Want to Talk Like a Pro? Learn from Harvard’s Alison Wood Brooks Now

Coming up next on Passion Struck.

So your question is, how can we think about the way that we communicate? How does that relate to us mattering? It's such a profound question. I think one thing that I've learned by doing this research and teaching this course about conversation is that our evidence to ourselves and to other people that we matter and that they matter, the place where that happens is so often During our conversations and in these little tiny moments where we make small choices that show, oh, I believe in myself, or I believe in you. And the difference between microkindnesses and microharms, sometimes when you're looking at a transcript, they look very subtle. But I think in the emotional experience of those interactions, the difference can be massive in terms of how much you are conveying that you believe that you matter. And how much you care about the other person and convey that they matter.

Welcome to Passion Struck. Hi, I'm your host, John R. Miles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now let's go out there and become passion-struck. Hi, I'm Alison Wood Brooks. I am absolutely thrilled today to bring you Dr. Alison Wood Brooks. Welcome, Alison.

Thank you so much for having me, John. I'm so happy to be here.

I've been looking so forward to this conversation. I got your book about 6 weeks ago, and it's just such an important topic that we're going to be getting in today. And the book, just so I can make it be the first thing we talk about, is titled Talk: The Science and Art of Conversation. Congratulations on its release.

Thank you so much. I'm really excited to share it with the world.

I love to start these episodes out by giving the audience some background. And you have had an incredible journey from Princeton to Wharton to now Harvard. What sparked your passion for behavior science and ultimately the study of conversations?

Oh my gosh, the story, the journey. Well, as an undergrad, I was very interested in— I thought I wanted to go to medical school originally. So I've long had a passion for humans and caring about people. And as an undergrad, I had the great privilege of taking courses from some really amazing behavioral scientists that made me fall in love with behavioral science. Rather than going to medical school, so I took the judgment and decision-making course with Danny Kahneman. I think it was the last time he ever taught it. He was co-teaching it at the time with Eldar Shafir, and I remember taking that class before Danny had won his Nobel Prize, and just thinking this is so fascinating. Like what an amazing way to come to understand each other and the world is through. Through the study of people. And so that was the beginning of my journey. I did some research internships in the summer as an undergrad at Columbia University and fell more and more deeply in love with it, decided that this was the life path for me. And I went to— I applied to grad school and went to Wharton and worked with Maurice Schweitzer and Katie Milkman. And Adam Grant. So in a way, just stumbled into this incredible milieu of behavioral scientists. And I studied people's feelings, mostly anxiety. Like, how can we come to understand why so many of us feel anxious so much of the time, and what can we do about it? Which then led me to my professorship at Harvard, where at the beginning I was recruited to teach negotiation. And presumably to do research on negotiation and people's emotions in negotiation. And after a couple years there, I started to get a little bit frustrated, and I realized I'm not sure I want to teach students who are already very strategic to be even more strategic. And it was this— coincided with this epiphany that for many decades, behavioral scientists had been studying difficult conversations. Mm-hmm. And all the way along, I had this niggling feeling like, well, but even conversations that seem like they should be easy are also very tricky, and we're making all kinds of mistakes. So let me see if I can figure out how we can do every conversation better. And that led me to a place of designing a new course called Talk at Harvard and eventually writing this book about that.

Well, I'm going to get to your course a little bit later, but I wanted to ask about one of the people you mentioned from Wharton, and that's Maurice Schweitzer, because as I was doing research on you, you happened to mention in another interview that collaborating with Maurice inspired you to pursue this path and part of the way that you teach. What was it about his approach that resonated with you and shaped your own teaching and research?

Oh, what a fabulous question, John. Maurice is one of the most amazing people and such a fantastic mentor. In fact, he's known as one of the best mentors in the field, and I was so lucky to benefit from that mentorship. He devoted so much attention and time to developing me as a scholar, and I— it was so incredibly helpful. And to this day, he's one of my best friends and continues to be a very valuable mentor. He spent a lot of time with me. We spent a lot of time in conversation. We spent a lot of time brainstorming. He taught me a lot about the importance of developing your taste for ideas. That there are a lot of people out there that can go through the motions of conducting behavioral science, but what might be the more rare skill is coming up with good ideas that touch on something real. And so I really, I had such a great privilege of working with Maurice.

