How to Have Amazing Conversations: Alison Wood Brooks (Transcript)

Well, Alison, I am so excited to talk with you about Talk. This is going to be a lot of fun.

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: It’s going to be so fun. Thanks for having me on, Cal.

The Academic Approach to Conversation

CAL WALTERS: It is a wonderful book that you’ve written. I was talking to you before we hopped on that you’ve done so much research on this topic and you teach a class at Harvard Business School, which we’ll get into. And so it’s amazing to me that it’s such a fun read because sometimes when someone is an academic, PhD has done all the research, it can read like an academic paper. That is not what this book reads like. It’s really fun.

I told you, I haven’t finished it yet. And that’s partly just because I really want to. I’m enjoying it. I don’t want to rush it and I’m learning a lot, so lots to talk about. I want to start though with you are an identical twin, Sarah. And you talk about this in the book. I never thought about what it would be like to be an identical twin. But it seems like that has been part of you being able to study conversations. So talk to us a little bit as we kick it off. What was it like having Sarah and how did that affect your view of conversing with people and the art and science of a good conversation?

The Twin Advantage in Understanding Conversation

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: This wasn’t obvious to me until very recently when I was talking to my therapist and he was like, you know so much about who you are and what you study and what you teach about and how you teach it is because you are an identical twin. You know that, right? And I was like, oh my God. It blew my mind. And it’s completely true.

I feel very lucky to have stumbled into this life of having a copy of myself, right? Like it’s an identical copy of my DNA growing up beside me from the very moment that I opened my newborn eyes and there’s a lot to it and any other twins are listening, they’ll feel this because it is, it’s like you grow up watching a version of yourself from the outside sort of navigating the social world.

You see a version of yourself succeeding and doing awesome stuff. You see a version of yourself making little stumbles and failing. So it’s an extra source of feedback. It’s like a mirror, an extra source of feedback that then you can say, oh, well, I’m going to, I could do that. I could do that awesome thing too. I can make the whole cafeteria table laugh. I can do that. Or you could say, oh, that didn’t go so well. I can avoid that in the future. So it’s sort of this extra source of feedback.

But also she’s not me. She is just like a very close sibling who I shared a bedroom with and shared all my clothes with and played on all the same basketball team, soccer teams. And you know, we were in all the same classes. And so it’s also this person, this like built in conversation partner that I walked through my whole childhood sort of shoulder to shoulder talking to somebody all the time.

And only now as I’m approaching middle age, am I appreciating what a gift that was. I got extra feedback. I had a built in friend. I learned so much about cooperation and competition and we’re very close now. She lives about a mile away from me here in Boston. She also has three kids. I have three kids. We see each other often and we’ve always been close. It doesn’t mean it’s always been easy, but we’ve always been very close.

And I think in a way, becoming a behavioral scientist and a professor and creating this course at Harvard about conversation very much is a way that I’m chasing, trying to sort of help other people find the tight knit shared reality. And that feedback mechanism and that closeness that I had a little bit built in by having an identical twin, but finding that level of shared reality in the relationships in their lives.

The Power of Real-Time Feedback

CAL WALTERS: I love that. What was it like being a. Would you like after a conversation, would you and Sarah. And I’m sure you didn’t do this maybe deliberately back then, but just reflecting back, would you all kind of critique each other and be like, oh, that was a. You really. That was a bad conversation. And not that you would use that language, but oh, you really crushed. That was. You were really funny in that situation. Or, you know, you were so awkward. Why don’t do that again. I’m just curious. Were those the types of conversations you guys had sometimes after?

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Relentlessly. Relentlessly. Sometimes you don’t even need to talk about it. Right. They hit you with that glance of like, you are so embarrassing right now. Stop it. But yes, relentless, mostly negative feedback. You don’t often tell your siblings how awesome they are sometimes. Right. And poignant moments when they do something really amazing. Yes. Most siblings know that feeling.

And twins are even more that way because you’re just together more often. Even little things like you do a little thing and they go ew. Or you know, like, oh no. Right. Like just tiny little micro decisions and micro expressions of disagreement and disapproval happen at every moment of every day and happened to me more frequently than most.

Reflecting on Awkward Conversations

CAL WALTERS: Yeah. This book has made me reflect back on so many of my awkward conversations. Even just things like. And you talk about in the book, which is great because conversations affect all parts of our life. But you know, going on a date or meeting your like I remember meeting my in laws for the first time and like preparing for that of just I want this to go well or a job interview or a tough conversation as a leader. And anyway, your work has made me self critique all of my mistakes, but it also gives a nice playbook for how to do it well.

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: So I hope it’s equal parts mortifying. Right. It makes you hyper vigilant about all the things that maybe went wrong. But, and, but in equal measure, I hope comforting. Right. It sort of gives you this toolkit of like, oh yeah, I did those things. It wasn’t great. But also that’s human nature. Like, everybody’s doing those things all the time. Conversation surprisingly messy. And going forward, now that I’m aware of it, I can make little moves to do it better. And I hope your conversation with your in laws went great.

CAL WALTERS: That’s right. They are my in laws. As far as I can remember, it went really well. I do remember being very nervous when I met with my father in law to ask if I could propose to his daughter. I remember we were like at IHOP, I think we went to IHOP, which we never go to IHOP. And I remember him thinking, okay, this is weird. Cal’s invited me out to breakfast.

And then I remember we were just chatting, you know, just having a normal breakfast. And I was like, how do I transition? I wish I’d had you as a coach. Like, how do I transition from talking about football to I want to marry your daughter?

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: From shift proposals. How do we. How do we move? How do we shift topic?

CAL WALTERS: How do we shift. This is. I need Alison. And I remember thinking. I think what I literally said was, well, let me just cut to the chase. And I’ll never forget he, like. I mean, he loves to eat just like I do. And he like slid his food to the side and he crossed his arms and it was so intimidating. I was like, oh, my goodness. And then I don’t remember what happened after that other than him saying, yes, you can marry her.

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I love the sliding, the food to the side.

CAL WALTERS: Oh, yeah, yeah. I’ll never forget that. That’s a big deal.

