We spend a lot of time each day in conversation. What if you could get better at it? Alison Wood Brooks, author of the new book, Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves, shares her research and tips on how to master conversation, become a better listener, navigate difficult discussions – and what makes an effective apology.

Alison Wood Brooks joins us from Massachusetts.

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Bio

Dr. Alison Wood Brooks is the O’Brien Associate Professor of Business Administration and Hellman Faculty Fellow at the Harvard Business School, where she created and teaches a course called TALK. As a behavioral scientist, she is a leading expert on the science of conversation. Her award-winning research has been published in top academic journals and is regularly cited in media outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and NPR. Her research was referenced in two of the top ten most-viewed TED talks of all time and depicted in Pixar’s Inside Out 2. In 2021, she was named a Best 40 Under 40 Business School Professor by Poets & Quants. “TALK: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves” is her first book.

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For More on Alison Woods Brooks

Read Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves

Website

Workbook

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Wise Quotes

On Boomerasking

“Asking questions is magical. It’s why there’s a whole part of the acronym is about asking. But Boomerasking, which is named after the outgoing and incoming returning arc of a boomerang, is sort of a boundary condition on the power of question asking, because it’s like this. It would be like, I say to you, Joe, have you ever been to Nepal? And you say no, and I’m like, let me tell you about the time I went to Nepal. It’s almost like you’re thinly veiling your egocentrism and sort of self-centeredness, your desire to disclose about yourself. You’re kind of masking it with this insincere question. And you hear it all the time. And what we find in our research is that when I say, have you ever been to Nepal, first of all, that question is so specific, you’re already on high alert. You’re like, oh, God, here comes a story about Nepal. But even if I were to ask you, like, how was your weekend, and then I let you answer, and even if you were excited to answer that, and then I bring it right back to myself immediately without following up on your answer, it makes you feel like I wasn’t interested to begin with. And that’s a really bad feeling. In the end, conversation needs to be sort of ping pongy back and forth, where both people are sharing about themselves, but also feeling affirmed and validated and listened to as we’re playing this ping pong game. And so if you bring it right back to yourself in boomerask, it undermines the healthy ping ponginess of a conversation. Thank you. Follow ups and callbacks do exactly the opposite. So whereas Boomer asks are a villain and you’re doing, you’re bringing it too much back to yourself, which people do all the time. Follow up questions, keep the focus on the other person. So anytime someone gives you this great gift of a disclosure, you share anything about your weekend. Or if I say, have you been to Nepal and you say, no, but I’ve been to Tibet or whatever.If they’re giving you any sort of sharing, some disclosure, some information about their perspective, that is such an amazing gift. That is the greatest gift that humans can really give to each other. And so a follow up question shows, hey, I value the gift you just gave me. I want to hear about your time in Tibet. I want to hear about your weekend. I actually care about your perspective and I want to learn from you. So follow up questions are superheroes.”

On Listening – and Mind Wandering

“The idea of listening seems so simple on its surface. It’s sort of deceptively simple. The human mind, unfortunately, and fortunately, was not built to focus on one person and one idea at a time. Our brains are amazing. And so they were more built to wander, right? They’re we’re constantly drawing connections between adjacent and unrelated ideas. We’re thinking so much, you know, even while I’m talking to you, I might for a fleeting moment, remember, oh, I got to pick up my kid in like an hour and a half, right? That’s not bad, per se, doesn’t mean that I’m a bad listener. But it is bad if I’m pretending to listen to you, and I’m actually thinking about something else. And it means that we aren’t actually exchanging the information that we believe we are exchanging. If we’re constantly pretending to listen to each other, and we’re not actually hearing each other, that will become a problem. You know, if you disclose something important about yourself to me, and I don’t hear it, but I pretend to hear it, that’s not going to go well. So we studied we studied this tendency by having hundreds of people come together and have conversations. And we interrupted them every five minutes. And we said, Okay, were you just listening to your partner? 24% of the time, people self reported that they were not listening to their partner, that their mind was wandering elsewhere. And we suspect that is a pretty massive underestimate because we all know that it’s embarrassing to admit that you weren’t listening. There’s this very high social expectation that you listen attentively. So we suspect that our minds are wandering even more frequently than that, and that’s already a very high number. This isn’t a bad thing. It’s not a criticism about the human mind, but what can be helpful about it is realizing, oh, my mind is wandering a lot of the time, your mind is wandering a lot of the time. What can we do to make sure that we actually are hearing each other, that we’re actually exchanging the information we think we are, that we’re making each other not only feel heard, but making sure that we actually are heard. I want to allow your mind to wander and also have a successful conversation. And so I think that’s a very helpful thought experiment of what can we do? First of all, we can give people more grace, when they don’t hear something, like it’s not because they’re not interested all the time, often it’s because they’re doing, they’re so interested that they’re probably elaborating on something you already said earlier. And being a little bit more direct and overt about admitting when we haven’t heard someone, right? Like, oh, I missed that thing. Did you mean this or this? Can you repeat that? These little repair strategies can be very, very helpful.”

On Difficult Conversations

“So my teaching and research on conversation has been incredibly empowering for me and for anyone who is nervous or conflict averse, because it made me realize that first of all, as we were talking about earlier, whole conversations aren’t hard and bad and scary and hostile. It’s just like little moments. And that’s what we talk about in the book. It’s called, it’s not like difficult conversations. It’s moments of difficulty. And moments of difficulty can crop up even in conversations that are supposed to be fun, right? Like you think about gathering with your family at Thanksgiving or going out on a date or having a gathering with friends. You never know when a little moment of a little rift is going to happen. A little moment of difficulty crops up that was unexpected. And even more sort of troublingly, I worry that we often sort of poke barbs into each other in ways that we never even know that that moment of difficulty has come and gone. That someone that you’re talking to might ruminate about later and you didn’t even know that you said something hurtful. But let’s set that aside. In the moments when you do know that things have gotten difficult, these moments of difficulty can occur for any, for any number of reasons. And in the book, we talk about a model, like layers of the earth. And above the surface, these are the words and gestures that you can see during the conversation. We might simply be using the same word to mean different things, or we might use different words to mean the same thing, or we’re just sort of talking past each other, we misunderstand each other. Those sorts of coordination problems can cause all kinds of moments of difficulty during a conversation. Just below that at the sort of surface of the earth are our emotions. So let’s say you’re feeling really calm, but I’m like stressed out. And I need you to like be there for me more intensely that can cause conflict, or I’m really excited and want to have a good time and you’re feeling sort of sleepy and want to be peaceful. We’re going to have a bit of a emotional clash there. Beneath that are our beliefs. So I believe the truth about something, I believe some data about vaccines, you believe different data about vaccines. We disagree and are we going to confront that and discuss it? Are we going to avoid it? It’s up to us beneath that we have differences in motives.”

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