Four scientific rules that will circulate your conversations

The conversation is at the heart of our relationships – however, many of us are surprisingly difficult to speak to others. We can feel anxious about having a little conversation with foreigners and fighting to connect with people closest to us. If it seems familiar, Alison Wood Brooks hopes to help. She is a professor at the Harvard Business School, where she teaches a suspected course entitled “Talk: How to Talk Gooder in Business and Life”, and the author of a new book, Talk: the science of conversation and the art of being ourselves. Both offer four key principles for more significant exchanges. Conversations are intrinsically unpredictable, explains Wood Brooks, but they follow certain rules – and knowing their architecture makes us more comfortable with what is out of our control. New scientist asked him for the best ways to apply this research to our own cats.

David Robson: Talking about speaking is quite meta. Have you ever found yourself criticizing your own performance?

Alison Wood Brooks: There are so many levels of “meta-thingers”. I have often felt like I float on the room, watch the conversations take place, even if I myself have been involved. I teach a course at HarvardAnd (my students) can also feel this feeling. There can be an uncomfortable hypervigilance period, but I hope it dissipates over time because they develop better habits. There is a famous quote from Charlie Parker, who was a saxophonist of jazz. He said something like: “Practical, practical, practical, then when you go on stage, let everything go and moan.” I think this is my approach to conversation. Even when you are hyper-consistent with the dynamics of conversations, you have to remember the real pleasure of being with another human mind and never losing the magic of being together. Think about the future, but once you talk, let everything go and moan.

By reading your book, I learned that a good way to organize a conversation is to ask someone why he is passionate about what he does. So where does your passion for conversation come from?

I have two answers to this question. One is professional. At the beginning of my teacher at Harvard, I studied emotions by exploring how people talk about their feelings and the balance between what we feel inside and how we express that to others. And I realized that I had just seen this deep and deep interest in understanding how people talk about everything, not just their feelings. We now have scientific tools that allow us To capture conversations and analyze them on a large scale. Treatment of natural language, automatic learning, AI advent – All of this allows us to take enormous extent of transcription data and to process it much more effectively.

The personal answer is that I am an identical twin, and I spent all my life, from the moment I opened my newborn eyes, existing next to a person who is an exact copy of myself. It was like watching me closely, interacting with the world, interacting with other people. I could see when she said and did things well, and I could try to do it myself. And I saw when her jokes failed, or she stumbled on her words – I tried to avoid these mistakes. It was a very lucky form of feedback that few people get. And then, as a twin, you have this person sharing a room, sharing all your clothes, going to all the same games and playing in the same sports teams, so we were constantly in conversation with each other. You have reached this shared level of reality which is so incredible, and I spent the rest of my life trying to help other people get there in their relationships.

“Talk” intelligently captures your framework for better conversations: subjects, asking, lightness and kindness. Let’s start at the start. How should we decide what to talk about?

My first advice is to prepare for me. Some people do it naturally. They already think of the things they should talk about with someone before seeing them. They should look at this habit. Some of my students, however, think it’s crazy. They think that the preparation will make the conversation rigid and forced and too scripted. But just because you’ve thought about what you might say that you have to talk about these things when the conversation is in class. However, this means that you always have an idea that awaits you when you don’t know what to talk to. Having only one subject in your rear pocket can help you in these anxious moments. It makes things more commonwhich is important to establish a connection. Choosing a subject is not only important at the start of a conversation. We are constantly making decisions On the question of whether we have to stay on a subject, drift towards something else or completely move gears and go to an extremely different place.

What advice when making these decisions?

There are three very clear signs that suggest that it is time to change subjects. The first is longer mutual breaks. The second is a more uncomfortable laugh, which we use to fill the space that we generally fill with enthusiasm with good content. And the third sign is redundancy. Once you have started to repeat things that have already been said on the subject, this is a sign that you should move on.

After an average conversation, most people have the impression of having covered the good number of subjects. But if you ask people after conversations that have not been well, they will say more often than they were talking about enough things, rather than talking about too many things. This suggests that a current error persists for too long on a subject after removing all the juice.

The second element of the conversation is to ask questions. I think many of us have heard the advice to ask more questions, but many people do not apply it. Why do you think it’s?

Many years of research have shown that the The human mind is remarkably egocentric. Often, we are so focused on our own point of view that we even forget to ask someone else to share what is in mind. Another reason is fear. You are interested in the other person, and you know that you should ask them questions, but you are afraid of being too intrusive, or that you will reveal your own incompetence, because you think you should already know the answer.

What types of questions should we ask – and avoid?

In the book, I’m talking about Power of follow -up questions This is based on everything your partner has just said. This shows that you heard them, that you care and want to know more. Even a question of follow -up can keep us away from superficial speech in something deeper and more significant.

However, there are some bad models of questions asking, such as “Boomerasking”. Michael Yeomans (at Imperial College London) and I have a Recent article on this subjectAnd oh my god, it was so fun to study. It is a game on the word boomerang: it comes back to the person who threw it. If I ask you what you have taken for breakfast, and you tell me that you have K and Banana special, and then I say: “Well, let me tell you about my breakfast, because, boy, was it delicious”-it’s a baby-boomer. Sometimes it is a barely veiled way of boasting or complaining, but sometimes I think that people are really interested in hearing their partner, but the partner’s response reminds them so much their own lives that they cannot help but share their point of view. In our research, we have found that this gives your partner that you were not interested in their point of view, so it seems very little sincere. Sharing your own perspective is important. It’s good at some point Bring the conversation to yourself. But don’t do it so early that it gives your partner that you don’t hear their response or don’t worry.

What are the advantages of lightness?

When we think of conversations that have not gone well, we often think of moments of hostility, anger or disagreement, but a killer of quiet conversation is boredom. Lightness is antidote. These small moments of brilliance or sparkle can bring us back and make us feel engaged again with each other.

Our research has shown that We give status and respect For people who make us feel good, so much so that in a group of people, a person who can land a single appropriate joke is more likely to be elected as a leader. And the joke doesn’t even need to be very funny! It is the fact that they were confident enough to try it and competent enough to read the part.

Do you have practical steps that people can apply to generate lightness, even if they are not a natural actor?

Lightness is not only to be funny. In fact, aiming to be an actor is not the right goal. When we look at the stand-up on Netflix, the actors repeated these jokes and perfected them and practiced them for a long time, and they deliver them in a monologue to an audience. It is a completely different task from a live conversation. In a real dialogue, what everyone is looking for is feeling committed, and that does not require particularly funny jokes or elaborate stories. When you see opportunities to make it fun or lighten the atmosphere, that’s what you need to enter. It can come from a change for a new new subject or recall things you talked about earlier in the conversation or earlier in your relationship. These reminders – which sometimes refer to something funny – is such a beautiful way to show that You listened and remember. A movement of lightness could also involve Gave sincere compliments to other people. When you think of beautiful things, when you admire someone, make sure you say it out loud.

This brings us to the last element of the conversation: kindness. Why do we not manage so often to be as kind as we would like?

The kindness oscillations often return to our self -centeredness. Research shows that we underestimate how much The perspectives of others differ Of our own, and we forget that we have the tools to ask others directly in the conversation of their point of view. Being a nicer chat is trying to focus on your partner’s point of view, then understand what they need and help them get it.

Finally, what is your number one advice so that readers have a better conversation the next time they talk to someone?

Each conversation is surprisingly delicate and complex. When things don’t happen perfectly, give yourself and give yourself more thanks. There will be trips and triples, then a little grace can go very, very far.