Alison Wood Brooks
Appearances
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
I think one thing that I've learned by doing this research and teaching this course about conversation is that our evidence to ourselves and to other people that we matter and that they matter, the place where that happens is so often during our conversations. And in these little tiny moments where we make small choices that show, oh, I believe in myself or I believe in you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Our evidence to ourselves and to other people that we matter and that they matter, the place where that happens is so often during our conversations and in these little tiny moments where we make small choices that show, oh, I believe in myself. or I believe in you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And the difference between like micro kindnesses and micro harms, sometimes when you're looking at a transcript, they look very subtle, but I think in the emotional experience of those interactions, the difference can be massive in terms of how much you are conveying that you believe that you matter and how much you care about the other person and convey that they matter.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Oh my goodness. Well, congratulations on being engaged. I heard the word fiance in there. And I think you're right in sharing that story about coming home at the end of the day. And of course we're tired when we get home. So there are going to be moments when you It's hard to maintain continuous attention on another person, but we always have to remind ourselves that attention is a gift.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Just meeting the gaze of another person, listening to what they're saying and giving them the gift of your attention is a way of showing that you care about them, you respect them and that they matter to you. I've recently learned that like many 40 somethings who were raised in a time when neurodivergence wasn't as diagnosed, I recently learned that I have ADHD.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And so I all my life have also struggled with these moments when your mind is wandering and it actually is quite effortful to keep your attention trained on another person and on the conversation. And even if you don't have ADHD, the human mind was built to wander. Our minds are very our brains are really good at connecting ideas and brainstorming spontaneously and thinking about things.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And so we should know that about ourselves. I think there is often this assumption that we are continuously and always hanging on the word of every other person in the world. That's just really hard to achieve. And in our studies of people listening to each other in conversation, we found that people's minds are actually wandering more than 25% of the time during conversation. And that's normal.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
You don't need to feel... bad about it. However, because giving attention to someone else is a signal that they matter and that you care about them, we should work hard to repair these moments of inattentiveness. And so if you notice that your own mind is wandering, you can ask repair questions like, oh, hey, John, I felt like you asked a really good question, but I missed the second half of it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Could you repeat yourself? A repair question like that is a form of caring. It's saying, hey, I actually do want to hear what you said, and I missed it. It takes a little bit of courage to do that. It means that you have to admit openly that you missed something, that you made some sort of mistake, and that can take a little bit of courage and bravery.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And then, of course, the greatest repair strategy of all is an apology, right? So saying, I'm so sorry, I didn't hear what you just said. but I really want to. Can you just repeat that or can you help me out, help me understand what you were trying to say? These things can be very powerful for showing people that you care about them and you care about their perspective.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
It's funny. I often get invited to come and visit military training. So the Army War College and different military groups are very interested in this topic. I think they know how much communication matters and are realizing like, oh, there's people out there teaching it in a different way. The course that I teach at Harvard is called How to Talk Gooder in Business and Life.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Just as you said, it's lovingly referred to by the students as TALK, which is the acronym that we walk through in the book. But the How to Talk Gooder in Business and Life title feels like a great victory that I was able to both convince Harvard to let me use a title that seems silly alongside very serious courses like Capitalism in America and things like this. So that felt like a win.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
The Ellen talk is levity. And so it's not a coincidence that the course title would have a sort of silly seeming name. But it also is a double entendre, right? The word gooder also refers to the K in talk, which is kindness. How can we be good? How do we strive to be the best and most good that we can be through our conversations?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And so there is, there's a sort of a double meaning in there and I feel very proud of it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Fabulous question. Well, when we think as a scientist and as a teacher, when you think about trying to teach people to have more effective conversations, it raises this question of what does success even mean in conversation?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And what you quickly realize is that success is a very complicated question in any domain, but particularly in conversation, and it has to be determined by the people involved. I don't march in and tell them what they should care about. But rather, let's think very deeply about what we are aiming to achieve, what we're aiming to do with our words in our interactions with other people.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
What are our intentions? If we can think a little bit more about that before the conversation happens, and then afterwards, you have much more clarity to assess, well, did we achieve those things? And so in the book, we outline a framework to help people think about what their goals are in conversation. Every conversation, you have at least one goal.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Otherwise, you wouldn't bother having the cover. You wouldn't bother talking to the other person at all, even if that goal is just to have fun or just to be polite. Someone wanders up to you and they start talking to you and you feel like it would be rude to not talk back. That means your goal is politeness and upholding the very basic expectation to respond to somebody.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
But usually when we have conversations, our system of goals is much more complex than that. We hold many goals at once. And some of those will align with our conversation partner goals and some of them will conflict. For example, so we use this framework called the conversational compass. It has two axes. The X axis is relational.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
At the high end of the relational axis, these are goals that reach for things like trust and showing someone that they matter. So things that serve the relationship and serve the other person. At the low end of the relational spectrum, these are self-focused goals, things that serve yourself. They are not intrinsically bad. They're not evil.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
It's just the fact of life that every person has their own needs. And so we're constantly navigating this relational access. Then the Y axis is informational. And at the high end of the informational axis, these are goals that reach for accurate information exchange. The most obvious purpose of communication is that we're trying to exchange information with each other.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