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Nothing that’s happening right here is as important as I think what you’re about to say is he’s cutting to the chase.

CAL WALTERS: That’s a cool move. That’s awesome.

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: It’s a power move.

CAL WALTERS: Yeah.

Teaching Conversation at Harvard Business School

CAL WALTERS: And so I wanted. So it’s beautiful that you teach this class at Harvard Business School because this audience is people that are interested in leadership. How long have you been teaching the class?

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: It’s so funny. Developing an entire course is such a massive undertaking. I started teaching it in different versions in 2018. It started out as like a four day intensive sort of experimental thing. And then over the next time, I taught it as a half semester and then as a full semester and then a full semester to, you know, many hundreds of people at once. So it has grown, but it started around 2018. So it’s been a while.

It’s been an incredible learning journey, honestly. Not only about how to deliver this content, but how people react to it. And even you know candidly in my own acceptance about this content is very personal. How people talk to each other is a very personal thing. And so I think it’s quite courageous, maybe a little foolish, but quite courageous to devote your life to trying to teach something that can be so sensitive and personal and getting to a place of acceptance where you realize this is really going to help some people, but other people may not be ready to receive it.

And so learning about that whole spectrum has been an amazing journey for me as a teacher.

Measuring Teaching Success

CAL WALTERS: I love hearing that, especially now as I teach, because I’m constantly thinking of what does success look like? Is it that everyone walks away being a true believer in this stuff? Is it that they are able to self critique or critique the material? And I’m still trying to figure that out.

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: So it’s hard because often you’re not. It’s hard to know what’s going on in the mind of each student. Right. When you face a classroom full of 60 people, I do everything I can to figure out what’s going on in their minds. I have them write weekly reflections to sort of share with me what’s going on. And still you can’t quite know how is this landing for everybody, what pieces of it are helping whom and when?

And so I think at some point you just have to really believe in the content that like, hey, this is. These are really good ideas that I think could help some people. And we’re going to go for it.

The Case for Studying Conversation

CAL WALTERS: Yeah. Well, I want that. That’s perfect. Cause I want to ask you, so if the leader that’s listening perhaps and is saying, okay, I’ve been having conversations my whole life, I know how to do this. What would be your pitch for them to do the work? To really read the book and just kind of dig into this research. What are the benefits to really dig into this?

Understanding the Complexity of Conversation

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: To that person, I would say, I get it. I mean, we learn to talk as toddlers when we’re a year old. We start to learn to do dialogue. We practice doing it with a huge array of conversation partners every day of our life. By the time we get to be teenagers and certainly adults, it’s a task that feels like second nature because we do it constantly across tons of different contexts. At home, at work, at school, everywhere. Very quick bump ins at the coffee shop and very serious work meetings and negotiations.

So it comes to feel like this thing we don’t even think about, it becomes second nature all along. Along the way, we are also all sort of scientists of conversation. We’re not only observing ourselves and our partners in conversation, but we often watch other people having conversations. All of our family members, all of our co workers, our teammates, strangers on a train. We’re all sort of passively observing how people talk to each other and trying to figure out, like, what goes well and what doesn’t go well.

So I’m with you. If it feels like, why do I need to take a deep dive into this thing that I already do? Already do it. It’s effortless. Here’s the pitch. Even the best. When you look under the hood of conversation, it is remarkably more complicated than you could imagine. It is so much trickier and so much messier and so much more complex than any of us could imagine.

The only way that you can see that is when you start to study hundreds of thousands of real conversations at very large scale. As an actual scientist, not as a lay scientist, sort of observing maybe 10 conversations per day, but hundreds of thousands of them and analyzing them using robust tools like natural language processing and machine learning. And what you start to see are patterns that emerge.

And you realize even people who are going through life and doing a pretty good job, even they have immense room for improvement. Because this task is so hard, you can never be perfect at it. And even aiming to be perfect is not the right goal. But all of us, we all have room for improvement, including me. And continuously and forever.

And because conversation is the way that we present ourselves to the world, it is the way that we learn about, come to know other people. It’s the pathway by which we pursue all of our goals in life. Because of that, it is a worthy pursuit to get better at it. You have to do it all day long, every day, do it well, wield your power well.

Studying Conversation in Real-World Contexts

CAL WALTERS: What have been some of the most interesting contexts that you’ve studied? This because I think I read you’ve studied it in speed dating, you’ve studied it in sales pitches. I mean, how does one even. You mentioned the hundreds of experiments or observations, but yeah, what have been some of the most interesting contexts that you’ve studied? How people talk to each other.

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: It’s funny when you read some books that you read about communication, have like flashy, attention grabbing content, like, oh, we’re going to take you inside the boardroom at Netflix, or I’m going to take you inside the war room with Trump. I’m going to take you into the best surgeon in the world. What is he saying to the nurses while he’s doing surgery? So there are contexts that are sort of attention grabbing and you can try and like glean things from it.

But what I find more interesting and compelling and where you can learn more is watching normal people talk to each other in the sort of situations you find yourselves in in normal day to day life. So we’ve studied conversation across many of these. We’ve looked at parole hearings between someone who’s been incarcerated and on a parole board. That’s actually kind of an extreme one. We’ve studied doctors talking to their patients, we’ve studied parents talking to their children. We study strangers talking to strangers outside, inside, every which way to Friday. We’ve studied entrepreneurs talking to potential investors. We’ve studied work colleagues and work meetings.

So across so many different contexts, what I find most exciting and interesting is like, but how do normal people talk? What are we all doing? What are we all struggling with? And how are the best among us sort of doing better? What can we learn from the people who seem to be navigating this surprisingly tricky task quite well?

Defining Success in Conversation

CAL WALTERS: What do you think success in a conversation is like? What does it mean to be a good conversationalist?

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Well, the answer to that isn’t really up to me. I’m not like conversation God. And it’s not up to you either, Cal. The answer to what makes a conversation successful is up to the people who are participating in it. It’s up to the user, it’s up to the speaker.

Human beings have a vast array of things they really care about. It’s what makes us special and different and maybe better than AI or robots is like they don’t have sincere desires. We have, we humans have sincere desires. We care about a lot of things. Sometimes it’s sort of dumb things and sometimes, sometimes they’re unvirtuous. But we sincerely have goals that we’d like to achieve.

