Ten Ways to Have Better Conversations | Celeste Headlee

[Music] [Applause] it's 13 million actually get the right numbers in there actually to be honest with you nobody could have been more surprised that the the tedtalk had that many conversations had that many views than me like I was literally the most surprised person by that because when they asked me to do that TED talks the prompt that they gave me was think of something that's going wrong in the world that bothers you and then tell us how to fix it and I said okay well what's bothering me is that we're not actually having real conversations anymore and I happen to know how to fix it so I thought that was a pretty boring topic I didn't cut my hair or put on makeup and then it got 13 million views so and I am going to tell you how to have better conversations today but really my goal is to teach you to convince you to stop using email and I have 44 minutes and eight seconds and by the time that's over I'm gonna have convinced you guys to use at least 50% less email than you're using right now and I realize that you're all going yeah absolutely but in the back of your head you're like no that's not happening because email is how I live and I get that I totally get that but just give me 30 43 minutes and 42 seconds the first thing that I have to do always always every time I speak on this subject and this is anywhere in the entire world this is not just an American problem is to convince you that you actually need help in this area because the number one question that I get everywhere is some version of how do I change what somebody else the way somebody else talks to me it's how do I get them to stop interrupting me how do I get them to stop to stop running on and on and on etc etc etc and there's good news and there's bad news right the bad news is you can't there is nothing you can do to change the way someone else box two you move this further for my mouth cuz I'm out the good news is you have 100% control over what you do and the further good news is you probably need the improvement and this is a difficult message for me to deliver because it turns out that the smarter you are the more likely you are to be bad in conversation that's that's just the truth so that's the way Thomas Jefferson says it and this is a little bit confusing cuz he he says he who knows best best knows how little he knows right what he's saying is he who knows the most actually is the person most likely to know how little that is and it turns out hundreds of years later that science backs him up and when I say that I just want to tell you about a little study by it done by Justin Dunning Justin Kruger and David Dunning they were trying to figure out how to train people better and they were having a tough time so they started trying to figure out how well we are actually able to estimate what we know or what we don't know so they would bring in hundreds in the end I think it was thousands of participants and I would have them take tests in lots of different things it wasn't just like math some of it was humor and then when they were done with the test they would quiz them in how well do you think you did which questions do you think you missed and how well do you think you did in comparison to everybody else so here's the thing the more incompetent you were in the subject the more likely you were to say you were above average it turns out that the exact same expertise you need to know how little you know is the expertise that you need to know that you don't know anything now on the flip side of that people who did really well also underestimated how well they did in comparison but the reason for that was they assumed everyone else had done about as well as they did they knew which questions they missed they just thought they were average but people even in the eighth percentile thought that they were above average so this is the problem and it's kind of the problem with conversation because all the research that we have shows that we all tend to vastly overestimate our conversational skills and vastly underestimate everyone else's conversational skills now one of the reasons for this is that we're not actually getting a lot of practice at it and by that I mean we're getting a ton of practice at talking but we're not actually getting a lot of practice at conversing anymore we tend to avoid small talk every chance we can right you bury your head in your phone so the uber driver doesn't make eye contact and start talking to you you get in the elevator and your potential there by yourself or you have a really tight smile and go hi how you doing right we avoid small talk as much as we possibly can and that's especially true at work we don't want to get involved and we think of it we think of it these are real tweets we think of it as a waste of time so one of the things I can tell you is that even though it feels like a waste of time one of my friends drove around the block twice because he saw his neighbor out front taking out his garbage cans and he didn't want to get caught into a conversation I mean we can laugh at that but we all do some version of that most of us do but here's the thing small talk those little chit chats you have that are just about nothing is really good for you and I mean really good for you people who chat with their neighbors live longer they're less likely to have a serious cardiac cardiac event within the next 10 years they're less likely to suffer from depression they're less likely to suffer from diabetes people who have regular small talks with strangers share many of the same benefits they're better physically they're healthier mentally so why do we avoid it and the average American adult spends about 30 minutes texting every day and only about 6 minutes on phone and in fact I think that that research is about three years old and I would bet it's worse than that right now some companies I mean big companies like coca-cola JPMorgan Chase Goldman Sachs Cisco Systems they use they use the phone so