Most Replayed Moment: The Framework To Instantly Become Better At Conversation!

**Steven Bartlett** (0:00)
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One of the things we notice when we have conversations on this show about conversation is people really care about likeability.

**Alison Wood Brooks** (1:11)
Yes.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:12)
Like they really want to know what's making them disliked. They really want to know how to be liked.

**Alison Wood Brooks** (1:16)
Good. So being liked is a huge drive.
But it's just one of many things that we care about in terms of gaining status. So status is respect, admiration, liking in the eyes of other people. Liking is usually comes from sort of warmth and charm. Admiration often comes from like perceptions of competence. So we want warmth and competence at once ideally.
Okay. Let's go back in time. Should we talk about the talk framework because there are going to be little clues about how to be better liked across the whole framework.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:50)
Okay.

**Alison Wood Brooks** (1:51)
Let's start with T.
I'm going to push these to the side. T is first I just want to say as a whole framework, T-A-L-K is the most comprehensive, teachable, practical, scientifically rigorous framework in the world for communication.

**Steven Bartlett** (2:09)
Did you invent it?

**Alison Wood Brooks** (2:10)
I did.

**Steven Bartlett** (2:10)
So you would say that.

**Alison Wood Brooks** (2:11)
But I didn't. When I first wrote the book, I didn't say it strongly enough. And in the last almost year, I've come to realize why.
One part is because most people focus only on difficult conversations, and here we are focusing on all conversations, even the ones that seem like they should be easy and fun. It's all conversations everywhere, personal and professional. The other piece is that I didn't even really intend this as a scientist, but the way we do research is essentially natural language processing, machine learning fits into this new world of AI. So the framework can be used by humans or machines to coach people to be better conversationalists and use as a rubric after the fact of saying, okay, how did this go? Did you do well? Let's look at T-A-L-K and evaluate.

**Steven Bartlett** (2:58)
Okay, it's the best in the world ever.

**Alison Wood Brooks** (3:00)
Thank you, Steven.
Thank you for recognizing. Okay, T is for topics. Topics. Topics are the building blocks of conversation. It is what we choose to talk about. Very simple. We all have an intuitive understanding that we sort of work through different chunks. First, we're going to talk about your conversation with your girlfriend. Then we're going to talk about the talk framework. Then we'll talk about the compass, whatever we're working through topics. What I think most people don't realize is that we're choosing topics every time we talk. It's not just at the beginning of a conversation, like an opener. Like, hey, what do you think of this, you know, the diplomat? No, it's every time you're talking, we're making moves to gently stay on topic or switch to something else. What's so beautiful about that is it means we all have power, we all have control to nudge the conversation one way or another.
And we can all do a better job with it.

**Steven Bartlett** (4:00)
So what's the game here, to pick better topics, to know what topic we're aiming at?

**Alison Wood Brooks** (4:04)
There's a lot of goals. It's both about choosing better topics. It's also about how can we make any topic better, okay? One huge piece of advice that when you start to realize how much your mind is doing during a live conversation is to offload some of that cognitive work to beforehand.