It's why humans evolved the ability to communicate and use our words. So this is things like learning, teaching, brainstorming, persuading, making a decision, very highly information-rich things. motives that people hold in conversation. But let's not forget that there's a low informational end of that y-axis of that spectrum.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
We hold all kinds of motives that are not related to exchanging accurate information exchange at all. So things like filling time, having fun, keeping secrets, protecting privacy. These are goals that are not about exchanging accurate information. Sometimes it's about concealing accurate information, or maybe it's not about information exchange at all. And these goals also matter.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
So we, in my course, use this compass to help plot our goals for any given interaction to get more sense around, well, what do I care about and what are my top priorities? What do I really want to achieve in this interaction? And you go off, you have your conversation, and after it's ended, you can look back and say, oh, my number one goal was to learn about John's history in the military.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Did I achieve that goal? Did I ask him enough questions about that topic? Were we able to do that? So it gives you a tool to assess how you did. Now, here's the tricky part. And this is part of why conversation is just so darn hard.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
No matter how much you work to understand your intentions and go into an interaction with intentionality, you don't have perfect control over everything because there's another person involved. And at any moment in the conversation, they could say something that completely changes your own conversational compass and completely changes their conversational compass.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Imagine if all of a sudden I said, John, I was also in the military and I didn't like it. All of a sudden you've learned something about me that we now really need to unpack, right? And you didn't know that ahead of time.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
I wasn't really in the military, but just as an example, they can say something that changes the dynamic of the conversation, shifts everybody's goals, and we need to be ready to be nimble and adjust to that new reality. And that's what makes conversation so hard.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
John, you're talking about topic prep. That's one of my favorite things. We talk about it a lot in the book. This is something that people do that is such a great life hack for showing people that you care about them and that they matter, is that you've thought about them away from the conversation. You've thought about them ahead of time.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
So in our research, what we find is even 30 seconds of forethought before a conversation starts will help you brainstorm topics and thoughts that can show the other person that you were thinking about them and that they matter to you. So even 30 seconds and you jot down just one or two things. Oh yeah, last time we talked, he told me that he worked for Lowe's. I want to revisit that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
I want to go back and say, by the way, how was it? How was it to work for Lowe's? How long did you work there? And who were your favorite coworkers? What were they like?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
So just a little moment like that where you remember what you talked about last time or what they've been doing in the time between or what they have coming up and jotting down a couple of ideas can make your conversation much more effective once you're in the conversation itself. You're a very good topic prepper, John, but more people could be like you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Oh, so this is good. It's related to this idea of topic prep, right? Because in every, and in most tasks that are live, but certainly conversation there, you have to strike the right balance between preparation ahead of time versus intuitive improvisational decision-making in the moment. And the same is true in conversation.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
You want to put enough prep in to show people that you were thinking about them when you were apart and that you prepped some topics and that you have thought about your intentionality and what you'd like to get out of the conversation. But once you're there, you need to let things go and be in the moment and rely on your more intuitive judgment, what psychologists would call system one thinking.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And so striking the balance between the two is really key. Now, many of us end up relying too heavily on our intuitive judgment. We don't prep topics. We don't think about what our goals are. We just bump into people randomly in the world and then we wing it. And our research suggests that is also not the right equilibrium.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
You should be both preparing ahead of time and feeling comfortable improvising in the moment to become the best conversationalists that you can be. We call this the myth of naturalness. When we see other people who are really great at conversation, often we believe that they're just born that way.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
and that they have amazing intuition and amazing intuitive judgment about how to behave in the moment. When in fact, what you can't see is all of the stuff that's happening under the surface for them. You don't see the many years when they were working hard to develop a skill, or like you, John, working to overcome some sort of challenge in their communicative abilities.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
You don't see in the moment how hard they're working Think listening so intently to what you're saying and thinking about how they can relate it to some other idea. All of that work is invisible. And so we come to believe, oh, this is just easier for some people than others. And maybe I'm not naturally gifted at it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
So your question is, how can we think about the way that we communicate? How does that relate to us mattering? It's such a profound question.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
The truth is the best conversationalists work hard at it and they probably have worked hard at it for a long time.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Absolutely. Thank you. That's very nice positive feedback, John. So T is for topics. Topics are, let me just say the maxims to start and then I'll dive into each one. T is for topics. A is for asking. L is for levity. And K is for kindness. So let me break down each one of those briefly.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
T is for topics is really, we know that conversation, we have to choose topics and conversation, but most of us think about, oh, what are we going to open with? What is our opener? What's the first topic or what's the most important topic? When in fact, a helpful mindset shift can be to realize that you're choosing topics every time you're speaking.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
We're making these little micro moves to have steered topics. And we're asking ourselves, should we stay on this topic or should we move to something else? Should we drift gently to something else or should we jump cut to something extremely different? Should we call back to something we talked about earlier or should we move elsewhere?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And we're making these sort of small moves every time we speak. And our partners making these small moves every time they speak as well. So managing, we can all learn to manage topics more effectively. We should be thinking about how the topics we choose can serve our intentions, our goals. So if my goal is to ask you for advice, I need to work up the courage to actually ask you for advice.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
If I forget to ask you for advice, I probably haven't served the goal that I was looking to achieve in that conversation. If I want to make you laugh, I need to raise topics that are going to be fun to talk about to make you laugh. So whatever your goals are, your topics should follow along with your intentions and just realizing that we're making these choices all the time. Now, a very...