little they've just eliminated voicemail from their phones they don't pay for it anymore it's gone because it's not used anymore and we're doing ourselves actual harm by avoiding small talks and conversations now one of the reasons is a very human reason for that and that is because talking about ourselves and talking about the things that we know feels really good and this comes this if one of the first light bulbs for me and my research came from this this research out of Harvard that was published in 2014 and they discovered that the the act of what they call self disclosure that really just means talking about yourself it gives you the same pleasure it activates the same pleasure center in your brain as sex and heroin it's inherently pleasurable now I want to take this even further because the participants in this study how many of you seen an MRI right I've seen an MRI you know how big they are when you're in an MRI they put you down in the cold thing and they put you inside a thing so these people chose first of all chose a lower salary they chose to be paid less for their time in order to continue talking about themselves and because they were in an MRI machine they had no idea if there was anyone else in the room think about this for just a second they may have been talking about themselves to an empty room for all they knew but they still chose to be paid less that is how inherently pleasurable it is for us to talk about ourselves everybody that is a human thing but sadly it kind of messes it messes with our estimation of how well conversations go because let's say you had a really great what you thought was a fantastic job interview and you out of it feeling awesome and you're like I'm gonna get that job and then you didn't or like a date and you were like oh man we really connected because you feel great and you feel pumped up right and then she or he never call you again that's because the little pleasure thing is in your brain every time you talked about yourself going and you feel awesome and they don't have that same experience this is one of the reasons why we're not that great at estimating how good we are in conversations and how bad is it it's pretty bad it's pretty bad at this point it's happened a little bit gradually so maybe we haven't realized how how much the amount of time that we spend talking to each other is how low that has gone but at this point the United Nations says that more people have access to a cell phone than have access to working toilets in the world and very few people in the developed world at least actually use those cell phones to make calls we use them to text and we use them to email how many of you regular answer email in your off hours okay you can you're not gonna yell at you it's more than that I know the statistics how many of you at this point don't even think anything of it it's not even a special thing when you answer email in your off hours right like we've seen all the 1960s and 70s shows where the dad says oh I'm bringing my work home with me tonight Martha sorry about that we don't even mention it anymore like that's what we do that's how we communicate with each other but here's the problem with all of the ways in which we have replaced regular human conversation and by that I mean face to face or voice to voice conversation the problem with that is that we as human beings need face to face and voice to voice conversation that's how the human race functions and the past 30 years empathy has dropped by 40% and almost all of that has occurred since the year 2000 now empathy may be one of those soft skills that people don't like to talk about or they grimace when you say you're gonna address that in your training but the thing is empathy is not something just mr. Rogers would talk to kids about empathy is literally one of the main reasons the human race has survived on this planet because we're all lava not all that great one-to-one with most other animals like we lose to a mosquito in a lot of places like we're not that intimidating we have not survived on the planet because we're stronger or faster or tougher and I hate to tell you this either we're not so not the smartest that belongs at this point to dolphins and whales dolphins and whales can project the image of a fish into another dolphins mind in order to tell them that that fish is around again do that but the way that we have survived our superpower has been our hive mind our collective consciousness meaning that because we have empathy for one another because we're willing to help somebody out even when it gives us nothing in return that has meant that we've collaborated century after century after century to protect one another and that's how we've survived we don't survive one on one we survive as a group and if you start pulling those little threads apart you're going to have trouble so here we come back to what we have replaced regular conversation with and that is texting and e-mailing and social media now the explosion in social media way outstripped the research into its effect on our brains so some of that research is just now beginning to come in and here's the thing just going off some some email research that came out just last year from Microsoft and if you've ever worked with Microsoft they're the worst anyway they don't read their own research they're the worst at email the worst but it turns out we are worst version of ourselves an email we are our worst version of ourselves we're less likely to negotiate we're less likely to cooperate we're more likely to be rude and we're more likely to escalate conflict the research is just beginning to come in on say Twitter and social media as well and it's it's basically the same we're not good people and some other really fascinating research that just came out last fall showed that if we read an opinion we've disagree with and I mean in any format a regular book digitally however at me when we read it we're more likely to think that person disagrees with us because they're stupid