Well, I love that. And that whole something that's real, I think, is very tangible. My son is right now going— he has an undergraduate in business and he's been pursuing another undergraduate in music production. And what I like— what I— and I know you're in a band, so he plays percussion and he does all the production for the band and also plays piano. But he can play— both our kids started playing piano, so they can play multiple instruments.

What a gift you have given to them to help them develop their musical skills. It's fabulous. My husband is a drummer, and we met playing in a band together, and we continue to play in a band together with a couple of my Harvard colleagues as well. So drummers are a special breed, John. They're very— at least for my husband, I always say he's like the heartbeat of our family. Really amazing.

Well, he keeps the beat. It's interesting, Josh went to a well-known middle school in Austin, Texas, and they had so many kids trying out for the band— I mean, this middle school band had 200 kids in it— that the only way they would allow someone to try out to be in percussion was if you had a background in piano. And he had never played before, started playing percussion, I, I think, in Maybe halfway through 6th grade, early 7th grade. And by the time he graduated middle school, he was the 5th chair in Texas. So—

Wow.

So just had an inherent talent for it. But where I was going with this is what I love about where he's going to school is all his exercises, he says, are extremely difficult, but they're making him do everything as if In the exercise, the people he's dealing with are actual clients, and they're treating it as if it's client interactions in the real world, which he really values because he thinks it's going to really help him longer down the road to be better at his craft.

Definitely. I love the idea that of just the fact that they're having them do it rather than just read about it or study about it or learn about something. This, it helps to close the, what we call the knowing-doing gap. Right? It's one thing to know something. It's a completely different thing to be able to do it in practice. And so the best way to learn how to close that knowing-doing gap is to actually practice doing it, which sounds like your son is getting to do in this class, which is fabulous. It's also what I do in my course at Harvard called Talk, which is— it's one thing to know what good conversation looks like. It's a completely other thing to be able to actually execute and do it. And so I put my students in lots of different situations to actually practice the art and the science of conversation in real time in a very safe and, I hope, loving environment in our classroom.

I absolutely love it. So—

Thanks.

Speaking of your classroom, you describe conversations as a coordination game that involves relentless micro-decisions. And when I think of micro-decisions, it's something that I talk about here on the podcast. I refer to them as microchoices. How does this perspective on microdecisions or microchoices help us better understand their role in fostering self-worth and meaningful conversations?

Oh, what a great question. We can definitely use your term. I like microchoices just as much as microdecisions. Well, we talked about this a little bit, John. Life is a series of moments. It's a series of microchoices. And what I realized in my research on conversation is that that's what we're doing when we're interacting with somebody else. It's just a series of hundreds of micro choices over time as every conversation unfolds. And if we can aim to make some of those choices just a little bit more effectively, because we talk to people so often and every day across every domain of our lives, in accumulation, If you can make some of those choices more effectively, that's going to have a massive impact on your life, on your career, on your family, on your love life, all of it. And so the whole sort of premise of this book is how can we learn to make some of those micro choices more effectively?

Well, it's a topic that is really important to me because when I was a young kid, I had a traumatic brain injury and it caused me to have speech impediments and I'd had some cognitive issues as well. And so I didn't want to use my voice because I was so worried about mispronouncing things, talking before I could think about things, or miscommunicating. And it's really been a deliberate focus of mine for decades to be able to communicate the way I do, but I still struggle, and I'm sure others who are listening do too. And this leads me to this question. We all have moments when we question whether we matter to others. How can being intentional about the way we communicate influence our sense of self-mattering?