Common goals include things like learning new information, feeling connected to someone, making a good impression on them, keeping a secret feeling, protecting information, having fun is a huge one that we, a lot of scientists often forget about. Persuading people to agree with us, asking for advice, and by the way, time exerts a lot of pressure on what success means because often we’ll hold a huge array of goals across a lot of different topics. But also, I need to leave in five minutes.

CAL WALTERS: Yeah.

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: So how are we going to achieve all of these things? In the book and in my class, I teach about a framework that helps to organize and categorize the very many goals that humans hold during their conversations. We call it the conversational compass. Do you want me to tell you about the compass, Cal?

CAL WALTERS: Yeah, yeah, please.

The Conversational Compass Framework

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Okay. So this world of motives and goals that people care about is so vast that really I don’t want to tell people what to care about, but it would be helpful for them to have some sense of what they care about. So the compass is a two by two framework. There’s two axes.

The x axis that runs east west is relational. At the high relational end of this spectrum, these are goals that reach for helping the other person or for helping the relationship. So apologizing I’m doing because I care about our relationship and I want to fix something that was broken. Seeking your advice or giving you advice might. I might be thinking mostly about you and how to help you. Having fun together, laughing together can often be highly relational.

At the other end of the relational spectrum, low relational goals are things that are selfish. It’s like my needs I’m going to. My goal is I need to persuade you to buy my book and I need to leave here in 20 minutes. These goals that are selfish are not evil, they’re not unvirtuous or bad. It’s just they’re serving mostly me. And so we should be aware of where we are on that spectrum and what goals we’re aiming for. Arguably, some people might say you should try and use the sort of self centered goals sparingly. Pick your battles of like what? The things that you care about for your own self interest probably aren’t going to be fun and enjoyable, or often aren’t fun and enjoyable or aligned with what your partner wants. So pursuing those selfish goals relentlessly could undermine your conversations.

The other axis in the conversational compass is the informational access. And so it also goes from high to low. High informational goals are what we classically think of as the purpose of conversation, which is exchanging accurate information. The human race evolved the ability to converse because we needed to exchange information. We needed to be able to communicate with each other, to pass down information across generations over time. And we still have many high, high informational goals. This is teaching, it’s learning, it’s making decisions together, it’s brainstorming ideas, it’s persuasion. Anything that relies on exchanging accurate information is a high informational goal.

But we can’t forget. And again, scholars often forget, humans have a lot of sincere desires that are not about information exchange. Sometimes we care a lot about keeping information private, about concealing information, and also sometimes we just don’t care about information exchange. We just want to be together, we want to fill time, we want to have fun, we want it to not feel awkward. All of those goals are very important, and they’re not at all about exchanging accurate information.

And so this two by two compass can help people organize the things that they truly care about onto a framework. The goal is not to move to one quadrant or another. They’re all good, they’re all useful. It’s just to describe what people actually care about and help them organize it in a way that makes sense.

Navigating Goal Misalignment

CAL WALTERS: Is the goal to align with your partner? So if my wife wants to talk about, like if my wife is just really wanting to connect, but I’m really excited to tell her about this conversation that I had with Alison, there might be a misalignment there of goals. So what do we do in that situation? Do I move to her? Does she move to me? Is it a little bit in the middle? What do we do?

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Depends on what kind of husband you want to be. This is really important. This is really important. So some of our goals are aligned naturally. We both want to have fun. We both want to laugh together. We both want it to not be awkward. We both want to talk about the show we watched last night. Right. There’s many goals are compatible, but often our goals are not compatible with others.

So everybody’s walking around with their own compass in their mind, and something that you want may bump up and collide with something that your wife wants. And when, whenever we have goals that where we confront a misalignment, that’s when we need to figure out, what are we going to do here? Are we going to prioritize your needs? Are we going to prioritize my needs? And how do we do that in a way that feels satisfying to both of us?

In the book, I talk a lot about kindness and try and attack kindness very concretely. Kindness really is trying to figure out what your partner really cares about, what your conversation partner really cares about, what they need. And then when you confront these moments where maybe what they need is incompatible with what you need, giving them what they need anyway. So having these sort of moments of selflessness where you prioritize someone else’s needs with the idea that hopefully later in the conversation or later in the relationship, you’re in a place of trust and love and support so that they’ll do the same for you, maybe it’s in five minutes or maybe it’s in a week, but it requires that we think about what other people need and actually give it to them.

The Power of Asking Direct Questions

CAL WALTERS: We’ll get into this beautiful framework that you have using the TALK acronym. One final question on that is, how do I best discern whether my wife wants to have. This is just purely for me right now. How do I best discern whether my wife wants to have a more relational conversation or a more information hike. Information conversation. Like, what’s the. What is the trick for this, Alison?

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah, you can ask. This is the really beautiful thing about conversate that conversation offers to us. Most of us try to guess, and we often guess wrong. We get it wrong all the time. We don’t. Somebody just needs a hug. But instead, we, like, try and solve their problem for them, right? So we guess like, oh, this is what you need. You need me to fix this for you. And actually, all they wanted was for you to be like, that’s hard. I’m going to give you a hug, and I’m going to make you tea, or I’m going to make you dinner or whatever. But instead, we guess, and we get it wrong a lot. And that’s not great for our relationships.

What’s really beautiful about conversation is you can ask directly. It gives you this opportunity to say, what do you need right now? I think some phrases that are very helpful that we can all use more. The question, what do you need? What do you need? What do you want? What’s going to make you feel better? How is this interaction rewarding to you? How can I make it most rewarding to you? Those are beautiful questions. Even hearing me say them right now probably feels pretty good. Like, if I was really asking you, it just feels amazing. And we don’t ask those questions enough.

The TALK Framework: Topics

CAL WALTERS: Thank you, Alison. This is good. So let’s talk about your TALK framework. And the T is for topics. The A is for asking, The L is for levity. And then the K, which we’ve already talked about just a little bit, is for kindness.