and they don't know what they're talking about and they don't understand the core issues if we hear it in their voice we're more likely to think they disagree with us because they have different perspectives and different experience in other words the voice literally humanizes another person we need to hear their voice to think of them as another human being and so you can imagine when we have started to move all of our conversation to digital formats you can imagine what that's doing to us right I mean you cannot begin to understand why we hate each other and what's going on not just in the US but all over the world we have stopped humanizing one another and we have lost empathy for one another now one of the ways that you have to have empathy for someone is by actually listening to them and this is difficult when you're in a position where you're training people because we're I'm going to explain to you why lecturing and educating is the worst is the enemy of conversation but let's start with listening because listening actually requires energy like quite literally it burns a tiny trace amount of glucose you are not going to lose anyway eight listening but I'm just telling you that to let you know that in fact if you sit there listening to someone in an intense focused way for any period of time you'll feel tired and there's a reason for that you've burned energy and so sometimes we avoid it for that very reason we've warned ourselves out doing other things and so we can't bring ourselves to listen to someone else and I get that but if you can't listen to someone you have the modern version of conversation which is this person saying what they know and think and then this person waits till they stop talking and then says what they know and think etc etc etc etc they don't listen to another don't really respond to one another they're really just waiting until the other person takes a breath so they can fit in what they've been waiting to say for the past three minutes and one of the reasons I know this is because they did a study and I mean it was worldwide they looked at Mauritania Japan all kinds of countries and what they were looking for was that the average amount of time we leave between one firt person finishing a sentence and another person starting another sentence worldwide the average amount of time is less than half a second so there's no way we are actually listening to everything the other person says we're assuming we know the rest and our brains are going okay wrap it up I got something to say and we stopped listening because what we have to say is really good and it's clever or it's this awesome story about meeting Ellen DeGeneres in a coffee shop and so we stopped listening because we just want to wait until there's a break in the conversation where we can put in what it is that we're going to say but what ends up happening is the modern version of conversation is a lecture and even though we're not like being teachers now I'm not talking about your training that's where you literally have to lecture I'm talking about the conversation part of it one should never enter a conversation intending to educate somebody ever I don't care how dumb you think they are or how wrong you think they are when you are trying to educate someone you are quite literally putting yourself on a higher status than they are which means you won't really listen to them won't really respect it and they're gonna feel defensive so your conversation is over before it begins instead again flip your script go into every conversation assuming that you have something to learn this is the way Bill Nye says it but let me tell you something after nearly 20 years interviewing all kinds of people from presidents down to kindergarten teachers and sanitation workers I can tell you this everyone is an expert in something everybody knows something you don't everybody is an expert in something which means there's something they can teach you and if all you're doing is going to these conversations and educating people you're missing out on a gigantic wealth of knowledge you're missing out because you will learn nothing from what you say you know all that already I mean Buddha said it a long time ago he said if your mouth is open you're not learning even the Larry King said it he said I will learn nothing from what I say today I can only learn by listening but we don't do it anymore one of the ways that can help you listen really well and it's a really good discipline is to ask good questions now a lot of times unfortunately the questions that we ask our setup in a way that they kind of enhance our own identity we ask questions in a way that show we either already know the answer or they show how well-informed we are or we kind of ask such a long complicated question than in the end it just ends up being a yes or no question right we're not giving control of the conversation over we're retaining control with our question whereas if you ask a simple question who what where when why or how you're saying okay now you tell me now you tell me what you have to say and you hand control over because this is the thing a healthy conversation is very much like a game of catch and a lot of times too these things I'll bring when I'm doing a workshop anyway I'll bring bucket of tennis balls and I'll have people play a game of catch because in a game of catch you literally cannot throw more times than you catch it has to be an even balance and more than that both people have to set the other person up to catch the ball if it's gonna be fun I mean if you're pegging the ball off down the thing if their persons not gonna play with you for very long it's not fun anymore but if it's a fun game of catch you're literally thinking about throwing the ball in a way where they can catch it and return it and that's the way a conversation needs to go you're considering the other person all the time so if I can do anything it's to make you start being aware of how little you let other people tell you what they