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Transcriber: Abdulrahman Sallam
Reviewer: Raúl Higareda
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(Applause)
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I’m going to ask you
to participate in an experiment,
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which is that when you leave this room,
when you go out into the world,
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today, tomorrow,
or whenever you feel like it,
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I’d like you to ask and answer
one question of someone who’s a stranger.
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You might meet them on the bus
or walking down the street.
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I’m going to show you the question
I’m going to ask you to ask and answer.
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The question is,
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“When was the last time
you cried in front of someone?”
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Now, just out of curiosity,
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how many of you are really excited
about this experiment?
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No hands went up whatsoever.
And that makes sense, right?
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Because there can be nothing
that seems more intimidating or less fun
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than finding a stranger, asking them when
they’ve cried in front of someone else,
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and then telling them about the time
you cried in front of someone else.
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But I’m going to try and convince you
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that this experiment
is not only worth doing,
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it’s worth doing whenever you can,
because it will make your life better.
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To explain how I got to this,
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I’ve to tell you a little bit of a story
about me and my wife.
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A few years ago,
we got into this bad pattern.
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We’d been married for 20 years, but I’d
come home from a long day at the office,
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I was a reporter
at the New York Times at that point,
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and I’d start complaining about my day,
about how I’m not appreciated enough.
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And my wife, very reasonably,
would offer me some great advice.
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Like, “Why don’t you take
your boss out to lunch?
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You guys can get to know
each other better.”
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And instead of being able to hear her,
I would get even more upset.
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And I would say things like,
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“Why aren’t you supporting me?
You should be outraged on my behalf.”
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And she would get upset
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because I was attacking her
for giving me good advice.
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This was not...
Anyone ever had an experience like this?
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It was not a good situation.
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And so, I started talking to researchers
who were studying communication.
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I asked them, “Why am I
getting into this pattern?”
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They said, “Well,
you’re making a mistake.”
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We’re living through this golden age
of understanding communication,
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really for the first time,
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because of advances
in neural imaging and data collection.
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They said one of the big things
that we’ve learned
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Is that we tend to think of a discussion
as being just one conversation.
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We’re talking about one thing:
my day, or the kids’ grades,
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or what to have for dinner.
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But what they said is that actually,
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each discussion contains
many different conversations.
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In general, these conversations
tend to fall into one of three buckets.
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There’s these practical conversations,
where we’re talking about
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what this is all about,
what we’re really discussing.
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But then there’s emotional conversations,
where we’re talking about how we feel,
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and my goal is
to share with you my feelings,
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and I don’t want you to solve them,
I want you to empathize.
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And then there’s social conversations
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about who we are, the social identities
that are important to us,
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how we relate
to each other and to society.
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And what the researchers said
is that we’ve learned
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if people are having different
conversations at the same moment,
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they can’t really hear each other.
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They can’t really connect.
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And this is exactly what was happening
with me and my wife, right?
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I was coming home and having
an emotional conversation.
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My wife was responding
with a practical conversation.
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They are both legitimate conversations,
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but because we weren’t having
the same conversation at the same moment,
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we weren’t really communicating
with each other.
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And within neurology and psychology,
this insight has become so important
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that it’s become known
as the matching principle,
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which says that successful communication
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requires recognizing what kind
of conversation is occurring
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and then matching each other.
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But how do we do that?
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Well, in schools, they’ve actually
taught teachers to do this.
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If you are a school teacher,
you’ll probably learn at some point
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that If a student comes to you
with a problem or something to talk about,
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you should ask them,
“Do you want to be helped?”
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which is a practical conversation.
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“Do you want to be hugged?” which is
an emotional conversation.
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Or “Do you want to be heard?”
which is a social conversation.
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And it seems to work.
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It seems like if you ask students
what they need,
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they’ll tell you.
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But of course, that is hard to do
in real life, right?
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If you go up and ask someone at work
if they want a hug,
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the HR might get involved,
so you might not want to do that.