Oh my goodness, what a profound question. First of all, thank you for sharing that with me. I think there are a lot of people who struggle with communication, and you're not alone in it. Actually, some of the people that I've talked to are people who are in the deaf community. also find that they work so hard at communicating that they too put such a value on developing it as a skill in the same way that it sounds like you've been working hard for much of your life to develop communication as a skill. So your question is, how can we think about the way that we communicate? How does that relate to us mattering? It's such a profound question. I think one thing that is, has I've learned by doing this research and teaching this course about conversation is that our evidence to ourselves and to other people that we matter and that they matter, the place where that happens is so often during our conversations and in these little tiny moments where we make small choices that show, oh, I believe in myself, or I believe in you. And the difference between, like, micro-kindnesses and micro-harms, sometimes when you're looking at a transcript, they look very subtle. But I think in the emotional experience of those interactions, the difference can be massive in terms of how much you are conveying that you believe that you matter and how much you care about the other person and convey that they matter.

Yeah, I mean, I have a couple good examples of this. Sometimes I am not the best, especially after I've worked all day, of keeping my attention span intact. And I know my fiancée is constantly all over me because I will tune out. And when you do that, you're really showing the person that perhaps they don't matter. And so for me, it's something that I really try to keep that focus there to make sure that the valuable time we have She does realize how much she matters to me. And I think another great example of this, I'll just use one from my, my past. I used to be a senior executive in Fortune 50 companies, and I had this role at Lowe's where I had just gotten to Lowe's. I inherited a group of people who had the lowest engagement scores in the entire company. And what I found was that Above all, they didn't feel like they mattered. They didn't matter to the mission. They didn't feel like they mattered to the customers. They didn't feel like anyone cared about them. And so one of the major things I did was I tried to have, I tried to treat the conversations I had with my employees as opportunities to affirm their value. How can someone who's listening to this use communication in their everyday life to intentionally show others that they matter?

Oh my goodness. Well, congratulations on being engaged. I heard the word fiancé in there. And I think you're right in sharing that story about coming home at the end of the day. And of course, we're tired when we get home. So there are going to be moments when you— it's hard to maintain continuous attention on another person. But we always have to remind ourselves that attention is a gift. Just Meeting the gaze of another person, listening to what they're saying, and giving them the gift of your attention is a way of showing that you care about them, you respect them, and that they matter to you. I've recently learned that, like many 40-somethings who were raised in a time when neurodivergence wasn't as diagnosed, I recently learned that I have ADHD. And so I, all my life, have also struggled with these moments when your mind is wandering. And it actually is quite effortful to keep your attention trained on another person and on the conversation. And even if you don't have ADHD, the human mind was built to wander. Our minds are very— our brains are really good at connecting ideas and brainstorming spontaneously and thinking about things. And so we should know that about ourselves. I think there's often this assumption that we are continuously and always listening, hanging on every word of every other person in the world. That's just really hard to achieve. And in our studies of people listening to each other in conversation, we've found that people's minds are actually wandering more than 25% of the time during conversation. And that's normal. You don't need to feel bad about it. However, because giving attention to someone else is a signal that they matter and that you care about them, we should work hard to repair these moments of inattentiveness. And so if you notice that your own mind is wandering, you can say, you can ask repair questions like, oh, hey, John, I felt like you asked a really good question, but I missed the second half of it. Could you repeat yourself? A repair question like that is a form of caring. It's saying, hey, I actually do want to hear what you said. And I missed it. It takes a little bit of courage to do that. It means that you have to admit openly that you missed something, that you made some sort of mistake. And that can take a little bit of courage and bravery. And then, of course, the greatest repair strategy of all is an apology, right? So saying, I'm so sorry, I didn't hear what you just said, but I really want to. Can we, can you just repeat that? Or can you help me out, help me understand what you were trying to say? These things can be very powerful for showing people that you care about them and you care about their perspective.

Yeah, thank you for sharing that. And I just want to mention to the audience, I've done 2 recent solo episodes on things that Alison brought up. Episode 531, I did a whole discussion on neurodiversity, and I— my focus for it was the topic of overcoming a lost mind. And I focused specifically in this one on bipolar, and I used the story of Andy Dunne in this. And then more recently, I did another episode, 543, on how to bridge the gap between knowing and doing. So Perfect. Both of them touch on behavior science and they're both further episodes you can tune into. So I want to go to your course because I, you can't do an interview with you without bringing up its name, How to Talk Better in Business and Life. It's both catchy and it's profound. And it's a class I wish I would've had at the Naval Academy because I think it would've helped us as officers. How did you come up with the idea for that name? And what surprises you the most when you're teaching this course?

