Sievers suspected these groups included someone special, the type of person who made it easier for everyone to align. But who were they? His first hypothesis was that having a strong leader made synchronization easier. Indeed, in some groups, there was one person who had taken charge from the start. “I think it’s gonna have a happy ending,” one such leader, known as Participant 4 in Group D, told his teammates regarding a clip of a child who appeared to be looking for his parents. Participant 4 was talkative and direct. He assigned roles to his groupmates and kept everyone on task. Perhaps Participant 4, in addition to being a leader, was also a supercommunicator?

  But when Sievers looked at the data, he found that strong leaders didn’t help people align. In fact, groups with a dominant leader had the least amount of neural synchrony. Participant 4 made it harder for his groupmates to sync up. When he dominated the conversation, he pushed everyone else into their own, separate thoughts.

  Rather, the groups with the greatest synchrony had one or two people who behaved very differently from Participant 4. These people tended to speak less than dominant leaders, and when they did open their mouths, it was usually to ask questions. They repeated others’ ideas and were quick to admit their own confusion or make fun of themselves. They encouraged their groupmates (“That’s really smart! Tell me more about what you think!”) and laughed at others’ jokes. They didn’t stand out as particularly talkative or clever, but when they spoke, everyone listened closely. And, somehow, they made it easier for other people to speak up. They made conversations flow. Sievers began referring to these people as high centrality participants.

  Here, for instance, are two high centrality participants discussing that bathtub scene, which featured the actors Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck:

  High Centrality Participant 1: What’s with that scene?[*]

  High Centrality Participant 2: I have no idea. I was lost. [Laughter.]

  Participant 3: Casey is watching Brad in the bath. Based on the length of the stare, we think Casey is attracted to Brad. [Group laughter.] Unrequited love.

  High Centrality Participant 2: Oh, I like that! I don’t know what “unrequited” means, but yeah!

  Participant 3: Like, not returned.

  High Centrality Participant 2: Oh, okay, yeah.

  High Centrality Participant 1: What do you think will happen in the next scene?

  Participant 3: I feel like they are gonna rob a bank. [Laughter.]

  High Centrality Participant 1: I like that! I like that!

  High Centrality Participant 2: Yeah. I was waiting for some other epiphany. [Laughter.]

  High centrality participants tended to ask ten to twenty times as many questions as other participants. When a group got stuck, they made it easy for everyone to take a quick break by bringing up a new topic or interrupting an awkward silence with a joke.

  But the most important difference between high centrality participants and everyone else was that the high centrality participants were constantly adjusting how they communicated, in order to match their companions. They subtly reflected shifts in other people’s moods and attitudes. When someone got serious, they matched that seriousness. When a discussion went light, they were the first to play along. They changed their minds frequently and let themselves be swayed by their groupmates.

  In one conversation, when a participant brought up an unexpectedly serious idea—that a character in a clip had been abandoned, the participant’s tone hinting that he might understand abandonment firsthand—the high centrality participant immediately matched his tone:

  Participant 2: How do you think this movie will end?

  Participant 6: I don’t think it’s a happy ending.

  High Centrality Participant: You don’t think it’s a happy ending?

  Participant 6: No.

  High Centrality Participant: Why not?

  Participant 6: I don’t know. This movie seemed to be more darker than…

  [Silence.]

  …

  High Centrality Participant: How will it end?

  …

  Participant 6: It might be the nephew and the parents died or something like this, and they…

  Participant 3: He’s just been abandoned.

  High Centrality Participant: Yeah, abandoned for the night. Yeah.

  Within moments of that exchange, the entire group became serious-minded and started discussing what abandonment felt like. They made room for Participant 6 to discuss his emotions and experiences. The High Centrality Participant matched Participant 6’s gravity, which nudged others to do so as well.

  High centrality participants, Sievers and his coauthors wrote in their results, were much more “likely to adapt their own brain activity to the group,” and “played an outsized role in creating group alignment by facilitating conversation.” But they didn’t merely mirror others—rather, they gently led people, nudging them to hear one another, or to explain themselves more clearly. They matched their groupmates’ conversational styles, making room for seriousness or laughter, and invited others to match them in return. And they had enormous influence on how people ended up answering the questions they had been assigned. In fact, whichever opinion the high centrality participants endorsed usually became the group’s consensus answer. But that influence was almost invisible. When polled afterward, few people realized how much the high centrality participants had swayed their own choices. Not every group had such a person—but those that did all seemed closer to one another afterward, and their brain scans showed they were more aligned.

  When Sievers looked at the lives of high centrality participants, he found they were unusual in other respects. They had much larger social networks than the average person and were more likely to be elected to positions of authority or entrusted with power. Other people turned to them when they needed to discuss something serious or ask for advice. “And that makes sense,” Sievers told me. “Because if you’re the kind of person who’s easy to talk to, then lots of people are going to want to talk to you.”