So in topics, this is fascinating to me, especially as a podcast host, because I have had a lot of conversations on this podcast, and I spend a lot of time preparing for it. And I think about, okay, what would make a good conversation? Where do I want to start? Where do I want to weave it? Like, how do we… How much do I switch between topics? Do I go deeper? Do I move to the next conversation? I mean, and whenever someone asks me about, like, hey, I’m starting a podcast, like, what would be your tip? And I’m like, so excited to talk to them because I’m like, I’ve got all kinds of thoughts. I don’t know if they’re any good.

So reading your book was super helpful. One of the things you talk about under the topics framework is this idea of preparing for a conversation.

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah.

CAL WALTERS: And it sounds like when you teach this to your students or when you kind of have them go through this exercise, there’s some hesitation, there’s some reservations about this just feels weird to prepare. So tell us a little bit about what you found in terms of the either the pros and cons of actually doing a little bit of preparation before you are about to have a discussion with someone.

The Power of Conversation Preparation

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Listen, I wish everyone in the world could go through the experience of being a podcast host because it forces you to practice and prep and learn many conversation strategies that most people are not nudged to do in their day to day lives, but should be applied to almost all conversations.

And in fact, as a podcast host, I would try, I would challenge you to take some of what you do to prep for these conversations and how actively you, how hard you work in listening to your guests during the conversation. Like we should all be doing that in all of our conversations. It’s just that you have to do it here. There’s a lot of attention being paid, right? Like if you didn’t do it, it would be very exposed. So the consequences are, the stakes are higher.

Okay, so topic prep. Yes. Many people are incredibly resistant to the idea of topic prep especially. And we collected data about this, especially in relationship, close relationships. So people like your romantic partner, your children, your parents, your besties, your friends, a lot of people are like, I don’t need to prepare for conversations with people I know really well. I’m going to know what, we always have a great time. I don’t need to think about it ahead of time. It’s just going to happen. The magic’s going to happen spontaneously.

And I get it. Like the fear of topic prep that people feel is that by thinking ahead somehow undermines the magic and the feeling of naturalness once you’re in the conversation, that it will feel rigid and forced or distracting because you’re trying to remember the topics you prepped to raise them in experience.

We’ve run experiments on this where we randomly assign people to either prepare topics ahead of time, think about it, or not. The people who prepare topics have much better conversations, way better, for a whole host of reasons.

One is they just feel more comfortable and less anxious the whole time. They know they have this sort of reserve of ideas of things they could raise if they need to, but they don’t have to. So when you get to those little mini moments of panic where you’re like, oh, I know we’re getting bored on this thing and I need to switch to something else. You just don’t need to panic. You can just go to something else that you’ve already got in your back pocket.

So it reduces anxiety. It reduces just what we call disfluencies at topic boundaries. So there’s not, as the pauses are shorter, there’s not as much uncomfortable laughter. Another sign that a topic is growing stale is that people start to repeat things they’ve already said. So redundancies. As soon as that starts happening, it’s a sign that you should switch to something else. And switching to a new topic is so much easier if you already have like a list of ideas of where to go.

It makes conversations much more enjoyable, mutually enjoyable for the person who has prepped and their partner. And it makes you much more likely to land on topics that actually are rewarding to you both.

And it’s not like rocket science. You just have to think. In our studies, we did a few different ways that you can prep. And even 30 seconds of forethought before the conversation starts makes the conversation more enjoyable and more productive because you literally think to yourself, okay, let’s imagine I’m meeting up with my best friend. Since the last time I saw him, he was going to… He had like an adult hockey game. His kid was… Had a really hard test at school. I want to check in about that. He mentioned that his… At work, he had this huge presentation with this investor. So I’m going to ask him how that went.

Just there. You’re already going to remember to ask the things that you should be checking in on about with your friend. You’re showing him that you were thinking about him when you were apart. Like, that’s what friendship is. And he’s going to have cool answers because it’s stuff that you actually should be talking about.

So yes, all of this to say topic prep is your friend. If you are resistant to it, I hear you. Maybe give it a try. And like all of my students, who are also often very skeptical about it, you too will be a topic prep convert.

The Connection Factor

CAL WALTERS: It makes so much sense. I mean, even just thinking about your friend as you were just rattling those things off, If I were your friend, I would feel so connected to you, I would be like, wow, she actually remembered the things that we talked about last time. She kind of knows what’s going on in my life and it just feels nice to be seen.

And I’m sure you would want to do that anyway. But we often… If we didn’t just do that little bit of prep, we wouldn’t already have it on our mind. So my guess is when we’re having the conversation, we’re thinking, oh, what should I ask him about? So it probably distracts us, too, from being present in the moment.

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Part of what people don’t realize about conversation is that once you’re in it, it is remarkably distracting. It’s so much trickier and more complicated than you realize. And your brain is like, in overdrive trying to keep up. Right? You’re trying to listen to what your partner’s saying. You’re trying to take in all these visual cues. You’re formulating, you’re elaborating on what they’re saying in your brain. You’re trying to respond quickly in a way that’s like, great.

So that cognitive load is very heavy. It’s very… You’re asking a lot of your brain. Any bit of that cognitive work that you can offload to before the conversation has begun, you should do it. Especially if it only requires like, 10 seconds and is very easy.

I like to write mine down. I write down topics in my calendar notes and on a piece of paper. Often I don’t bring them up, but when I do, it’s so helpful every time. And it’s not just for people that you know well. Right. It’s really productive in work meetings. Of course, it’s a way that, in a way, it actually like, nudges you to even prepare more thoroughly. Like, think more about the content of what you’re working on with somebody. If you’re like, oh, yeah, I should know what to talk about once we’re together. Oh, yeah, I meant to actually devote some brain power to that thing anyway.

You can also topic prep for people that you don’t know at all. So there are lots of archetypes in the world. There’s the barista at the coffee place. There’s the assistant that you don’t know well, that you’re going to bump into in the hallway at work. There’s the person sitting on the subway near you. All of these different types of people you can also think ahead of. Like, what would a good person do in that situation? What would they say? Is it like a quick compliment? Is it a funny question? Is it a joke about the train? Like, all of these little moments of forethought are forms of topic prep.