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
important piece of advice is that people tend to stagnate too long on topics. And it's better on average to as soon as you feel like a topic is losing its juice to switch to something new and fresh and different to keep everybody engaged because mutual engagement matters so much. And on that note, I will switch topics to A is for asking.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
A is for asking underscores how important question asking is in all of our conversations. Asking questions is one of the most powerful tools we have available to us in our toolkit. It's the best and most direct way to lure out the contents of another person's mind.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
In the context of this conversation we're having, John, you're expected to ask me questions, but I can also break norms and ask you questions, which might make the conversation even more interactive and interesting. In the book, we talk about the power of asking more questions to understand other people's minds and to make them more feel like they matter.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
But we also talk about the types of questions and the patterns of questions that are most effective. And so I'll just hint at two of them. One is follow-up questions. Once someone has shared something about themselves, it's so important to ask another question after that to show that you heard them, to show that you care about them, and that you want to learn more.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
So follow-up questions are superheroes. And then the second great pattern of question asking that I would recommend would be open-ended questions. So closed and open questions all have a place in conversation, but open-ended questions are the ones that we remember. So if I say to you, John, what was your episode about bipolar? What was the most meaningful thing about that episode to you?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
What did you learn? And then you'd give me an answer. I don't actually want to go there right now. But if that kind of question, if I were to let you answer and we let the conversation go there, it's the kind of thing that you would remember, right? It would allow you to share your perspective, something that you learned. I would ask you follow up questions about it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And that would become very meaningful. So open-ended questions are an amazing tool for that. The best open-ended questions often start with the word what. Why questions can feel a bit accusatory. So like, why did you do an episode about neurodivergence can feel a bit accusatory as opposed to what were the things you learned the most about that from that episode?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
feels less threatening, and extracts more information. So follow-up questions and open-ended questions that start with the word what are very good ideas. Do more of them in our conversations. Moving to levity.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Please, yes.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Sure. Yeah, when you start to get into the idea of, hey, it's better to ask more questions, a very natural follow-up question is, well, is there a tipping point? When does lots of questions become too many questions? When does it get annoying or feel interrogative or intrusive? And so we use the speed dating data as an example of a very cooperative context.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
So speed dating is where strangers get together. They might have four or five minutes to get to know each other, and they haven't met before. In that sort of context, you have so much to learn about each other. You need to find out where they're from, what they like, where did they go to school, what are their hobbies, what are their families like?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
There's just so much to learn about each other that we actually never see a tipping point in the number of fights. You can't possibly ask too many questions in a very cooperative way. context like speed dating. We just never see it. It just never gets annoying because you have so much to learn.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Now, when we start to think about more conflictual context, so let's say a negotiation or maybe a feedback meeting to someone at work, We do see instances where there is a tipping point where you can ask too many questions, where someone starts to feel defensive. There's information they don't want to share with you. Or are you going to use, why are you asking me so many questions?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Are you going to use my answers to exploit me later? So people are just a little bit more guarded in those contexts. But even there, even in the most intense negotiations or the most conflictual contexts, we're What surprised us in the data is that the tipping point where lots of questions becomes too many questions is way further out than you would think.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
The bigger risk in any context is not asking enough questions. Walking away and having asked zero or one or two questions the whole time is a much more common mistake. than asking too many. So there is a tipping point when people have conflict, but we should think less about that and think more about the silent killer of conversation, which is not asking enough.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Let's go to levity. Let's go. When you say go to levity, I imagine us like sledding down a hill or riding a balloon into the air because levity is a very fun place. It's a place we need to go in our conversations. It's these moments of sparkle and bubble and fizz that keep things fun and engaging. And they're so very important.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
That was an intimidating moment. I didn't, I actually, I ruminated about that afterwards because I did feel very put on the spot about tell me a joke. And I was like, oh, I wish I had prepared.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
I know, exactly. I hope I did a good tap dance in that moment. I think I did come up with something, didn't I? It was probably quite bad.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Oh, how cute. Actually, yeah, the problem is we read a lot of these joke books together with my kids, but they love them so much that they memorize the jokes. And then I don't because I rely on the kids to say them to me. They recite them back. So anyway, it was quite the memory challenge. But I appreciated it because they started from a place of levity.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
