The Art of Supercommunication: Unleashing the Power of Connection with Charles Duhigg

Welcome to the Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar. Charles, welcome back to the Science of Success. Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. Well, it's great to have you back. I'm really excited. And, you know, we were talking about this in the preshow too. But to me, I really love the theme of super communicators, and I'm a huge proponent of the lifelong journey of mastering communication skills. And to me, having somebody of your talent investigate that and dig in and find some awesome case studies, examples, and science to say, hey, here's how you can be a better communicator really gets me excited. So I'm pumped about the book. And I wanna hear what inspired you to dig into that topic? Yeah. So a lot of this came from, you know, with the previous book I'd written, the power of habit, was I started writing it because I wanted to figure out how to improve my own habits. Right? I feel like if I'm so smart, why is it so hard for me to go running in the morning or or to lose 10 pounds? And this was very similar that I had a couple of experiences where I realized I was not as good at communication as I thought I was. And I'm a journalist. I'm supposed to be a professional communicator. They made me a manager at work at the New York Times, and and I was really good at, like, the logistics part of the job and terrible at managing other people, like, just terrible at communicating with them, terrible at hearing what they were trying to tell me. And then I would come home, and this thing would happen again and again at home where I'd come home after a long day. I'd be kind of exhausted. I would be upset. I would start complaining to my wife about, you know, my boss is a jerk, and my coworkers don't appreciate me, and x and y and z. And she very reasonably would say, well, what, you know, why don't you take your boss to lunch and get to know each other a little bit better? Like here's a solution. And instead of being able to hear what she was saying, I would get even more upset. I'd be like, no. No. No. You're supposed to have my back. You're supposed to be supporting me. And she would get upset because I wasn't listening to her good advice. And so I started calling experts and I started saying like, look, this is what's going on in my life. Like, what am I doing wrong? And they said, well, the thing you have to understand is that we think of a discussion as being about one thing, like what happened today or where we should go on vacation. But actually, each discussion is made up of different kinds of conversations, and most of them fall into one of three …