Flexibility in Conversation

CAL WALTERS: That’s really good. I hadn’t even thought about just the kind of archetype questions and like, well, I love that question. What would a good person do in this situation? And you made it and you said something that stood out to me. You said that sometimes you don’t even use the topics. So is your approach to do the preparation, but then to connect whenever you have that meeting or conversation, it’s just you, you kind of feel the vibe and yeah, it depends.

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: On your goals, right? Like if they’re… Yeah, if they’re… If your goal is very specific. We need to make a decision together about which project we’re going to invest in. You need to talk about that topic, and that should be part of your topic prep. Like, this is item number one. We’re going to get to that.

But also in your topic prep, you can kind of be like, prioritizing topics in the way that you would prioritize your goals. So having a little reserve. If like lower to your goals are, hey, feel connected and have fun, then in your reserve should be some topics that will be fun and make you feel connected. And so often you end up using those reserves on the margin. And even if you don’t, they’re there for you. You felt more comfortable and prepared the whole time.

Follow-Up Questions vs. Topic Switching

CAL WALTERS: This is so good. And I’m having so many questions that are coming to mind, Alison, because I think about this stuff all the time. One quick one. Because I think about this a lot as a podcast host. I think the best podcast conversations are with the follow up questions. I think that’s where you really get to the good stuff.

And I’ve listened to conversations and I’ve done them where it’s just like, okay, you’ve got a book. We’re going to kind of go through the things and sometimes people have… They’ve already talked so much about a topic that you can easily get them kind of real scripted. And so that’s also why I like to ask follow up questions. But your research also seems to indicate that switching topics more frequently ends up leading to more enjoyable conversations.

The Magic of Follow-Up Questions

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Your instincts are so good, Cal. So follow up questions are magic. They require no prep. It requires that you listen to your partner, find little bits that you’re curious about, and ask about it. They are incredibly powerful. They increase social closeness and liking and information exchange. They’re also useful in a pinch where, like, if you don’t know what to say, you can always ask a follow up question literally every time you talk.

I have my students do an exercise called never ending follow ups where you literally just ask a follow up question every time you talk, which sounds extreme, but in the experience of it is like really wonderful. It doesn’t feel extreme at all. It’s just really. It gets, you get deep with somebody quickly. So follow up questions are magic. Yes. And so much more interesting than just like going through a list of pre planned topic questions where somebody could just sort of script their answer. So that’s not. You’re kind of, you’re getting away from the spirit of what a conversation is. If you’re just doing like the working through a list. Follow up questions add that magic back in.

At the same time, we also find that great conversationalists switch topics assertively. So as soon as something seems like it’s running out of juice, they very confidently move to a new topic. And something that blew my mind when we were doing this research is that you can do both. It’s not a trade off. Oh, the best conversation. I think naturally we think about a trade off between breadth and depth. Like covering a lot of topics versus one and going really deep on it. That feels like ooh. But I, if I want to have a deep meaningful conversation, then I can’t move topics quickly.

What we see though is in practice great conversationalists do both. They switch topics assertively and frequently and they get deep on it quickly, often by asking follow up questions. So they just don’t, they don’t hem and haw in small talk. They’re sort of like, let’s get past this bullshit and get into the real stuff quickly. So that then, and then once we get through the good stuff, then we can move to a new topic. And so you just see this, it’s more interesting. It moves faster semantically and conceptually. That blew my mind. That there is not actually. It doesn’t seem like there’s a dramatic trade off between breadth and depth in terms of like information exchange in, in a conversation.

The other thing that you said that also it’s very comforting if you’re a very good follow up question asker. Follow up questions are like stealth topic changers because if you, if let’s say we start by talking about your daughter and you’re telling me things that she’s doing at school. She’s 10 years old, she’s doing great. Her favorite subject is math. Whatever we get down, I learn a lot of information quickly by asking follow up questions. I all of a sudden we’re talking about a sport that she’s playing or that she’s in the school play and then all of a sudden you offer like, oh yeah, I did. I did school plays when I was young too. All of a sudden we’re sort of in a different territory. We really are like moving into a different topic, but we never made a sharp jump cut to get there. It’s just that follow up questions have the tendency to uncover and reveal so much information that they bring you to new, new worlds and quickly.

Mastering Topic Switches and Conversation Endings

CAL WALTERS: That’s really, really helpful for me. And I’m sure, I mean it’s like any conversation, not just a podcast. But how do you. Any other tips for switching topics? I mean, we talked about the going. The follow up can actually be a stealth way to switch. But any other. Because that’s, that’s probably. I’ve probably had some of the most awkward conversations.

There’s two parts to this for me, I imagine at a, like a social get together at my work, for example, where everyone kind of has to come. There’s some kind of holiday theme perhaps. And you know, you end up talking to someone that you maybe haven’t talked to in a while. And there’s two parts to this that I’m one, like switching topics is one part, but then also ending a conversation. And because I don’t know if you’ve ever had the situation where you kind of feel like you’re like, it’s just you and another person. There’s a whole room full of people and it’s like, I don’t want to break away from this and make you feel bad, but there’s a ton of other people that I bet you want to talk to and I want to talk. So any other tips for topic switching? And then how do you break off a conversation without it being awkward?

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: So the end of a conversation is the final topic switch. The topic that you’re choosing is silence and both walking away. And so in a way, you’re sort of making all of these choices all the way along. So the same hemming and hawing that we do when we feel impolite and we don’t want to move to a new topic, the same thing is happening at the end where we’re like hemming and hawing and we don’t want to be rude, we don’t want to hurt their feelings and walk away that same hemming. So the. And the solution is the same in both cases, which is like, just be more assertive about it. Like just switch assertively.

That move is made much easier if you’ve thought ahead about where you could go. Right. If you have a go to question. What are you excited about these days? Or a go to story. Hey, I heard this NPR episode of this American Life and let me tell you about it. Or hey, I’ve been watching this amazing show, Silo. It’s got this really nuanced female character. Let me tell you about it. So it helps if you’ve got ideas at the ready that help you make that move assertively at the end of a conversation, the same is true.