know and you actually listen to them instead of assuming that you know what they're gonna say you know I hear from people all the time complaining about Millennials because of course they're they're the ijen right they've grown up with smartphones they're terrible they can't talk to each other they're socially awkward they're stunted okay but I'll tell you this right now research shows that people over the age of 50 and 60 are worse listeners than Millennials are because possibly possibly somebody who's 50 or 60 years old thinks they've already heard it and thinks they know what's coming so when we're gonna groom to go back to email here really quickly cuz it's bad it's a it's a scourge upon the planet at this point I want to tell you the things that email does well because there's four or five of them number one email is really good at sending attachments right great it's awesome I can send war peace at the exact same speed I send what do you want for dinner email is very good at sending agendas or lists here's the things we need for the party here's what we're gonna talk about in the meeting email is very good at sending praise we have found that people like to go back to those emails in which they were praised and read them over and over again emails great for that email is really good at sending follow-ups so for example let's say that you have something that you need to work out with somebody so you call them on the phone or you go to their cubicle and see their face and you just discuss it and you talk about it and then you send an email saying okay here's what I think we settled on boom and the person either says yeah that's basically it with these two emendations or they say no and then you go back and talk to them face to face or voice to voice again now I should say for this in case you are a remote worker that we found that actually FaceTime or Skype or whatever it is that actually shows your face is pretty much just as effective as that this as seeing them in person just being able to see the human face has the same effect but I will also say this one of the big mistakes we make when we actually are on the phone is we try to multitask how many of you are good at multitasking okay you're afraid to Anthony great afraid to use your hands because you know I'm about to tell you there's no such thing in the human brain the human brain can't multitask now like 4% of human beings are actually pretty good and passable at switching quickly from one task to another the number of people who think they're in that 4% is pretty high but let me give you some bad news about multitasking number one the attempt to multitask pumps dopamine into your brain so when you're trying to do more than one thing at a time it feels great it feels really good it feels like you're being very productive and it also becomes addictive but with every dopamine high comes a dopamine yeah which means you're gonna go home that night and you're gonna crash and you're gonna be really fatigued way more fatigued than if you had just on one thing at a time the other thing is the quality of both tasks that you're trying to do goes down by a minimum of 20 to 25 percent and your IQ drops by 10 points your brain can't do it you're asking your brain to do something it can't do and so it short circuits a little now here's the thing we have found those exact same results from people who leave their cell phones visible or keep their email clients open on their computers at all time why because your brain part of your brain as long as that is visible is occupied in thinking about that cell phone it's on alert it's like a soldier at the gates of the of the fort right it's waiting so that it's ready if a notification comes in the same thing if your email client is open all the time it's waiting which means again if you do that your IQ falls by five to nine points because part of your brain power is occupied in thinking about that phone and here's another thing that we know they did a study in Britain in which they asked hundreds of people to come in strangers and sit down and have conversations like 10 15 minute conversations with the other person now when half of those instances they walked in and they just set a cell phone down on the table it belonged to neither person it ever made any noise but the people who had a cellphone present and visible in the room came out and were 67% more likely to say the other person was unfriendly untrustworthy on empathetic and unlikable so if you go to lunch and you set your cell phone down on the table and you feel great because you don't look at it what you don't realize is that that phone's presence is having an effect on your brain it's distracting you and on their brain they don't like you I'm simplifying just a little bit and this is the thing this is the problem look I I have no problem with technology technology is fantastic I've got a Fitbit I have a surface tablet that I love like my own child I mean I have every possible piece of technology but what I have learned is how to use the technology for the things I don't do well and reclaim the things that I as a human being do better than any other species or piece of technology on the planet and that is communication now one little caveat here human beings are terrible at listening just from birth okay so here's the problem if you've ever had a baby you know that human beings don't come out of the womb knowing how to listen well we come out of the womb knowing how to scream and some of us just keep doing that for the rest of our lives we have to actually learn how to listen and another thing that we know I mean and this is not the fault of Technology some of this research the seminal research into listening comes from a guy named Ralph Nichols who we call the father of licking listening and he started his research way back in the 1940s here's the thing when he asked people to listen to someone talk for like 10 minutes and he said I'm gonna give you a test I want you to listen really really closely as