So levity in the book and in my class that we talk about is So many conversations go off the rails for obvious reasons where people, there's hostility, there's confrontation, there's disagreement. These are very obvious, loud problems and they exist and they are very important, but there's a more quiet killer of conversation and that's boredom.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Boredom and disinterest can be really problematic in conversation. It might be even more pervasive than the sort of louder problems of hostility and disagreement. And so levity is the antidote for boredom. It's the way that we pull each other back in. It's moments of humor, laughter, and warmth.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
that just pull you back in enough so that we can maintain this feeling of sustained engagement with each other and really to go on and accomplish any of our goals, whether they're silly or serious. And a conversation devoid of levity, it's going to be very hard for people to maintain the engagement that you need to just enjoy life and enjoy each other and trust each other.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Well, you've been talking about making people feel like they matter. And boy, if there's anything that makes people feel like they matter, it's callbacks. Callbacks are any time you reference back to something that someone has said earlier in the conversation or earlier in your relationship. There's such a fabulous, undeniable indicator that you've listened to somebody.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
The only way you can do it is if you heard someone earlier in the conversation, you held it in your mind, and then you're clever enough to raise it later.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
The other bonus, the other lovely thing about callbacks is that they're almost always funny because it's the sort of moment, witty moment where it's like a little surprising and just feels like a hug that like someone was listening enough to you that they would call it back later. I work with an improv company called Freestyle Plus.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
It's a company that's been spun out from a Broadway show called Freestyle Love Supreme.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Amazing. Well, you'll love this. So the guys who come and visit my class are Anthony Veneziale and Sammy Weegent, who are the CEOs, co-CEOs and founders of Freestyle Plus. They helped to originate this Broadway show called Freestyle Love Supreme together with Lin-Manuel Miranda. This was before Hamilton Times, before In the Heights. And this Broadway show is fully... freestyle rap.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And so they've got a live beat boxer. They interact with the crowd. They ask crowd questions like, what's the hardest, what's the hard thing you've been going through in your life? And then they get up on stage and they freestyle rap and retell the whole story. Then they tell it backwards. Then they tell it again with a different ending all the whole time, just freestyle rapping.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
It's the most amazing thing that I've like ever witnessed with my eyes that human beings can do on stage. So these guys come to my class at Harvard and work with my students to workshop their improvisational chops. And this year, what we were working on in particular were the students' ability to use callbacks. And so we designed a new game where you practice doing callbacks.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
So you start by having a conversation about any topic of your choosing. And the goal is to latch on to something specific that your partner has said from earlier in the conversation. So for example, in this one, John said he knows Angela Duckworth, and he's talked to her before. And when he talked to her about intentionality, her focus was on self-control.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And so I'm now calling back to that moment that John was talking about my friend and his friend, Angela, and her focus on self-control. The only way I can do that is because I was listening really intently to what you had to say and that I care about you. I care about your ideas. And I thought that was a really nice point. And so we can all do this anytime.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And knowing that callbacks are possible actually leads people to listen a little bit differently. It helps you to stay attentive, even when your mind is built to wander. And it, because, oh, I'm on the lookout for stuff that I'll be able to call back to later. Little details, little funny phrases, good ideas that are worthy of bringing up again.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And it helps you to maintain your engagement in the conversation. Often when we think of very charismatic conversationalists, actually, these are the kinds of things that they do. They use callbacks.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Just like you were saying, when people think of their favorite conversationalist and then they give them a call, they very quickly realize, oh, they're just calling back to stuff that we experienced together in the past. And that feels so good. It feels like it's kind, it brings levity, and it just shows that they care about you and that you matter.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Yes. So this is our final maxim. We made it to the K. K is for kindness and a huge emphasis in this in this chapter on kindness is about listening. So there have been decades of work on active listening. So things like nodding and smiling and using nonverbal cues to show someone that you've heard them, eye contact, leaning forward. This is all really great.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
It's the basics of being a good listener. What we've uncovered more recently in our research on conversation is that the best conversationalists go a level beyond active listening. They don't just use their nonverbals to show their partner that they matter and that they're being heard. Because those things can be faked sometimes. They also use their words.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
They use verbal cues to show that they've heard someone. Verbal cues, unlike nodding and smiling, verbal cues can't be faked. The only way that I can call back to something that you said earlier, the only way that I can ask a follow-up question, the only way that I can repeat back something that I just heard you say and validate your feelings about it is if I heard you say it in the first place.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
