Alison Wood Brooks

I think that could help a ton of kids, just a tiny bit of forethought.

Switch topics confidently when they start to lag.

Have a mindset to ask more questions.

If you're a kid or a teenager who can even ask one question per conversation, it's going to be such a huge win for you, especially follow-up questions.

I mean, you hear a teenager ask a follow-up question and you're like, wow, that kid is amazing.

Giving people compliments.

If you...

think something nice in your mind about someone, say it out loud.

It shows that you are confident and competent and you really care about people.

Yeah.

So sort of all of the things that we've been talking about, Shankar, the more that we can help our kids learn to do those things, the better they're going to do in their lives.

I think a lot of people can relate to this question, and it's a hard one.

I think we do, especially hardened over so many years in a relationship with someone, you get in habits and in ruts, communication ruts.

It's why so many couples go to couples therapy is to try and sort of break out of these loops of attack and defend or the habits of sort of bickering with each other.

I hear that this person has already sort of tried, hey, I'm going to like offer – I'm going to be vulnerable with them to try and trigger their reciprocity about being vulnerable.

And that doesn't sound like it's working.

But that's one option.

Another is literally like the kill them with kindness approach where –

What if you broke your communication patterns in another way that where you just start giving them lots of affirmation, lots of validation, saying all the things that you really love about them and appreciate to make sure that you're in like the sturdiest, most supportive, most wonderful place you could be?

Sometimes when you're in a happy place in that way, other people are more willing to sort of admit or acknowledge moments of things, little failures or cracks around the edges.