immediately after they got done listening another person they could only remember about half of what they heard within a month they law another 25% and after that it was gone which is why when you have annual conferences you end up talking about the same stuff every year we're not good at we're not good listeners and we have this excellent research out of Australia and New Zealand because they were trying to teach school kids better in which they discovered that you don't learn you do not improve your listening skills while you're doing something else you have to actually take a class in listening in which they say we're going to now learn how to listen better and then at the end of the class they say ok we learned how to listen better and that was the only way they saw an improvement in listening that was it when it was specifically about learning to listen not what they were listening to a biology lecture or anything else that was going on so how many of you had at some point were offered a public speaking course most people are at some point how many of you are offered a listening course yeah so like human beings are really good at speaking even the introverts there is zero evidence that introverts are bad at talking just so you know that's not what introversion is the secret is we all feel awkward not just introverts we're all good pretty good at talking for the most part what we're not good at is listening so it always strikes me strikes me as ironic that the one thing we train is the one thing we basically do well pretty naturally and the one thing we almost never train is the thing that we're terrible at which is listening now you're not gonna leave this ballroom and go out there and be like I'm gonna be a great listener for the rest of my life that's not what's gonna happen you're gonna have to actually work at it and practice and there are ways that you can do that if I think everybody got a book right cuz they're in there I could go over them but they're in the book this is how you learn how to listen better they're not easy but they're simple and you get a little bit better every single day but one of the ways you do that one of the best ways you can do that is go into every conversation and make it your mantra okay I'm gonna learn something from this conversation by the time this is done I'm gonna learn something for this person and if you do that think how brilliant you'll be you'll be like having all these conversations and learning something from every single person you'll be a genius-level person not quite the last thing I wanted well not the last thing but another thing I want to talk about is how to keep it brief so over the past say 25 years our attention span has been shrinking and we can say that's a good thing or a bad thing you can ballon how well people used to read longer books than they do now that's fine but all I'm gonna tell you is that this is what's happening so on the Internet our attention span when we're surfing on the Internet is about eight seconds long and that's one second shorter than the attention span of a goldfish in conversation our attention is maybe thirty to sixty seconds long now one of the things I want you to do when you leave here is find a secondhand an actual clock somewhere and and test see how long 30 seconds is and keep in mind that that's how long you can keep the attention of the person who's listening to you and so therefore out of selfish reasons if you want them to actually listening to what you're saying and retain it then you need to speak in thirty to sixty second chunks and it helps anyway because I think one of your other speaker just talked about this true you're the human brain cannot hold more than three or four things in it at any one time that's it after that it just deletes something it gets up to maybe three or four and then everything needs to be deleted so if you're one of those people that goes on and on and on that's okay but nobody's gonna remember anything that you said and this also is especially the case among married people and before you start to blame women let me just tell you it's exactly the same when it's the same-sex couple someone is going to be upset and they're gonna start reciting every single thing that's upset them that they can remember and the other person will remember none of that which means you're not going to get back the response that you want which means you're gonna do it again the next time you're in a fight however long it is between fights so that's another thing is keeping it brief that's not necessarily the case in emails although I mean most of us don't we see a long email right and we're like Oh or I do and and one last thing I will say about email before I move on a little bit it's that probably I talked a little bit about what email does well but I want to talk to you about one specific thing that email does really really badly and that is apologize you know one of the most powerful tools that we have is the fMRI the functional magnetic resonance imaging machine because it allows us to watch the brain thinking while we're conscious that was never possible before and it's only we've only had access to that for a couple decades like it's pretty recent so one of the things that we know now is the process the complicated process of getting to forgiveness of getting to the point where some one person or both people can move on and it is a relatively complicated process I want you to take your right hand and put it at the top of your ear now move it up about one-inch move it back about one inch that's your empathy Center that's the compassion center of your brain right there underneath your finger and when this gets activated that begins this process of forgiveness that leads you to forgiveness and moving on when someone reads in a ecology in any kind of written language text email even at this point handwritten this never lights up nothing ever happens which means that complicated process never begins which means it's as though you never said sorry which