Ask The Expert – How to have conversations that matter

Sarah Ellis:  Hello.  Thanks for listening to the Squiggly Careers podcasts.  I'm Sarah Ellis, one of your co-hosts, and this is the first in our next series of the Ask the Expert interviews.  Today, you're going to hear my conversation with radio host and author, Celeste Headlee.

I got in touch with Celeste because I love her TED talk, which is called Ten Ways to Have Better Conversations.  It's something I recommend all the time, and it turns out I'm not her only fan as her talk has actually had more than 23 million views.

So, I just got in touch with her out of the blue and just said, "I'd love to talk to you about having conversations about how we can have better conversations and what that looks like".  She very generously, I suspect not really knowing who we were or what we do, just said yes, which I really appreciated.

She is brilliant to talk to because she's a great example of an expert practitioner who's taken all of her insights and her knowledge, added to that with academic rigorous research, and then made her ideas really practical and helpful for us all to learn from; so very in keeping I think with Squiggly Careers and what we're trying to do.  So I hope that listening to our conversation today helps you to have better conversations.  I'll be back at the end to let you know what's next.

Celeste, thank you so much for joining us today on the Squiggly Careers podcast.  I'm really looking forward to our conversation together.

Celeste Headlee: I am too.  Thanks for having me.

Sarah Ellis: You're really welcome.  So I'm going to dive straight in with conversations, very much part of our everyday lives; you talk about the fact that they are uniquely human, they're part of who we are and what we do, and they are so critical for how we build relationships and yet I have rarely seen it be a skill that gets lots of appreciation or really invested in within a work context.  Why do you think that is?  From all the research that you've done, the people that you've spoken to, to me there seems to be this gap between recognising their importance and then perhaps doing anything about.

Celeste Headlee: There are a couple of things going on here; you're absolutely correct, in fact one survey of all the business journals found that listening, for example, was one of the top rated abilities, between academics and executives, and yet the subject of listening came up maybe 1% of the time in these business journals.

So, yeah, we seem to recognise the importance and yet don't spend any time working on them.  So there are a few things going on; the first one is that we don't think it's our responsibility.  In other words, research shows that more than four out of five people say that a bad conversation, or bad communication, played a role in trashing or crashing a relationship at some point, but fewer than one out of five think it was their fault.  You can do the maths; it doesn't work!

So, yeah, we tend to think that when a conversation goes wrong, it was the fault of the other person, and that means we're never going to work on our conversational skills; we're always going to assume the other person has work to do and complain about what they did wrong.

There are a few other things going on as well.  For example, the smarter you are the worse you are in conversation; and again, the smarter you are the more your confidence goes up; but possibly, because of that, your conversational skills go down; you're less likely to listen to other people, for example.  You know a lot of things and so you approach conversations as a way for you to relay the information that you have. 

Human beings, I mean our species, Homo sapiens, we automatically rank people and decide where we are in the social pecking order; so we, somewhere in our brains, have ranked everyone in relation to us, and if someone is of lower rank than us we don't listen to them.  So it requires effort in order to make sure that you're not only improving your listening skills, but also recognising that you need to.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah.  It sounds like it's a combination of both effort and also, if we're being really honest with ourselves, I was listening to you there talking about that ranking, which feels intuitively uncomfortable, but I suspect what we all do, whether we know or not; and there's a bit of letting go of ego I suspect as well as part of this because you mention a few times around, with conversations, so often we want to make it about us, we want to do the talking rather than the listening. 

So I thought, if we're going to take this really seriously today, and I think preparing for a conversation with someone who's an expert in conversations, was one of the more intimidating things that I've had to do this year, so I was thinking, "Right, what do I do that hinders rather than helps quality conversations?"  So I thought I'm going to share one with you, Celeste, and see if you can help me with my one.

I think one of the things that I have a tendency to do is that, when I'm talking to someone, I come up with lots of new ideas, and so I get distracted by, and actually can then derail a conversation, with those new ideas.  So it then means that the focus shifts; it then means that perhaps what's important about that conversation gets lost.  It's because I naturally love coming up with ideas and I like making connections between different things, but then when I really think about that, I'm not sure that always serves that conversation, or that's not always I think what matters most in that moment, but because it pops into my head I end up saying it.  So I feel like I then lose the focus and the brevity, and probably ultimately the usefulness, of what that conversation was originally intended for, because of this tendency to add in new stuff I think all of the time.

