We Need to Talk How to Have Conversations That Matter

you also recommended recommended Celeste headley's book we need to talk she does Ted talks will link to that in the show notes she also did of course you did our show because she's a friend of mine episode 423 that's how I learned about her what is your podcast good news to you great thank you yeah the book has nothing to do with cults by the way folks it focuses on teaching people how to talk and mostly listen with curiosity rather than judgment again that's 423 of this show and will link that in the show

I normally don't go right into a book spiel but I loved this book. It's right up my alley. There's lots of research on social science, psychology, neuroscience as applied to conversations and human interaction, especially as experienced as somebody who's been doing interviews for almost a decade longer than I have.

And so I ended up finding all this research and this knowledge from neurological fields and from sociological fields even teaching English as a second language there's some really valuable research there and I started compiling a set of things that actually worked that I could test out in my professional field.

One of the things I point to in the book is they did this massive study on how much space people leave between one person finishing a sentence and another person responding.

And when I say massive I mean worldwide every continent they studied tons and tons of different places and they found that on average human beings leave less than a half a second of space which means there is no way you have heard what the other person said.

It's also probably why research shows that older people are worse listeners than millennials. Younger people are better listeners and I have to wonder if that's because they're less prone to assume they know already what you're saying and what you think.

you also recommended recommended Celeste headley's book we need to talk she does Ted talks will link to that in the show notes she also did of course you did our show because she's a friend of mine episode 423 that's how I learned about her

I normally don't go right into a book spiel but I loved this book. It's right up my alley. There's lots of research on social science, psychology, neuroscience as applied to conversations and human interaction, especially as experienced as somebody who's been doing interviews for almost a decade longer than I have.

And one of the things in 'We Need to Talk' that really struck me at first was that changing how you listen will actually improve what you have to say.

It's not directly cognitive bias or perhaps it is a different kind of cognitive bias where we always assumed that we know what's going to happen but bias creeps into our speech and our thought presses and certainly in our conversations and you write about that a lot in the book.

I think we're about one tenth of the way through the good stuff in the book and I would just love to keep going.

big thank you to Celeste love her work the book is called 'We Need to Talk' we'll link it in the show notes

Celeste headley's book we need to talk she does Ted talks will link to that in the show notes she also did of course you did our show because she's a friend of mine episode 423 that's how I learned about her

I normally don't go right into a book spiel but I loved this book. It's right up my alley.

There's lots of research on social science, psychology, neuroscience as applied to conversations and human interaction, especially as experienced as somebody who's been doing interviews for almost a decade longer than I have.

Today we'll outline some strategies that will make you a better conversationalist and give you actionable steps that you can take to improve your communication skills.

One of the things in 'We Need to Talk' that really struck me at first was that changing how you listen will actually improve what you have to say.

And when I say massive I mean worldwide every continent they studied tons and tons of different places and they found that on average human beings leave less than a half a second of space which means there is no way you have heard what the other person said.

Celeste Headley is the author of the book, We Need to Talk, How to Have Conversations That Matter.