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But luckily, there is another way
of doing this for all of us normal people,
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which is to ask questions
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and in particular,
to ask a certain type of question,
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a special question
known as a deep question.
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A deep question is something
that invites us to talk about our values
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or our beliefs or our experiences.
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And that can sound a little intimidating,
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but it’s actually
much easier than it sounds.
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For instance, instead of asking someone,
“Where do you work?”
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you could ask them,
“What do you love about your job?”
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Instead of asking someone,
“Where did you go to high school?”
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you could say, “What was high school like?
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What did you learn there?
What changed you there?”
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Put differently, instead of asking
about the facts of someone’s life,
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we should ask them
how they feel about their life.
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Because when we do, they tend
to reveal to us who they really are.
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They tend to tell us what they want,
not only out of this conversation,
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but how they hope that we’ll see them
and how they want to see us,
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what matters to them most.
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In fact, what studies show us
is that this is so powerful
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because these kinds of questions
allow us to be vulnerable,
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and vulnerability
and reciprocal vulnerability,
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when we hear vulnerability
and we become vulnerable in return,
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is the key to allowing us
to connect with other people.
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To explain how this works,
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I want to tell you a story
about this guy, Doctor Behfar Ehdaie.
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Dr. Ehdaie is a cancer surgeon
in New York City.
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He specializes in prostate cancer,
removing prostate tumors...
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Removing cancer tumors from prostates.
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And he has this kind of interesting job,
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because every single day
a patient will come into his office
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asking, he thinks, for medical advice,
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and what he will tell them is,
“You should not get surgery.”
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The prostate is located so close
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to the to the nerves that control
urination and sexual function
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that it’s a relatively risky surgery.
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And what's more, most prostate tumors,
they grow very, very slowly.
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It’s actually one of the slowest growing
forms of cancer in existence.
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There’s a saying among doctors
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that if you have an old patient
with prostate cancer,
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he’s going to die of old age
before the cancer kills him.
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And so Dr. Ehdaie would’ve
these patients come in and he’d tell them,
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“Look, I don’t think
you should do anything.
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I think you should do active surveillance.
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What we’re going to do is
take a blood sample every 6 months,
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we’re going to do a biopsy every 2 years,
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and if the tumor seems to change,
we’ll do an MRI,
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and if we’ve to, we can do the surgery,
but otherwise, no radiation, no surgery,
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it’s going to be okay.”
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And these patients would listen to him,
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and then they’d go home
and they’d discuss it with their spouse,
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and then they’d walk in the next day
and they’d insist on having the surgery.
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They’d say, “I want you to cut me open,
take the tumor out as fast as possible.”
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And for Dr. Ehdaie,
this was bewildering, right?
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He thought these would be
the easiest conversations of his life.
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He’s telling people that they don’t
have to have surgery, and he’s a surgeon.
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He told me that when this happens
again and again and again,
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you start to realize this isn’t
a problem with my patients.
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This is a problem with me.
I’m doing something wrong.
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And so he goes to these professors
at the Harvard Business School,
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and he asks them for advice
on what to do differently.
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And they said, “Well look,
your biggest mistake
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is you are starting
this conversation all wrong.
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You are starting by assuming that
the patient walks into your exam room
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looking for advice
and looking for medical solutions.
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But you don’t know if that’s true,
you’re not asking them any questions.
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What you need to do is
you need to start asking deep questions.”
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So two weeks later,
after having this conversation,
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a 62-year-old man comes into
Dr. Ehdaie’s office for the first time.
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He had just gotten his diagnosis
of having prostate cancer.
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And Dr Ehdaie,
instead of giving him advice,
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instead of telling him what to do,
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he asks the question,
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“What does this cancer
diagnosis mean to you?”
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And the man starts talking.
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And he starts talking about how his father
had died when he was 17 years old.
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And this had just been so hard for him,
and it had been so hard for his mom.
