dress specifically, you always wanna think about where you fit in, so this can be with dating or even interviews, you wanna dress for the company you wanna work at. You wanna dress for how you wanna dress on your ideal date. For example, if your ideal date is hanging out with a picnic in the park, you don’t wanna be in a button-down, even though other people might like that, because that’s not actually your ideal date, you actually are better off being in a more casual or your favorite T-shirt, your favorite jeans, because it’s going to trigger the right neural maps to the right people. I do not believe in appealing to everyone, I believe in appealing to the right people. So if your ideal partner is the kind of person who would wanna do a picnic and dress more casually. I would rather you trigger a positive neural map for them. So what’s your ideal date? What’s your ideal meeting? Is it online? Is it casual? Is it a business suit? Is it a button down? Dress for your ideal. That’s going to turn on the right people and turn off the wrong people.

Brett McKay: That makes sense. Yeah, if you wear a suit, you might get somebody that they want like fancy stuff all the time, that’s actually not you, and you found yourself in like I’m in a conundrum here.

Vanessa Van Edwards: I’ll give you another very kind of… This happens in a lot of ways not just the basics of formal and not formal. Politicians in the United States are known to wear pins, flag pins. So a flag pin is a symbol for certain people that they love, it’s also an ornament or a symbol of certain sort of people they do not love, and so even when you think about those kinds of things like wearing a pin on your lapel or not, what does that pin say. I want you to think about what are the other pins in your life, they could be images in your profile, they could be things in your background, all of those things are going to either be allergies for people you don’t want, or attractors for people you do want.

Brett McKay: I like that. Well, Vanessa, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Vanessa Van Edwards: Oh my goodness, thank you so much. Cues is wherever books are sold, I also record the audible and that we have a lot of fun with that so if you prefer audio books. And then of course, my website is scienceofpeople.com. We have a ton of free videos of cues, non-verbal cues, I break down The Rock and so many fun people, Princess Diana, Justin Bieber, so if you wanna see some of the cues in action, you can also waste many, many hours on our website if you lik e.

Brett McKay: Great, well, Vanessa Van Edwards. Thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Vanessa Van Edwards: Thank you so much for having me.

Brett McKay: Well, my guest is Vanessa Van Edwards. She’s the author of the book, Cues, it’s available on amazon.com and book stores everywhere. You can find more information about her work at her website, scienceofpeople.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/charismacues where you can find links to resources and we delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of The AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles, written over the years about pretty much anything you would think of.

And if you’d like to enjoy ad free episodes of the AOM podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use the code “manliness” at checkout for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android or iOS, and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you’d take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

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If you’ve wanted to develop your character, you’ve probably thought about strengthening virtues like courage, humility, and resolution. But my guest would say that practicing social skills is another way of increasing your moral strength, and the moral strength of society as a whole.

David Brooks is the author of numerous books, including his latest, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen. Today on the show, David discusses why our culture lost an emphasis on moral formation, and why this loss has led to alienation and anomie. We then talk about the role each of us can play in repairing this fabric by developing concrete social skills, avenues to improve character that, unlike some virtues that are only called upon in a crisis, you can practice every day. David shares insights on how we can get better at giving people attention, asking good questions, and helping those who are going through a hard time. We also discuss how understanding different personality types and life stages can allow us to better understand other people.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• David’s previous appearances on the AoM Podcast:
  • Episode #292: The Road to Character
  • Episode #518: The Quest for a Moral Life
• “How America Got Mean” — Atlantic article by David Brooks
• AoM series on becoming a better listener
• AoM excerpt: 10 Ways to Help a Grieving Friend
• AoM Article: The 3 Elements of Charisma — Presence
• AoM Article: The Stages of a Man’s Life 

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. If you’ve ever wanted to develop your character, you’ve probably thought about strengthening virtues like courage, humility, and resolution. But my guest would say that practicing social skills is another way of increasing your moral strength and the moral strength of society as a whole. David Brooks is the author of numerous books, including his latest, “How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen”. Today on the show, David discusses why our culture lost an emphasis on moral formation, and why this loss has led to alienation and anomie. We then talk about the role each of us can play in repairing this fabric by developing concrete social skills avenues to improve character that unlike some virtues that are only called upon in a crisis, you can practice everyday.

David shares insights on how we can get better at giving people attention, asking good questions, and helping those who are going through a hard time. We also discussed how understanding different personality types and life stages can allow us to better understand other people. After the show’s over, check at our show notes at aom.is/knowaperson.

All right. David Brooks, welcome back to the show.

David Brooks: Oh, it’s great to be back with you.

Brett McKay: I see you got a new book out, “How to Know a Person,” and in this book you take a deep dive to explore how to be the kind of person that can see and understand others deeply. What was the impetus behind this project?

David Brooks: Yeah, the impetus was basically we have a society that’s rotting at the relational foundations. And so, there are all sorts of super bad statistics out there. 54% of Americans say that no one knows them well. The number of people who say they have no close personal friends has gone up by four times in the last two decades. We’ve seen a rise of depression, rise of suicide. 45% of teenagers say they’re persistently sad and hopeless. So there’s just like this crisis of people feeling alone and feeling alienated. And this book is meant to be an Exocet missile at that problem, [chuckle] it’s meant to really introduce people to the skills they need so they can actually show up better for people. And there’s one skill that’s the core skill of all those skills, which is the ability to understand the people around you and make them feel seen, heard, and and understood. And I wanted to get a lot better at doing that for the people around me. And I hope other people wanna get better too.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So you argue in the book that there are two types of people in the world. There’s Illuminators and then there’s Diminishers. Let’s talk about the Diminishers first, ’cause the Illuminators, that’s what the book’s primarily about. What are Diminishers like, what are these kind of people like?

David Brooks: These are people who are not curious about you. I’ve noticed when I go to a party, or sometimes I’ll leave a party and I’ll think, “You know, that whole time nobody asked me a question.” And I found that about 30% of my people are question askers and the other 70% are perfectly fine, they’re just not that curious about you. And so, Diminishers just lack that curiosity. But then worse, they stereotype, they label, they ignore, they’ve got their own egos in the way, so they’re thinking about themselves and not about others or they’re so stuck in their own viewpoint, they can’t get a sense of your own viewpoint.

Brett McKay: Well, and you mentioned at the start, there’s a lot of these statistics that we’ve been seeing about how… It’s like the social fabric is framed in the West and particularly in the United States, increase in loneliness, increases in suicide, depression, et cetera. But then also, you highlight other statistics we’ve been seeing in the past, I don’t know it’s five years maybe. And you wrote about this in the book as well as in an article that you did for the Atlantic about just people behaving badly in public. What are some of the statistics you’ve seen there?

David Brooks: Yeah, well, there’s been a record rise in fights. We’ve obviously seen rising murder rates. I was at a restaurant in New York and the owner told me that he has to kick somebody out of his restaurant for entitled behavior about once a week. I was friends with a woman who’s a head nurse at a hospital and she says her main problem is keeping staff, that the patients have become so abusive. A lot of nurses want to get out of the profession. And that’s a problem caused by loneliness. When you feel that society doesn’t recognize you, it feels like an injustice. And so you tend to wanna lash out, you tend to wanna attack, you feel under threat and you become vicious.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve heard this thrown around. Sometimes I roll my eyes at it, but I think it’s true, that idea that hurt people, hurt people. It’s probably what’s going on.

David Brooks: I mean, loneliness is this weird thing ’cause you feel under threat and so you begin to get suspicious of the people around you and it cuts you off from the very thing you need most, which is some friendship and social connection. And if you look at our politics, I think you see the viciousness born out of a lot of people who feel they’ve been disrespected on a regular basis.

Brett McKay: Okay. So it’s a vicious cycle going on. People are Diminishers typically by nature ’cause we’re self-centered, we’re ego centered. But that being a Diminisher is causing other people to be Diminishers to you, and it just cycles and cycles downward.

David Brooks: Yeah, exactly. I think that’s well put. I wish I had put it that way.

Brett McKay: So in this chapter, in this article in the Atlantic that I really enjoyed, you make the case that one of the reasons there’s been an uptick in Diminisher behavior is that we no longer have a shared moral education or shared idea of moral formation in the United States. And you talk about there’s three elements to moral formation. What are those three elements?

David Brooks: Yeah, so when you get morally educated, those three things are, one, you learn ways to restrain your natural selfishness. Two, you find an ideal, some goal or some ideal that you try to orient your life around, something to give your life purpose, direction and meaning. And then third, moral formation is just teaching people the skills of how to be considered to each other in the complex circumstances of life. How to listen well to somebody, how to ask for and offer forgiveness, how to argue well without breaking a relationship, how to have a party where everybody feels included. And these are just basic social skills that you learn them the way you learn carpentry or tennis or whatever. And some days it feels like we’ve built a society where we haven’t taught people how to do the most important skills they need.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you have a great line in that article that I liked about this, sociality is a moral virtue and that it’s a skill. And you say this, you say, “We learn most virtues the way we learn crafts, through the repetition of many small habits and practices, all within a coherent moral culture, a community of common values, whose members aspire to earn one another’s respect.” And that’s very Aristotelian.

David Brooks: I guess so I’m happy to follow Aristotle. That’s high company. I might as well learn from the best.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And then, in this article you also talk about before World War II in the United States and in other western countries, people were very intentional about moral formation. What did it look like before the war?

David Brooks: Yeah. Well, if you go all the way back to America’s founders, our founders had a very realistic view of human nature. They thought people are wonderful in many ways and cooperative and generous, but they’re also basically selfish and self-centered. And they had the thought that if we’re gonna make a democracy out of these people, we’ve gotta train them better. We’ve gotta give them training on how to be a good citizen, how to be a good neighbor, how to be a good friend. And so, those morally formative institutions came from all parts of the political spectrum and all parts of the religious or non-religious spectrum. There were things like the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts in schools. Schools used to think their main job was not to prepare you for the SAT or to get into college. Their main job was to teach character.

A Headmaster at one school said, “We try to raise students who will be acceptable at a dance invaluable at a shipwreck.” They wanted to train young people to be strong in a crisis. And so, there were all these morally formative institutions of all varieties for the first 150 years of our country. And then, around 1945, ’46 a new mode of thinking came into the culture, which was, people are not basically sinful and self-centered. People are good, people are wonderful, it’s institutions in authority, that’s the problem. And so, a lot of the institutions like the Girl Scouts or the schools that used to be in the moral formation business, they got into the self-actualization business, that all you gotta do is get in touch with yourself ’cause you’re good.

And so, we stopped doing moral formation and you can see it, they have these things Google Ngrams that measure which words are used in common conversation. And usage of words like humility, honesty, courage, all the moral words, usage of those words went down like 60% over the next few decades. We just stopped talking about how do we make people morally better.

Brett McKay: What do you think caused that shift? I mean, it sounds like we went from a moral based vocabulary to a therapeutic vocabulary, or a psychological, like what caused that shift?

David Brooks: Yeah, I do think it was the basic sense that if you think human nature is good, that we’re all wonderful inside, you don’t need to form it. You just need to let it loose. And so people were encouraged to be self-indulgent. And then, the second thing that happened is we went, I would say from a more moralist to culture, as you say, to a therapeutic culture, but then we just went to a utilitarian culture. And so, schools where I teach, which used to put creating… Here’s a phrase I heard from Ted Lasso, which is a perfect description of moral formation. He was asked what was his goals for his soccer team in his comedy series. And he said, “My goal for us this year is just to make the men on this team better versions of themselves on and off the field.”

That’s what moral formation is, just institutions that wanna make the people in them better versions of themselves on and off the field. And we dropped that goal in a lot of our institutions, a lot of our schools. And now, the goal is to get people into Harvard to prepare people for professional success. And I think it’s just fundamentally wrong that… What’s the most practical thing you can major in at a college, for example? Well, it’s the humanities, ’cause the humanities teach you about other people. And if you don’t know about other people, you’ll be miserable and you’ll make them miserable. So we’re very shortsighted in thinking we should teach you how to code, but we’re not gonna teach you how to understand human nature.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think people don’t appreciate oftentimes like, how radical of a shift that is. For thousands of years the purpose of education was to train the soul or order your desires in the appropriate way. It wasn’t just about making a buck.

David Brooks: Yeah. And now I think, I have taught courses. My students call my courses Therapy with Brooks, but they’re trying to be moral formation classes. Like one of them was about making four big commitments. Most of us make a commitment to a philosophy or faith or to a family, to a community, and to a vocation. How do you choose those commitments and how do you live up to your commitments? And the course was very popular, and these courses tend to be very popular, but they’re few and far between at our universities and some of my colleagues would say, “I can’t teach moral formation. My degree is in geology, or my degree is in political science. I have no idea what moral formation is or how you would go about it.” And we’ve become so professionalized that we’ve become demoralized and my students, by the way are… They’re wonderful kids, but they’re perfectly aware that they’re morally inarticulate. They’ve not been given the tools to talk and think about this process of how do you become a better person?

Brett McKay: And as we talked about earlier, because we don’t have this moral education in our culture, you know, this reinforcing web of social influences that help build character, this just leads to a downward cycle of disconnection and alienation because people are untrustworthy. So there’s less social trust. And so, we start retreating further into ourselves, but then when we do that, we feel lonely and unrecognized, and so, we lash out. And that just creates more of the perception that people can’t be trusted. And so people disconnect from each other even more and it just goes on and on. And you say that a big part of recovering a moral tenor in our society is learning to treat people better, to really see them and know them. So how do we start recovering that aspect of what I think you’d call, like the road to character?

