Laughing Is My Superpower

Charles Duhigg’s Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection came out just last month. Amazon promised a blend of deep research and storytelling, both things we love here at Maestro Group, so I knew it deserved a review.

Duhigg covers topics we have written about before, and even mentions many of the studies we’ve cited, but it’s worth reading for the stories he shares to illustrate his points. From choosing the right astronauts for NASA’s space program to properly framing the characters on CBS’s The Big Bang Theory, the book offers an enjoyable journey not only looking at what makes someone a good communicator, but also how we can emulate those traits in our own lives (and why it’s worth doing so).

Rather than summarize Duhigg’s synopsis of kinds of conversations and rules to follow, I’m instead going to dig deeper into topics from his book that we’ve touched on before. Duhigg sheds light and provides more depth on open-ended questions, body language, negotiation, follow-up questions, looping information, and so many other matters that directly apply to the conversations we have with our prospects. You may even learn there’s a reason behind some of your conversational quirks.

ONE MORE TIME WITH FEELING

We talk about asking questions a lot around here. We have workshops on questions, an application for practicing question trees, and we are suckers for open-ended queries. Duhigg manages to take things a step further in his exploration of open-ended questions by specifically considering those that spark emotional connections.

Emotions? Eww. We’re sales professionals, not psychologists. Why do we want to elicit emotions? Duhigg tells the story of University of Chicago psychology professor Nicholas Epley, who stood in front of a room of hedge funders and taught them how to discuss their feelings. They were similarly skeptical—with one man, after seeing the list of questions he was supposed to ask his assigned partner, saying, “Oh, shit. This is going to be awful,” loud enough for all to hear. As it turns out, however, a broker with a failing firm has a lot of feelings about it.

Brokers, hedge funders, CEOs…we’re all emotion-filled blobs. Whether you let your feelings out or bottle them up to explode at a later time, emotions impact all of our conversations and decisions. Even though we think emotional conversations will be awkward, studies show that people leave the conversations feeling more connected and judge the exchange as especially rewarding.

The trick, according to Epley, is to ask specific kinds of questions that don’t seem emotional at first, but that make emotions easier to acknowledge. Instead of, “Do you have a current solution for records management?” (binary) or “How are you currently handling records management?” (open-ended), try, “What do you like about your current records-management solution?” (open-ended and feeling-eliciting).

Am I implying that you can get people to feel connected just by having them ask questions that elicit emotion? Yes, yes I am. Duhigg shares the story of married co-researchers Elaine and Arthur Aron of State University of New York at Stony Brook. They had study participants, none of whom knew each other, come into their lab and go back and forth asking each other 36 questions that elicited “sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personalistic self-disclosure.” It became known as the Fast Friends Procedure. More than half of the participants sought each other out after the study, and one set of conversation partners ended up getting married.

I’M LAUGHING BECAUSE YOU’RE LAUGHING

As part of my job at Maestro conducting messaging audits, I interview our clients. These interviews usually last about an hour, and I have to go back and watch them to get all of the information I need. While I’m conducting the interview on Zoom, I hide “Self View.” It keeps me from being in my own head, which often sounds like, “Did I ask that question in a weird way? I kind of trailed off at the end. Am I holding my mouth funny? Why does my mouth look weird? Do all human mouths look like that? Oh, god, was I just moving my mouth around on screen? Wait, what are they saying? Focus on them! Now their mouth looks funny. Phew, all human mouths must just look weird.”

Yes, I have an overactive internal monologue and perhaps some social anxiety, but my point is that when I go back and watch the interviews, I am forced to watch myself. I’ve realized that I laugh. A lot. And I recently watched an interview in which the other person did not laugh back.

I thought I was weird (remember, social anxiety), but Charles Duhigg saved me from my self-loathing. According to his book, most laughter in conversations is not a response to humor. That kind of laughter makes up less than 20 percent of conversational laughter. Instead, people laugh to show that they want to connect with whomever they’re speaking with.

Terence McGuire, a psychiatrist working for NASA, realized this during his quest to find astronauts with emotional intelligence. Trips to space or even the moon used to be fairly short in duration, but once space stations were built beginning in the 1970s, crews could stay in space over much longer periods of time. This became problematic in some cases, because humans are emotion-filled blobs. In 1976, a Soviet mission had to be cut short when the crew started experiencing shared delusions, including one of a strange scent on board.

By the late 1990s, McGuire had been conducting interviews with incoming astronauts for 20 years. He went back to his recorded interviews to see if anything in them could shed light on who ended up doing well and who revealed themselves to not have been a great choice. McGuire found that the individuals who made the best astronauts were those who matched his mood and energy during the interview. In other words, when he laughed, they laughed.

At some call centers, operators are trained to match the mood and energy of the callers. There’s even software that can help guide the operators in real time, and companies that use it report better customer service calls. So, it turns out that I’m not weird for laughing. And to my non-laughing interviewee, I hope you’re not planning on spending time on a space station. It won’t go well.

I’M TALKING TOO MUCH TO TELL IF YOU’RE LISTENING

Besides laughing and noticing personal facial flaws, something else I do a lot of during messaging-audit interviews is nodding and smiling. I think I do it automatically, but I also know it helps people feel heard and encourages them to tell me more. But you have to do more than show someone you’re listening while they are talking.

“We have trouble noticing other people while we’re talking,” observes Michael Yeomans, a professor at Imperial College London, as quoted by Duhigg. Yeomans is one of the researchers who studied speed daters in a Harvard study, one we’ve cited before because it helped uncover the power of follow-up questions. His statement may sound obvious, but it’s so important. If we want to show someone we’re listening, but they don’t notice much while they are speaking, we have to demonstrate that we heard them after they speak.

We talk a lot about looping back information, and using phrases such as, “So, what I hear you saying is…Did I get that right?” This technique is a good way to make sure you understand what someone said, and it can help clarify objections, but more than anything, it’s proof you’ve been listening. A 2020 study found that those who loop back information in conversations are seen as “better teammates, advisors…and more desirable partners for future collaboration.”

Looping back information is especially important in a conflict situation where individuals often feel that they are not being heard. Duhigg introduces readers to Sheila Heen, a Harvard professor who studies how people connect with each other amid conflict. Heen teaches her law students to “loop for understanding” because it’s a great way to expose deep, emotional issues that can completely derail a negotiation if you don’t know they exist. And where else can deep, emotional issues derail a negotiation? Sales. While sales negotiations are (hopefully) not conflict situations, they are still rife with emotions that have the potential to create a roadblock.

What I like most about Supercommunicators is that, by getting down to the nitty-gritty of what people are doing to communicate with others effectively and why it works, it shows us that anybody can be a supercommunicator. By tweaking our questions so they are more likely to elicit emotion, or practicing looping back information, we can all improve our interactions. I’m off to see if there’s a book called Noninternalmonologuers. That’s clearly what I need to read next.

Interested in taking one of our questions-focused workshops or being coached through your current deals? Reach out a mastery@maestrogroup.co.