So here's the advice. This is what this means for all of us. Put in the hard work to listen to people. But if you do, if you put in that hard work to be attentive to the people in front of you, make sure that you show it. Make sure that you show the person that you've heard them by using your words, by saying it out loud. Hey, I just heard you say this. Am I hearing you right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Or, hey, I just heard you say that. That was really great. Hey, remember when you talked about Angela Duckworth and her emphasis on self-control? I thought that was a really nice point. So these verbal cues that you heard someone are so very powerful and should definitely be part of your listening toolkits.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
What a great question. I think when we think about big concepts like kindness and dehumanization, I know I always felt this way, even as a child, but still into adulthood. My question was, well, where does that happen? Where does this unfold? When and where and with whom?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And as a behavioral scientist and in writing this book and teaching this course, what I've realized is it so often happens in these micro moments during our conversations, even our private conversations with people that we care about. We're making these tiny choices. I can give you a compliment. This interview has been so wonderful.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Or I can give you a backhanded compliment like, oh, this has been so wonderful compared to all of the podcast interviews that I've done about the book. That's a very small change in language and it has a massively different impact on who you're saying it to. Straightforward compliments make them feel good. It makes them feel like they matter. It makes them feel like you care about them.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
The emotional tone is very positive. A backhanded compliment where you say the comparison set out loud feels hurtful. It feels almost more like an insult than like a compliment. And so we're just constantly making these tiny choices in our language that lean in the direction of micro kindnesses and towards micro harms.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And I think a big concept in the book is, I don't know if I can make you a good person, but if you are a good person who cares about other people and wants them to feel like they matter, conversation is an amazing opportunity, an amazing place that we all have access to where we can put our goodness into practice.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And it's also often the place where we put our not so goodness into practice and we should work to get rid of that, right? So lean into the good stuff and lean away from the accusatory, from the defensive, from the hurtful, tiny little jabs and barbs that we poke into other people, because that's what makes someone a good, kind person versus a hurtful person.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Oh, I would love to have you, John. And thank you so much for having me on your podcast. It's just such an honor to be here. Thank you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Oh, great. So my website is allisonwoodbrooks.com. There's all the ordering and pre-ordering information about the book, which comes in a hardback copy and a Kindle and an audio book. So if you don't have time to read books, I'm with you. I hear you. And you can listen to it on walks and runs around your neighborhood.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
All the information you need is there about my research and about the book and about the course. And I'd love to connect.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Thanks for having me, John. You're awesome.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Thank you so much for having me, John. I'm so happy to be here.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And the difference between micro kindnesses and micro harms, sometimes when you're looking at a transcript, they look very subtle. But I think in the emotional experience of those interactions, the difference can be massive in terms of how much you are conveying that you believe that you matter and how much you care about the other person and convey that they matter.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Thank you so much. I'm really excited to share it with the world.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Oh my gosh, the story, the journey. Well, as an undergrad, I was very interested in, I thought I wanted to go to medical school originally. So I've long had a passion for humans and caring about people.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And as an undergrad, I had the great privilege of taking courses from some really amazing behavioral scientists that made me fall in love with behavioral science rather than going to medical school. So I took the judgment and decision-making course with Danny Kahneman. I think it was the last time he ever taught it. He was co-teaching it at the time with Eldar Shafir.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And I remember taking that class before Danny had won his Nobel Prize. And just thinking, this is so fascinating. Like what an amazing way to come to understand each other and the world is through the study of people. And so that was the beginning of my journey.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
I did some research internships in the summer as an undergrad at Columbia University and fell more and more deeply in love with it, decided that this was the life path for me. And I went to I applied to grad school and went to Wharton and worked with Maurice Schweitzer and Katie Milkman and Adam Grant. So in a way, just stumbled into this incredible milieu of behavioral scientists.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And I studied people's feelings, mostly anxiety, like how can we come to understand why so many of us feel anxious so much of the time and what can we do about it? Which then led me to my professorship at Harvard, where at the beginning I was recruited to teach negotiation and presumably to do research on negotiation and people's emotions and negotiation.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And after a couple of years there, I started to get a little bit frustrated and I realized I'm not sure I want to teach students who are already very strategic. to be even more strategic. And it was this coincided with this epiphany that for many decades, behavioral scientists had been studying difficult conversations.