David Brooks: The first step is just like the first encounter with a person. The first time you meet, we meet each other. We’re unconsciously asking ourselves certain questions. Am I a priority for this person? Am I a person to them? And the answers to those questions will be communicated in the eyes before any words come out of anybody’s mouth. It’s how do you gaze at someone? And that first burst of attention is just super powerful. And so I tell this story in the book. I was out… I was in Waco, Texas at a diner having breakfast with a woman named LaRue Dorsey, who was this 93 year old lady who used to be a teacher. And she presented herself to me as a strict disciplinarian. And I was a little intimidated by her. She said to me, “You know, I love my students enough to discipline them.”

And then, into the diner walks, a mutual friend of ours named Jimmy Darrell, who’s a pastor. He pastors the homeless. And he walks up to us and he grabs Mrs. Dorsey by the shoulders and he shakes her way harder than you should shake a 93 year old. And he says to her, “Mrs. Dorsey, Mrs. Dorsey, you’re the best, you’re the best. I love you. I love you.” And that stern disciplinarian I had been talking to turned instantly into a bright eye shining nine year old girl. And that shows the power of a gaze to turn somebody into a different version of themselves. And the most powerful point I’m trying to make here is that Jimmy is a pastor. And so, when he meets anybody, absolutely anybody, he thinks he’s met someone, made in the image of God, he thinks he’s looking into the face of God, he’s trying to see them with the eyes Jesus would use to see them, eyes with compassion and love. And you can be an atheist, a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, Buddhist, whatever, the ability to approach everybody you meet with that level of reverence and respect is an absolute precondition for knowing them well. And that’s what’s sacred to me, the sacredness of each individual human being we encounter.

Brett McKay: All right. So Jimmy, this pastor, he’s an Illuminator, right? He’s the guy that when you’re around him, you just, you feel noticed, you feel seen, and you feel better being with that person.

David Brooks: Yeah, absolutely. And I have a friend named Mac, he’s probably like 75. You go walk into a coffee shop with him, first meeting, everyone becomes friends with him. ’cause he’s so outward. Second meeting, they think he is their best friend. In the third meeting, they ask him to officiate his wedding. And like he’s just like, his attention is on you. And it’s just very powerful. I tell the story in the book of another illuminator, and he worked at Bell Labs and they were… Bell Labs was this a legendary research facility. And they noticed that some of the researchers were way more innovative and productive than others. And they were asking, “What makes some of these people so good and not better than the others? And it had nothing to do with their IQ level, their education level. It turned out the most innovative researchers were in the habit of having breakfast or lunch with this electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist.

And he would get inside their head, he’d pour his attention into them and help them think through their problems and help them make progress. And so, by getting into other people’s heads, Harry Nyquist was an Illuminator. He made them better.

Brett McKay: Have you had any Illuminators in your life that have had a big impact on you?

David Brooks: Yeah, I would say that guy Mac has had a big impact. You know, it sometimes… I would say in my own life, when I felt really seen, sometimes it hasn’t always been pleasant. I have a memory going way back to 11th grade English. And I had made some smart-alecky remark and my teacher Mrs. Dooshna barks at me in front of the whole class. “David, you’re being a smart-ass. You’re trying to get by on glibness, stop it”. [chuckle] And on the one hand, I was kind of humiliated ’cause she called me out in front of the whole class. But on the other hand, I thought, “Wow, she really knows me.” And she had named for me something which was a real problem, especially for me in high school, just being smart-ass. And it gave me something to work on. So even though it wasn’t a sweet experience, I did feel known by her.

Brett McKay: Yeah, she saw you.

David Brooks: Yeah.

Brett McKay: And I really love this idea and you weave it throughout the entire book, this idea that attention, paying attention to people is a moral act. And I think there’s… You talk about Simone Weil, she taught… That was like her big philosophical idea, “Attention is a moral act”.

David Brooks: Yeah. There were a couple of women from Jewish families in World War II who really pay, who really emphasized this the… Simone Weil said that “Attention is the ultimate act of generosity, paying attention to one another.” There was another woman, a Jewish woman in Amsterdam when the Nazis invaded. And she just… She was sort of a mess when they invaded, very self-absorbed and self-centered. But as the horror of the Holocaust became clear to everybody, she became more self-sacrificial. And her biographer said of her, she grew by looking, she would study people, the bend of their neck, the anxiety in their voice, and she refused to be calloused over by the brutality of the time she was living in. And she went to work as a volunteer in one of the transit camps. And people described her as transcendent, glowing, always on the lookout for others, always trying to be open-hearted toward others, always trying to serve others.

And they describe her as just this Saint Leaf figure. And what really strikes me about that is you can be open-hearted, even in brutal times, and when you’re just this defiant kind of humanist, especially brave, when politics are rough, when you’re stuck in a region at war and you can not lose your humanity. That’s a true accomplishment. And they did it by just noticing the people around them.

Brett McKay: Okay. Let’s talk about some things that you’ve found to help you become more of an illuminator type. So it requires paying attention to others, and that requires developing these concrete social skills that you’ve talked about. And one of the skills of an illuminator is this idea that you need to have the ability to accompany another person. What does it mean to accompany someone?

David Brooks: Yeah, well, most of life is just hanging out. We’re not having deep conversations with each other. But when you’re accompanying, I obviously get it from music, where the pianist accompanies the singer. The pianist is there paying attention to the singer, trying to make her shine. And it’s sort of an other-centered way of being. And so, sometimes when we’re accompanying each other, we’re just playing, like we’re playing basketball. And play is an amazingly powerful way to get to know another person, because people tend to be at their most natural when they’re playing basketball or playing pickleball or just playing. Like when my son, my youngest son was an infant, he would wake up at 4:00 in the morning, and I would have to wake up with him, and I would play with him for about five hours before I went off to work.

And when he was like 16 months, I remember he was playing on my chest and I remember thinking, I know him best, better than I’ve known anybody. And he probably knows me best, better than anybody has ever known me, ’cause I’ve been so open playing with him. And we had never exchanged a word at that point, ’cause he couldn’t talk. But through the looks and interactions of play, you really can get to know someone very well. And then, the other part of accompaniment is just being present, just showing up for people in hard times. And one of the stories I tell in the book is about a former student of mine who’s lost her dad to pancreatic cancer. And she had always discussed with him that he would miss her big life events.

Then shortly after college graduation, she was invited to be a bridesmaid at a friend’s wedding. And she was at the wedding, and she was watching the interaction between the proud father and his daughter as she was getting married. And of course, she was moved, but also tender because of the loss of her own dad. And during the reception, they had the father-daughter dance, and she said, “I think I’m just gonna step into the restroom, and I’m gonna have a cry.” And she comes out of the restroom, and everybody at her table and the adjacent table had gotten up, and they were just standing there outside the bathroom. And as she exited, each of them, nobody said anything. They each just gave her a hug and went back to their tables. And she said, “I didn’t need them to linger around and offer false grief. They gave me exactly what I wanted.” And so that’s a group of people who really knew what she needed. They knew her, and they saw her.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So being with someone, accompanying someone, it’s a passive-active activity. You’re along for the ride, but you’re also engaged with it at the same time. One way you can be engaged when you’re accompanying someone is listening, asking questions. And you do this, I love what you do in the books. You offer some concrete advice on questions you can ask to get to know someone better. So what are some really great questions you found to learn how to understand people better?

David Brooks: Well, I think one thing I learned was we need to be a little more ambitious in our questions. We need to ask big questions. And so, kids are phenomenal at asking questions. One of my favorite stories in the book concerns a friend of mine named Niobe Way, who was teaching eighth grade boys how to ask questions so they could become student journalists. And the first day of class, she sits in the front of the class and said, “Okay, ask me anything and I’ll answer it.” So the first question from a boy was, are you married? The answer was no. And the second question was, are you divorced? The answer was yes. Third question was, do you still love him? And immediately she has a sharp intake of breath and she says yes. And they say, well, does he know? Do your kids know? And so kids are just phenomenal at those blunt questions.

But as we get older, we get a little shy and we don’t ask. I start by asking people questions like, “Where are you from?” I want to know where their childhood was. I’ve traveled a lot in the country, so there’s a good chance I’ve been to at least near where they’re from. Or “Where’d you get your name?” That’s something that gets people talking about their family or maybe their ethnic heritage. And then as you really get to know someone, you can have playful questions. Like I once was at a group and I asked, “What’s the most fun, unimportant thing about you?” And I learned that this academic, who I find very imposing, loves trashy reality TV. That’s an unimportant thing about him, that’s kind of fun.

And then, as you really get to know someone, the good questions lift them above their daily experience and get them to think about their own life in a new way and explore it with you. So those are questions like, what crossroads are you at? Most of us are in one life transition or another in life, so what crossroads are you at? Or what’s the commitment you’ve made that you no longer believe in? Or what forgiveness are you withholding? And so, those are questions that get people to step back and have to think about their life in a new way. And they find it very rewarding to answer those questions ’cause it allows them to show themselves. And it’s tremendously fun to be the one hearing them because every life is more fantastic and amazing than you think. We only see 20% of each other, and if we get to see 50%, we’re astounded by the things that are going on down in each person.

Brett McKay: Okay. So you don’t wanna start with these big questions right away with someone, a stranger, like, you don’t discount the importance of small talk. They’re friendly noises we make to get comfortable with people. But you said you can ask those questions about your name, where you’re from, and then lead up to these big ones. Some of my favorite ones, we talked about you had dinner with a political scientist and he was 80 years old. Now, I love this question he asked. He says, “I’m 80. What should I do with the rest of my life?”

David Brooks: Yeah, it was such a big question, but we had a great conversation around it. It’s like, first, what are his interests? But second, like, how should you age? How should you approach the final years of energy before death? It was just like a set of big questions. And I will tell you, I’ve learned this as a journalist and I’ve learned it from talking to conversation experts. How often, when you ask a question, does somebody say, none of your damn business? The answer is never, almost never. People are dying to tell their story. For this book, I interviewed a guy named Dan McAdams, who works at Northwestern, and he studies how people tell their life story. And he calls people in, asks them to describe their high points of life, the low points, the turning points. And then after a few hours, he says, “Thank you,” and he hands them a check to compensate them for their time. A lot of the people push back the check and say, “I don’t wanna take money for this. This has been one of the best afternoons of my life. No one has ever asked me these questions.” And so people are just dying to be asked.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and you’re helping that person. What these questions do is you’re helping these people craft the story of their life. And they’ve never probably been asked to tell their story. And with these questions, you’re allowing them to do that.

David Brooks: Yeah, and I guess I’d say, most people don’t sit down and say, what’s the story of my life? It’s only when we’re asked that we have to come up with it. And as we’re listening to the stories, you wanna listen first, what’s the role the person puts themselves? How do they see themselves? I guess for me, I’d be the teacher. That’s the role I assign myself in life. And other people can be the healer. Other people are the reconciler. Other people are builders. And there’s usually a social role we give ourselves. And then, the other thing that’s interesting to listen for in listening to people’s story is, what’s the plot here? People pick up a size and shape of a plot from the culture around.

And so, some people may tell their life story as a rags to riches story. I started at the bottom, I’ve made it to the top. Some people as an overcoming the monster story. I had an abusive parent or I had to struggle with alcohol and I had to overcome the monster. And a lot of people, and I think I’m in this camp, tell redemption stories that I was cruising along in life, something bad happened, I came back better. That’s redemption, that’s a redemption story. And so, when you hear the plot of somebody’s stories, you learn a lot about them by what plot they assign to their lives.

Brett McKay: So this idea of paying attention to people, ask good questions is part of it, but then you have to listen and you have to listen away so the person sees that you’re actually listening. Anything that you’ve come across that has helped you become a better listener?

David Brooks: Yeah, I share a whole bunch of tips on how to be a better conversationalist. One of them is treat attention as an on-off switch, not a dimmer. Make it 100% paying attention, not 60%. Another is be a loud listener. You should be listening so actively you burn calories. And so, I have a buddy named Andy Crouch who’s, when you’re talking to him, he’s like a congregation in one of those Pentecostal churches. He’s going, “Mm-hmm, yep, yep, preach, amen, amen, amen.” I just love talking to that guy. Another is don’t fear the pause. If I say something in our conversation, at what point do you stop listening so you can think of what you’re gonna say? We miss like 40% of each other’s comments ’cause we shift to, “Well, what am I gonna say to this?” And so, if I let you talk out the whole thing you wanna say, then I pause for a couple seconds, maybe I hold up my hand to show that I’m really digesting what you just said, and then I answer. And that’s a way of really hearing what you’re saying and really honoring what you’re saying.

Brett McKay: You also talk about how you can help someone who’s going through a hard time. I think this is an area where people have friends and family members who are going through a hard time, could be job loss, a loved one died, could be depression, alcoholism. And they see these people suffering, but they don’t know what to do. They wanna help and be with that person, but they don’t know what to do, so they just don’t do anything, which is probably the worst thing you could do. And I think the reason why people don’t know is, going back to what we were talking about earlier, you’re just not taught this stuff anymore. So what can people do to help someone going through a hard time?

David Brooks: Yeah. Well, it’s two different kinds of hard times. First is depression. As I describe in the book, one of my oldest friends got hit with a real severe case of depression. And I did it wrong for the first year or two. The first, I would try to offer him ideas on what he could do to get out of depression. Like, “Why don’t you go to Vietnam and help people who are poor? That’ll be rewarding. You’ve done it before, you found it so rewarding. Why don’t you do that again?” And I learned that if you’re trying to offer somebody who’s depressed ideas about how to get out of depression, you’re really, all you’re doing is saying, you just don’t get it, cause it’s not ideas they’re lacking when they’re depressed. The second mistake I made was positive reframing, trying to remind my friend of all the good things he had in his life, his great career, his great wife, his great kids.

