The Invisible Rules Of Social Success You Were Never Taught - Charles Duhigg

What do most people get wrong when it comes to understanding communication, do you think?

I think what most people get wrong is they think that it's something that should just happen naturally, right? That it's something that, that, that the best communicators are people who don't think about communication. But what we've discovered is exactly the opposite. I- if, if you know someone who is just fantastic at connecting with people, at communicating, and you go up and you ask them, you know, "Have you always been like this?" Inevitably, what they are gonna tell you is no. They'll say something like, "When I was in high school, I had real trouble making friends, and so I really had to, like, study how kids talk to each other," or, or, "My, my parents got divorced when I was a kid, and I had to be the peacemaker between them." The thing about communication is, it's just a set of skills. It's not even particularly complicated skills. It's a set of skills that anyone can learn. Anyone can become a super communicator. But you have to realize that they're skills, and you have to practice them a little bit. And, and you have to commit to thinking about how you communicate to get better at it.

I suppose communication is quite tightly tied to our sense of self. You know, it's the-

Yeah.

... it's our expression of who we are. So when we look at somebody that's a good or a bad communicator, that's because they're a good or a bad person. What was... their sense of self-worth comes through as well.

Absolutely. I mean, th- that happens a lot. And, and of course, um, you can be a bad person and be a great communicator (laughs) . You can be a good person and not be a great communicator. Um, but you're exactly right that, like, communication is very central to not only how we think about ourselves, but, but how we move through the world. And, and what's interesting is, if you think about it, communication is so ... Communication is Homo sapiens' superpower, right? It is the thing that has allowed us to, to be... you know, do better than every other species, to build families, and villages, and towns, to pass knowledge from, from one generation to the next generation. And so our brains have evolved to be pretty good at communication. Like, like, we have all of the stuff in our head to be fantastic at it. And as a result, because it's so important to who we are as a species, you're right, we tend to judge people, like their moral worth, on whether they're a good communicator or not. And, and that, that can be a little bit dangerous, but it also means that if you want to connect with someone and you're someone who's an introvert, you're someone who has trouble connecting, it's really just a matter of learning how... learning these skills about how communication works, and you can form that bond.