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And all the way along, I had this niggling feeling like, well, but even conversations that seem like they should be easy are also very tricky and we're making all kinds of mistakes. So let me see if I can figure out how we can do every conversation better. And that led me to a place of designing a new course called Talk at Harvard and eventually writing this book about that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Oh, what a fabulous question, John. Maurice is one of the most amazing people and such a fantastic mentor. In fact, he's known as one of the best mentors in the field, and I was so lucky to benefit from that mentorship. He devoted so much attention and time to developing me as a scholar, and it was so incredibly helpful.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And to this day, he's one of my best friends and continues to be a very valuable mentor. He spent a lot of time with me. We spent a lot of time in conversation. We spent a lot of time brainstorming.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
He taught me a lot about the importance of developing your taste for ideas, that there are a lot of people out there that can go through the motions of conducting behavioral science, but what might be the more rare skill is coming up with good ideas that touch on something real. And so I really, I had such a great privilege of working with Maurice.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
What a gift you have given to them to help them develop their musical skills. It's fabulous. My husband is a drummer and we've met playing in a band together and we continue to play in a band together with a couple of my Harvard colleagues as well. So drummers are a special breed, John.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
They're very, at least for my husband, I always say he's like the heartbeat of our family and it's really amazing.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Definitely. I love the idea of just the fact that they're having them do it rather than just read about it or study about it or learn about something. It helps to close what we call the knowing doing gap, right? It's one thing to know something. It's a completely different thing to be able to do it in practice.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And so the best way to learn how to close that knowing-doing gap is to actually practice doing it, which sounds like your son is getting to do in this class, which is fabulous. It's also what I do in my course at Harvard called Talk, which is, it's one thing to know what good conversation looks like. It's a completely other thing to be able to actually execute and do it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And so when I put my students in lots of different situations to actually practice the art and the science of conversation in real time in a very safe and I hope loving environment in our classroom.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Oh, what a great question. We can definitely use your term. I like micro choices just as much as micro decisions. Well, we talked about this a little bit, John. Life is a series of moments. It's a series of micro choices. And what I realized in my research on conversation is that that's what we're doing when we're interacting with somebody else.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
It's just a series of hundreds of micro choices over time as every conversation unfolds.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And if we can aim to make some of those choices just a little bit more effectively, because we talk to people so often and every day across every domain of our lives, in accumulation, if you can make some of those choices more effectively, that's going to have a massive impact on your life, on your career, on your family, on your love life, all of it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And so the whole sort of premise of this book is how can we learn to make some of those micro choices more effectively?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Oh my goodness. What a profound question. First of all, thank you for sharing that with me. I think there are a lot of people who struggle with communication and you're not alone in it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Actually, some of the people that I've talked to are people who are in the deaf community also find that they work so hard at communicating that they too put such a value on developing it as a skill in the same way that it sounds like you've been working hard for much of your life to develop communication as a skill. So your question is, how can we think about the way that we communicate?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
How does that relate to us mattering? It's such a profound question. I think one thing that I've learned by doing this research and teaching this course about conversation is that
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy to be here.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
Conversation is a surprisingly vast ocean of complexity. There's a lot going on under the hood. For something we learn to do as toddlers and practice doing every day of our lives, every day, all day long with a huge range of partners, it feels like we get to adulthood and we should be experts. And in truth, we are far from being expert at conversation.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
The definition of a good conversation is not up to me as a scientist or as a professor. It's not even up to you, Mike. It's determined by the goals of the people participating in the conversation. And the goals that people have when they interact with other people are vast.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
If you didn't have we always have at least one goal, even if it's just to have fun or be polite or to uphold the very basic expectation that you're going to respond to another person. Usually people have many more than just one goal. So you kind of hold on to this rich constellation of things you might want to. Share a story. You might want to seek someone's advice.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
You might want to have a great time. You might want to give them a compliment. You want to persuade them to agree with your view on a certain issue. And also, you need to leave in five minutes. So we all hold these very many goals at the same time. And the person you're talking to has their own constellation of goals that they hold on to.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