And that positive reframing just makes things worse too, ’cause it’s like telling the person that he’s not enjoying the things he should palpably be enjoying. And so, it makes him feel worse. And I learned in this sort of thing, all you can do is show, “I’m still here, I’m not going away, I’ll never go away. This is unconditional. I’m sticking around as your friend.” And then, you can say, “Listen, I admire you for your strength ’cause you’re still here. And you have faced a lot of pain, but you’re still here.” And I think those are some of the things you can say to someone who’s depressed. For someone who’s suffering grief, I think the best thing, you know, I have a friend who lost a daughter to an accident in Afghanistan. And then nearly lost another daughter to a bike accident in DC.

And she told me, “Sometimes people don’t know if they should mention Anna,” the daughter who died, “because that might be reminding me of a bad subject. But they should know that Anna is always on my mind. And therefore, if you mention her, you’re giving me the chance to talk about her if I want to, or to not talk about her if I don’t, but you’re giving me the chance.” And then, she said to me as she was nursing her younger daughter back to health, she said, “Do you want to know what the best thing anybody ever did for us in this period of recuperation? Somebody went to the bathroom in our house on a visit and noticed we didn’t have a shower mat in the shower. And so they went out to Target, they bought a shower mat, they put it in the shower, and they didn’t say anything. They just did it.” And she said, “That was the kind of practical help that just helped me exactly where I needed help, just on the daily practicalities of life as my daughter and I are going through this hard time.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think that’s one of the benefits going back to, this idea we had, a community of moral formation, helped you learn how to do these things. Like churches, I think it’s one of the benefits of churches is that you had these rituals you’d go through when someone passed away. So in my church, if someone dies, the members of the church, they’re gonna cook the family lots of dinners and casseroles. They don’t have to worry about that. They’re gonna put on the funeral for the person. There’s like these things you just do that people have done for generations that you just, you do over and over again, no matter what. And now, when people are going to church less, they don’t have those built-in rituals. So they don’t, they have a harder time figuring out, “Well, what should I do to help this person out?”

David Brooks: Yeah, no, I agree completely. Like in the Jewish tradition, it’s called sitting shiva. And so, if you lose a husband, the obvious form of therapy is not, well, you need to throw a party every night for the next week. But that’s sort of what it can be like in the Jewish community where the person who’s grieving has a lot to do. They gotta clean up the house. They gotta arrange the food. And they have people around them every night for a week. And it’s actually a brilliant form of therapy ’cause it surrounds you with community and it surrounds you with a lot of casseroles and stuff like that. But it gives you something to do and it gives you a way to process what you’re going through. And people now, if we don’t go to church or synagogue or mosque, we may have friends, but we’re not enmeshed in the institutions that leap up during hard times. And so, just as you say, a church or a synagogue or a mosque, that community, they know exactly what to do when there’s grief. Your loose collection of friends are gonna be a lot less reliable.

Brett McKay: Okay, so helping someone who’s going through a hard time, whether it’s depression or grief, I think the big takeaway there is just be with them, accompany them. And maybe you don’t have to say anything. Just be there with them and find ways so you can help them. That’s it. And don’t worry about saying the wrong thing. I think a lot of people, that’s another thing they freak out about. They’re gonna say the wrong thing. I think people will just appreciate that you are there with them.

David Brooks: Yeah, and I learned that there are two sorts of people in a crisis. There are firemen and builders and there are some people that show up right at the moment when you’ve lost a spouse or a kid or whatever and they’re there in the beginning and then there’s another group of people who they show up later on but they’re there for the long term process which you have to go through to rebuild your mind, rebuild the models of your mind so you can now cope with what life is like without that person, and these tend to be two different sorts of people. And the other thing that a lot of people I’ve heard say is that when you lose… When you, say you lose a kid, some of the people you think are going to show up for you who you’re really close to do not show up for you, and some of the people you never expected they travel across the country and they show up. And it goes back to that illuminator diminisher dualism that some people are just shower uppers and they may not be your best friend but when they hear about a crisis, suddenly they’re there and they’ve parked in front of your house and they’re there ready to do whatever you want them to do and that’s a good trait to be a shower upper.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that idea of the distinction between firemen and builders. I saw this firsthand, my wife and I, one of our good very good friends, he lost his wife in a tragic skiing accident several years ago, so he’s a widower, had five kids at the time they’re all under the age of 11, I think. And so right away people circled the wagons around him and helped him out but then he talked about after a while people just stopped because people have their lives to live, like he understood it but my wife and I made it a priority just to stay connected with him even though he lives in another state because, yeah, your life, you have to rebuild a life completely after that and you need other people to help you during that process.

David Brooks: Yeah, I mean you even need to rebuild your mind ’cause your mind is, we understand reality by building models of reality and so in that guy’s models his wife was right there and if he had something funny to share, she would be there and suddenly she’s not there anymore and sort of the fibers of his mind are reaching out for even though she’s not there and it takes like years for the models to get modernized so she’s there as a memory but not as a living presence.

Brett McKay: Okay. So, we talked about paying attention, and you can do that just by being with someone, asking good questions really listening. You also talk about you have this chapter on personality and understanding the science of personality, how can understanding personality help you relate better with others?

David Brooks: Well, to know other people, you have to know about human nature. Just as a geologist can look at a rock face and see more than an amateur or just as a sommelier can taste more at a wine, it really helps to have domain knowledge about human beings. And one of the things… The easiest to spot thing is the personality type and our conversation of personality types is very screwed up in this country. I sometimes ask groups of people how many of you know about Myers-Briggs and almost every hand in the room goes up, people know about Myers-Briggs, and then I say how many of you know about the big five personality traits and maybe 10% or 20% know and what’s wrong with that is that Myers-Briggs has no basis in scientific research.

You take the test multiple times, you get multiple diagnoses of who you are. It is not predictive of how anybody’s gonna do in a job or in a marriage or anywhere else. And the categories are wrong in Myers-Briggs. Like it says that some people are thinking people and some people are feeling people but in fact people who are good at thinking are also good at feeling so it gets human nature wrong but there’s masses of research in what’s known as the big five personality traits and those are extroversion which is drawn to positive emotions, conscientiousness, high impulse control, agreeableness, your ability to like other people, openness to new experience whether you’re adventurous or not and then neuroticism do you respond to negative emotions.

And if I know that you’re high in conscientiousness, I’m probably gonna expect you to be disciplined and persevering and organized. I’m gonna be expecting you’re going to be do pretty well at school and probably pretty well in a company because you really have a lot of self-control. On the other hand if my kid is high in neuroticism which is very sensitive to negative emotions like fear or anger then my kid is gonna hear my correction which I think is a gentle correction, he’s gonna hear that as shouting. And so I need to parent a kid who’s neurotic in a way that is a little gentler and so he doesn’t feel perpetually under assault. So it’s super important that I know his personality traits.

And we can do that mostly by observing each other, if we hang around each other, we know who’s extroverted or not, we know who’s agreeable or not and it just helps you see what kind of person that is. If you can attach sort of a tendency of personality to them.

Brett McKay: All right, it will help you relate better to them. You also have this chapter on life stages and this is really interesting because as I was reading this book, I was writing an article about life stages paradigms from different cultures and different times in human history. Tell us about this like how can understanding life stages or life cycles help us be able to understand and relate better to people.

David Brooks: Yeah, so we have different tasks that we go through in life and they happen at different times and our minds are reshaped so we can complete that life task. So when you’re a boy or a girl your primary life task is to show you can compete and you can be effective, and so at school there’s a lot of competitive games as people are competing to show, “Yes, I can be effective and at school,” and so you’re kind of self-absorbed as a kid and you’re just trying to show you can do things.

And then, you get to adolescence and you’re in a more interpersonal phase, you’re trying to find out who you are and that’s shaped by what other people say about you. So you become… Your main job there is to make friends and be popular among friends. And so, in that first stage of that first task of life you’re gonna be a little self-centered and self-enclosed. And then, the next task in adolescence, you’re gonna be super sensitive to social slights and so that’s just a very different mentality. So if you can see what task somebody’s in the middle of, you’ll have a good deal of idea of how their mind works. And so, for example I’m kind of caught between two life tasks, the one task which is what most middle-aged people are in the middle of, is career consolidation. How do I become a success at work? But then you hit a certain age and that becomes a little unsatisfying and you move on to the next task which is generativity, how do I give back?

And so, I’m in this weird transition moment where I hope I’m trying to give back to society but I still have the normal anxieties of anybody in career. And so, like a couple years ago I wrote a book about how to be a good member of community, how to be a generous human being, and I wrote this noble book about how you shouldn’t care about career success and yet when the book came out, I was like looking at my Amazon ranking every hour, and so I clearly had not made the transition I was still obsessed with career and I sort of think I’m in the middle of that. So if you can ask yourself or ask the other person, “What’s your main life task right now?” You’ll be able to learn a lot about how they see the world, how they structure their days, how they prioritize their desires.

Brett McKay: Yeah, one of the ideas from The Road to Character that I think about a lot that you wrote about was this idea of two Adams, so we’re talking about Adam like the first human. There’s Adam one and Adam two and this comes from the Jewish tradition that there’s these two types of Adams. And Adam one is our ambitious career-oriented self and then Adam two is when we shift to generativity like helping other people thinking of we. And I’ve seen that in my own life and I also see it in the lives of teenage boys that I mentor. I know when I interact with my these teenage boys at church and in flag football, like they’re totally, they’re getting into Adam one phase, like what they want to know is like how can they be successful, how can they get stronger, how can they get better, what can they do to attract members of the opposite sex, that’s their focus.

And so like I understand that, there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s the phase of life that they’re in, they’re trying to build a life for themselves and so I try to orient a lot of the things I talk about towards that. I think understanding those life stages can help you connect better and understand people better.

David Brooks: Yeah, and if some people, like if you have somebody who’s in the interpersonal phase and she marries someone who’s still in that first stage of trying to prove themselves, she’s gonna ask him to give more emotional connection than he’s capable of giving ’cause his mind just hasn’t entered the task where deep introspection or deep connection are a priority for him and so he doesn’t do it and so that’s gonna be… If you’re at these different life tasks you’re gonna have different mentalities and another transition is between the generative state which is usually when you’re in your 60s or your 70s and you’re not really driven by status as much. You just want to contribute but then there’s the next stage which is the final stage of life which Erik Erikson the psychologist said is about integrity or despair.

And that final phase is when you piece together what your life meant, can you look back on it with relatively few regrets, understanding how you affected the world, and if you can do that you’ve achieved integrity, Erikson says and “If you can’t do that you have achieved despair,” and so, I’m struck by especially among seniors, how much they wanna learn. You’d think their curiosity would be down but it’s not at all, seniors really wanna learn. I think they wanna figure out where they fit into the world and what they can leave behind to the world.

Brett McKay: So what I love about the book, you weave in these big ideas along with these concrete practical things. Let’s end with a concrete practical thing. What’s one thing that you think people can start doing today to become more of this illuminator type?

David Brooks: Yeah, I would say one of them would just be like be a little more aggressive on the next time you’re on a train or in a coffee shop, like start a conversation with somebody and we underestimate how much we’ll enjoy that. We underestimate how much people will wanna get deep and so just be a little more… I have a friend who says I practice aggressive friendship. Be the person on the train who starts the conversation and if they cut you off, fine, but the odds are they will love to have this conversation and they’ll love to make it fun. Then there are other little practical things like one of them is just when thanking a… Once writing a thank you note, the temptation is to write about yourself. Here’s how I am gonna use what you gave me but the nicer thing is to write about the other person’s intentions. “Thank you for taking the time to think about who I am and buying me this perfect gift. It makes me feel seen by you” and so that’s the sort of practical thing you can do and then I will tell parents. If your kid’s in school, the most practical thing they can do is major in the humanities and learn about people and then the most practical thing you can do is to lead with respect, lead with a sense of I wanna get to know you and you’ll find even in the little encounters or the cash register or the big encounters with family and friends, life is just a little happier.

Brett McKay: I love that. Well, David, where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

David Brooks: Well, they can buy their book from Amazon or wherever they buy their books. They can also… My writing generally appears in the New York Times and in the Atlantic Magazine so if people wanna google me and they can find more writing than is humanly possible.

Brett McKay: Well, David Brooks, thanks for your time, it’s been a pleasure.

David Brooks: Oh, it’s always great to talk with you. Thank you for having me on.

Brett McKay: My guest today was David Brooks. He’s the author of the book How to Know a Person. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Check out our show notes at aom.is/knowaperson, where you can find links to resources where we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple podcast or Spotify, it helps out a lot. If you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support and until next time, this is Brett McKay. Reminding you to not only listen to AOM podcast but to put what you’ve heard into action.

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When someone asks us to do something we don’t want to do, we often say yes even though we want to say no, because we think that saying no will feel terrible. But my guest, Dr. Vanessa Patrick, says the opposite is true: we actually feel great when we say no.

So why do we have such a hard time doing so?

