Category: 2 – BUY it! (All Categories are 1 – Read ASAP!, 2 – BUY it!, 3 – SHELF it, 4 – SOMEDAY it)
Comments: Solid book with a nice combination of stories and research about great communication.
Insights that resonated:
(1) What kind of conversation are we in: Does the other person want to be helped, hugged, or heard?
(2) Effective communication often comes down to our ability to match the mood and energy of the person we’re communicating with.
(3) The most powerful thing we can do to show that we are seeking to understand and not to be understood in a tense conversation is to: (a) take the time to wait for the person to finish, (b) then play back what we understood and, (c) check if what we understood was what they were trying to say.
(4) “While there are many factors that determine if a romantic relationship succeeds or flounders, one key factor is whether makes the people in it feel more in control of their happiness or less in control of their happiness.”
In detailed examinations of conversations among unhappy couples, researchers found that the partners tended to focus on trying to control the other person. For example, they might say “don’t go there” or “don’t use your voice against me” or “you always do this all that.”
Happy couples instead focused either on controlling themselves or the environment. For example, they’d talk slower and make sure that they kept that cool. The key with happy couples was focusing on things that they could control together and ensuring that they kept an argument as small as possible, instead of letting it expand into other areas and throwing “the kitchen sink” at each other.
(5) Social identities have a noticeable impact in our behavior. For example, without any intervention, studies with graduate level students found that women consistently performed consistently worse than men in math tests. That’s because, by default, they were aware of a stereotype that women are worse at math than men.
However, in tests where these women were reminded of other identities, e.g. that of a puzzle-solver or a successful sportsperson, the performance differences disappeared.
These identities matter a ton in communication because conflicts escalate when they move from being about the topic to being perceived as threatening the person’s identity.
That’s where motivational interviewing comes in. With tricky issues, motivational interviewing focuses on asking questions to help a person understand both sides of an issue and why they might be for against it.
The goal isn’t to persuade – it is to simply understand both sides of the issues and reinforce that there are other identities they could choose. He made the point with fascinating examples involving polarizing issues such as gun rights and vaccines.
(5) From 7 decades of data from the famous Grant study, the people who were most satisfied in the relationships at age 50 were the healthiest and happiest at age 80. One researcher put it bluntly – “The most defining factor for happiness and satisfaction of life is love, not romantic love, but the love and connection with our friends, family, coworkers and their community.”
Marler's Observatory 