It's funny, I often get invited to come and visit military training. So the Army War College and different military groups are very interested in this topic. I think they know how much communication matters and are realizing like, oh, there's people out there teaching it in a different way. The course that I teach at Harvard is called How to Talk Gooder in Business and Life, just as you said. It's lovingly referred to by the students as TALK, which is the acronym that we walk through in the book. But the How to Talk Gooder in Business and Life title feels like a great victory that I was able to both convince Harvard to let me use a title that seems silly alongside very serious courses like Capitalism in America and things like this. So that felt like a win. The Ellen Talk is levity. And so it's not a coincidence that the course title would have a sort of silly-seeming name. But it also is a double entendre, right? The word gooder. Also refers to the K in TALK, which is kindness. How can we be good? How do we strive to be the best and most good that we can be through our conversations? And so there is, there's a sort of a double meaning in there, and I feel very proud of it.

You've described conversation as more than just an exchange of words. It's a tool for, as I would say, creating mattering and building trust. And I remember interviewing Angela Duckworth and I was talking to her about the lens I talk a lot about, which is intentionality. And for her, that really equates to the study of self-control in the work that she does. How does, whether you call it intentionality or self-control, play a role in helping us transform everyday conversations into something that's more meaningful?

Fabulous question. Well, when we think as a scientist and as a teacher, when you think about trying to teach people to have more effective conversations, it raises this question of what does success even mean in conversation? And what you quickly realize is that success is a very complicated question in any domain, but particularly in conversation, and it has to be determined by the people involved. I don't march in and tell them what they should care about, but rather let's think very deeply about what we are aiming to achieve, what we're aiming to do with our words in our interactions with other people. What are our intentions? If we can think a little bit more about that before the conversation happens, and then afterwards you have much more, you have more clarity to assess, well, did we achieve those things? And so in the book, we outline a framework to help people think about what their goals are in conversation. Every conversation you have at least one goal, otherwise you wouldn't bother having the conver— you wouldn't bother talking to the other person at all. Even if that goal is just to have fun or just to be polite, someone wanders up to you and they start talking to you and you feel like it would be rude to not talk back. That means your goal is politeness and upholding the very basic expectation to respond to somebody. But usually when we have conversations, our system of goals is much more complex than that. We hold many goals at once, and some of those will align with our conversation partner's goals, and some of them will conflict. For example, so we use this framework called the conversational compass. It has 2 axes. The x-axis is relational. At the high end of the relational axis, these are goals that reach for things Like trust and showing someone that they matter. So things that serve the relationship and serve the other person. At the low end of the relational spectrum, these are self-focused goals, things that serve yourself. They are not intrinsically bad. They're not evil. It's just the fact of life that every person has their own needs. And so we're constantly navigating this relational axis. Then the y-axis is informational. And at the high end of the informational axis, these are goals that reach for accurate information exchange. It's the most obvious purpose of communication is that we're trying to exchange information with each other. It's why humans evolved the ability to communicate and use our words. So this is things like learning, teaching, brainstorming, persuading, making a decision, very highly information-rich motives that people hold in conversation. But let's not forget that there's a low informational end of that y-axis of that spectrum. We hold all kinds of motives that are not related to exchanging accurate information exchange at all. So things like filling time, having fun, keeping secrets, protecting privacy— these are goals that are not about exchanging accurate information. Sometimes it's about concealing accurate information, or maybe it's not about information exchange at all. And these goals also matter. So we, in my course, use this compass to help plot our goals for any given interaction, to get more sense around Well, what do I care about and what are my top priorities? What do I really want to achieve in this interaction? Then you go off, you have your conversation, and after it's ended, you can look back and say, oh, my number one goal was to learn about John's history in the military. Did I achieve that goal? Did I ask him enough questions about that topic? Were we able to do that? So it gives you a tool to assess how you did. Now, here's the tricky part. And this is part of why conversation is just so darn hard. No matter how much you work to understand your intentions and go into an interaction with intentionality, you don't have perfect control over everything because there's another person involved. And at any moment in the conversation, they could say something that completely changes your own conversational compass. And completely changes their conversational compass. Imagine if all of a sudden I said, John, I was also in the military and I didn't like it. All of a sudden you've learned something about me that we now really need to unpack, right? And you didn't know that ahead of time. I wasn't really in the military, but just as an example, they can say something that changes the dynamic of the conversation, shifts everybody's goals, and we need to be ready to be nimble. And adjust to those, to that new reality. And that's what makes conversation so hard.