Today on the show, Vanessa, who’s the author of The Power of Saying No: The New Science of How to Say No That Puts You in Charge of Your Life, answers that question and more. She shares how to categorize the asks you get into quadrants to determine whether you should say yes or no to them. And she explains how to give an “empowered refusal” — a no that’s phrased in a way that makes it less likely to create offense or pushback — so you can start saying no to the things that don’t matter, and spend more of your time on the things that do.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Article: How to Firmly Say No Without Coming Off Like a Jerk
• AoM Article: A Better Way to Say No
• Sunday Firesides: Give the Gift of No
• AoM Article: How to Be Assertive
• AoM Article: There Is No Indispensable Man

Connect With Dr. Vanessa Patrick

• Vanessa’s website
• Vanessa on LinkedIn
• Vanessa on Twitter
• Vanessa on IG
• Vanessa’s faculty page

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. When someone asks us to do something we don’t want to do, we often say yes, even though we want to say no, because we think saying no will feel terrible, but my guest, Dr. Vanessa Patrick says the opposite is true. We actually feel great when we say no. So, why do we have such a hard time doing so? Today on the show, Vanessa, who is the author of “The Power of Saying No: The New Science of How to Say No” that puts you in charge of your life, answers that question and more. She shares how to categorize the ask you get into quadrants to determine whether you should say yes or no to them. And she explains how to give an empowered refusal, a no that’s phrased in a way that makes it less likely to create offense or pushback. So, you can start saying no to the things that don’t matter and spend more of your time on the things that do. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/sayno.

All right. Vanessa Patrick, welcome to the show.

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: Thank you so much for having me. I’m delighted to be here.

Brett McKay:So, you are a professor of marketing, and you’ve done a lot of research on why people have a hard time saying no, even when they really want to say no. I think a lot of people have this problem. I know I have this problem. And today we’re going to talk about what you can do about it and how you can get better at saying no. But first let’s talk about why it is that saying no can be so hard. You say it has a lot to do with our desire to belong to groups. What’s going on there?

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: So the two letter word, no, it’s a tiny little word, but it causes a lot of us a lot of angst and is ridden with conflict and anxiety. And so the reason that I’m really interested in is why is that the case? And so in my research, I’ve identified three main reasons for why we find saying no so difficult. And it boils down to people and how people think about us and how we relate to other people. And so those three reasons are one, a concern for our relationship with others. So, we want to have good relationships with others. We want people to like us. We want to belong to social groups and we want friends. And so we believe that when we say no, we are likely to damage that relationship. So, we often say yes when we want to say no. The second driver of saying yes when we want to say no is our concern for our own reputation, the desire to look good in the eyes of others. And that essentially is this motivation for us to look competent and capable and able to do anything, regardless of how difficult the ask is. And we are very motivated to impress others in this way. And so we sometimes say yes because we want to impress people and take on stuff that is difficult.

The other reason, and this is a very, very important reason, and that is that we have never really learned how to say no effectively. I mean, if you think about when we are born, we are born pretty selfish and focused on what we want. And if you think about a toddler, they are very good at saying no, I don’t want this, and I don’t want that. But we socialize that out of our children, right? We tell them that they need to be cooperative and kind and giving and sacrifice their own wants and allow other people to have their way. And so we kind of socialize that out of people. So, people have never really learned how to say no effectively, which is where my book comes in.

Brett McKay: All right. So, speaking of that idea that our desire to belong to groups and nurture relationships, you call this, you say no is the harmony buster, right? Because like, as soon as you say no, you think, oh my gosh, this person’s not going to like me anymore and that hurts.

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: Yeah, yeah. And, you know, when people ask us a favor or ask us to go somewhere or invite us someplace, they are expecting us to say yes. They wouldn’t have asked us if they didn’t expect that yes. And so saying no goes against that expectation. And that is something we struggle with a lot and is filled with conflict. Because we have to actually go against the expectations of others. So, I describe no as a socially dis-preferred response because no one wants us to say no to them.

Brett McKay: Right. I think we’ve all experienced that when a family member or a friend made a like a pretty heavy ask, right? You’re like, oh, geez, that’s gonna really be inconvenient. And I just don’t have the bandwidth. But you still say yes, because you care about the relationship. And you feel like if you do say no, it’ll hurt the relationship.

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: Right, right. And in the book, I help people categorize those different asks, and also learn to say no to the things that don’t matter. And even if it’s a big ask from someone important, if it’s really a hell no for you, then it should not be something that you engage in.

Brett McKay: Well, this idea that our desire for reputation or status also contributes to us saying yes to things to which we want to say no, I thought that was interesting. You talk about this, you see this a lot when we say yes to acquaintances. I think most of us have no problem saying no to a complete stranger.

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Or, you know, sometimes saying no to like a close friend or a family member because you know, well, you might have a tight relationship with them. So, you know if you say no, they’re not going to care and they’re not going to think less of you. But acquaintances, that gets hard because you say we can fall into this acquaintance trap. What is the acquaintance trap?

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: Yes, so the acquaintance trap is essentially this idea that we have different types of relationships with different sorts of people. And so as you rightly pointed out, to a complete stranger, it’s not that hard to say no because we’re never going to see them again. And you can say no without any fear of your reputation or relationship being damaged because it’s a non issue. And with people who are very close to us, we are very secure in those relationships. And we are not worried if we say no to our mom that our mom will stop talking to us. Our mom is gonna be our mom and she will get over it and talk to us eventually. And so essentially, it’s the whole bunch of other people who form the majority of the relationships in our lives, who are our acquaintances to whom we have the most difficult time saying no. Because we have good relationships with them, but not great relationships with them. They are weak social ties. And we do care about how we look in their eyes. And so that combination of reputation and relationships with acquaintances put us in a situation very often, where it’s really hard to say no to them.

Brett McKay: Okay, so our drive for wanting to belong or keep relationships strong, or our drive for reputation makes it hard to say no, and we’ll talk about this idea that we don’t know how to say no. We’re gonna dig deep into that. But before we do, you’ve also done research on what happens whenever we say yes to things we wanna say no to and how it makes us feel. What does that research show?

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: It’s interesting because most people feel that they are gonna feel really guilty for saying no. And that saying no is going to make them feel bad. And that is actually a forecast that is incorrect. What actually happens in real life, is that it’s when we say yes to the things we don’t wanna do that we feel really bad. We feel resentful, we feel angry, we feel guilty. And when we say no to those things, we feel relieved and happy and freer. And so even though we think that saying no will feel bad and make us feel bad, it’s actually the opposite. It’s saying yes to the things that don’t motivate us, that are not aligned with our purpose, that don’t leverage our unique strengths, those are the things that feel bad.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I imagine that’s a source of a lot of burnout that people might be experiencing.

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: Oh, absolutely. 100%. When we fill our calendars with busy work and stuff that’s not aligned with our identity, stuff that’s not… Doesn’t make us feel energized and good about doing it, we feel really resentful to the people who are making us do those things, and angry with that. And if we spend more time doing the things that give us joy and are fulfilling and tap into what we are able to uniquely contribute, it’s a completely different experience.

Brett McKay: So saying yes to things you wanna say no to, it makes you feel put upon, disempowered, not an agent, like you’re acted on, like it just, that doesn’t feel good.

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: Absolutely.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And I think it’s interesting. I know I’ve experienced that where I have this ask given to me and I’m just wrestling with it, “Oh my gosh, I don’t wanna do this.” And then I finally say no and I’m like, “Oh yeah, that wasn’t so bad.” But then when I say yes, just think, “Oh, this is awful,” and I’m just complaining about the entire time. And for some reason I can’t remember that you’ll feel worse saying yes to this thing and instead of saying no.

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: Yeah, yeah. The fact is that when we say yes to something and we feel really bad, our psychological immune system kicks in, and we immediately wanna start coping with that. And to do that, we often try to search desperately for a silver lining, something that’s good about the fact that you are spending your time doing this thing that you really did not wanna do. And I recommend that we kind of manage that psychological immune system so that we don’t repeat the mistake again. So when we do feel resentful, and when we do feel that sense of, “I’m wasting my time, I really shouldn’t be doing this,” it’s a learning opportunity for us to really recognize that this is something that I really don’t like to do, I should avoid doing it in the future, rather than let that psychological immune system kick in and not learn from that experience.

Brett McKay: Another thing I think, and you talk about this in the book that contributes to us having such a hard time saying no, is that we often go around in the world thinking, “Well, I’m the only one that could do this.”

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: Yes.

Brett McKay: And it reminds me of a quote from Bertrand Russell. He said, “One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.” Like you’re this indispensable person. But actually when you say no, there’s probably someone else that can do the thing that you said no to.

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: Oh, absolutely. In fact that’s a very, very vivid thing to remember. That whenever you feel that you’re the only person who can do this, you need to check yourself. Because, I often remind myself that the graveyards are full of indispensable people. The reality is that when someone makes a request of you, most often, they just need that thing done. And while you might be a great candidate to do it, you might not be the only candidate to do it. And the reality is, if when you say no, they’re simply going to go back to their list and go down that list to the next person. That’s what happens most of the time.

Brett McKay: Yeah, the graveyards are full of indispensable people. Reminds me, my great-grandfather, he self-published a short memoir, and at the end of it, he had a poem called “The Indispensable Man.” And Dwight Eisenhower actually used to carry this poem around. And it goes like this, “Sometime when you’re feeling important, sometime when your ego’s in bloom, sometime when you take it for granted, you’re the best qualified in the room. Sometime when you feel that you’re going would leave an un-fillable hole, just follow these simple instructions and see how they humble your soul. Take a bucket and fill it with water. Put your hand in it up to the wrist. Pull it out and the hole that’s remaining is a measure of how much you’ll be missed. You can splash all you wish when you enter, you may stir up the water galore, but stop and you’ll find that in no time, it looks quite the same as before.”

The moral of this Quin example is to do just the best that you can. Be proud of yourself, but remember, there’s no indispensable man. So I think it’s a good reminder when you’re feeling like, “Man, if I don’t say yes to this, then everything’s gonna fall apart,” that no, in most cases, other arrangements will be made and things will just keep moving on without you.

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: Yeah, I mean it’s really humbling and you know you become able to say no to a lot more things when you have a more realistic view of what you can contribute. Having a clear idea of what you can do and do uniquely is so important because in some domains we might be indispensable and it’s so important to be able to focus our energies on those domains because there we can make a positive difference in the world, where if we scatter our attention and do anything that everyone asks us, then we diffuse the impact that we can have. And so our self-awareness needs to kind of focus on where am I truly indispensable and where am I not?

Brett McKay: All right, well let’s dig into how people can start saying no more often and feel good about it. One thing you recommend is that people avoid calling themselves a people pleaser. And I think a lot of people who have a hard time saying, no, they do that, well, I’m just such a people pleaser. Why do you recommend people not labeling themselves as that?

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: You know, in my research I would very often ask people to tell me stories about when they said yes, when they wanted to say no. And they would tell me those stories, but they would also give themselves the excuse or give themselves an out by explaining to me that, “I’m just a people pleaser. I have this terrible people pleasing tendency.” And the idea is that the words that we use are really important. If we call ourselves people pleasers, we are more likely to act like people pleasers because the self-talk, the way we speak to ourselves, the way we describe ourselves does implicate our identity. So we need to be able to talk to ourselves in a way that allows ourselves to act in the way we want to act. So we should not call ourselves or give ourselves a label that puts us in a situation that we don’t wanna be in. So people pleaser is definitely one of those labels because we make greater inroads into our identity when we use words like that and it tells us who we are.

Brett McKay: So part of how to say no is knowing when to say no. And you mentioned earlier about categorizing the ask that you get, and you actually have this really useful quadrant that people can use for deciding when to say yes and when to say no. Can you walk us through these four quadrants?

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: Right. So this is the framework that I call the decipher, the ask framework. And it’s really about deciphering between the good for me activities versus the not good for me activities. And the framework takes two lenses. The first lens is how costly is taking this on going to be for me? Is it gonna be very, very effortful, time consuming, energy consuming, etcetera? And so that’s one dimension. How costly is it for me, versus how much benefit will the asker get from me doing this? You know, like is this tapping into something that I can uniquely do and really make a positive difference or does it have no real benefit for me doing it at all? And so it’s got these two dimensions that we consider. And so if you think about the different ask, you can think about something like low cost to you ask, pretty easy for you to do, but has a huge benefit for other people.

I call these as pass the salt tasks. So imagine you’re sitting at the dining table and the salt shaker is sitting in front of you and someone says, “Hey Vanessa, can you pass the salt?” And I just lift up the salt shaker and pass it along the table. For me it was super easy to do, not a big deal, but for the other person, presumably, they really needed salt for their meal and it’s gonna transform their meal. So it’s a big deal for them. There are some asks like those which the past the salt asks, which might be useful to think about saying yes to because they are very low cost to you, but they actually make a positive difference in the world. In complete contrast to pass the salt asks are what I call bake your famous lasagna asks, these are asks that are very costly for you.

They are hugely time consuming like baking a lasagna for example. They might be effortful. And so if you’ve been asked by a friend to bake this lasagna for a potluck party where everyone else is bringing party trays or picking up cookies from a store and you are the only person who’s slaving making this tedious dish, maybe those are the kind of asks that you should be thinking about saying no to. And so thinking about the kind of asks that are coming your way are really important. And the reason we need to say no to bake your famous lasagna asks is so we can say yes to hero’s journey asks. So hero’s journey asks are the ones where they might be high effort for you, you might have to give a lot of yourself, but they also make a positive difference in the world. And so we need to think about where… And we talked about this a little bit earlier, right? When we are talking about where you spend your energy, how do you find the things that you can uniquely do that you are indispensable for in that specific domain in the moment?

And so spending our time doing those because those are energizing and motivating and feel good because you know that you are uniquely contributing to the world.

Brett McKay: And then there is that final one, that low cost to you, but low to other people. That’s the email tweet post ask, right?

