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Every time the front door of my gym swings open and a member breezes into the space, the entrance staff cries out “Have a great workout!” Five years into giving limp waves in return, I bellied up to the desk and asked the staffers how they were doing.
Thus began my weeklong experiment in being one of the “supercommunicators”. My bible was bestselling author Charles Duhigg’s zippy psychology cum self-help book of the same name. Inspired by his own chagrin at being a less than sterling conversational partner – with his children, wife, and employees at his former workplace – he committed himself to learning how to talk to others in a way that makes them feel heard.
Ever since the Work From Home era hit us, pining for conversation has been something of a lost cause. A 2023 surgeon general report on the social epidemic sweeping the US warned that the consequences of loneliness can be equivalent to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. The Time Use survey from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that 38% of Americans socialized or communicated with friends in 2003. That number was down by 10 percentage points in 2021.
But Duhigg has found that a small cohort of gifted individuals can cut through the doom and gloom. Supercommunicators are rarely the most dynamic people in the room. They are the normies who are blessed with the ability to make those around them feel truly understood. The benefits aren’t only altruistic. Supercommunicators are scarily good at getting what they want.
Duhigg’s conversations with neurologists, psychologists, and negotiation experts led him to learn that superior conversationalists have a lot in common. They tend to open up and share information about their own experiences and feelings, laugh freely, and ask 20 times more questions than the average person. It’s a skill that can be observed and measured, thanks to brain imaging technology that looks for matching electrical pulses. When individuals are truly in sync, their eyes tend to dilate in tandem, and their pulses match. “This is called neural entrainment, and it feels wonderful,” Duhigg writes.
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