means there will be no forgiveness there will be no moving on if you want to say sorry to someone you have to call them or see them now the reason we avoid that is because that's uncomfortable we don't like to do it but see that's the thing the discomfort is actually what makes that apology work because the other person sees you struggling to apologize and then suddenly the compassion center lights up and then you can move on so if there's one thing I can get you to never do again is send an apology through email just don't waste your time now the last thing I'm going to talk about is the hive mind and I kind of mentioned this earlier how much we rely on one another and to a certain extent we've kind of thrown a spanner in the works because of Google which is a very fine search engine I might add but it has made us all believe that were experts in everything or we gon' Facebook and we read like the first couple paragraphs of an article on merit pay for teachers and so then we offer our opinion when someone starts asking about it you don't know anything about merit pay for teachers because you read two paragraphs of an article on Facebook I just want to break that to you you don't know anything about health care because you read the summation of an article that you saw as it flashed by on Twitter and that's okay that's the point that's how we work I don't know how to do a brain surgery but I can go find a surgeon who does and get his or her expert opinion I don't know how to my toilet frankly how many of you could explain to me exactly how a toilet works exactly including the reverse osmosis part yeah that's what I thought we don't need to you can call a plumber that's how the hive mind works we all become experts in something some people come experts in more than one thing and then we rely on each other's expertise we are master communicators because we're supposed to be able to tell someone what we need find the person that knows more about than anybody else and then believe them that's how it works but it's not how it's working right now so there's this study that they did recently and I'm gonna tell it to you because it was the first glimmer of hope I've had I'm a journalist this has been a very depressing two years my whole job is to find the truth and present it to you so you can make up your own mind so you could imagine if I spend all my time finding the truth for you and I present it and everyone goes big news you can imagine how depressing that is but I finally got a glimmer of hope when I read some of this recent work so what they did is they went and they asked people what do you think should be done about the situation in the Ukraine and then they showed them a picture of Europe and they said okay point to Ukraine now the worst your geography was and it was bad because the average person was off by 1800 miles the worst your geography was the more likely you were to recommend military intervention however what they found when they replicated that with all kinds of complicated things including health care and merit pay for teachers what they found was when they then said to them okay here's a piece of paper you explained to me how if we follow your opinion how that works write it out how's it gonna work now and suddenly they began to doubt their opinion this is the first crack in confirmation bias we have been able to document ever I mean you want to talk about something that is very human confirmation bias is very human in fact we are the only human only species that suffers from it because think about this for a second let's say you find a lake and you the gazelle there is convinced believes there are no alligators in the lake and you present evidence saying look at this video evidence of all those alligators in the lake and then look at the alligator scat and footprints and then the gazelle says no no no no I truly believe in my heart there are no alligators in that Lake okay gazelles would be wiped off the face of the planet we are the only ones that suffer from that because it's not all that great at helping you survive but what it does do what it does beautifully as forces us to rely on each other because we don't know everything and that's a good thing confirmation is strong bias is strong in this one part of one so the fact that we've actually been able to find a crack in confirmation bias is a fabulous thing and before I end I want to show you my absolute favorite slide of all time I love this slide okay so this is this research at Princeton I'm gonna get really geeked out about this what they did was they had one person they had everyone hooked up to fMRI they had one person tell a story about their own life just something that happened in their lives then they had everyone else listening in an engaged way focusing and what they found was that as this person continued to tell their story the brainwaves of the speaker and the listener moved in sync exact sync you guys are all looking at me like I mean that's freaking amazing that is miraculous in some cases the sink was so close that the listener would anticipate changes in the speaker's brain by a fraction of a second that's mind meld we wouldn't believe it if it were in Star Trek we have no idea how this works or why we don't but we know this is what happens when one human being listens to another human beings human voice this is what we give up when we send an email or an emoji this so if nothing else if nothing else before you send that email remember this slide this beautiful human beings are miraculous slide and pick up the phone instead thanks [Music] you

Channel: Crucial Learning

Views: 92,353

Keywords: vitalsmartsvideo, crucial conversations, vitalsmartsspeakers, Celeste Headlee, REACH 2018, Big Idea Speech

Id: -iOr-Z_qNAo

Length: 43min 5sec (2585 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 12 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/skythirty1]

It’s the extended version of her TED Talk! I couldn’t help but wonder what you guys would think of this~