Charles Duhigg

And that thinking puts us in a place where we can connect with other people much, much better.

Well, there's a couple of things that he probably did, which I'll ask you about, and you can tell me if this lines up with your experiences with him.

And they are things that any of us can learn to do.

My guess is that one of the things that he did is that he made you feel like he was listening really closely, like he was hearing what you were having to say.

Is that right?

And probably the way he was doing that was through some variation of what's known as looping for understanding.

And looping for understanding is actually this technique that they teach people when they become negotiators or when they become conflict mediators.

And it just has these three steps, but we can use it in any conversation.

I use it with my wife all the time, which is, first of all, you should ask a question, right?

And some questions are more powerful than other questions, and we can talk about those.

The second step is that you should repeat back what the person just said in your own words.

And the reason we do this is to prove to them that we're listening, because often, particularly when we're in a conflict, particularly when we're discussing something difficult.

we don't know if the other person is actually listening or just waiting their turn to talk and so when they repeat back what we just said it makes us feel heard it proves to us that they've they've heard us and then the third step and this is the one most people forget is ask if you got it right because when you do that what you're doing is you're giving the other person permission to tell you if there's something that you didn't pick up on

And what we know is that if you use this technique, and my guess is that your friend did this very, very gracefully, so gracefully you probably didn't even notice he was doing it.

But that when he does that, what happens is, and this is hardwired into our brains, we feel closer and more trusting of the other person.

And because we believe that they have listened to us, we become more likely to listen to them.

So there's more to it than that.

That's absolutely right.

So looping for understanding is one skill that super communicators seem to possess and use on a regular basis.

Another, as I mentioned, is that they tend to ask special questions.