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: Yes. So those are the kind of asks which are low benefit to other people, not very high cost to you, but are they worth doing? So in the book, I talk about a few things. I call them bullshit jobs, because they are probably not worth doing. If you see yourself doing stuff that’s making no difference to the world, however easy it is, you should probably not spend even a minute doing it. And so you can think about discussing with the asker whether those things should even be done or should they be outsourced or just eliminated so that no one has to do those kind of jobs. And so once we identify and become much better at spotting the kind of ask that it is, deciphering the kind of ask that it is, then how we respond to those asks becomes pretty obvious and straightforward.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I thought this quadrant was really useful. And I’ve been thinking about the ask that I get, and putting it into there. So, the low cost to you, low benefit to others, that’s the email tweet post, automatic no, probably… Maybe it doesn’t have to be done. The low cost to you, high benefit to others. Examples of that you gave in your line of work, since you’re a professor, writing recommendation letters, giving feedback to student presentations, things like that, it’s easy to do, but high benefit to the person. But you also say you gotta be careful saying yes to those things because you have this idea from George Washington, many…

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: Yes, many sickles make a suckle.

Brett McKay: Right, yeah. You don’t wanna say yes too much. Then your entire workflow is just caught up with these little, small pass the salt ask.

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: Yes, yes. Precisely.

Brett McKay: And when you were talking about the bake your famous lasagna, that made me think of like the no indispensable man problem, right? It’s like, well, you’re the only one who can make this lasagna. It’s like, well, you could get a lasagna from Costco and it’ll probably taste the same. Just do that. I don’t need to do this.

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: Oh, yeah. Just go to the grocery store and buy a party tray like everybody else.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you’ll be good. And then I like the hero’s journey. If it’s a high cost to you, but a high benefit to others, then say yes. But then just make sure you’re really measuring the benefits. I think that’s a really useful quadrant.

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: Yeah, but even in the hero’s journey, one needs to be very careful that it is in fact a hero’s journey. And that the benefit that you’re conferring on others is real. So you need to, even when you take those on, ask the right questions. Don’t just make assumptions about the benefit, or sometimes just asking, why are you asking me? I know you’ve approached me for this, but can you explain why you asked me to do this? And sometimes you’ll hear stuff about why their thought process, how they see you as a person, what you contribute, and then you can get a better understanding of how your talent is viewed in the context of the organization.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay. So we’ve talked about the groundwork for saying no, don’t refer to yourself as a people pleaser and decide when you should say no by categorizing asks into quadrants. So you should probably say no when it’s low effort for you, but low reward or a lot of effort for you, but low benefit. And you should probably say yes when it’s low effort for you, and high benefit to others, or high effort for you, but high potential reward too. Now let’s get into actually how you give a no. So you and your research team have developed this idea that’s called the Empowered Refusal. And it’s a way of saying no that will allow you to still maintain relationships, and maintain your reputation. So what is an empowered refusal?

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: So the empowered refusal is a way of saying no, and it’s a way of saying no that stems from your identity. So you look inwards, and identify what are the values, priorities, preferences and beliefs that you have. And then you communicate your no using who you are, your identity as the basis for saying no. And so because you implicate your identity, you come across with greater conviction and determination, and come across also as much more persuasive to the other person, and do not invite pushback.

Brett McKay: Well, so what’s an example of that, of saying a no that’s tied up with your identity and saying it in a way that doesn’t get pushback?

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: So when you speak from your identity, your identity is who you are. It is a stable stance, right? And so words that are empowering and implicate your identity are words like saying, “I don’t, I never, I always, it is my policy too.” As soon as you use words like that, you come across as much more empowered than if you use words like, “I can’t, I shouldn’t, I wish I could, but.” So the language that we use can communicate and tap into identity quite effectively. So in our research studies, we’ve contrasted the phrase, “I can’t,” with the phrase, “I don’t.” And what we show in our work is that when you say, “I can’t,” you come across as disempowered, not in control of the situation. And you communicate that in some other circumstance, you would, but the situation does not allow you to. So you come across as disempowered. As soon as you say I don’t, you come across as having a much more stable stance on the matter. You talk about who you are, you implicate the kind of person that you are. So it’s a small change in the language, but it has a tremendously powerful impact on the listener, as well as on yourself.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I’ve noticed with my own experience, I do that with… With my work, I get asked to like come speak to things or maybe do… Something like that. And my answer is, I just, that’s something I don’t do. And it’s because like I just want to be with my kids, like I wanna be a good dad. That’s a priority for me. And it makes it easy to say no. I don’t have to think about it.

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

Brett McKay: And the research shows that when you tell someone no, using the I don’t phrase, they’re more willing to accept it. And if you say I can’t, they’ll start trying to negotiate with you. Is that how it works?

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: Exactly. And so, we basically show that saying no in a way that stems from your identity and using words like I don’t, is so much more empowering and it is so much more effective in persuading the other person that you are not the right person for this job. And it’s important to remember that when you are saying no, because you make it about yourself, your no is about you, and not a rejection of the other person. And that’s a really interesting kind of change in the way we think about it. If we say, I’m giving voice to my values, what I… My priorities, my preferences, my beliefs, this is not about you. This is certainly not personal and it’s not a rejection of you, it changes the dynamic.

Brett McKay: So this is how you’re able to maintain the relationship or even make it stronger.

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: Exactly. Exactly.

Brett McKay: And it makes it stronger, ’cause now people know something about you that they didn’t know.

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: Absolutely.

Brett McKay: So, related to this idea of tying your no to your identity and saying, “I don’t,” instead of, “I can’t,” your I don’ts grow out of a setting what you call personal policies for yourself. So not doing speaking engagements because my priority is being a dad, is a personal policy. What are some other personal policies that you’ve seen in your own life but also in the research you’ve done?

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: So personal policies are simple rules that we set up for ourselves that guide our actions and decisions. They are the ways in which our values and our preferences get manifested in how we operate in the world. So for example, I’m a morning person, and I like my mornings to be dedicated to creative work, writing, research, thinking. And so I have a personal policy where I don’t do meetings in the morning, unless it’s a standing administrative meeting that I have no control over. So those are the kind of things that you have to think about. You have to think about how you would like the world to be, and to what extent can you control and manage the situation so that the world is the way you want it to be. How can you create operating principles?

Brett McKay: Yeah, you gave examples of several creative type people who have created these sorts of policies for themselves. There’s a lot of writers who say, look, the thing I’m good at that allows me to get the most value to the world is writing good books. So they say, “Here’s a list of things I don’t do. I don’t do speaking engagements, I’m not gonna read your manuscript, I’m not going to meet with you.” And it’s not ’cause he doesn’t like you, and he doesn’t wish you well for whatever thing you’re doing, it’s just like, it’s gonna prevent him from doing the writing that he knows will actually have a big impact.

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: Yes. And understanding that, where you can impact the world in a positive way, how your talent can be best used, and your time can be best used, these are really important things for us to reflect on, and then make policies around.

Brett McKay: And it sounds like having these personal policies and understanding how to use the I don’t language, this would allow you to create templates for yourself on how to say no when you do get those asks. So instead of having to think about it every single time, you get an email for with a request and you already have the template, ’cause like, all right, here’s my identity. I know what I’m all about. Here’s my personal policy, and then you just, you create a template that can be used in any request.

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: Exactly. And I think that it can be very efficient to have those sort of decision rules. So I’ll give you an example, Brett. One of the things that happens quite often as a mom is that you get asked to volunteer for various different things at your children’s schools. Now, having a lens with which to decide what you volunteer for and what you don’t volunteer for is efficient and effective. So in my view, I look at it and think, if it has to do with teaching the kids something, sharing my knowledge, I am all in. I will go and read to the kids, I will go and do a presentation, I will do career day, I will do those kind of things. If it doesn’t tap into those things, I’m less likely to do them. So if you ask me if the teacher wants someone to stuff envelopes or go and buy treats for the class, I don’t typically volunteer to do those kind of things, because I’ve got a lens with which I decide what I’m gonna volunteer for, and what I’m not gonna volunteer for.

Brett McKay: Okay. So we’ve talked about how to say no by sorting ask into quadrants, by saying I don’t instead of I can’t and then developing personal policies that these I don’ts grow out of. Something else you talk about in the book is how this preparation can help you manage what you call the spotlight effect. And this is when someone asks you to do something and you just, you feel put on the spot. Like everyone’s eyes are on you, waiting for your answer. And this can either be in your head, like you have a psychological audience in your head, or it might be literally someone asks you to do something and everyone else, there’s a whole bunch of people there watching you, waiting for your answer. So you feel under pressure, and so you end up just saying yes to make the spotlight go away. But some preparation can help you deal with that spotlight, so you don’t automatically say yes. So, how would this play out in an example? Like let’s say you’re at a work meeting and the boss says, “Hey, can you stay late to do X?”

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: Yeah. So it would be really helpful to have a policy around that. Now, if it is important, so the book is not about getting out of things that are your actual job or getting out of things because of laziness or other sorts of priorities. So it’s really about taking on stuff, and saying no to things that are not your responsibility. So the first question you need to ask is, why is he asking me? Is it super urgent? Is it super important? Is it something that can be handled in a different way? So imagine that there’s a crisis at work, and it needs to be done. Maybe that’s not the best time to push back and exert your own personal policy. Perhaps, it’s a good time to just help out, but then, after the crisis has died down, to go back and speak to your boss about a last minute change in asking me to stay late doesn’t work for me because I have these family commitments, or whatever the reason is that you wanna say no.

Alternatively, so if it’s not a crisis situation, you could just say, “Hey you know that I’ve got family commitments starting at 5:00 PM, and there’s an expectation that I’m gonna be home at 5:00, I can’t change that last minute.” So those are the kind of things that you have to learn to communicate, and learn to respond, depending on the situation. What personal policies do is that they… You’ve already decided what you prefer, what you hope will happen. So they just become easier to use as the infrastructure to be able to communicate a more effective refusal.

Brett McKay: Let’s say you give an empowered no, I think most people are gonna be like, they’re good people and they’re like, “Okay, I understand that,” and they move on. Some people though, they just can’t take a hint, and you’re gonna get a lot of pushback. How do you handle people who have a hard time taking no for an answer?

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: Yeah. So we will encounter pushy askers unfortunately, and there will be people who will not take no for an answer, even if you’ve said an empowered refusal. I think recognizing how these people operate and learning to manage them is very important. So in the book, I call pushy askers walnut trees, and I use the metaphor of a walnut tree, because it becomes a vivid imagery to describe people who will not take no for an answer. So the long story short, the Black American walnut tree is essentially this beautiful tree with a luxuriant canopy, and a root system that goes out 50 feet in the area, but it dominates the landscape. It stunts the growth of all the other trees around it. And this is because it exudes into the soil, a toxin called jug lone.

And so walnut trees are like people who will not take no for an answer. It’s all about them, and what they want. Your preferences, your values, they don’t matter. What I have found in my work is that, as soon as you kind of reframe people from being toxic or jerks or difficult or all these things that people talk about in the literature and in management books, as soon as you reframe those kind of people into describing their behavior as walnut tree-like behavior, then it becomes easier for you to handle the walnut tree, easier for you to manage the pushback that they are giving you. And so it’s important to recognize how walnut trees act. You will find that walnut trees very often will make a request face-to-face. Research shows that we are 34 times more likely to say yes to a face-to-face request. They know that, and so they’ll make sure to ask you face-to-face.

The other thing they’ll do is that they’ll insist on leveraging or capitalizing on the spotlight effect. So they will insist on getting an immediate response from you, and that immediate response when you are under the glare of the spotlight is going to be yes. And so they know that, too. They often will create a home court advantage where they are in a situation where it’s impossible for you to say no to them. So they might invite you to their house, they might take you for lunch to an expensive restaurant and foot the bill. They basically put you in a vulnerable position so that that spotlight glares even more brightly. So the first point with walnut, with dealing with walnut trees is recognizing walnut tree behavior.

Second is recognizing how walnut trees respond to your no. Some walnut trees will explode with anger. How dare you say no to me, sort of walnut trees. Other walnut trees will give you the complete opposite. They’ll just do a silent treatment. You said no to me, and I’m never gonna talk to you forever. So neither response is great, but walnut trees tend to be very demanding in this way. They’re essentially trying to push you to say yes. And so I talk about two types of strategies, active pushback and passive pushback that walnut tree engage in. So active pushback is the screaming at you, or making you feel really guilty or giving you one reason after another as to why you should say yes to their request. So that’s a much more active way they are pushing back against your no. A passive way is by making you feel really guilty, telling you all the things you are going to miss. Walnut trees are great at creating FOMO or the fear of missing out. Oh, you must come because think about all the things you’ll be missing out if you don’t come. Those are passive, because what the walnut tree is trying to do in those situations is get you to change your mind, right? Yourself. So you will change your mind and say, you are right. You’re probably right. I should go.

And so recognizing the patterns of the walnut trees and then deciding for yourself, how you are going to communicate your empowered refusal. So I’ve got a whole set of strategies associated with how do you communicate your empowered refusal? So for example, if someone’s yelling at you, one strategy is to go softer, create like a vocal contrast. If someone is yelling, you talking softer makes it very salient that they are yelling. Repeating yourself. So saying, “I just said no, I think it was pretty clear that I just said no.” And so when you repeat yourself, it sounds like you are definitely not budging. And so these are all the different things that we have to learn and understand and think about as we are dealing with that sort of pushback.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that advice or that insight about walnut trees will try to make the ask in person and in their own home turf. I’ve had that happen to me. People will be like, “Hey, send me an email. Brett, I’d like to talk to you about something. Can we meet X or can we get on the phone X.” They never say why. And like, I understand like they’re trying to do a power play here. Like they’re trying to throw me off.

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: Of course.