Celeste Headlee: Yeah, there are a couple of things.  You can think of it this way: the way that you are describing your conversations, as though you're speeding by at 75 miles an hour on the highway, so signs are coming and zooming by, "Vroom, vroom", and those are like your thoughts.  So you're not really taking in any of the scenery; you're not really understanding any of the cities that you pass by.

What you want instead of this horizontal conversation is a vertical conversation, and that requires you to stop the car.  So you just have to let the signs go, flash by you, and then return yourself to listening.  And, frankly, this requires training; you literally have to train your brain to do it to where it becomes a habit so that, by the time you come back, your thought comes in, you tell your brain, "No, no, no; let's go back to listening", and then you return to listening.  That, ultimately, will take you less than a second; it will be very, very quick.

Sarah Ellis: I really love that metaphor of you are missing out on the scenery by just keeping going, and actually losing an opportunity to really explore and to have a more meaningful conversation with someone.  I think you've almost got to choose to think, "I want to improve the quality of my conversations and my listenings", because it's not just going to happen.

Celeste Headlee: Right, no, it doesn't happen.  It's very much like working out at the gym.  I give keynote speeches all over the world and I always warn people, "Listen, you're going to get fired up, but you're not going to be able to say 'Okay, from now on, I'm going to be a great listener', and then walk out of this ballroom and you're a great listener; that's not how that works".  It doesn't work that way to go to the gym, have a really great workout and say, "Okay, done for the rest of my life!"  It's going to be a discipline.  You've got to get back on that treadmill every single day.  You can't think of it as though you're gaining knowledge; you have to think of it as though you are actually practising an ability.

Sarah Ellis: You include in your book actually a great quote from Stephen Covey where he says, "Most people do not listen with the intent to understand".  I was really interested in your work in terms of, as you've described, we've got to break this habit of hearing, and replace it with active listening, with really listening.  I just wondered if you could expand a little bit on, in your experience, what does that look like, feel like?  I know that you've also worked really hard on this for yourself despite being a real expert in the area, so perhaps we could just bring to life a little bit more what active listening is like in practice when we start to really practise it.

Celeste Headlee: Frankly, I am still working on it.  When I say that you don't just learn how to listen and then you're good for the rest of your life, it really is always going to be a work in progress.  There are different levels of listening, as you say. 

We say "active listening" but let me give you some even more specific ways to think about how we listen.  For example, there's evaluative listening; that's when listening is actually you see it as somebody else's responsibility, it's when you respond with judgement or respond with, "Was that correct or incorrect?"  In order words, you're listening only long enough to decide whether you agree with what this person's saying and then you hear no more; you're just waiting to tell them what they got right or what they got wrong.  That's the lowest level of listening.  It's frankly the listening the vast majority of people engage in.

Then there's interpretative listening; that's when you're actively trying to understand what someone's saying, but only to the extent that you want to give feedback.  Then there's the final level, which is transformative listening, and that's kind of listening in which you're engaged to such an extent that you'd actually be willing to change your mind, to have an exchange of ideas, to entertain a different perspective and accept that that other perspective is as valid as yours whether you agree with it or not.  Transformative listening is what you always should be aiming for.  It's called transformative because you are open to the idea that the listening could transform you. 

The thing for me is like, research shows that in fact when you're in a conversation, the less you talk the more you enjoy the conversation; it's an inverse ratio.  This was research that was done just a couple of years ago, and I'll quote directly from the report, they said, "People enjoyed their conversations more when they spoke a smaller proportion of the time".

You see the difficulty here.  We get these shots of dopamine every time we talk, or talk about ourselves; dopamine is the addiction hormone.  It gives you a very short-term burst of energy and pleasure in your brain.  It's what you get in your brain when you take a shot of heroin. 