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And then he starts talking about
how at work he’s worried
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that the younger employees,
if they find out that he has cancer,
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they’ll look at him differently.
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They’re going to be
already writing him into the grave,
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even though he’s got
20 or 30 years left on his career.
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And then he starts talking
about his grandchildren
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and his fears for the world
they’re inheriting,
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with climate change
and everything else that’s going on.
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Dr. Ehdaie had expected this guy
to at least bring up cancer,
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to at least mention mortality or pain,
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but it never came up.
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And at that moment, Dr. Ehdaie realized,
because he had asked this deep question,
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that this man wanted to have
an emotional conversation.
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He wanted to talk about how do we feel.
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He needed to be hugged.
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So Dr. Ehdaie didn’t actually hug him,
but he did the verbal equivalent.
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He started talking about how he understood
that his own father had gotten sick
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and that it had been terrifying for them,
but it had also brought them together
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in these ways
that he didn’t actually anticipate.
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And they talk about this
for eight minutes, just eight minutes.
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And then Dr. Ehdaie says,
“Look, do you mind?
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There’s some medical options
I’d like to talk over with you.
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Is that okay?”
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And they move into
a practical conversation together.
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And within seven more minutes,
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the man decides to do active surveillance
and never looks back.
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Dr. Ehdaie’s patients overwhelmingly
now opt for active surveillance,
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his advice, because of this approach.
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And the thing is, we can do
this in any conversation.
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It doesn’t have to be an
important conversation or life or death.
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We can always connect more and better,
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and in a really profound way,
with the person that we’re speaking to,
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if we want to.
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Which brings me back to that experiment.
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So just to remind you
what you’re supposed to do:
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walk out of the room, find a stranger,
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ask them, “When was the last time
you cried in front of someone?”
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And then as soon as they answer,
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you answer the question yourself,
and you tell them when you last cried.
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Let me just say, this experiment
has been done thousands of times,
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most notably by a guy named Nick Epley
at the University of Chicago.
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People hate this experiment.
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Nobody who participates
comes in and is like,
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“I’m really looking...
This is going to be a great time.”
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Instead, what they say is,
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“I do not want to do this.
This sounds terrible.”
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But they’re in an experiment
and they basically have to do it.
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They get paired with a partner,
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they go and ask the question,
ask and answer,
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and then Nick Epley afterwards asks them,
“What was that like?”
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And what people say are things like,
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“Oh, my gosh,
I felt so connected to that person,
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more connected than I’ve been to people
in other conversations in a while.
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I felt more caring towards them,
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and I felt like they were
really caring about me.
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I felt like they listened so attentively,
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and it was really easy for me
to listen to what they were saying.”
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Ultimately, almost everyone says this is
one of the best conversations
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that they’ve had in the last week,
the last month, the last year...
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And they say things like, “I’m so glad
I got paired with that person,
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because they were exactly right for me.”
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When in truth,
the only thing that was right
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is that they were a stranger
and they had the right question,
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the right kind of question to ask.
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So why? Why is this so powerful?
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Why is asking this question,
why does it help us connect so well?
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Because it’s a deep question.
It allows us to say something real.
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And when we ask deep questions,
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we figure out which
of the three conversations we’re in,
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what we’re talking about,
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what everyone really wants
out of this dialogue.
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And that is how
we connect with each other.
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We are living through a time
of polarization and division.
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We have forgotten
how to have conversations.
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But there's a science to it.
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There are these folks
who are known as super communicators,
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who are not special,
they’re not more charismatic,
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or they’re not more outgoing
than anyone else.
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They’ve just learned skills
that allow us to connect with others.
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And they’re skills
that all of us can learn.
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And that feeling you get
after a wonderful conversation,
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that glow that you experience,
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our brains have evolved to give us that,
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to crave connection.
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So I hope you go out,
I hope you find a stranger,
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and I hope you tell them all about
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the last time you cried
in front of another person.
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And then tell me how it went.
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Thanks.
00:12:48
(Applause)
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