It can help to give a compliment, say, this was really fun. I really loved it. I can’t wait for the next one. I’m going to, I’m going to go, right? Like I just end it with one compliment. This was great. And now it’s over. Another thing, another move that can be helpful. You described a situation where there are a lot of people in the room. One way to end is to say, I’m dying to introduce you to my friend. Like, let me go introduce you to somebody else. You introduce them, give them a hug, boom, you’re gone. Right? Like just any sort of assertive move where you acknowledge, hey, endings are hard to coordinate. Ending any topic and shifting a new topic, all of these micro decisions are hard to coordinate. We will never be able to get it perfectly right. I will never be able to figure out, when do you want this to end? When do I want this to end? So accepting that complexity and just saying, let’s end it confidently, you can do away with a lot of self torture and a lot of hemming and hawing about it.

CAL WALTERS: So it sounds like assertiveness is key. Whether you’re switching topics or ending a conversation, it’s just, just going for it.

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: That’s what I’m hearing a little bit. Like by acknowledging and being aware of the complexity of this coordination game that is conversation, it should make you feel more empowered to take like little tinier risks almost and saying, we’re never going to get this perfect. So I’m just going to go. Or we can’t get the. I have no idea. I can’t possibly know what if you’re going to find this funny, but I’m going to try this topic anyway. I’m going to assertively go there. It’s like little moments of, of courage. And we all know what it feels like to talk to people like that and it’s great.

CAL WALTERS: Yeah, it’s amazing. I feel like I feel more confident now reading your work to switch topics like that. That was really helpful. It’s like, okay, I can just. People tend to like that more. I’m not going to feel like I need to sit on a particular topic because when I think back on some of my least I would say effective conversations, it was like you just kind of sat on a topic for stagnation. Yeah, you stagnated. And it’s like, okay, I want to move on. I don’t know if they want to move on. And even just reading your work too, it’s like they probably want to move on too. Oh wow.

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: For sure. Nobody wants to feel bored. I also I like asking myself this question of like how much does anyone really have to say about any topic? Even if you are a world renowned expert on whatever dolphins, you might have like two minutes worth of content in you that’s actually exciting and interesting to share. It’s definitely not two hours. So just be almost a little bit of humility of like, well we did what we could here on this topic. Let’s try something else. I think can go a long way.

The Biggest Question-Asking Mistakes

CAL WALTERS: So I love the A in your talk framework, especially as someone who thinks a lot about asking good questions. Where do people go wrong here? Let’s just talk about the big fails when it comes to question asking. What are the things we want to for sure avoid?

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Top line failure. People don’t ask enough. Top line failure. No one should ever leave a conversation having asked zero questions. We call these ZQs. We’ve all experienced people like this on a date or in a work meeting or in an interview. Don’t leave a conversation having asked none. Sadly, more people are ZQs than we’d like to admit. And even if you have asked some questions, it’s probably not enough.

Questions are incredibly powerful. They help unlock information exchange, they bring us closer together. They do all the good things that we’re looking to do in conversation. And for many different reasons. We sort of forget to ask them or we’re afraid to ask them. We’re worried about asking the wrong question. And so those fears hold us back from asking asking more. So top line advice, just ask more and sort of like topic switching. It sounds like that’s very simple advice that seems like, well that can’t make such a huge difference. But if you actually earnestly pursue that goal of confidently switching topics more frequently, confidently asking more questions at every moment of every conversation, it will change your life. I mean it’ll change every moment that you’re engaged with other people. So that’s top line.

Once you try and ask more questions, question types matter too, right? We talked a little bit about the power of follow up questions. It’s so funny. Online I see a lot of people giving advice about like which question to ask. Don’t ask this question in an interview, ask this question. And I always find that to be like maybe a little bit helpful. But actually what matters more is what comes after. No matter where you start, whatever question, whether you say, whether you ask someone what are you excited about recently or what are you struggling with recently, the conversation is going to unfold from there. So they’re going to give you an answer and then your next choice is do I ask a follow up question or do I talk about myself again?

And so these patterns of asking probably matter a lot more than what was the, the root question, the original question? What we find in our research is that follow up questions are incredibly powerful. If you do ask a question and someone shares something about themselves with you, do not just bring it right back to yourself. We call that boomerasking. It follows a pattern of a boomerang. You see it all the time and it’s important for people to share about themselves. You want to ping pong you back and forth like you’re learning about me, I’m learning about you. The problem is if you do it immediately after someone has shared with you, it makes them feel like you didn’t care about what they, about what they said.

CAL WALTERS: Yeah, I’ve experienced that a good bit. And it’s interesting too, just that reflecting back, my wife do this. My wife and I will do this. We’ll come back from a party and just say, hey, you know, how was it? Or who did you talk to? And it is amazing how, how many people don’t ask questions. And that is an interesting, I think because of this podcast and because I Alison, I’m, I’m actually more comfortable asking questions. So that’s also maybe one of those, I don’t know things maybe you’ve discovered in, in your work that some people would, I, I just would prefer to hear other people talk that I don’t like to talk about myself.

Developing Your Conversational Strengths

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: You like learning too. You like learning? For sure. People have different leanings, proclivities of things and habits that they’ve learned that they’ve become good at. There’s some people who are terrific question askers and that you should lean into that some people are much more comfortable answering like waiting for other people to ask.

Usually people who are habitual answers would probably be well served to incorporate more question asking into their, into their toolkit. But yes, it’s okay. And all of these things, from topics to asking levity and kindness People are all over the map in terms of their habits and strengths and weaknesses and just what you’ve sort of learned to do in your life and what you might be most comfortable with.

I think with my students, my goal is to push them to try things that are a little bit outside their comfort zone. And by definition, it’s going to feel weird, it’s going to feel uncomfortable, but you can’t realize the benefits of a new strategy unless you really give it a try. In practice. I’m like you. I’m much more comfortable asking questions relentlessly than answering them. So it’s been. It’s been a fun challenge to be on a book tour because I essentially have to sit and sort of answer questions, which is another skill that matters tremendously.