Brett McKay: So I just, I balance things out like, hey, you know what? To best prepare for this, I’d like to know what it is we’re gonna talk about, so I can prepare for it and make it a productive conversation.

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: Precisely.

Brett McKay: And that’s how I do it. And oftentimes if they kind of are wishy-washy, it’s like, well, sorry, I can’t do it. That’s gonna be a waste of time. So, sorry.

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: Yeah.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned this earlier about this empowered no. I think people might hear this idea of empowered no and think, well, I just gotta say no to all the things now that I don’t wanna do. But you have caveats about this. It’s a nuanced thing. Sometimes you gotta say yes, even though you wanna say no. So an example of the boss putting you in the spotlight, because something has to get done, it’s a do or die. But also like, young people, when you’re young and starting off in your life, in your career, it often pays more to say yes, because you’re trying to gain experience and more, yeah, just more opportunities. And then as you get older or progress in your career, then you need to start saying no more, because you gotta start focusing on those things you are really good at.

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: Yes, exactly. And so as you said, rightly said, it is very nuanced and there’s a time and place for everything. So when you’re starting out in your career, and you are exploring, sometimes junior people have to go through the motions to learn about what it takes to do all aspects of the job, even if you don’t necessarily like all aspects of the job. It’s once you reach a slightly senior position that you actually have some choices about what you would like to focus on, that you have the choice. But very often when you’re young, you have to do everything. So if you think about the movie set for example, you think about Steven Spielberg. He didn’t reach there by not doing all the basic menial tasks that every gopher has to do on a movie set. You do all of that. You learn a ton through that process, and then you reach a point where you’ve gained certain expertise in certain areas, you’ve got a position where you can choose, these are the things I wanna focus on and these are the things I’m not.

So it’s really important that we allow ourselves to experience different things. And so the other aspect is even for people who are more experienced. Let’s say you are looking to reinvent yourself. When you’re reinventing yourself, very often, you have to explore different pathways. When you’re in exploration mode, thinking about what are all the different things I could do? That’s when you say yes to a lot of things. And then once you’ve had those experiences, and then you begin to focus. Okay, now I’ve experienced all these things, and I’ve decided I like this subset. And now, you have to learn to say no to the things that are distracting you from focusing on that subset. And so it is a very nuanced issue, and one has to use prudence and judgment when deciding what to say yes to and what to say no to, depending on the situation.

Brett McKay: And that’s when it’s useful to do some reflection and maybe do some… Maybe categorize those asks in the quadrant. That can be really useful.

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: Absolutely.

Brett McKay: Well, Vanessa, this has been a fantastic conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: Thank you so much. I’ve enjoyed chatting with you too. Well, my website is probably a good first stop. It’s parasympatheticness… Happy to connect with listeners on LinkedIn, and you can follow me on Instagram and Twitter as well.

Brett McKay: Well, Dr. Vanessa Patrick, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Dr. Vanessa Patrick: Thank you so much. This has been great fun. I’ve enjoyed it.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Vanessa Patrick. She’s the author of the book, “The Power of Saying No”. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You will find more information about her work at her website, vanessapatrick.net. Also, check out her show notes at aom.is/sayno where you can find links to her resources, where you delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you can think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple podcast or Spotify, it helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing this show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support and until next time, it’s Brett McKay, reminding you to listen to AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

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Have you ever had an interaction with someone where you asked them question after question about themselves, but they never asked you a single thing? What was supposed to be a cooperative, back-and-forth dance, became a one-sided monologue. They did all the talking; you did all the listening.

There’s a name for this all-too-common phenomenon: conversational narcissism.

Conversational narcissists try to hold the floor as much as possible — not typically in overt ways, as in talking non-stop, but through more subtle tactics. They don’t ask people questions, or if they do, they find a way to turn the conversation back to themselves (“Oh, you’re going to Iceland this year? I love Iceland! I went last summer . . .”).

Conversational narcissists usually don’t have ill intent. They’re just starved for attention, and will seize an opportunity to get it for all it’s worth. 

Yet, it’s amazing to think that, having spent day and night with their own thoughts and experiences, the thing people most want to talk about with others . . . is their own thoughts and experiences; that having already been sated 24/7 on themselves . . . their only appetite is for more of the same.

The cure for conversational narcissism is cultivating a more outward-facing curiosity — becoming genuinely interested in the backgrounds and ideas of others. Every individual is a world unto themselves, with landscapes of the heart and mind worth exploring. 

Once you get a sense of the treasures that lie within other people, and how much coming to understand someone else’s hopes, dreams, and perspectives can add to your life, using an interaction merely to retread your own head starts to seem like a wasted opportunity. 

“Enough about me; I want to hear about you,” becomes not something you apologetically say after dominating the entirety of a conversation, but something you instinctively feel before it’s even begun. 

Help support independent publishing. Make a donation to The Art of Manliness! Thanks for the support!

Influence comes down to a person’s level of authority. When someone is perceived as having power, status, and worth, others readily follow them and comply with them.

Authority isn’t just a matter of position. It’s also a personal quality.

When people attempt to develop their influence or authority, they tend to focus on learning social skills and changing their behaviors around speech and body language.

But my guest would say that authority isn’t about what you learn but who you are, and that once you establish the right lifestyle and mindset, influential behaviors will emerge as a natural byproduct.

Chase Hughes is a behavioral analyst who trains both military operatives and civilians. Today on the show, Chase unpacks the five factors that measure someone’s level of authority and produce composure, a state which resides between posturing and collapse. We talk about how so much of authority comes down to having your stuff together, why you should become your own butler, and what Andy Griffith has to teach about leadership. We also talk about the things that kill your authority, and how not to be influenced by false authority.

Resources Related to the Episode

• Chase’s books:
  • Six-Minute X-Ray: Rapid Behavior Profiling
  • The Ellipsis Manual: Analysis and Engineering of Human Behavior
• Chase’s app
• Milgram experiment
• “The Social Psychology of Imitated Jaywalking”
• Chase’s Authority Self-Assessment Matrix
• AoM Article: The 5 T’s of Mastering the Art of Poise
• Becoming a Well-Differentiated Leader
• AoM Article: Never Complain; Never Explain
• Smoke-filled room experiment
• AoM Article: 8 Reasons You’re Hardwired for Sheepness
• The 34 Behaviors That Will Kill Your Authority

Connect With Chase Hughes

• Chase‘s website
• Chase on IG
• Chase‘s YouTube channel and The Behavioral Panel YouTube channel
• Chase on Twitter

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

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Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Influence comes down to a person’s level of authority. When someone is perceived as having power, status and worth, others readily follow them and comply with them. Authority isn’t just a matter of position though, it’s also a personal quality. When people attempt to develop their influence or authority, they tend to focus on learning social skills and changing their behaviors around speech and body language. But my guest would say that authority isn’t about what you learn, but who you are. And that once you establish the right lifestyle and mindset, influential behaviors will emerge as a natural byproduct. Chase Hughes is a behavioral analyst who trains both military operatives and civilians. Today on the show, Chase unpacks the five factors that measure someone’s level of authority and produce composure, a state which resides between posturing and collapse. We talk about how so much of authority comes down to having your stuff together, why you should become your own butler, and what Andy Griffith has to teach about leadership. We also talk about the things that kill your authority and how not to be influenced by false authority. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/authority.

All right, Chase Hughes, welcome to the show.

Chase Hughes: Thanks, Brett. Thanks for having me, man.

Brett McKay: So you are a behavioral analyst and you train military and law enforcement on how to read people and gather human intelligence, so they might be using this stuff in interrogations, interviews, things like that. How did you get into this line of work?

Chase Hughes: I did 20 years in the military, and I joined when I was 17 years old and I was stationed in Pearl Harbor. Long story short, I was out in Waikiki Beach one evening and I was talking to this young lady who I thought was just super into me, and essentially I asked her out and she basically turned me down really hard. And I went home that night and I typed how to tell when girls like you into the internet. And I remember just printing off this massive stack of body language articles and stuff. And I just went down this rabbit hole for like a year. And then while I was getting good at this, one of my best friends, his name was Craig Weberley, died in the USS Cole terrorist attack. And I was reading these intelligence reports that all the failures that led up to this happening was just a training… Intelligence operative training that they couldn’t get people in the region to provide intel and stuff. So I just dedicated the rest of my career to making this stuff possible for intelligence operatives to be able to gain rapport and really build up a relationship with these people where they can get intelligence faster.

Brett McKay: So you went from pick up artistry to helping the military?

Chase Hughes: [chuckle] Right. I wouldn’t call it pick up artistry. I just wanted to be good enough at body language that I would just know when not to ask. And I would just avoid rejection, I think.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Well, so you’ve written several books where you present the things that you train in the military and law enforcement in a very reader friendly way. And you’ve developed these really sophisticated and, you know, that you have like this behavioral table of elements where you can… You analyze body language basically and what that can possibly mean. But one of the factors that you talk about a lot in your books and you hit home hard is one of the key factors in gathering intelligence, whether it’s from a potential, an enemy combatant, something like that, or if you just wanna know if someone is interested in you or you’re making a sales pitch and you wanna make sure that you are directing your pitch in a way that it resonates with that person. You argue that when it comes to influence, authority is more important than social skills. So what led you to that conclusion?

Chase Hughes: Well, if anybody’s ever taken like Psych 101 in college, you remember this Milgram experiment, and I’ll give you like a 15 second, 20 second recap of this thing. So essentially they got volunteers for this experiment, and they were told… They met this person and you’re gonna give them a quiz and every time they get an answer wrong, you’re gonna shock them with this electrical shocking machine. And with each wrong question, you’re gonna increase the voltage and it gets worse. I’m not gonna go into all the details, but it was pretty bad. Like 67% of people went all the way to maximum voltage, even when the person on the other side of the room that was being “shocked” even though they weren’t was screaming and begging to stop the experiment saying they had heart problems and all this, and there’s hundreds of other psychology experiments like this.

But just looking at this, there’s no secret technique that was used. There’s no like, oh, they use some covert language trick or some secret rapport building technique or any of this. It’s just authority made that happen. And if authority can do that almost on its own with no like secret linguistics or any of those tricks or anything like that, or sales tactics, that seems to be the number one place that we need to focus if we’re starting to learn persuasion or influence or any of that, authority is just so, so important because it can make extreme things happen.

Brett McKay: Well, yeah. Some of the other studies you highlight besides the Milgram study is that researchers have done studies on jaywalking. What was going on there?

Chase Hughes: Yeah. I think that was called the Crosswalk Experiment, where one person essentially just… It’s a dude wearing like jeans and a t-shirt and he walks across the street when he’s not supposed to, when the sign says don’t do it. And then the same dude goes up and puts on like a suit and tie and they cut his hair and stuff, and it increases the amount of people who will follow him across the intersection by like 88% just because of a shift in clothing. And that’s a good estimate. Just our understanding of authority is not all about just and real authority. It’s about perceived authority as much as it is about just having genuine authority.

Brett McKay: And why are we so keyed on individuals with authority? Like why do we tend to follow them?

Chase Hughes: So our ancestors left all kinds of stuff in our bodies to survive. That’s why we have a fight or flight response. And all kinds of just pre-programmed responses, even facial expressions, we’re born with facial expressions like anger and sadness and happiness and fear. So our ancestors also left everything that helped them to survive. So the DNA, let’s say like 100,000 years ago, if our ancestors are learning lessons that helped them to survive, their DNA essentially says, “Okay, I’m gonna hardwire this so I can pass it down.” So obeying authority and being obedient towards a perceived authority was probably one of, if not the most important thing for tribal function. And when humans are in tribes, and if they don’t obey the tribal leader, they might get killed. They don’t get protection, they get less access to resources, they get disliked by the rest of their tribe because the leader doesn’t like them. It’s tremendous. Like it’s the bottom second row and third row of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Like all the stuff we need to survive can essentially stem from our relationship to authority figures.

Brett McKay: And individuals who are highly persuasive, whether they’re people who, you know, good salesmen for example, good politicians, but also you could be like con artist. They understand this probably intuitively, correct?

Chase Hughes: I definitely think so. Like a good example would be like a, let’s say a dangerous cult is out there and they’re recruiting people into this weird cult. And how can like a socially intelligent CEO, for example, get talked into joining this weird cult, and just trying to figure that out is this mammalian, this almost animal response, this programmed into our brain to be responsive towards this confidence and charisma and authority. And it just says, you need to trust this person and go along with what they say. And that’s an unconscious process. We’re not sitting there with a checklist, a grocery list, like checking off everything as the person displays behaviors. Like it’s an unconscious list, which we’ll get into a little bit later for sure.

Brett McKay: So yeah, the big takeaway that I think we’re trying to get at, I wanted to frame the rest of our conversation around is, I think a lot of times when people think about social skills or being more persuasive or being good with women, like knowing how to interact with women, they think about all these little like hacks, like things you could say. They think about the specific body language they should use, and you’re arguing like, that’s probably icing on the cake. What you should really spend most of your time focusing on is developing that perception of authority.

Chase Hughes: Yes. So just getting to the point where the display of those behaviors is a byproduct of who you are, not what you’ve learned.

Brett McKay: Gotcha. And so we’ve been talking to authority, like how are you defining authority? I mean, is it a matter of position? Can you have authority and not be in the position of authority? Is it charisma? How are you defining authority?