Yeah, I remember, especially as I was in meetings and trying to sway people's minds, or if I'm on sales calls, especially if I'm meeting someone for the first time or first couple of times, I'm, I used to do all kinds of research and I would keep interesting facts about them that I could use. to prepare for the meeting that if something came up, I could give a tidbit to let them know that I did my homework, which would cause them to warm up, feel like I was making them matter, and it 99% of the time produced a much better outcome.

John, you're talking about topic prep. That's one of my favorite things. We talk about it a lot in the book. This is something that people do that is such a great life hack for showing people that you care about them and that they matter is that you've thought about them away from the conversation. You thought about them ahead of time. So in our research, what we find is even 30 seconds of forethought before a conversation starts will help you brainstorm topics and thoughts that can show the other person that you were thinking about them and that they matter to you. So even 30 seconds and you jot down just 1 or 2 things. Oh yeah, last time we talked, he told me that he worked for Lowe's. I want to revisit that. I want to go back and say, by the way, how was it? How was it to work for Lowe's? How long did you work there? And who were your favorite coworkers? What were they like? So just a little moment like that where you remember what you talked about last time or what they've been doing in the time between or what they have coming up and jotting down a couple of ideas can make your conversation much more effective once you're in the conversation itself. You're a very good topic prepper, John, but more people could be like you.

Another thing I just was thinking of is I've been doing a lot of conversations recently on spirituality and intuition. How does our intuition play a role in how we should approach a conversation?

Oh, so this is good. It's related to this idea of topic prep, right? Because in every— and in most tasks in our lives, but certainly conversation, there you have to strike the right balance between Preparation ahead of time versus intuitive, improvisational decision-making in the moment. And the same is true in conversation. You want to put enough prep in to show people that you were thinking about them when you were apart, and that you've prepped some topics, and that you have thought about your intentionality and what you'd like to get out of the conversation. But once you're there, you need to let things go and be in the moment and rely on your more intuitive judgment, what psychologists would we call System 1 thinking. And so striking the balance between the two is really key. Now, many of us end up relying too heavily on our intuitive judgment. We don't prep topics. We don't think about what our goals are. We just bump into people randomly in the world, and then we wing it. And our research suggests that is also not the right equilibrium. You should be both preparing ahead of time and feeling comfortable improvising in the moment to become the best conversationalists that you can be. We call this the myth of naturalness. When we see other people who are really great at conversation, often we believe that they're just born that way and that they have amazing intuition and amazing intuitive judgment about how to behave in the moment. When in fact, what you can't see is all of the stuff that's happening under the surface for them. You don't see the many years when they were working hard to develop a skill, or like you, John, working to overcome some sort of challenge in their communicative abilities, you don't see in the moment how hard they're working, listening so intently to what you're saying and thinking about how they can relate it to some other idea. All of that work is invisible. And so we come to believe, oh, this is just easier for some people than others. And maybe I'm not naturally gifted at it. The truth is the best conversationalists work hard at it, and they probably have worked hard at it for a long time.

Thank you for sharing that, Alison. And I wanted to get into the heart of your book. The title of your book, Talk, is not only a title, it's a framework and a game changer for conversations. So I want to have you break down topics, asking, levity, and kindness, because to me, It feels like a guide to creating conversations that matter. Could you go over each component and how it helps someone foster self-mattering and making others feel seen?