Showing Engagement While Listening

CAL WALTERS: Do you have any. Have you found any recommendations on what to do while someone is talking? Like you are talking right now, and I’m really interested in what you’re saying, and I want you to know that. But I’m wondering, how do I best do that? I mean, I’m kind of shaking my head. I’m trying to react.

One of the weird things I’ve also found Allison, on. On PI with podcasting is that you have to be careful not to overly affirm every answer that someone gives. I don’t know if that makes sense, because I’ve noticed when you listen to a podcast and the host is constantly like, oh, that’s so cool. Oh, that’s awesome. It just gets a little annoying. So sometimes I want to affirm the guest, but I also don’t want to annoy the listener with my constant affirmations.

The Science of Active Listening

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: So anyway, I’m ruminating about this. I wish more people ruminated about this. So decades of research on active listening, right? So called we all have heard this phrase. Active listening are mostly about what are you doing with your body to show your partner, your conversation partner, that you’re hearing them. So it’s this nodding, it’s smiling, it’s eye contact, it’s leaning forward, these nonverbal cues that, hey, I hear you and I’m engaged with you. That’s very important. It’s important that your partner believes that you’re listening to them. So it’s sort of like listening 101.

The problem is, almost all of those behaviors are easy to fake. And we all know it, because when we sit on Zoom and we’re smiling and nodding at the camera, everybody’s off on the side, like texting their friends and making their grocery list. So the question then becomes, well, what’s not fakeable. What is a high fidelity way to show your partner that you are putting in the very hard work to listen to them? You’re hanging on their every word, you’re thinking about what they’re saying.

And the beautiful opportunity that’s presented to us in conversation is that you can show someone you’re listening with your words. So affirmation’s great. That’s so cool. But what’s even better is like specific concrete affirmation. I found it so interesting when you said that conversation offers a unique opportunity to use my words so literally repeating back something that they have said. Just repeating it, right? Like just acknowledging, hey, what I’m hearing you say here is this and just repeating it. That’s amazing. If you attach an affirmation to it. Here’s what I heard you say and I loved it. And here’s why. I mean, now you’re getting into much more effective territory.

Listeners don’t find that kind of affirmation as cloying as just like, oh, I love that. Oh, great, right? Like these more sort of empty affirmations that are not rooted in necessarily what the other person has said. So in our research we’ve studied these verbal expressions of that you’ve heard someone. They are so magical. Usually when we think of someone charismatic or compelling, this is kind of what they’re doing. They put in the hard work to listen, which by the way, is not easy at all. The human mind is built to wander. It is not built to focus on one person and listen to everything they’re saying. So if you’re a mind wanderer, you are not alone. I’m with you personally and professionally.

But if you are working really hard to listen to somebody, you should show it with your non verbal cues, but maybe even more importantly with your words. And you can do it by repeating what they’ve said, by affirming specifically things that they’ve said, by asking follow up questions. So wow, what I heard you say here is this. It seemed like you felt sad about that. Did I hear that right? Are you, Is there a sadness built into this to follow up questions? If you’re in a group conversation, paraphrasing is amazing. We’ve all seen that before too, where you try and summarize or pull together things that a few people have said. The only way you can do that is if you were listening to all of those people.

And then there’s my favorite move in all of conversation, which is the callback, which is you reference back to something that was said much earlier in the conversation or earlier in the conversation or even earlier in your relationship. Right. Like, oh, when I was talking to you a month ago, you mentioned that your daughter. You had to pick up your daughter at 3, 3:15 every day. Like, the only way I can say that is if I was listening to you a month ago, was thinking about it, care about you, and I’m super smart, and I’m bringing it up again, like, all of those things. That’s what everybody wants to be in conversation. Clever, kind, a good listener, making people feel known and understood. So callbacks are just. There’s also a bonus. Like, often callbacks are funny because they’re. It’s, like, so surprising that someone would be so, like, great. So use more callbacks.

The Power of Specific Encouragement

CAL WALTERS: Wow, that’s. It’s really similar to. I was talking to someone about encouragement, and one of their recommendations was to give specific encouragement. Like, that’s one of the best ways. It’s not just, oh, you did great, but if you can point out specifically what it is you thought they did great, that it just makes such a big difference in terms of how much people believe you.

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yes.

CAL WALTERS: And.

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Well, exactly. And it’s the. I. What. What I believe. I believe you when you say that, like, lots of affirmations gets annoying. It might be annoying for the person you’re talking to, and it’s certainly annoying for people who are listening. So making them more specific, I think takes that. Annoying. It’s annoying because it sometimes can feel shallow or, like, not based in substance.

When you are doing encouragement, you can do personal encouragement, which is like, I love your energy. Or like, you’re so amazing. What a great idea you just suggested. Right. Like, you’re giving them a compliment in that moment. As a person. You can also do what we call topic encouragement, which is like, oh, this is so interesting. I’m dying to know more about what you just said, which is saying, I. I want to stay on this topic. I want to continue to work here together and learn as much as we can about. It’s a little bit different than saying, like, I love you. It’s saying, I love this topic and what we’re accomplishing on this topic together. And both of those things, personal encouragement and topic encouragement are so energizing and so awesome and really a clear way to communicate to somebody, I’m enjoying this and I’m into it. Let’s keep going.

Bringing Energy to Conversations

CAL WALTERS: One of the things that’s really cool, Allison, because I’ve listened to you on a few podcasts and now I’m getting a chance to have this conversation. You are a really good conversationalist. And one of the. Seriously, I mean, it’s just. And one of the things. Let me get. Let me be very specific. One of the. One of the ways that you’re really good is the energy that you bring. Like, just really good energy. Lots of laughing, lots of smiling, and even just listening to some of your conversations. Like, wow, this is really. It’s really enjoyable because you can just tell she’s really into it.

But that’s kind of cool that you’re someone who’s like, a researcher on these topics, but then you also, I think, have authority on this topic because you live it, which is. Which is really neat. Which leads me to levity. And we’ll kind of land the plane here. I don’t consider myself a very funny person. I wish I was more funny. I’m a little bit intense. And so when I see levity, I feel like, ah, man, I. I don’t know if I can do. I don’t know if I do that. A lot of my conversations, I feel like I’m more of a. My questions are often for information I want to learn. I. So give some encouragement or some advice to someone like me who says, okay, I got into topics I’ve gotten to asking. Now I’m at levity. But I don’t consider myself to be a funny person. I also am a professional. So, you know.