  In other words, the high centrality participants were supercommunicators.

  THE THREE MINDSETS

  So, to become a supercommunicator, all we need to do is listen closely to what’s said and unsaid, ask the right questions, recognize and match others’ moods, and make our own feelings easy for others to perceive.

  Simple, right?

  Well, no, of course not. Each of those tasks is difficult on its own. Together, they can seem impossible.

  To understand how supercommunicators do what they do, it’s useful to explore what happens inside our brains when we’re in a conversation. Researchers have studied how our minds function during different sorts of discussions and have found that various neural networks and brain structures become active during different types of dialogue. Simplifying greatly, there are three kinds of conversation that dominate most discussions.

  These three conversations—which correspond to practical decision-making conversations, emotional conversations, and conversations about identity—are best captured by three questions: What’s This Really About?, How Do We Feel?, and Who Are We? Each of these conversations, as we will see, draws on a different type of mindset and mental processing. When we have a conversation about, say, a choice—a What’s This Really About? conversation—we’re activating different parts of our brains from when we discuss our feelings—the How Do We Feel? discussion—and if our mind doesn’t align with the brains of our conversational partners, we’ll all feel like we didn’t fully understand one another.

  The first mindset—the decision-making mindset—is associated with the What’s This Really About? conversation, and it’s active whenever we’re thinking about practical matters, such as making choices or analyzing plans. When someone says, “What are we going to do about Sam’s grades?,” our brains’ frontal control network, the command center for our thoughts and actions, becomes active. We have to make a series of decisions, often subconsciously, to evaluate the words we heard, but also to consider what motives or desires might be lurking underneath. “Is this discussion serious or playful?” “Should I offer a solution or just listen?” The What’s This Really About? conversation is integral to thinking about the future, negotiating options, discussing intellectual concepts, and determining what we want to discuss, our goals for this conversation, and how we should discuss it.

  The second mindset—the emotional mindset—emerges when we discuss How Do We Feel? and draws on neural structures—the nucleus accumbens, the amygdala, and the hippocampus, among others—that help shape our beliefs, emotions, and memories. When we tell a funny story, or have an argument with our spouse, or experience a rush of pride or sorrow during a conversation, that’s the emotional mindset at work. When a friend complains to us about their boss, and we sense they’re asking for empathy, rather than advice, it’s because we’re attuned to How Do We Feel?

  The third conversational mindset—the social mindset—emerges when we discuss our relationships, how we are seen by others and see ourselves, and our social identities. These are Who Are We? discussions. When we, for instance, gossip about office politics, or figure out the people we know in common, or explain how our religion or family background—or any other identity—influences us, we’re using our brain’s default mode network, which plays a role in how we think “about other people, oneself, and the relation of oneself to other people,” as the neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman wrote. One 1997 study published in the journal Human Nature found that 70 percent of our conversations are social in nature. During those dialogues the social mindset is constantly shaping how we listen and what we say.

  Each of these conversations—and each mindset—is, of course, deeply intertwined. We often use all three during a single dialogue. The important thing to understand is that these mindsets can shift as a conversation unfolds. For example, a discussion might begin when a friend asks for help thinking through a work problem (What’s This Really About?) and then proceeds to admit he’s feeling stressed (How Do We Feel?) before finally focusing on how other people will react when they learn about this issue (Who Are We?).

  If we could see inside our friend’s skull during this conversation, we would see—and I’m simplifying greatly here—the decision-making mindset becoming dominant at first, and then the emotional mindset assuming primacy, and then the social mindset asserting influence.

  Miscommunication occurs when people are having different kinds of conversations. If you are speaking emotionally, while I’m talking practically, we are, in essence, using different cognitive languages. (This explains why, when you complain about your boss—“Jim is driving me crazy!”—and your spouse responds with a practical suggestion—“What if you just invited him to lunch?”—it’s more apt to create conflict than connection: “I’m not asking you to solve this! I just want some empathy.”)

  Supercommunicators know how to evoke synchronization by encouraging people to match how they’re communicating. Psychologists who study married couples, for instance, have found that the happiest spouses frequently mirror each other’s speaking styles. “The underlying mechanism that maintains closeness in marriage is symmetry,” one prominent researcher, John Gottman, wrote in the Journal of Communication. Happy couples “communicate agreement not with the speaker’s point of view or content, but with the speaker’s affect.” Happy couples ask each other more questions, repeat what the other person said, make tension-easing jokes, get serious together. The next time you feel yourself edging toward an argument, try asking your partner: “Do you want to talk about our emotions? Or do we need to make a decision together? Or is this about something else?”

  The importance of this insight—that communication comes from connection and alignment—is so fundamental that it has become known as the matching principle: Effective communication requires recognizing what kind of conversation is occurring, and then matching each other. On a very basic level, if someone seems emotional, allow yourself to become emotional as well. If someone is intent on decision making, match that focus. If they are preoccupied by social implications, reflect their fixation back to them.

