When it comes to communicating, to paraphrase Charles Dickens, it's the best of times and it's the worst of times. We've got cell phones and social media. We have FaceTime and WhatsApp and Zoom. With just a few clicks, we can communicate at any moment of the day with anyone from Albuquerque to Zurich.

So why are we so bad at it?
The novelist E.M. Forster said, “Only connect,” but that's much easier said than done. Because communicating isn't an inborn talent, as Charles Duhigg shares in his new book, “Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection.” It turns out that the ability to connect with other people is a skill, like any other. We're not born great cooks, but we can become pretty good ones with enough practice. If there's anyone eminently qualified to communicate about communicating, though, it's Duhigg. We sat down with him to learn how to speak the hidden language of communicating. (Spoiler alert: Duolingo won't help you.)

EXHIBITOR Magazine: I think many of life's epiphanies occur when we're awakened to the fact that we're lacking something or when we become immensely frustrated by our inability to accomplish something we badly desire. Did you have some kind of Eureka! moment when it came to communication?
Charles Duhigg: Absolutely. I basically had two things that happened, I was working at The New York Times and they made me a manager. I thought it would be great to be a manager. It turns out I was terrible at it. I was terrible at communicating with the people who were reporting to me, and then I got into this bad pattern when I got home. My wife and I have been married for 20 years, so I would come home and complain about the day and she would very reasonably give me good advice. Instead of being able to hear what she was saying, I'd get even more upset.

I think this is a pattern that many people probably experience in their own relationships. So I started trying to figure out what it was I was doing wrong. Why did this keep happening? Because theoretically, I'm a professional communicator and should know how to do it — but I didn't know how to do it. I began researching, calling up experts, and asking them. They said, well, you're actually calling us at the right time because we're living through this golden age of understanding communication in a very real, practical sense. They told me one of the biggest mistakes we make is that we assume a discussion is about one thing — it's about our kids or our day at work or where we should go on vacation. But every discussion is actually made up of different kinds of conversations. There are these practical conversations where we're making plans together or solving problems, for example, but there are also social conversations, where we talk about who we are. Then there are emotional conversations where I tell you what I'm feeling. With the last one, I don't want you to solve my feelings. I want you to empathize.

All these kinds of conversations are equally legitimate. But if you're not having the same kind of conversation at the same time as the person you're talking to, then you can't really hear each other and you can't really connect.

EM: After you became interested in the topic, you took a deep, deep dive into it. One of the most fascinating parts of the book is what you learned from a CIA spy, of all things.
CD: Jim Lawler is his name. I'll set the stage: In the 1980s he was in the CIA. He was 30 years old, really young. He had wanted to be in the CIA his entire life. They sent them through training and then they sent him to Europe where his job was to recruit spies. He is absolutely awful at it. He would go to parties and try his best. And people would respond to him with things like, “I know you're trying to recruit me.” He just keeps failing at it. This is kind of an ongoing problem for him until he meets this woman. She works in the foreign ministry of her government in the Middle East, but she's visiting Europe, and he starts chatting her up. He takes her to lunch, and they get to know each other to the point that they become friends. Eventually he comes cleans and tells her, “I work for the CIA. Would you help me?” She tells him, absolutely not.

His bosses said, “If you don't close the deal here, you're gonna get fired.” So he convinces her to have one more dinner with him. At this point she's feeling defeated. She has to go back to her country. She'd come to Europe trying to figure out how she could find a way to stand up for women's rights back home. How she was going to stand up against the religious radicals that had taken over her government. She's glum and truly down. So Lawler tries to cheer her up. He tells her jokes. He tells her stories. He reminisces about places they went sightseeing together, and absolutely none of it works. Toward the end of the meal, he just gives up and realizes there's no way he's going to be able to convince her to take a suicidal risk on his behalf.

Something in him breaks open. He gets really serious and honest. He tells her, “I understand how you feel because, like, I feel disappointed in myself because I wanted this job for so long. And it turns out I'm terrible at it. I think I'm gonna get fired. I just understand how frustrating it is to not live up to your own hopes and dreams.” Something extraordinary happened then. She began crying because at that moment they were having the same kind of conversation. That's when she said, “I can help you. I want to do something important. I want to be part of this.” And she became one of the best assets for the CIA in the Middle East for the next two years. But it's only because he learned to connect with her, to match her, to hear what kinds of conversations she wanted to have, and then choose to lean into that.

EM: It occurs to me it's probably not quite what Ian Fleming had in mind with James Bond. But on the other hand, Lawler was probably better suited to the actual world of espionage than 007 ever was.

What's intriguing is he wasn't naturally very adept at communicating with people — but he proves it's a skill that can be learned. So what is it that these supercommunicators, whether it's the CIA or a trade show coordinator, have in common?

CD: When I started writing this book, I thought excellent communicators would be charming, outgoing extroverts, and it turns out that's not true at all. Communication is just a set of skills that anyone can learn. And we're all supercommunicators at one point or another, right? We all know the right question to ask a friend to help figure out what's going on. Or when we walk into that business meeting, we know exactly what to say and when, but there are people who can do this consistently in almost any situation. There are people who recognize the skills that they're using in those moments and can apply them to any situation and you're right, there are some qualities — or some tactics — they have in common.

The first is, we know that consistently good communicators ask 10 to 20 times as many questions as the average person. And some of those questions are deep questions, questions that they ask others about their values or their beliefs or their experiences. It sounds a little intimidating, but it's as simple as if you meet someone who's a doctor, instead of saying, “Where do you practice medicine?” you could ask something deeper, such as, “Why did you choose medical school?” When you ask that kind of question, what you're really doing is saying, “I want to connect with you and learn about you. Will you tell me about the things that matter to you?” Those are easy questions to ask. They're also effective because what we know from study after study is that they make us feel closer, they make us feel more trusting of each other, and they allow us to connect.

EM: One of the commandments of effective salespeople is: Take the customer's perspective and try to see a situation from their point of view to show that we empathize. But what I was intrigued by is, you say that's a misguided approach in some ways.

CD: There's been a lot of studies that have looked at this angle. It's not that we shouldn't try to take the customer's perspective. It's that we're often wrong in what we think the customer's perspective actually is. We call it “perspective taking,” but what we should really be engaging in is “perspective getting,” and the way that we get that perspective is asking questions. The questions ultimately all boil down to, what does this mean to you? What's important to you? What's the problem that you're facing that I can help you solve? If I ask deep questions, I'm asking you to tell me how you see the world at that point and what kind of a conversation you want. It takes a lot of the guesswork out of it, and I can just connect with you.

EM: The people reading this are mainly going to be trade show or corporate event professionals who have unique communication challenges. When their customers come into a booth or attend an event, they sometimes have as little as 30 seconds to connect. How do we use the techniques you study to communicate in that context?

CD: nterestingly, the answer is by proving that we're listening. So how do we prove that we actually want to understand? What matters much more than listening is what you do after someone stops speaking. It's a technique taught at Harvard Business School called “looping for understanding,” and there are three steps.

The first step is asking a question, preferably one of the deeper questions. Once the person answers, repeat back in your own words what you heard them say to prove that you're paying attention and thinking about what they told you. And then step number three will be one of two things. They can respond with yes, you understood correctly. Or they'll say no, you didn't understand what I was saying, which is good, because you can ask for clarification, and they will try to connect again with you and answer more clearly.

What we're doing in that moment is asking them for permission to acknowledge that we've been listening. And when we believe someone is listening to us, we become more willing to listen to them. E