How to Connect with Anyone: Using Deep Questions and Active Listening To Transform Relationships

Charles Duhigg shares 5 big ideas from Supercommunicators

Are you a good communicator? You may have noticed that this skill is not evenly distributed among the population. But imagine how much better your life and career would be if you mastered this superpower, if you were able to effortlessly use words and body language to inspire, influence, and connect. Well, you’re in luck, people, because

Charles Duhigg

is here to share some big ideas from his latest book Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection, Charles is a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist and the bestselling author of The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better. He writes for The New Yorker and other publications, and was previously a senior editor at The New York Times. Here he is to share his key insights.

1. We are all supercommunicators.

We all access our instincts and figure out how to how to connect with someone else. We all have the ability to ask ourselves, “What kind of conversation is actually happening? Is this a social conversation, practical conversation or emotional conversation?” We can then match the other person and invite them to match us. Within psychology, this is actually known as the matching principle. What it says is that we need to be having the same kind of conversation at the same time, if we want to connect with each other.

2. Ask deep questions.

Science has a pretty easy technique for figuring out our current type of conversation. This technique is to ask questions, but certain kinds of deep questions. Studies of supercommunicators have found that oftentimes, they ask 10 to 20 times as many questions as everyone else. But we don’t often notice that they’re asking these questions because so many of the questions are so easy to hear and respond to. These questions include: What do you think of that? Why do you think that happened? What happens next? What do you think was going on inside his head when he said that?