The longer term pleasure, the kind of pleasure that can actually reap benefits for years, if not for the rest of your life, are the ones that bring shots of serotonin and oxytocin.  Those are the hormones that are associated with the love of your family or cuddling a dog.  Those are the kind of reactions you get in your body when you feel a sense of belonging, when the social interaction that you have actually makes you feel you belong there and you belong to part of a community.

Sarah Ellis: There was a specific technique, if that's the right word to use, that you mentioned in the book when you're talking about empathy.  When you were talking about empathy you make the distinction between what you call a "shift response" and a "support response" when you're having a conversation and trying to build empathy.  I wonder if you could just explain that for our listeners so they can understand the difference and how it's useful in terms of building empathetic relationships?

Celeste Headlee: The shift response is one in which we shift attention back to ourselves.  I should say all of this, these terms, and the research that underlies them, came from a sociologist named Charles Derber.  He wrote a book called The Pursuit of Attention.  He's talking about, in that book, a phenomenon called "conversational narcissism".  Now, that sounds really scary, but really what he's just saying is that most of us are very talented and skilled at turning the attention back to ourselves.  It's partly because the subject of ourselves is very comfortable and familiar, and it's familiar ground, we know what we're talking about,; but it's also because attention feels really good.

So, a shift response is one in which somebody says something, they say, "Oh, I'm going to take my dog for a walk this afternoon", and you say, instead of saying, "Oh, do you take your dog for a walk every day; how far are you going to go; what kind of dog do you have?" instead, you shift the attention to yourself by saying, "Oh, I have a dog too, and I take her for a walk twice a day, morning and then in the afternoon".  That's a shift response.

The support response is the one I gave an example of earlier, "What kind of dog do you have; how often do you walk your dog; where do you walk?"  Those are all ones in which you're supporting the statement that they just made, and I probably don't need to tell you which one most of us do!  We tend to shift attention back to ourselves. 

This is something Charles Derber also talked about, is that sometimes we're subtle about it; sometimes we shift attention simply by withholding supportive energy.  So, for example, somebody would say, "Oh, I'm going to take my dog for the walk in the afternoon", and you say, "Huh", and they say, "Yeah, she's an active breed and so she needs more exercise", and you say, "Yeah".  Then they say, "Oh, do you have a dog?"  So, we're just withholding energy until they shift it back to us.  That's also a way that we do this.

Sarah Ellis: I do think sometimes people do it with a -- you think you're perhaps creating connection, so you mistake a shared experience because somebody tells you something's happened to them and you think, "Oh, that happened to me". 

Actually, it was one of the things that I really had to learn when I was training to be a coach and to make that transition in my career, one of the things that you often feel in the moment is useful, or helpful to somebody as part of a coaching conversation, is to say, "I've experienced something similar; I had a difficult manager, or I've been made redundant", but what I started to learn is the minute you do that, you do shift the conversation to make it all about you; you've stopped making it about the person that you're trying to support. 

Often actually, you stop people being able to confront things that are really challenging because you've given them a different way to take the conversation, and you've actually got to really stick with what it is somebody's trying to talk to you about.  It's a real skill, isn't it?  I think you said this actually in your TED talk, perhaps it's one of your first tips around just curiosity, almost approaching every conversation with curiosity and always assuming that you've got something to learn, just that idea of if you started every conversation just with that perspective and that point of view, that would be really powerful.

Celeste Headlee: I agree.  I've sometimes toyed around whether or not I would want to issue to people a little journal that they could carry with them that they could just mark down what they learned in each conversation they had; because, if you make it your goal not to leave a conversation until you've learned something, it just shifts your whole perspective. 

We spend too much time focused on what we're going to say, and we really don't spend any time focusing on what we're going to hear, and yet what we hear is much more transformative than what we say.  You already know everything you're going to say; you're not going to surprise yourself with anything that comes out of your mouth; and frankly, let's be honest with each other here, a lot of the stories we all tell, we've told before.  We tend to tell the same stories over and over again, so come on, focus on the part of the conversation that actually might change you, that actually might help you and enlighten you and inform you.  That's the part of the conversation that you're hearing.

Sarah Ellis: I am interested to know, because I am sure, like me, over the course of everybody's career, you have those conversations that you dread, and those hard conversations are so important because that's where we understand other people who've got probably different points of view to us; that's where we can build empathy. 