Absolutely. Thank you. That's very nice, positive feedback, John. So T is for topics. Topics are— let me just say the maxims to start, and then I'll dive into each one. T is for topics. A is for asking. L is for levity, and K is for kindness. So let me break down each one of those briefly. T is for topics. Is really, we know that conversation, we have to choose topics in conversation. But most of us think about, oh, what are we going to open with? What is our opener? What's the first topic? Or what's the most important topic? When in fact, a helpful mindset shift can be to realize that you're choosing topics every time you're speaking. We're making these little micro moves to steer topics, and we're asking ourselves, should we stay on this topic or should we move to something else? Should we drift gently to something else or should we jump cut to something extremely different? Should we call back to something we talked about earlier or should we move elsewhere? And we're making these sort of small moves every time we speak, and our partner's making these small moves every time they speak as well. So managing, we can all learn to manage topics more effectively. We should be thinking about how the topics we choose can serve our intentions, our goals. So if my goal is to ask you for advice, I need to work up the courage to actually ask you for advice. If I forget to ask you for advice, I probably haven't served the goal that I was looking to achieve in that conversation. If I want to make you laugh, I need to raise topics that are going to be fun to talk about to make you laugh. So whatever your goals are, your topics should follow along with your intentions. And just realizing that we're making these choices all the time. Now, a very important piece of advice is that people tend to stagnate too long on topics. And it's better on average to, as soon as you feel like a topic is losing its juice, to switch to something new and fresh and different to keep everybody engaged because mutual engagement matters so much. And on that note, I will switch topics to A is for Asking. A is for Asking underscores how important question asking is in all of our conversations. Asking questions might be— is one of the most powerful tools we have available to us in our toolkit. It's the best and most direct way to lure out the contents of another person's mind. In the context of this conversation we're having, John, you're expected to ask me questions, but I can also break norms and ask you questions, which might make the conversation even more interactive and interesting. In the book, we talk about the power of asking more questions to understand other people's minds and to make them feel like they matter. But we also talk about the types of questions and the patterns of questions that are most effective. And so I'll just hint at 2 of them. One is follow-up questions. Once someone has shared something about themselves, it's so important to ask another question after that, to show that you heard them, to show that you care about them, and that you want to learn more. So follow-up questions are superheroes. And then the second great pattern of question asking that I would recommend would be open-ended questions. So closed and open questions all have a place in conversation, but open-ended questions are the ones that we Remember. So if I say to you, John, what was your episode about bipolar? What was the most meaningful thing about that episode to you? What did you learn? And then you'd give me an answer. I don't actually want to go there right now. But if that kind of question, if I were to let you answer and we let the conversation go there, it's the kind of thing that you would remember, right? It would allow you to share your perspective, something that you learned. I would ask you follow-up questions about it. And that would become very meaningful. So open-ended questions are an amazing tool for that. The best open-ended questions often start with the word what. Why questions can feel a bit accusatory. So like, why did you do an episode about neurodivergence? Can feel a bit accusatory as opposed to, what were the things you learned the most about that from that episode? Feels less threatening and So follow-up questions and open-ended questions that start with the word what are very good ideas. Do more of them in our conversations. Moving to levity.

Well, before you go to levity, can I ask you a superhero follow-up question?

Please, yes.

So in the book, you were talking in this chapter, you've got a subsection, What's with All the Questions? And you mentioned that some of the kids especially where you teach, are from other countries. And so when they're dealing in our culture, they don't know what is too many questions, etc. And you go into this whole thing about speed dating, which caught my eye. But the fundamental question you're trying to answer here, is there a tipping point when many questions become too many? Can you maybe explain this speed dating example as a way to answer that?

Sure. Yeah. When you start to get into the idea of, hey, it's better to ask more questions, a very natural follow-up question is, well, is there a tipping point? When does lots of questions become too many questions? When does it get annoying or feel interrogative or intrusive? And so the speed— we use the speed dating data as an example of a very cooperative context. So speed dating is where strangers get together, they might have 4 or 5 minutes to get to know each other, and they haven't met before. In that sort of context, you have so much to learn about each other, you need to find out where they're from, what they Like, where did they go to school? What are their hobbies? What are their families like? There's just so much to learn about each other that we actually never see a tipping point in the number of questions. You can't possibly ask too many questions in a very cooperative context like speed dating. We just never see it. It just never gets annoying because you have so much to learn. Now, when we start to think about more conflictual contexts, So let's say a negotiation or maybe a feedback meeting to someone at work. We do see instances where there is a tipping point where you can ask too many questions, where someone starts to feel defensive. There's information they don't want to share with you, or are you going to use— why are you asking me so many questions? Are you going to use my answers to exploit me later? So people are just a little bit more guarded in those contexts, but even there, even in the most intense negotiations or the most conflictual contexts, what surprised us in the data is that the tipping point where lots of questions becomes too many questions is way further out than you would think. The bigger risk in any context is not asking enough questions. Walking away and having asked 0 or 1 or 2 questions the whole time is a much more common mistake than asking too many. So there is a tipping point when people have conflict, but it's— we should think less about that and think more about the silent killer of conversation, which is not asking enough.