Chase Hughes: Well, in my training, I tend to use five factors to measure a person’s level of authority. And I even have an assessment that if you wanna throw it in the show notes, you’re more than welcome to. And it can essentially assess someone’s level of authority using these five factors. And those are confidence, discipline, leadership, gratitude and enjoyment. And once those all combine, it leads to authority, but it produces a behavior that I call composure. And then a person can essentially rate themselves like at the end of every day in their journal or whatever on this composure scale and on those five factors. And the more often they’re doing that, the more that’s being brought into awareness and with composure. And we tend to look at composure as a pendulum where the center would be composure and the left side would be collapse, maybe the right side would be posturing. And that’s what we call those two far ends of that pendulum. When we fall out of composures, we fall one way, it’s into collapsing and we fall the other way it’s into posturing and over posturing behaviors.

Brett McKay: And can composure be situational? Like in some situations you have more composure and therefore more authority and then other situations not so much.

Chase Hughes: It can, and I think the more that somebody is able to bring this into everyday life, and this is one of the things I talk about a lot in my trainings is, are you able to do this off camera? Like when no one’s looking, are you still a leader? Are you still a role model when the cameras are off, no one’s looking, do you still exhibit those behaviors? And the more you get into that sort of lifestyle, the less situations will matter when it comes to authority, I think.

Brett McKay: So what you’re saying is, if you develop these five factors, which we’re gonna talk about, as a consequence of that, you will start displaying behaviors that other people will see and perceive as you having authority, is that the idea?

Chase Hughes: Absolutely. Yeah.

Brett McKay: So, I mean, okay, for us, when we’re looking at people and we’re sizing people up of whether they have composure and authority, what are we looking at? What factors, what cues are we homing in on to say, “Yeah, this guy’s got it together.”?

Chase Hughes: So our brains will typically, and this is very much an unconscious process, but our brains go through a five-stage process, I would say. So our brains are analyzing another person’s movement and it goes in this order. As far as I can tell, I’ve done about 20,000 hours of research on this. Movement first then appearance, then confidence. And this is essentially when our brains are looking for confidence on a subconscious level, what that means is we’re looking for a lack of reservation in behavior and movement. And so it’s movement, appearance, confidence, connection, like are they fully checked in? So just when you think about connection, just think of the way that Bill Clinton looks at people and connects with them when he talks to them. And the final one here is intent. So how am I understanding and processing this other person’s intent? And if all five of those line up, the subconscious part of our brain sees that this person is very likely an authority.

Brett McKay: Gotcha. And as you’re saying, sometimes people wanna hack this and they do the posturing. So they probably read some sort of research where, well, people with big body language, they take up a lot of space, they’re perceived as having more authority, so they start doing that.

Chase Hughes: You’re right.

Brett McKay: But it just comes off as phony-baloney.

Chase Hughes: It really does. And I think one of the reasons that this is common is I think there’s a problem in learning new behaviors where people focus on symptoms and they ignore causes. So let me just look at the symptoms of rich people. For example, if I wanna make money, I’m gonna look at the symptoms of rich people. Okay, they have a big house, that’s what I need. Then they have an expensive car, that’s what I need. But they’re not looking at causes. So when I’m looking at like, I take up a lot of space, my voice is crystal clear, there’s two things that really happen. Number one, the person’s focusing on symptoms instead of the cause of those behaviors. And number two, the biggest disaster of all time when it comes down to authority and actually having real confidence is getting into a mindset where you’re worried or thinking, even just thinking about status and hierarchy. The number one thing that I see when I train operatives is, the soon as they start worrying or thinking about status and hierarchy, it automatically starts to deteriorate their level of authority and confidence.

Brett McKay: Yeah. The alpha doesn’t think about being alpha.

Chase Hughes: Right. It’s not in their head. And I think if you’re doing all of this symptom stuff, you’re getting into performance mode instead of connection mode. And when I say performance, this is if you wanna just figure out what mode I’m in, in a conversation, if you’re in performance mode, you’re maybe tense or feel pressured. You’re observing yourself too much in the conversation, you’re analyzing the event afterwards a whole lot. There’s not much feeling of connection and it feels like an evaluation from the other person while you’re in performance mode because you’re performing and the focus is more on yourself, and in connection mode, your focus is on the other person. It feels like a connection. You’re feeling good about the event without needing to recall all these details. You’re feeling relaxed, comfortable, curious about the other person and just you’re really comfortable sharing your own depth of emotion.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think we’ve all encountered the individuals who they’re in performance mode, right? If you’ve been with like a salesperson, I’ve had this happen to me when I’ve had people come out to give me estimates for a new roof or something. And it’s interesting to see the different approaches people take and like one guy I can tell like, man, you’re doing all the tricks. And it just… And then you have another guy comes in and he’s not doing that, but you can tell that he’s got his stuff together and I actually trust him more.

Chase Hughes: It’s so, so true. But I think that some of those things, when somebody gets into performance mode, there’s maybe some anxiety there that this helps them to alleviate anxiety because I’m gonna look up these power poses to give me confidence and I’m gonna look up these articles that are, you know, you’ve seen them on LinkedIn and stuff, like the 31 Body Language Signs of Confident People, which are all of course symptoms. But I think those help sometimes in the interim with people with anxiety, and anxiety is probably one of the things that keeps people from having confidence and developing authority. And I think anxiety comes from three things very specifically. Number one is a decline in the reputation that you have with yourself. And number two is an inability to recognize what you can and can’t control. And number three is unmet expectations or the fear of your expectations being unmet. Those are the three pillars that I have to get rid of in the operatives that I train.

Brett McKay: How do those things come about in someone’s life? How do they show up? Why does that happen to people?

Chase Hughes: I think they just get into this mindset of I need to manage how I’m being perceived. And they tend to think more about status and hierarchy and we’ll definitely cover some ways to get over that here in a little bit if you want.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Well, yeah. I guess they’re needy, and they showcase their neediness and I think everyone’s been around a person like, “Ah, you’re just way too needy.”

Chase Hughes: Yeah. And if you’ll allow me to go back to the pendulum for just a second, and we have composure in the middle and we have collapse and posturing, collapse and posturing on these far ends of the pendulum have a lot more in common than people think. They’re both trying to get the other person to give something up, whether it’s respect, admiration, love, money, whatever it is. Second, their agendas are concealed and hidden from public view. They wear this mask to kind of conceal the collapse or they wanna conceal the posturing behavior. And they both cover up for feelings of a little bit of inadequacy and the feelings of always trying to be tough. And I think they’re both incredibly stressful states to live in and they’re kind of rooted in insecurity. And the one big thing that they both have in common is they both believe highly in competition and they kind of live their lives in a competitive instead of a collaborative frame of mind.

Brett McKay: And then one other thing you talk about too is that people with authority or people with that natural influence, they tend to understand that most people have that neediness and those unmet desires, and they’re just kind of broken human beings. And because they understand that, that’s one of the reasons why they’re able to connect with them is they can give that person what they need.

Chase Hughes: It’s so, so true, yeah.

Brett McKay: So let’s dig into these factors that contribute to people perceiving us as someone with authority, and actually having it. It’s not just about perceiving, you actually have it, and because you actually have it, it naturally comes out in the way you present yourself. You talk about confidence. How do you define confidence?

Chase Hughes: I’d say confidence is, if I can just use one word, it’s comfort. It’s just comfort. It’s just giving yourself permission. That’s kind of what it is. It’s how you… You have got a good reputation with yourself, and you’re giving yourself permission to do something, and one incredible thing is that if you’re displaying super confident behavior to a person that you’re just meeting for the first time, they will automatically assume that you’ve been that way for decades. So you’re not just confident in yourself, you’re carrying the permission from thousands of other people that you’ve interacted with, so they’re assuming that thousands of other people accepted your confident behavior, so that’s a really key point to make that even if it’s a one-on-one interaction and you’re behaving confidently, that person… If it’s genuine, that person is assuming that it’s been this way for years for you.

Brett McKay: So how do you develop this genuine confidence? I’m sure we could dedicate a whole podcast to this, but generally, what do you tell your operatives, what do they need to start doing in their personal lives to develop this natural confidence that’ll be displayed naturally when they interact with other people?

Chase Hughes: All right, let me see if I can do this like a two-minute summary. So the first thing, I want you to start challenging yourself to be slower than anyone else in the room. So just set a speed limit on your body, just try it on for a few days of like, “I will not move faster than if I was standing in a swimming pool.” So this starts re-teaching your body to just display the signs of comfort. And second, just having the knowledge that you don’t need permission to be confident is so, so critically huge. And keeping track of your own levels of confidence throughout every single day is the way to get that down into the lower parts of the brain, because just thinking about it stays in the top of the brain, “If I can get my lower brain really invested in my confidence, I don’t need… ” I’m not talking about setting goals or anything like that, I’m just talking about at the end of every day, I’m gonna sit down and I’m gonna write from one to five or one to 10, how was my confidence today? That’s it. ‘Cause it’s just like when you’re looking for a new car, like on the internet and watching all the YouTubes and all the videos and stuff about, “I’m gonna get this new car,” then you buy the car and you start seeing it everywhere.

Like, I just got a Tesla and I’m like, “Wow, everybody bought Teslas at the same time as me.” But that’s not true at all, right? So I’ve just repetitively shown it to my brain so much that now my brain is searching for it, and if you can just set a competition to move slower than the person that you’re speaking to and to be more comfortable. That’s it. Just start out with those two things, “I’m gonna be the most comfortable person in this environment,” just comfort, just relaxed, “And I’m gonna move slower.” Those two things are like the… And monitoring, those three things, I would say, are this ultimate gateway to developing confidence the fastest way.

Brett McKay: Okay, so that’s a fast way to do it, but then at the same time, you’ll probably wanna do things where you’re developing that self-regard, you’re doing things that make you feel competent and confident. So it can come down to setting goals and accomplishing them, just doing those things in your private life will help you develop that confidence for the long-term.

Chase Hughes: Yes, absolutely. And just taking tiny, tiny steps out of your comfort zone when it comes to just talking to other people, and you’re essentially teaching the lower part of your brain like, “No, nothing bad’s gonna happen, they’re not gonna punch me in the face if I start acting confident. There’s not gonna be like a tiger that jumps out from a closet if I start behaving confidently.” You’re just slowly, gradually introducing your brain to a little bit more stressful or slightly stressful situations, and over time, and I’m talking like just over maybe 15 days, the confidence starts building itself and you get more and more permission and you’ll notice as a person becomes more and more confident, you can see that they’re just giving themselves more permission.

Brett McKay: Yeah, so it’s the ability… So that long-term, long-lasting confidence is the ability to handle uncertainty no matter what’s thrown at you. And I think that’s why you can tell some people like, “That guy’s street-wise.” And it’s probably because they grew up in the school of hard knocks, and they’ve had to deal with uncertainty over and over and over again, and because of that, they have the confidence in any situation, like, “Well, I handled this when I was a kid, and I was out in war and I handled that alright,” and so it just carries over to everything they do.

Chase Hughes: It’s so true, but that can lead people to thinking like, “Oh, I need to go through this big rite of passage,” which isn’t necessarily true. There’s all kinds of people who are super confident who have not been through anything like that.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Yeah, I mean, you define confidence as the ability to take action without reservation, and I really like that definition, because anybody, they can build up their confidence by taking part in little deprivations in their life, taking on challenges and then following through on those challenges, and by doing that, you’re gonna build up that good reputation with yourself, it’s a sense of self-trust. And this really takes us to our next element of authority, which is discipline. So why is discipline important in developing authority and how do we develop it?

Chase Hughes: Okay. So Brett, if you and I were sitting in ATL, like the Atlanta Airport, waiting on a flight or something, I could ask you with no… Like you’re not some behavior profile or anything, but I could say, “Brett, spot someone across that’s just standing over there, across the gate from ours, who is disciplined.” You could do it. And most people could do it. And I think that discipline has an unusual way, and I’m the number one body language expert in the world somehow, and I still can’t explain this articulately, but discipline has a way of coming up in our non-verbal communication that sends these little gut feelings to other people like, “That person is a disciplined person,” and it makes us, when we see a disciplined person, obviously it’s a little bit inspiring, but it makes us a little bit more likely to follow that person, who they are. So discipline definitely shows up. If I have off-camera discipline where nobody’s looking, it shows up in my behavior and other people can almost feel it.

Brett McKay: Okay, so that’s basically it comes down to keep a schedule, manage your money right, keep your house clean, make your bed like Jordan Peterson says, that’s stuff you do.

Chase Hughes: Yeah. And I say discipline is… I define discipline as the ability to prioritize the needs of your future self ahead of your own, so I am taking care of Chase tomorrow, and I’m prioritizing his needs over my own, so think of all the people or all the times, like when I was in college, you’d stay up all night and you know you have exams tomorrow, you stay up all night drinking or whatever. And you wake up the next day and you’re like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe I did that.” And you’re mad at your past tense self because you didn’t have concern for your future self. So if you wanna start cultivating discipline in your life, start with small, little things, and just my advice is always to become your own butler, and this is… Wouldn’t it be great if you could wake up and everything was ready for you? Like you got up out of bed and your clothes are all laid out for the next day, and everything’s there? So, you are your own butler, your past tense self did all of that for you, because they put your concerns ahead of their own. And then I continue to do this, and I’ll be in the kitchen with my wife, Michelle, and I’ll be sticking… It’s night time, right?

And I’m about to go to bed, and I’ll be sticking one of those little Keurig Coffee Cup pods into the coffee maker and sticking a coffee mug there, ready for the next morning. And out loud, I’ll say, “Man, Chase is gonna love this.” So I will continuously speak about my future self in a way that I am prioritizing his needs and I will talk about him in the future, and just getting a relationship to where you’re looking forward in time with concern and getting to the point where you’re looking backward in time at your past tense self with gratitude.

