All you need is love—and twenty questions
Ask more questions is advice that’s par for the course for a journalist, but best-selling author Charles Duhigg also believes it’s the single most important factor in communicating successfully. In his new book Supercommunicators: How To Unlock The Secret Language Of Connection, Duhigg writes that some people seem to “click" with others effortlessly, while most struggle to carry a conversation though we are connected and talking all the time—email, WhatsApp groups, Instagram, X, Slack channels, phone and video calls, meetings—in person and via screens.
The ones who seem to slip into and steer conversations easily are “supercommunicators", and one of their secrets is that they ask 10 to 20 times more questions than the garden variety talker. Supercommunicators are not born with the gift of the gab; they’ve just learnt certain tips and tricks through trial, error and necessity to get people to open up to them.
At the crux of the book is the premise that we’ve all failed to speak in ways that allow us to be understood. “Conversation is the communal air we breathe," writes Duhigg, but we’re all usually talking at cross purposes.
There are essentially three kinds of conversations we’re having at any given time—practical, decision-driving conversations, which he calls “What’s This Really About?"; emotional conversations that ask “How Do We Feel?"; and finally social conversations that explore “Who Are We?". The problem is that one of us is usually having the first kind of conversation, while the other is in the second or third mode.
That’s why we get our signals crossed and end up bickering or feeling misunderstood, he explains. So how do we all get to the same frequency, or, in other words, have the same kind of conversation?
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