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah.

CAL WALTERS: So how do you advise people to begin to add more levity to their conversations?

Levity Beyond Humor

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: First, I want to acknowledge the raucously kind compliment that you gave me before asking this question. It was so kind. I. The energy that I bring to conversation is very sincere. I really feel like talking to people is like a privilege. You get to go on, like, a journey into their mind and into their life. And I sincerely love people and I love talking to people. So thank you. That was very nice.

Levity. I hope the levity chapter in the book is incredibly comforting, especially to people who don’t think that they’re funny. And you don’t need to be like. You don’t. You don’t have to be. Science remains to be seen whether being funny is a teachable skill. Actually, of all things that we can learn to do better in conversation, I always tell my students at the beginning of the levity module in our course. Course, I cannot teach you to be funny. Like, that is not my goal here. I can teach you to care more about humor and the role of humor and how important it is for how we come to understand each other. And status hierarchies and all of these things. So just sort of an appreciation for the role that human humor plays in the social world. But I. I’m not convinced that I can teach people to be. To be funnier.

But the levity maxim is not about being funny. And in fact, if you have this mindset, if your goal, if you go into a conversation and your goal is to be funny, it’s the wrong goal. It’s the wrong goal. The point of levity are to find these opportunities, these sparkly moments to keep everybody engaged. Sometimes it’s through humor, sometimes it’s through things that are not funny at all and are really warm. So compliments, asking questions. It’s really about keeping your hand on the gauge, the temperature gauge. And as soon as you feel like a conversation is getting too boring or people are stagnating or they’re feeling disengaged and disinterested, any move that helps pull people back in, humor works well at doing that, but so does so many other things.

Topic shifting is a huge one. If people are getting bored, shift to something else that they’re actually interested in. So for those of you who feel like, I wish I were funnier, I’m not that funny, don’t worry about it. Just seize the opportunities to give more compliments, more flattery, shift topics more often. You don’t need to be funny, but you can’t be boring. You need mutual engagement from everybody involved to have a rewarding conversation.

Final Thoughts for Leaders

CAL WALTERS: And I love that you put that in the book, because I know we’ve mentioned it a little bit, that as a researcher, I’m sure there are a lot of people. It’s like, okay, this is the science of a good conversation. But I love that you bring the. The importance of levity, the importance of enjoyment, the importance of connection, and. And that’s such a. It’s just a great reminder to laugh. That’s one of the things you talk about in the book, and you do that very well.

Well, Alison, we’re. We’re getting to the end here. I. I just want to give you an opportunity because you are speaking to leaders. We’ve covered a fair amount of the book. Certainly there’s so much that we haven’t covered. So I highly encourage people to get the book. We’ve given just kind of a little taste. But anything else that you really want leaders to be thinking about when it comes to conversations and growing in this area as we wrap up here?

Final Thoughts on Conversation Mastery

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah, you started the. We started the conversation. You asked me, like, why should people dive into this topic, into this book? And my answer was that for something that feels second nature, it’s like, why do I need this? I am already, like, good at this. I do this all the time.

I hope that this book and this conversation have shown people that when you look under the hood of conversation, it is remarkably more complicated and trickier than it appears and that it feels as we sort of bump through life, just doing it naturally. So there’s a lot we can do to get better at it, but it also means that we are bound to never be perfect at it.

And in like, the goal of this book and the goal of my course and every goal that people should be holding should not be aiming for perfection. That’s a fallacy. Conversation is a remarkably tricky and complicated coordination game. We are all bound to make tons of mistakes. We will always have moments of awkwardness. We will forget to ask questions that we should ask. We will say things that are embarrassing. We’ll stay too long and not be confident enough to just leave.

So I think my, my final word is just to try and find more grace for yourselves, for ourselves when we have, when we make these little mistakes and to have, and to try and find more grace for the people that we talk to and the people we see in the world. Because everybody’s doing their best and it’s a, it’s a hard thing to do.

Wrapping Up

CAL WALTERS: Well, that’s a great message and this is a great book. I encourage folks, go get the book talk. I’ll put links to talk and how to connect with Alison in the show notes, whether you’re watching on YouTube or listening on podcast. Alison, I’ve had so much fun today. Thank you for having this conversation, for coaching me up, and for writing a great book. I really appreciate it.

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Cal, thanks for so much for having me on. Fun of the last.

Host’s Final Thoughts

CAL WALTERS: Well, my friend, thank you so much for sticking around till the end of this conversation with Alison Wood Brooks. What did you think? Let me know in the comments on YouTube if you’re watching. What stood out to you the most? What of those tactics that she described are you going to implement in your life? You could also drop a comment on Spotify. I would love to hear from you.

I just loved what she had to say. And again, check out her book. It’s really, really good. It’s an easy read. It flows nicely. It’s not one of those academic type books where it’s hard to get through. It’s. It’s really fun to read. Just get a lot of great stories and it’s just really helpful.

And because we converse so much as leaders, whether at home or at work, it’s really nice to know how to do it well and have an extra level of confidence. That’s what I think I have found after going through her work is I feel more confident now and and how to have a conversation. I feel more confident to switch topics because I know that people tend to enjoy that more. So I hope you’ll go and check out more of her work.

And I am just so grateful to get to spend some time with you that we get to learn together. I will be forever grateful for you spending time on this podcast with me because the time that you have is of course your most valuable resource and I’m just honored that you would spend it with me.

If you enjoyed this conversation, please go share it with someone in your your network because they might benefit from this as well. And also I just so appreciate those of you who have left a rating or review on Apple Podcast or Spotify that really helps us bring in new leaders to our community and it just helps us reach more people. And when I say us, I mean me and my wife, which we really love doing this work. And I hope that that comes across in the episodes that I do.

So go and have a great week and remember that life is short. So let’s have great conversations and make it count. Take care.

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