You've had, during the course of your career, conversations with so many different people, and some of those, and certainly the ones you describe in your book, sounded really difficult maybe because people have got a very different point of view to you; they were just tough or hard to speak to in some way.  How can people have those tough conversations and not shy away or get overly aggressive?

Celeste Headlee: Most of the stuff we've already talked about, Sarah, will help you.  In other words, focusing on what you want to learn from the other person will naturally lead you to ask questions more than make statements.  We know that the more questions you ask the more the other person enjoys the conversation. 

Let me give you some very practical tips on how to get through these conversations.  Number one: if you allow someone to feel proud, a sense of pride at the beginning of a conversation, it makes it more likely that they will be open-minded and open to being wrong, open to new information.

So, sometimes I'm completely blatant about this, and I will say, "Listen, here's what the research says, so let's start there; tell me about the best thing that's happened to you in the past month; brag for me for a second and tell me about something you're really proud of".  That works very reliably.

You can get through these difficult conversations in a number of ways, but again, I want to give people actionable tips that they can actually use.  So, for example, in order to get through a difficult conversation, this might surprise you, but you can use affirmations.  I realise that a lot of people have a wonky view of affirmations, it seems like the kind of thing you'd do for self-help or whatever that may be, but in fact it's pretty surprising how effective self-affirmations are at actually carving new neural pathways in our brains.

So, in other words, you can use affirmations to retrain your brain so that when you get negative feedback you don't have a defensive response, but you have a productive response.  You can use them as a way to shift your brain from retaliation when you are criticised, to questioning and curiosity.

So, whatever it is that is most difficult for you over the course of a difficult conversation, and this is the first step obviously, becoming aware of what you're like in these conversations, what is it you struggle with?  Do you become defensive?  Do you not like getting negative feedback?  Are you a tone police person, in order words are you worried about the way someone phrases something rather than the meat of their message?  Whatever it is that you struggle with, write yourself an affirmation to diffuse that bomb, and repeat it in your head. 

As the conversation begins to become difficult, you can take a breath, you can tell the person, "Give me just a moment to think this through", and repeat your affirmation to yourself.  "I'm here to listen to this other person, I don't need them to like me, but they may have an insight that will be of use to me so I'm going to listen without judging; I'm going to do all this".  Whatever your affirmation is that works for you, use it, and when you finish the conversation, use it again.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah.  It's so clear.  The more I listen to you talk today, and the more I've explored your work and all the research your work has led me to, the more you realise just how much of a work in progress this is going to be, because it's almost day in, day out you're going to have examples where everything that we've talked about today will be relevant; are you building empathy; are you approaching conversations with curiosity; how do we make sure we don't fall back into those bad habits of hearing rather than really listening and just waiting for our chance to speak?

So, Celeste, we ask all of our guests on the Squiggly Careers podcast just to finish our conversation today by sharing your best piece of career advice for our listeners.  So this could be advice that you've been given that's just been really useful for you, it can be your own advice, or it could be specific to career advice for improving people's conversations, whatever feels right and relevant to you at the moment.

Celeste Headlee: So my second book that came out this year was called Do Nothing, so the advice that I want to give you comes mostly from that research, which is, you're okay.  In all these conversations that we have about how to improve yourself, how to be better, leave yourself time to be and don't always be improving; sometimes be.  That would be the best advice I could give.

Sarah Ellis: Thanks for listening to today's episode.  I hope you found my conversation with Celeste useful.  As always, we'd love to know what you think.  You can get in touch with us on Instagram where we're just @amazingif, or you can always connect with Helen or me on LinkedIn.

If you do have a spare five minutes, I know everyone says this, but it is helpful if you get a chance to rate and review the podcast if you've not already.  And if you have bought our book, the Squiggly Career, and you get chance to leave us a rating, you don't even need to write a review on Amazon, that would also be something we'd really appreciate.  It's really hard to book reviews, and it's a really small way that you can I guess support us in the work that we're trying to do.

Next week, Helen and I will be back with another topic to help you navigate your Squiggly Career, but that's all for now.  Thanks again for listening, and we'll speak to you again soon.