And so the definition of success in any given conversation depends on achieving at least some subset of those goals. And achieving those goals is harder than it first appears.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
Yeah. Yeah. So in almost every encounter, we have some goals that are common across most conversations, one of which is that we want it to be enjoyable and feel meaningful and not overly shallow. We want to avoid awkwardness. We want to feel connected. We want to feel safe. Often, we want to learn new things from each other.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
It's why the human race evolved the ability to communicate at all as to share and exchange accurate information. To the extent that you can achieve enjoyment and safety and connection and information exchange all within one conversation, that's going to be a conversation that feels terrific. it can break down in any one of those ways.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
If it's not enjoyable, if it doesn't feel safe, if it's not advancing your understanding in the way that you want it to, and if you don't feel connected to the other person, like you're helping each other and like you understand each other, in any one of those ways, when we walk away, it can feel like a failure.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
So I wanna push you on this. You never know what you could uncover, even in a seemingly sort of shallow context or a shallow conversation. You never know when you're gonna see someone again. You never know if you could uncover something in that conversation that would inspire you to see them again. So even in the unlikeliest of circumstances, I just wanna push you and everyone
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
to consider the idea that maybe it doesn't have to be as shallow as it first appears. I teach about this in my course at Harvard. There's this topic pyramid with three levels. At the base of the pyramid, this is where small talk lives. This is topics you could talk about with anybody, let's say at a dinner party or a cocktail party.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
So the traffic, the weather, the weekend, the holidays, whatever, stuff you can talk about with anyone. The problem isn't with small talk in general. In fact, it's a very important social ritual that helps us initiate conversations, get acquainted with people we don't know well, or reacquaint ourselves with people we haven't seen in a while.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
The mistake that most people make, particularly at a cocktail party or maybe a networking event or really anywhere, is they stay too long at the base of the pyramid. So you need to think of small talk as a place to be searching for something more meaningful, for looking for doorknobs to go through doors to more meaningful rooms of the conversation.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
And if you find them, you can move into the second tier of the pyramid, which is medium or tailored talk. And the way to get there is to get more personalized. And this might look like asking questions that triggers self-disclosure from your partner. It might mean sharing something personal, maybe something joyful or painful about your own life.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
Or it could not be about disclosure at all, but just trying to find topics that are exciting to both of you, sort of chasing the energy to find topics where they're an expert or they have some interest or just positive energy in general. So chase the energy to launch away from small talk. At the very top of the pyramid is deep talk. This is a meaningful topic that maybe only a
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
You two people could talk about at a specific moment in time. The conversation we're having right now feels like we're getting there, right? Like we're there because we have this substantive topic to talk about. You have this expertise. We're getting to know each other. We're sort of...
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
hovering over deep talk and having a substantive collaboration and work to work on together can help you get there. And we're sort of all navigating this topic pyramid all the time. Not every conversation is bound for the peak of the pyramid. It would be annoying if someone is always trying to have these sort of deep, meaningful conversations with everybody.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
You don't need to have a deep conversation with the barista at Starbucks. But you could maybe give them a compliment or ask about their kid, right? If it's the same person you're seeing every day and get into that medium second tier of the pyramid. But I do want to push you and everyone on this idea of like, it doesn't have to be shallow.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
And you never know when something that seems like a small talk conversation could become something more.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
Yeah, or not. Maybe take a rest. Don't talk to anybody tomorrow. Yeah, exhaustion is real. So I think all of this stuff, thinking about how to have great conversations, how to really connect with people. One thing that has become clear through our research is it does require a tremendous amount of energy and effort.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
You even just listening, your mind is wandering 24% of the time, even when you're trying to listen attentively. So to be a good listener, it takes a lot of energy, a lot of focus. And we're not always... prepared, we don't always have that energy.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
So I think giving yourself grace about that and giving others grace about sort of social and conversational fatigue is also really important, particularly in this world where we're constantly toggling between text threads and emails and phone calls and Zoom calls and in-person conversations. We're sort of having more conversation
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
across all different modes of communication than ever before in human history. So the fatigue, the drain on our energy that comes from that is very, very real and should be taken seriously.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
What a lovely question. I sometimes think of conversation as this sort of journey that you're going on, a sort of relentless search process where you're searching for deep, meaningful moments where you get to the peak of that topic pyramid, where you feel like, oh, we did it, we did the thing, where we feel really...
