The Mel Robbins Podcast
How to Communicate With Confidence & Ease (From Harvard Business School’s #1 Professor)
30 Oct 2025
Chapter 1: What are the key principles of effective communication from Harvard Business School?
Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. I'm sitting here right now in our Boston studios, and I'm surrounded here in Boston by some of the world's most prestigious research institutions and academic institutions, including MIT, Harvard, Harvard Business School. In fact, did you know it costs $75,000 in tuition a year to go to Harvard Business School?
What are they teaching over there? Well, today, you and I are going to learn what they're teaching Harvard Business School students in one of the most popular classes at Harvard Business School. And no, it's not on finance or investment banking. It's on the science of communication. Professor Allison Wood Brooks created the course. It has a wait list.
She has taken time out from her crazy busy schedule to be here for one reason today. She's here for you, to teach you the main lessons, the takeaways, and the strategy. See, learning how to communicate better, it's a skill.
Chapter 2: How can overthinking affect our communication in everyday situations?
It's a skill that will change your life. This is a class that should be taught everywhere, not just at Harvard Business School. I mean, wouldn't you love it if your boss was a better communicator with you? Don't you wish your friends or your partner or your family could really share what they're thinking in a way that was a little bit more direct?
Don't you wish that people didn't misunderstand you? I sure do. What I love about Professor Brooks's research is is that she's taken all these big, heady intellectual topics about communication and boiled it down into four simple things based on the research that you and I can do that are going to help you communicate better starting today. So are you ready?
Because class is officially in session. Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. I am so excited that you're here.
Chapter 3: What is the number one mistake people make during conversations?
I'm so excited about the topic today. I'm excited about the guests that we're going to spend time with. I also want to take a moment and welcome you to the Mel Robbins Podcast family. And today, you and I are going to learn how to be a better communicator. based on the research from Harvard Business School professor.
She's also a bestselling author of the brand new book, Talk, the Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves. She is a behavioral scientist and researcher by the name of Alison Wood Brooks. Professor Brooks teaches an award-winning course on communication at Harvard Business School. It has a wait list. And today she is condensing all 40 lectures into one hour for you.
And this isn't just about talking. It's about showing up as the most confident, engaging, and influential version of you.
Chapter 4: How can you communicate with confidence despite feeling anxious?
So without further ado, please help me welcome Harvard Business School Professor Brooks to the Mel Robbins Podcast. I'm so happy to be here, Mel. Thank you. I am so excited to just dig into your research and learn everything that we can learn from this crazy popular class that you teach at Harvard Business School. But here's where I want to start.
There is a person listening right now who has no time, and yet they found time and made time to be with you and me right now. What is Can the person listening expect to change about their life if they take everything that you're about to teach us and they try it and they put it to use?
If they really take what we talk about to heart, I think everything about their life could get better.
Your love life, your relationship with your children, your relationship with your parents, your work, your relationships with your colleagues, what you're able to get done together, everything, every person you know, every relationship in your life is a repeated sequence of conversations over time. So even if each of those conversations gets a little bit better,
this short time that we have on the earth, everything about it is going to get better. Wow. Why does communication matter so much?
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Chapter 5: Why do we often misread people's intentions in conversations?
Communication is everything, everything. So really, you can think of every relationship in your life as this repeated sequence of conversations. And if you zero in on each one of those conversations, it's a series of tiny choices that you're making at Every moment of every conversation, and we're about to do it right now, Mel.
Every moment you're making these choices, what should we be talking about? What should I be asking the other person about? When should we be laughing? When should we be crying? When should I ask a question? When should I share something of myself? We're making these tiny micro decisions all the way along.
And it's going to determine what we're able to do together, what we're able to accomplish together, what we're able to learn about each other. How we talk is who we are and what we're able to do in the world.