Thanks for going there. And now I'll let you go to levity.

Let's go to levity. Let's go. When you say go to levity, I imagine us like sledding down a hill or riding a balloon into the air because levity is a very fun place. It's a place we need to go in our conversations. It's these moments of sparkle and bubble and fizz that keep things fun and engaging. And they're so very important.

They are. And I was listening to another episode that you did on another podcast, and I would have frozen in my shoes because the first question they asked you was to tell a dad joke.

That was an intimidating moment. I didn't— I actually, I ruminated about that afterwards because I did feel very put on the spot about, tell me a joke. And I was like, oh, I wish I had prepared.

Yeah, that seems like one that the host should have reached out to you beforehand to let you know, because even if I had one, when you're put on the spot like that, it's so hard to just produce it.

I know, exactly. I hope I did a good tap dance in that moment. I think I did come up with something, didn't I? It was probably quite bad.

You talked about your kids and you Said you'd been reading a lot of books around Halloween, and so you turned it into a Halloween-themed joke.

Oh, how cute. Actually, yeah, the problem is we read a lot of these joke books together with my kids, but they love them so much that they memorize the jokes and then I don't because I rely on the kids to say them to me. They recite them back. So anyway, it was quite the memory challenge, but I appreciated it because they started from a place of levity. So levity in the book and in my class, what we talk about is so many conversations go off the rails for obvious reasons, where people— there's hostility, there's confrontation, there's disagreement. These are very obvious, loud problems, and they exist and they are very important. But there's a more quiet killer of conversation, and that's boredom. Boredom and disinterest are real, can be really problematic in conversation. It might be even more pervasive than the sort of loud louder problems of hostility and disagreement. And so levity is the antidote for boredom. It's the way that we pull each other back in. We— it's moments of humor, laughter, and warmth that just pull you back in enough so that we can maintain this feeling of sustained engagement with each other, and really to go on and accomplish any of our goals, whether they're silly or serious. And a conversation devoid of levity It's going to be very hard for people to maintain the engagement that you need to just enjoy life and enjoy each other and trust each other.

Follow-up question to that is one of the things that caught my eye in this chapter. One of the things that you write about is callbacks. And you say in your class, you ask students to identify their favorite person in the world to talk to, and then you ask them to initiate a new conversation with them and record it. Why were callbacks such an interesting aspect of what you found out from that?

Well, you've been talking about making people feel like they matter. And boy, if there's anything that makes people feel like they matter, it's callbacks. Callbacks are any time you reference back to something that someone has said earlier in the conversation or earlier in your relationship. They're such a fabulous, undeniable indicator that you've listened to somebody. The only way you can do it is if you heard someone earlier in the conversation, you held it in your mind, and then you're clever enough to raise it later. The other bonus, the other lovely thing about callbacks is that they're almost always funny because it's this sort of moment, witty moment, where it's like a little surprising and just feels like a hug that like someone was listening enough to you that they would call it back later. I work with an improv company called Freestyle Plus. It's a company that's been spun out from a Broadway show called Freestyle Love Supreme.