  It is important to note that matching isn’t mimicry. As you’ll see in the forthcoming chapters, we need to genuinely understand what someone is feeling, what they want, and who they are. And then, to match them, we need to know how to share ourselves in return. When we align, we start to connect, and that’s when a meaningful conversation begins.

  TO RECRUIT A SPY, CONNECT

  After the disastrous dinner where he had revealed that he worked for the CIA and Yasmin had fled, it didn’t seem to Lawler like there was much hope left. This was his only potential recruitment after nearly a year of work. He had completely messed things up and was fairly certain this failure was going to cost him his job. Only one option remained: To call Yasmin and beg her to join him for one last meal. “I filled up a notebook with ideas for what to say to her, but I knew it was pointless,” Lawler told me. “Nothing was going to break through.”

  Yasmin agreed to a final dinner. They went to a fancy restaurant where she sat, quiet and on edge, through the entire meal. Her anxiety wasn’t just due to Lawler’s proposal, she told him. She was flying home soon and was nervous and discouraged. She had hoped this trip would reveal something to her, show her how to live a more meaningful life. But here she was, about to go home, and everything was the same. She felt like she had disappointed herself.

  “She was so sad,” Lawler told me. “So I tried to cheer her up—you know, little jokes, funny stories.”

  Lawler talked about a landlord who had kept forgetting his name, and reminisced about sightseeing trips they had taken together. Yasmin remained glum. Eventually, it was time for dessert. A silence crept in. Lawler wondered if he should try one more pitch. Should he offer to get her a visa to America for her cooperation? Too risky, he decided. She might just stand up and leave.

  The silence extended. Lawler had no idea what to say. The last time he had felt this lost was before he had joined the CIA, when he had worked for his father selling steel components in Dallas. “I had never sold a thing in my life before that,” he told me. “I was terrible at it.” There was this one day, after months of discouraging sales calls, when he had visited a potential client—a woman running a small construction firm in West Texas—who was on the phone when he arrived, her five-year-old son playing with blocks alongside her desk.

  When the woman hung up, she listened to Lawler’s pitch for steel joists and thanked him for stopping by. Then, she began talking about the challenges of juggling work and motherhood. It was a constant struggle, she said. She always felt as if she was letting someone down, having to choose between being a good businesswoman or a good mom.

  Lawler was in his early twenties at the time, and didn’t have children. He had nothing in common with this woman, and had no idea how to reply. But he had to say something. So he started rambling about his own family. It was hard working for his dad, he told her. His brother was a better salesman, and that had caused tension between them. “She’d been honest with me, and so I was honest back,” Lawler told me. “It felt good to tell the truth.” He ended up sharing more than he intended, more than seemed appropriate, to be honest. But she didn’t seem to mind.

  Then Lawler returned to his sales spiel, and “she told me she didn’t need any components, but she appreciated the conversation,” he said. “And I left, thinking, well, there’s another screwup.”

  Two months later the woman called and placed a huge order. “I told her, ‘I’m not sure we can give you the pricing you’re looking for’—that’s how bad a salesman I was,” Lawler told me. “And she said, ‘That’s okay, I feel like we have a connection.’ ”

  That experience had reshaped Lawler’s approach to sales. From then on, whenever he spoke to clients, he listened closely to their moods and concerns and enthusiasms, and tried to relate to them—to show that he understood, at least a little bit, what they were feeling. He slowly became a better salesman. Not great, but better. “I learned that if you listen for someone’s truth, and you put your truth next to it, you might reach them.” His goal, during sales calls, became simply to connect. He didn’t try to pressure or impress clients. He just tried to find something they shared. “It didn’t work all the time,” he said. “But it worked enough.”

  Eating dessert with Yasmin, it occurred to Lawler that he had forgotten this lesson. He had been thinking of recruiting spies as very different from selling steel. But, at some level, they were the same basic activity. In both situations, he needed to connect with someone, which meant he had to show them he was hearing what they were trying to say.

  But he hadn’t done that with Yasmin, he realized, not in an honest way, not like he had with the mother in West Texas. He hadn’t proved that he heard Yasmin’s anxieties and hopes, hadn’t been authentic about himself. He hadn’t shared with her the way she had with him.

  So, once the dishes were cleared, Lawler started talking about how he felt. He told Yasmin he was worried he wasn’t cut out for this life. He had worked so hard to get into the CIA, but he found himself lacking something, some kind of confidence that he saw in his peers. He told her about all the times he’d clumsily approached foreign officials, how terrified he was they would report him and he’d get deported. He described his embarrassment when a colleague had explained that he was trying to recruit a KGB officer who was simultaneously seeking to recruit him. He told her he was worried he was a failure just for admitting all this to her—but he understood, a little, what she was feeling when she thought about returning home. He had felt the same way back in Texas, when he was desperate for a life that mattered.