I love how you framed it because I was sitting here thinking, I hope that she can help me not have so many regrets. Because I think a lot of us leave a conversation and are like, oh, I wish I hadn't have said that. Or, oh, I wish I would have brought that up. But you're also talking about the power of forward momentum. Yeah.
by small shifts in these interactions that we have with people at work, in our love life, in our families that can change everything. And you have earned the right to talk about this and to teach us this because you created and you teach a wildly popular and award-winning Harvard Business School course. It is called Talk, How to Talk Gooder in Business and Life. And
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Chapter 6: What strategies can help recover from awkward moments in communication?
And I'm not that good with grammar, being dyslexic, but I know that gooder is probably not the right word. But I have a feeling it's intentional. Why the hell do you call it How to Talk Gooder in Business and Life?
I have to tell you, getting that course title approved by the powers that be at Harvard is one of the greatest accomplishments of my professional life. It's sitting next to so many serious courses like Democracy in America and Capitalism in Today's Age. It was intentional. It has a few different meanings. Of course, it's grammatically incorrect, which drives some people up the wall.
But there's two meanings. A huge part of the course is about balancing gravity and levity. And so I really wanted to signal that in the course title. We're gonna take conversation, we're gonna take our work very seriously.
Chapter 7: What common skills do effective leaders and communicators possess?
But in order to do that, we need to also maintain a spirit of play and fun. We have to have fun together or we aren't gonna feel safe, we're not gonna be able to make progress. The word gooder also is really rooted in this word good. We're going to work towards a goal of kindness. We want to be good people when we're talking to other people and hopefully a little bit gooder.
So I want to hear the story behind what made you want to even create this course. Because if you're really thinking about it, you've got Harvard Business School, 11% acceptance rate.
Aren't the people going to Harvard Business School already good at communicating? I know. This is what everybody thinks. And in a way, yes. And in a way, no. Okay. When I was originally recruited to be on the faculty at Harvard, I was recruited to teach a course on negotiation.
And by the way, the negotiation course at Harvard is like Legendary.
Chapter 8: How can you apply the four-part framework for better conversations?
Yeah. Some of my colleagues were sort of the founders of this framework that is now taught at every business school, at every law school. It's really an incredible course. Why were they recruiting you?
I don't mean to be rude, but like, what were you doing at the time that made them go, we got to have Professor Brooks here?
Well, I went to grad school. I went to grad school in a business school at Wharton in Philadelphia. I was obsessed with humans and people and figuring us all out. And I was a behavioral scientist. And in grad school, I spent my time studying emotions, the way that we feel on the inside, but also how we talk about our feelings with other people.
And one of the places that I studied emotions was in negotiations. When you put people in these difficult situations, how do they feel? How are their feelings influencing their behavior and what they're able to do when they're negotiating?
Well, that's super cool. So this is your area of expertise. You get recruited to go to Harvard Business School to teach this course in negotiation. What happened?
Yeah. So I was there. I taught negotiation for about four years. It's an amazing course. You spend time practicing in doing these role plays of, okay, you're going to be, you're the manager of a factory and you need to negotiate and procure some of these hard things or, oh, now you're going to negotiate for a new house. Okay, let's do that. Let's go practice. You do these role plays.
You learn great frameworks about how to do it better. But even as I was teaching this great class and I could feel that my students were getting so much value from it, I realized that we were missing something. Okay. When I think about negotiations, you realize, how often am I doing this? How often are you doing this? Maybe you're negotiating for a new car or a new house or a higher salary.
I don't know, maybe once every two months, maybe. Mm-hmm. And what I started to realize is like, wait, but we have to talk to people all day long every day. And I don't think of those as negotiations. That seems like a different nut to crack. And many of our students at Harvard are actually already quite strategics.
So some of the lessons that we're teaching them in negotiation are pretty intuitive to them. We're taking strategic people and like teaching them to be even more strategic. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I think what these people need might be, how do we teach them to be more engaging and fun and funny and interesting and dynamic and more empathic?
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