And I do improv too, and I've done freestyle and I've done long form and short form and—

Amazing. Well, you'll love this. So the guys who come and visit my class are Anthony Veneziale and Sammy Wiegand, who are the CEOs, co-CEOs and founders of Freestyle Plus. They helped to originate this Broadway show called Freestyle Love Supreme together with Lin-Manuel Miranda. This was before Hamilton times, before In the Heights. And this Broadway show is fully freestyle rap. And so they've got a live beatboxer. They interact with the crowd. They ask crowd questions like, what's the hardest— what's a hard thing you've been going through in your life? And then they get up on stage and they freestyle rap and retell the whole story. Then they tell it backwards. Then they tell it again with a different ending. All the whole time, just freestyle rapping. It's the most amazing thing that I've, like, ever witnessed with my eyes that human beings can do on stage. So these guys come to my class at Harvard and work with my students to workshop their improvisational chops. And this year, what we were working on in particular were the students' ability to use callbacks. And so we designed a new game where you practice doing callbacks. So you start by having a conversation about any topic of your choosing. And the goal is to latch on to something specific that your partner has said from earlier in the conversation. So for example, in this one, John said he knows Angela Duckworth and he's talked to her before. And when he talked to her about intentionality, her focus was on self-control. And so I'm now calling back to that moment that John was talking about my friend and his friend Angela. And her focus on self-control. The only way I can do that is because I was listening really intently to what you had to say, and that I care about you. I care about your ideas. And I thought that was a really nice point. And so we can all do this anytime. And knowing that callbacks are possible actually leads people to listen a little bit differently. It helps you to stay attentive, even when your mind is built to wander. And it, because, oh, I'm on the lookout for stuff that I'll be able to call back to later. Little details, little funny phrases, good ideas that are worthy of bringing up again. And it helps you to maintain your engagement in the conversation. Often when we think of very charismatic conversationalists, actually, these are the kinds of things that they do. They use callbacks. Just like you were saying, when people think of their favorite conversationalist and then they give them a call, they very quickly realize, oh, they're just calling back to stuff that we experienced together in the past. And that feels so good. It feels like it's kind, it brings levity, and it just shows that they care about you and that you matter.

And another way to do that is through active listening, which is one of the most powerful ways to show kindness.

Yes. Yes. So this is our final maxim. We made it to the K. K is for kindness and a huge emphasis in this in this chapter on kindness is about listening. So there've been decades of work on active listening. So things like nodding and smiling and using nonverbal cues to show someone that you've heard them, eye contact, leaning forward. This is all really great. It's the basics of being a good listener. What we've uncovered more recently in our research on conversation is that the best conversationalists go a level beyond active listening. They don't just use their nonverbals to show their partner that they matter and that they're being heard. Because those things can be faked sometimes. They also use their words. They use verbal cues to show that they've heard someone. Verbal cues, unlike nodding and smiling, verbal cues can't be faked. The only way that I can call back to something that you said earlier, the only way that I can ask a follow-up question, the only way that I can repeat back something that I just heard you say and validate your feelings about it, is if I heard you say it in the first place. So here's the advice. This is what this means for all of us. Put in the hard work to listen to people. But if you do, if you put in that hard work to be attentive to the people in front of you, make sure that you show it. Make sure that you show the person that you've heard them by using your words, by saying it out loud. Hey, I just heard you say this. Am I hearing you right? Or, hey, I just heard you say that. That was really great. Hey, remember when you talked about Angela Duckworth and her emphasis on self-control? I thought that was a really nice point. point. So these verbal cues that you heard someone are so very powerful and should definitely be part of your listening toolkit.

Well, I love that we're ending there. And Alison, your work really highlights that every conversation is an opportunity to matter and to help others feel like they matter. And I really hope listeners today can carry this mindset into their daily lives. And we just touched on the surface of your book, So I'd encourage them to buy a copy of it. It's going to be one of those that you're constantly going to refer back to. And if I were a bit younger, I'd try to go and either audit or take your class because it sounds so interesting.

Oh, I would love to have you, John. And thank you so much for having me on your podcast. It's just such an honor to be here. Thank you.

And Alison, last question is, where's the best place people should go to learn more about you?

Oh, great. So my website is alisonwoodbrooks.com. There's all the ordering and pre-ordering information about the book, which comes in a hardback copy and Kindle and an audiobook. So if you don't have time to read books, I'm with you. I hear you. And you can listen to it on walks and runs around your neighborhood. All the information you need is there about my research and about the book and about the course, and I'd love to connect.

Well, thank you so much for joining me today. It was such an honor to have you.

Thanks for having me, John. You're awesome.