You Might Also Like: On Purpose with Jay Shetty

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them, that's bull spend. And marketers are calling it out. In.
Dashboard. Confessions.

**Jay Shetty** (0:09)
I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow.

**Alison Wood Brooks** (0:15)
Yeah, it wasn't.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:17)
Cut the bull spend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title and more. Advertise on LinkedIn.
Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to linkedin.com/campaignterms and conditions apply.

**Jay Shetty** (0:31)
Hey, it's Jay. I don't know what your day has been like, but I was just thinking about you for a minute.
And I hope you're being a little patient with yourself because you deserve it. And yeah, I'll talk to you soon.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to On Purpose, the place you come to become happier, healthier and more healed. Today, I'm joined by Alison Wood Brooks, Harvard Business School professor and one of the world's leading experts on the science of conversation. In her new book, Talk, The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves, Alison shares the research-backed tools that can help anyone build deeper relationships, navigate difficult conversations and connect more meaningfully with others. Alison Wood Brooks, welcome to On Purpose.

**Alison Wood Brooks** (1:27)
Hey, Jay, thank you so much for having me.

**Jay Shetty** (1:28)
It's so great to have you here. It's almost nerve-racking to have a conversation with a professional conversationalist, researcher and communication expert. Don't be, don't be. But you've made me feel so at ease ever since you walked into the room, so I feel good.

**Alison Wood Brooks** (1:43)
I more than most understand how hard conversation is, and I'm in such awe of everything that you do here, and I know that none of us can be perfect at it. So let's shed that anxiety.

**Jay Shetty** (1:53)
Okay. Well, let's dive in.
If someone wants to feel more confident when they communicate, what's the number one habit they should stop doing today?

**Alison Wood Brooks** (2:02)
I think so many of the problems and mistakes and anxiety that comes in conversation is an over-focus on yourself.
Even anxiety as an emotion makes us over-focus on ourselves, right? It kind of narrows our aperture and we're like, oh God, here's all the things that could go wrong. So if people want to feel more confident, if they can truly convince themselves this isn't about me, this is about us, this is about the other person, push yourself sort of relentlessly to focus on your conversation partner, it's going to set you up to feel far less anxious and actually perform better in the conversation.

**Jay Shetty** (2:40)
It almost feels when we're having a conversation with someone that we have a camera pointed at us and in our head, we're watching the livestream of every single facial expression, physical movement, hand gesture, and we're going, oh, that was cringe. Yeah. Why did you say that? Yeah. Oh, don't do that again. The anxiety that we're feeling is almost because we have a version of ourselves playing back at ourselves rather than looking at the other person's eyes and the other person's face and the other person's body gestures and hand gestures. How do we get out of our heads? Because it feels like that tape of ourselves is playing 24-7.
And that's why most of us, when we get introduced to someone, it was so funny, I was at a restaurant last night and I always ask the waiting stuff what their names are and I always talk to them by their name, whichever restaurant I'm in. And at the end of my meal, I went down and I saw one of them and I said, hey, Katerina, can you show me where the restrooms are? And she goes, how did you remember my name?
And I was like, because it was that moment of when I met her, I wasn't thinking about how I looked or who I was. I was thinking about her, I saw her face, I saw her name. And so talk to me about how do we get out of our heads when all of our anxiety is naturally making us focus on every tiny detail of our hand movement, what word we said or how cringe we are?

**Alison Wood Brooks** (4:03)
The way life is designed is you're set up to have that hypervigilance about yourself. You have access to every move and experience in your own life, from your own perspective. You only have a very limited access to other people's experiences and their perspective. You get little samples. Even people we know really, really well, even my identical twin sister, I don't know what happened to her this morning. I don't know if somebody cat called her on the street or she had gotten a fight with her kid or something, right? There's just no way to have the richness of information about other people that we do about ourselves. I think in accumulation across your whole life, that causes us to turn inward and be hyper-vigilant and hyper-aware of ourselves. Psychologists call this ecocentrism.