The Lost Art of Connection: How to Be a Supercommunicator | Charles Duhigg

Charles Duhigg (0:03)

Homo sapiens superpower is communication. Every conversation is made up of multiple kinds of conversation. If two people or more are having different kinds of conversations at the same time, they won't hear each other. And most of those different kinds of conversation, they fall into one of three big buckets.

Michael Gervais (0:18)

Why do you say that it's a superpower? I think we're terrible at it.

Charles Duhigg (0:21)

You're exactly right. Much of communication is not as good as it could be. And there's three things that if you just practice them a little bit, they're going to become habits. It's literally just a set of simple skills.

Michael Gervais (0:32)

Charles, you brought the heat again.

Okay, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I am your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, by trade in training, a high-performance psychologist. A simple question for you today. How skilled are you at communicating? In a world that is drowning in words, how do you make your words matter?

Returning to the podcast this week is Charles Duhigg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of bestsellers like The Power of Habit and Smarter, Faster, Better. He's got a new book, Supercommunicators, How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection. And this one's a little different. Instead of focusing on how we can maximize our own personal abilities, this one is all about how to be extraordinary in our interactions with each other. The ability to genuinely engage, to echo emotions and to create space for real heartfelt exchanges. We unravel how to reclaim our conversational depth in a world that is buzzing with superficial interactions.

I need this. This was awesome. I am so fatigued by superficial interactions. This is timely and it's wonderful. And with that, let's dive right into this incredible conversation with Charles Duhigg. Okay, Charles, welcome back to the Finding Mastery podcast and congratulations on your new book.

Charles Duhigg (2:06)

Thank you.

Michael Gervais (2:06)

Communicators, yes, this is awesome. Congratulations.

And then just before we dive in, I just want to find out like, how are you?

Charles Duhigg (2:15)

I am great. Thank you for asking. That's very, you're a super communicator because you start with questions that invite the other person to say something meaningful. I am doing great. So since the last time we talked, I moved from New York to California. I'm talking to you from Santa Cruz, California, which has been a massive, massive improvement in our quality of life.

And then I've spent the last couple of years writing this book and just being really, and now I finally get to share it with people, which is really exciting to me.

So things are going fantastic.

Michael Gervais (2:48)

That is awesome. Okay, cool. And the pressure's on now to be a super communicator with you if you've just written the book on it. So, and I know you've heard that before, but I really, I really appreciate that challenge.

So how about this? Let's have an agreement. If I'm blowing it, okay, if I'm blowing it in any kind of way or slightly beginning to blow it, will you just kind of wave both your arms and say, ah, Mike, I just want to?

Charles Duhigg (3:14)

Absolutely. I'll be like, you know, my friend.

Michael Gervais (3:17)

Yeah, right, right.

Charles Duhigg (3:19)

But I don't think you're going to blow it.

Michael Gervais (3:22)

To be determined.

Okay, so you, last time we connected, you had written a first rate book, The Power of Habit. Congratulations on that success, and then we kind of missed each other on your second book, which is Smarter, Faster, Better. And then here you are on the third book, Supercommunicators. So can you just bring in, like, that, the arc of why you are from those two into super communicators?

Charles Duhigg (3:51)

Yeah, and there's a very specific reason that I got interested in communication, but part of it was that, you know, Power of Habit and Smarter, Faster, Better, which is about productivity, they're both really focused on the individual, right? What do I do to make myself better? How do I build the habits to make me successful? But the truth of the matter is, the more and more time I spent thinking about this, the more I realized so much of our success depends on other people, right? It depends on the teams we belong to. It depends on how we get along with coworkers, how we get along with our partner and our kids, our spouse.

And I saw this in my own life, right?

That I fell into this bad pattern. Two things happened. First of all, I was made a manager at the New York Times. And I thought I would be great at this because I've had managers before. And I have an MBA from Harvard. And so, and I was terrible at it. I was just like so bad. And I was good at the, I was fine at the logistics part. I was fine at the like strategy. It was the communication part that I was terrible at, which of course is like 95% of being a manager is communication.