Brett McKay: All right, so developing discipline that’s gonna make you naturally appear more competent and composed to other people. And I think also what it’ll do too as you do these things of being your own butler, working out, sticking to a schedule, managing your finances, that’s also gonna give you confidence, which is gonna just super charge that factor as well.

Chase Hughes: That is… Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So true, and I think all these things do feed into each other. I’m glad you brought that up.

Brett McKay: Yeah. All right, so that’s discipline. What about leadership? What do you mean by leadership?

Chase Hughes: My definition when I do trainings on leadership is that leadership is having possession of innate, like non-acting behaviors, your normal behavior produces following behavior in other people on its own. So what this means is, if I’m in another culture where I don’t speak the language, they would still follow some of my behaviors, I would still be effective to some degree as a leader because of how I behave and how I act. And I think if your behavior is producing what I call followership on its own, this means that you most likely have off-camera leadership. You’re not one person at work who’s all organized and everything, and you go back to your house and your bathroom counter is just covered in crap, you’ve got piles of laundry and dishes and stuff like that, but then when you go to work, everyone thinks that you’re really well put together. That would more likely be the person in charge and not the leader, ’cause those are two very, very different things.

Brett McKay: Okay, so the way you develop leadership is you work on that discipline, work on that confidence. So the next factor is gratitude. Why does gratitude contribute to our perception of authority?

Chase Hughes: So, if you look at the people that we naturally follow, that people talk about a lot, and the people that… One of the people that if I’m giving training on leadership, 100% chance, there’s gonna be a video of Andy Griffith on the screen. I believe that… And this came to me from one of my commanders on deployment, if you screwed up on this deployment in the Middle East, he had every box set of the Andy Griffith show, of every episode, and you had to pick a random season and a random episode and watch that episode, and write a paper on how you learned a lesson to fix how you screwed up as a leader from that one episode. And the insane thing was, in every episode, there was something that applied to a leadership mistake, a leadership lesson. And one of those people, like if you look at people like Andy Griffith or Bill Clinton or the people that we just naturally gravitate towards as mentors, as leaders, they all have a look of gratitude on their face, you can see that while you’re communicating with these people.

And I think gratitude has a very distinct way of showing itself in human behavior and on our face that other people don’t consciously perceive, they’re not saying, “Oh, that’s a very grateful person,” they just unconsciously perceive that level of gratitude and it helps us to be more likely to follow a person’s behavior. And I always teach that there’s the two types of gratitude, if you just practice this regularly, and you don’t have to go to Michael’s and build a crafty little gratitude journal or anything like that, but just low level and then high level gratitude. So if you’re eating a taco at Taco Bell, you’re grateful for the employees that put it all together for you, but you’re also grateful for the farmer who’s supporting his family somewhere in the world, who grew the lettuce that’s in your taco. So it’s like you’re zooming in on gratitude and then zoom all the way out, like on Google Earth, to where you can see the entire picture.

Brett McKay: No, I think we’ve all encountered leaders who have that, who display gratitude to you. You’ll go to the ends of the Earth for that person. Sometimes there’s leaders who will… They’ll bark at you and just get results, and in the short term, that might work. But they’re not gonna have that long-lasting influence because they didn’t cultivate that gratitude.

Chase Hughes: So, so true. Yeah.

Brett McKay: And it’s funny you mentioned Andy Griffith. That’s a great… I’m gonna look into that more, about Andy Griffith as an example of authority and influence. Wasn’t that… He only has one gun, it’s got one bullet and it’s locked up, but he’s able to manage the town with just that?

Chase Hughes: No, Barney carries the gun. Andy never does.

Brett McKay: Okay. Andy never does, right. He gave it to Barney, yeah.

Chase Hughes: He carries Barney’s bullet in his pocket.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s right, that’s right.

Chase Hughes: And somebody asked him one time, they said, “Sheriff Taylor, why is it that you don’t carry a gun?” And he said, “Well, a lot of people respect me around here, and if I started carrying a gun, I’d be worried that some of that respect might be fear, and I might be confusing the two.” And it’s just… Man, the show is just such a good master class in leadership.

Brett McKay: And it’s funny, it’s super funny.

Chase Hughes: Yeah, it’s great.

Brett McKay: It’s a good… Yeah. There’s this barbershop I went to, they actually set up an old black and white TV, and they somehow fixed it, so where they put in a Amazon Fire Stick, and they’d stream Andy Griffith’s shows. And so you’re just sitting there to get your hair cut in an old-time barbershop, watching Andy Griffith, and just remember laughing out loud at Barney and his shenanigans.

Chase Hughes: If I’m ever out in your town, I wanna go there. That sounds awesome.

Brett McKay: Yeah, it’s cool. All right, so that’s gratitude. Enjoyment is that fifth factor. What do you mean by that?

Chase Hughes: Yeah. This is just a… It’s super simple, it’s just a person’s level of in-the-moment enjoyment. If you look at people that we nationally, culturally view as the natural leaders of the world, and then just imagine one of them taking their garbage out, or imagine one of them mowing their yard, or imagine one of them just doing a mundane task, you’d still imagine them with a tiny, tiny smile on their face, even if it’s faint. And we all have this ability to detect another person’s level of enjoyment, and I think it’s the most magnetic human trait that draws people in. And if we are able to stay in some kind of what I call calm enjoyment in my training, it’s just, I have the ability to just calmly enjoy these mundane tasks, that I think is the cornerstone of getting started as a leader, is being able to live in this calm enjoyment.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that makes sense. I think no one likes to be around a negative Nelly, we’re attracted to the guy who seems like he’s having a good time.

Chase Hughes: Always, yeah.

Brett McKay: So yeah, so we develop confidence, we develop discipline, we focus on developing our leadership, our gratitude, and just learning how to enjoy even the smallest of things. As we do this, we’ll naturally start displaying behaviors that will tell people that we have influence, we have authority.

Chase Hughes: Yes.

Brett McKay: Yeah, so we’ll start moving differently, we’ll start talking differently, maybe we even start dressing differently, correct?

Chase Hughes: Yes, and I think some of those we’ll do deliberately, but over time, if we’re practicing measuring ourselves every day on confidence, discipline, leadership, gratitude, enjoyment, and then finally, composure, over time, all those cool behaviors that you read about in articles and stuff like that, those become a by-product of your new psychology, your new mindset of having authority in your life, and then it’s not… You’re not faking it because we are all manufacturing gut feelings in people every single conversation that we have. And if I wanna manufacture good gut feelings in other people, then that stuff needs to be real. So I’m always asking the question, “What can I do to make this a by-product of everything?” If I wanted authority, how do I make authority a by-product? And that’s by just monitoring that stuff every day. You don’t have to be judgmental of yourself, but just getting your lower brain aware of the stuff to begin with, and dragging that stuff out into the light, ’cause most people don’t really wanna think about it. We’re dragging it into the light and getting the brain super aware of it, and it speeds up that development so fast.

Brett McKay: And then if you wanna start implementing consciously some of these body language or social skills you read about, as you do the inner work, the stuff you start actually consciously doing will actually have more effect, likely.

Chase Hughes: So true, yeah. So as an example, a client of mine had trouble with posture and when people have anxiety, we want to… Our bellies are really soft, right? So when we talk about body language, somebody gets fearful, one of the things that happens with the body is the rib cage comes downward to protect all these soft organs that are in our belly, which makes our posture bad. So one client of mine had this issue and I put this kind of a kinesiology tape, like a physical therapist would use this stuff called KT tape, and it’s just kind of like a two-foot strip of like, I would say like mesh kind of tape made for the body. And I would stick it on his back in an X pattern in a way that if he started slouching, it would stretch the skin, and it would instantly… It’s not painful or uncomfortable, but it instantly brings awareness to the fact that he’s slouching. So, little tricks like that. How can I remind myself regularly to be in composure and to be confident? And just as a quick tip, how can I do this even in the car when nobody’s looking? Adjust your rear view mirror in your car for next time you drive to where you have to sit up really straight to see out of your back window. So just angle it up just a little bit to remind you every time you look in that rear-view mirror, to sit up straight. Just small little things on a daily basis like that to start correcting those non-verbal behaviors does go a long way, for sure.

Brett McKay: And again, I wanna circle back, the reason why we’re doing all this stuff, developing our authority, it just makes being influential and makes the social component of our lives just… It’ll get you 90% there, whether you’re interacting with women or making a sales pitch, or your leadership position at work, just developing that inner authority will get you 90% of your influence.

Chase Hughes: Absolutely. And it just makes your life better, just being able to just relax, ’cause a lot of people are living off-camera differently than they are on camera, and the moment that those two things start blending together and you’re like you can walk into work and know that the person I am here at work, when I’m in charge of these employees or whatever, is the same person I am at home, everything changes.

Brett McKay: In the books and in some of your interviews that I listened to preparing for our conversation, you talked about some authority killers. What are some authority killers? What are the most common ones you see in the people you work with?

Chase Hughes: I’ll give you a few here. I think number one is rapid body movement. And as a body language expert, there’s one thing that fear makes our bodies do, is protecting arteries, but it makes our bodies speed up, our head movement, our speech, our gestures, all of that speeds up, which is why I think that slowing down our bodies is one of the fastest ways to re-train the body to be more in composure. And complaining, I think, is one of the big ones. When we hear somebody complaining, we subconsciously make an agreement that they’re probably not a leader, and I will not claim to have any neuroscience to back this up, but think about the last time you heard somebody complaining. There’s something that goes on in the subconscious that says, “Wait, why was I paying attention to this person?” It automatically usurps some of the authority. But I would say overall, the biggest mistake that most people make is allowing the outside environment to determine who they are as a person and how they identify themselves. So starting to just internalize their own feelings and not determine who they are based on how people react. So like, “I need X, Y, and Z to feel good about myself,” that’s one of the biggest.

Brett McKay: Yeah. There’s a, I guess, in family psychology, family therapy, they call it differentiation, you wanna be well differentiated, so it’s like your self isn’t dependent on the emotions and feelings of other people. And it’s a hard thing to get… It’s a continual thing you have to work on all the time.

Chase Hughes: I do too. I mean, I don’t know if you go through this, but we’re about to hit a million subscribers on YouTube, and I’ll go through there and I’ll read a negative comment, and I will sometimes have a visceral reaction to it, like my heart rate will go up. And I was watching Eddie Murphy on an old interview, and somebody said, “Oh, you have a new movie coming out,” I think it was Jay Leno, and he said, “Oh, the reviews are great.” And Eddie said, “Oh, I don’t read those reviews,” and he said, “No, but they’re really good.” And he said, “Yeah, but if you believe the good ones, that means you’re going to believe the bad ones too.”

Brett McKay: [chuckle] Right, yeah, exactly. And it doesn’t get easier. Never does. So we’ve been talking about how we can develop our own charisma, authority, so that we can be more influential with others. What can we do to avoid being lulled into the charisma authority of potential bad actors? Like someone trying to recruit us to a cult or MLM or manipulative boss, what can we do to be on the lookout for that, so we know, we’re like, “We gotta be careful with this person.”?

Chase Hughes: I will tell you, I published books on hardcore interrogation tactics and stuff like that, and I’m a body language expert, behavior expert, that still does not give me a vaccine against being immune to that stuff. And when it comes to the charisma and authority, you’re not gonna really vaccinate yourself against it, but I would say the more that you learn about how the brain works and how it reacts to authority, and just learn a little bit about the psychological aspect of it, like the bystander effect and the Milgram Experiment, and there’s another experiment called The smoke-filled room where just a person sits because other people do in a room that’s filling up with smoke. And the smoke alarms are going off, they’ll just sit there because other people are sitting there, which are paid actors for the experiment. But in the last experiment they did, the percentage of people that stayed in the room long enough to die was 100%. 100%, just because 11 people stayed in the room and they didn’t leave, they didn’t care about the smoke, so that person stayed because the other people did. So, just understanding those little psychological principles can help you break away because it’s in your conscious awareness, and now it’s not unconscious. You’re taking the unconscious responses and making them very conscious.

And the final thing I would say is, pay very close attention to how you feel in that person’s absence. So if you’re around somebody and you’re like, “Wow, this is an incredible leader,” or “We’ve got an incredible connection and I can’t believe how awesome this person makes me feel,” if the positive feelings go away when you’re away from that person, something is off. You should still feel good about that interaction, it shouldn’t be like you need that drug again, because that person was probably using manipulative tactics on you, so they pumped you up with a lot of neurotransmitters, then you go away and those chemicals wear off ’cause it wasn’t emotional, it was chemical. They gave you a chemical high instead of this emotional feeling of actually feeling good. So pay attention, when that conversation ends with that person, do I still feel good about it? Do I still feel good? And if it’s not good, that might be a red flag.

Brett McKay: Well, Chase, this has been a great conversation. We’ve literally scratched the surface of your work. Where can people go to learn more about what you do?

Chase Hughes: You can just type “Chase Hughes” into the App Store, or you can check us out on YouTube. I’ve got pretty growing YouTube channel and we’ve got another channel with a few other guys that we profile human behavior, called The Behavior Panel, and it’s the most fun time of my week, for sure.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Chase Hughes, thanks for your time, it’s been a pleasure.

Chase Hughes: Brett, thanks, man.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Chase Hughes. He’s the author of several books on behavior, including The Ellipsis Manual, it’s available on Amazon.com. Also, check out his website at chasehughes.com where you can find more information about his work, including his course on authority. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/authority, where you can find links to resources where we can delve deeper in this topic, including links to Chase’s Authority Self-assessment Matrix and his 34 Behaviors That Will Kill Your Authority.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code “manliness” at checkout for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android, iOS, and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. Helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett Mckay reminding you to not only listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

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