Charles Duhigg

That's actually kind of a deep question.

What do you think of the other side?

What do you think are the emotions that they're feeling?

What explains them?

As Democrats, we feel like as leaders, people come to us for solutions and come to us for answers.

But sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is to give voice to the right question, even if we don't know what the answer is.

Skills of super communicators are learnable.

So if you talk to the best communicators, let's take Bill Clinton as an example.

And you ask them, have you always been good at communication?

They inevitably say no.

They say things like, in high school, I had real trouble making friends.

So I really had to study how kids talk to each other.

Or in the case of Bill Clinton, my parents got divorced and it was awful.

And I had to be the peacemaker between my parents who were warring with each other.

No one is born a great communicator.

We learn to become great communicators by just practicing these skills.

And what happens is there's a handful of skills matching each other on the kind of conversation you're having, asking deep questions.

Another one we haven't talked about is proving that you're listening.

So this thing known as looping for understanding, where you show the person that you're listening, you prove to them that you're paying attention.

Those are all things that we can practice.