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
close and connected and like i trust you and we we talked about a thing that was felt really good we felt connected i don't think we can expect that all the time and even in conversations where you walk away feeling like oh my gosh that was great If you look back at the transcript, what you would see is kind of like a train wreck. We interrupt each other all the time.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
There's all kinds of moments of misunderstanding. We say things that we probably shouldn't. We forget to say things that we should. But there are these moments where you come together and say, wow, that felt really good. And likely, if you're feeling that way, it's likely that the other person is as well. But to your point, Mike, you never know. We really cannot read the minds of other people.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
The most direct way to understand what is in someone else's head and how they felt like the conversation went is to ask them directly. Questions are the most direct pathway to learning about someone else's mind.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
Yeah, I know. I've heard that about Bill Clinton as well. There are people in the world who have developed conversation as a skill. And it's very easy to look at someone like Bill Clinton and think, boy, he is gifted. He is a gifted, natural conversationalist. He has this charisma. He's really good at connecting with people. And maybe it's effortless for him.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
And when you look at someone like Bill Clinton, who just seems charismatic and so good at connecting with people, such a great listener, it can make you feel bad about yourself. Like, what am I not doing right here? What is this thing that he's so good at? Which I call the myth of naturalness.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
Even for someone like Bill Clinton, what you can't see are all the many experiences that he's had in his life that led him to this place where he became such a good communicator. And you can't see all of the effort that he's putting in to every conversation to make sure that his partners are feeling so understood and loved and listened to and charmed and delighted.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
If you were to ask Bill Clinton, my guess would be that he thinks about people a lot when he's not together with them. He thinks about what topics he needs to bring up with them once they're together.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
And then once they're in a conversation, he's thinking very, he's listening very attentively, putting in tons of effort to really listen to people, elaborate on their ideas, follow up with them, and very actively sort of thinking about how to be the most helpful he can be to them in that sort of magical moment of the conversation.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
Also, when people describe Bill Clinton in particular, I suspect what he's quite good at is listening. And listening is one of the most important skills in conversation overall. And it's much more complicated than it first appears.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
So I think as humans, we tend to fixate on talking, thinking about, well, when am I gonna speak up? And what am I gonna say? What am I gonna disclose? What should I ask this person? When in fact, I think perhaps the more important part of the equation is listening.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
focusing on your partner and working really hard to listen to their words, but also to their nonverbal cues, their gestures, their facial expressions. When we study listening as behavioral scientists, we think of it as all of the information that's coming at you visually. and through your ears, the audio, right?
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
And so that's the person and how they're moving, what they look like, the sound of their voice, the meaning of their words, and also the environment all around you, sort of reading the room. All of this is required when you're listening. So perhaps it's no surprise that listening is incredibly effortful. You need to be perceiving all of this information.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
And then in your mind, you elaborate and think more deeply about some of it. We can't really take it all in and think about all of it. And the third step of listening that's so unique to conversation is the expression of listening. It's not that you just hear and see things and then think about it. You can actually say and show your partner that you've heard them.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
So, Michael, just now you've made a really great distinction between talking and listening. The only way I can say that back to you is because I heard you say it in the first place. I'm thinking about this distinction very carefully. I'm compelled by it. And now I have the ability to repeat it back to you and affirm the distinction and say, hey, I'm willing to go there with you.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
Let's do this together.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
Yes, there is fantastic research on conversational endings by behavioral scientists, Adam Mastroianni and Gus Cooney. The end of a conversation, if we think of a conversation as the series of coordinated decisions between two people, the end of the conversation is the last coordination decision.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
It's saying, OK, the next topic we're going to choose is silence and we're going to walk away from each other and it's over. And so even though we're that begins at the very start of like where what are we going to talk about now and now and now and now and then we get to the end and somebody has the power to end it.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
So just like every other coordination choice, this ending decision is surprisingly difficult and causes a lot of awkwardness. In their study of conversational endings, they found that, essentially, we can't read other people's minds about when they would like to end. We're not even really that great at knowing when we would like to end a conversation.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
And because of this, almost no conversation ends when you want it to. We're just bad at guessing. Which is, on one hand, sort of depressing. On the other hand, I think very empowering. So it's saying like, look, you're going to get it wrong anyway. So as soon as you start to feel like a conversation is running out of juice, just leave. Like, just end it. It's okay.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
You know what's funny? When I talk to people myself, I truly, honestly have a mindset of how can I make this good? Like what power do I have? Even in the worst of circumstances, like it's really, someone's really struggling. They're really awkward or they're a windbag or they're not very nice or they're boring, whatever, whatever the challenge is.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
I love taking that on as a personal challenge of like, how can I make this interesting? How can I make this productive? How can I make it fun? It's a sort of treasure hunt for me. And the ways that I most commonly do that and try and pursue the adventure of making it good is through question asking, trying to ask questions that help us together search for better treasure?
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
I know that every person out there, even those who seem boring or blustery or not that nice, I know they have something in their mind that I will be so interested to learn about. and uncover. And so I like trying to figure that out. I also, I find many people to be sort of too serious and a little boring.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
And so I have a sort of personal mission of injecting levity through humor, but also through warmth moves like flattery and just changing the topic to unexpected things. My friend calls it breaking the pace. I like to break the pace sometimes.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
Thank you so much for having me, Mike. I've had such a great time.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
You never know what you could uncover, even in a seemingly sort of shallow conversation. And you never know when something that seems like a small talk conversation could become something more.