As summer winds down, folks are taking their last vacations before school is back in session (if it isn’t already) and fall arrives.

When it comes to the logistics of pulling off a vacation, most of the attention is spent on preparing for the trip, and it certainly helps to nail your departure plans. (Here’s a checklist to consult of 39 things to do before you leave.)

In contrast, very little attention is paid to the logistics of coming back from a vacation. But I’ve noticed over the years that the return poses its own logistical and psychological challenges. You’ve got luggage to unpack, no food in the house, and an inbox of a bajillion work emails waiting for you. On top of that, you’re probably pooped from the travel back home.

With a little bit of foresight, you can make your re-entry from vacation back into the real world go more smoothly. Here’s your game plan.

Take Care of Stuff Before You Leave

Post-return peace still begins with prior-to-departure action.

If I’ve learned anything from my decades of taking trips, it’s that the worst part of coming home is the stuff you didn’t deal with before you left.

So the day before you leave, knock out the chores that future-you would hate to come home to.

I take out all the trash, including the little cans in the bathrooms, and run the garbage disposal. There’s nothing worse than walking into a house that’s been sealed up for a week and getting hit with the smell of sauerkraut that’s been sitting in the kitchen sink. Run the dishwasher and empty it, so you come home to clean dishes and an empty dishwasher.

If your budget allows for it, plan to have a housekeeper clean your house while you’re away. There’s nothing better than coming home to a completely clean house and climbing into a bed with fresh sheets.

Have a plan for dinner. Buy some frozen pizzas that you can pop into the oven. It beats having to stop somewhere for food after leaving the airport instead of being able to go right home.

Come Back From Your Vacation on Saturday

The most popular days to return from vacation are Saturday and Sunday, and there is debate over which is better: the Saturday crowd likes having a buffer day before returning to work on Monday; the Sunday advocates say you might as well get another non-PTO-requiring vacation day, and you can just bite the bullet and go back to work the day after you get home.

I’m with the Saturday crowd, as it offers two distinct advantages.

The first is that Saturday is a less popular day for traveling, so the airport will be a little less congested and plane tickets are often a little cheaper, too.

The second is that when you come home on Saturday, having a buffer day to rest and get your life back in order before returning to work on Monday (more on this in a second) really does pay off.

Yes, you could have had Saturday as an additional day at your vacation destination, but having a buffer day offers more ROI. Research has shown that when it comes to people’s perception of an experience, its duration hardly registers, while how it ends matters a lot. Returning from a trip on Sunday and immediately pivoting, tired and out of sorts, into a cold open at work the next day is more likely to sour the memory of your trip. Giving yourself a soft, relaxed landing on Saturday is more likely to preserve a positive overall feeling about your trip — and about traveling in general.

Use Your Buffer Day to Get Your House in Order

Even if your travel plans don’t allow you to come home on Saturday, consider creating a buffer day another way: Take the day after you return off from work, even if it requires using another day of PTO.

Traveling can be exhausting, so you and your family probably need some extra rest and some time to get your regular life running again. A buffer day allows for that.

Use it to catch up on sleep, unpack, do the built-up laundry, hit the grocery store, take care of chores, and plan out the rest of the week. Basically, do the kind of things you’d do on a Reset Day. It’s not a fun day. It’s a boring, get-your-house-in-order day that allows you to re-find traction and hit the ground running when you wake up the next morning.

Tackle Your Inbox Strategically

One of the biggest challenges of coming back from vacation is managing the pile-up of email that’s come your way while you were gone. The temptation is to start from the oldest emails and slog your way through every last one of them until you’re done. Instead, give yourself 25 minutes to get through as many emails as you can. The hard stop makes the backlog more manageable.

To make the process efficient, first skim through your email subject lines and immediately delete the ones that don’t need your attention; a good number can probably go right into the trash. Then prioritize the most important emails and knock those out first. The rest you can get to later.

Make the Good Vacation Vibes Last

We go on vacations to relax and rejuvenate. But if you’re like me, you’ve probably experienced a little post-vacation blues.

To counter the post-vacation letdown and keep the good vibes going, do some things to keep the memory of your trip alive. Scroll through the photos you took while on vacation. Talk about your trip with your family around the dinner table. Put that souvenir you bought while in the Rocky Mountains on your desk.

Also, before the post-vacation glow wears off, get another fun thing on the calendar. It could be another trip, even a small one, but it doesn’t have to be. It could just be a campout with your kids or a get-together with friends. Research suggests that a big part of the happiness we get from trips and events comes from simply looking forward to them. Partake in the art of anticipation, and ensure that as one good time comes to an end, there’s another on the horizon.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Years ago, I found myself at Kate’s ten-year high school reunion. As I surveyed the room of her former classmates, I noticed a dichotomy in the trajectories that the males and females had taken. By and large, the women had kept themselves up; they still seemed vibrant, engaged, and in shape, even if they had had a few kids by that time. The years had not been as kind to the majority of dudes, however. Many were already overweight, out-of-shape, and looking pretty schlubby and dead behind the eyes. 

It was then that a moniker for the condition that seemed to be besetting these men came to my mind: Soft Suburban Dad Syndrome.

In the years since, I’ve noticed SSDS manifest itself in plenty of my peers, and from time to time, unfortunately, in myself as well. Soft Suburban Dad Syndrome develops in the decades after a man graduates from college, gets married, has kids, establishes his career, and, whether or not he literally settles down in the suburbs, moves further and further into the outskirts of a dynamic and adventurous life. With the passage of time, and the eroding of youth, the masses of men fairly give up on life and lose their edge. 

Marriage, family, white collar work, suburbia, and adulthood in general don’t invariably lead to a degradation in virility, vitality, and manliness. But unless an intentional, active effort is made to cultivate a countervailing force, such responsibilities and routines tend to lead to a busyness, inertia, stagnation, and malaise that can enervate one’s interests, mollify one’s penchant for challenge and growth, and extinguish the fire in the belly.

The components of that countervailing force have been thoroughly explained in AoM’s most classic and epic article: Semper Virilis: A Roadmap to Manhood in the 21st Century. But a helpful first step to following that roadmap is diagnosing whether you’re suffering from Soft Suburban Dad Syndrome yourself, and which symptoms you most need to address. So below we offer 50 questions for self-examination, organized into the different areas of life where SSDS can crop up. Read; reflect; figure out where you want to push back on the domesticating defaults many guys sink into as they transition from young buck to mature man; and decide how you might change in order to maintain your strength — physical, mental, and social — into old age.

Physical

Literal softness constitutes the very tangible epicenter of Soft Suburban Dad Syndrome. As the post-college years go by, men often become more and more sedentary. Testosterone, muscle, and energy go down, while body fat goes up. This can turn into a negative cycle, where the more obese you become, the less you want to move, and the less you move, the more weight you gain.

Maintaining your physical prowess is more than a matter of health; strength and toughness (two qualities which are both vital, and not identical) affects every other aspect of your life as well, from your confidence and how you show up at work and in relationships, to what activities and interests you’re capable of pursuing, to the maintenance of your psychological well-being. As such, getting and staying in good physical condition represents the very foundation of fighting SSDS and leading a vital, fulfilling life.

1. Do you do at least 60 minutes of physical activity every day?

2. Have you gotten your testosterone tested — and is it at a healthy level?

3. Is your waist bigger than 40 inches?

4. Can you hold a squat for 30 seconds?

5. Can you hang from a bar for 30 seconds?

6. Can you do at least five pull-ups?

7. Can you pick up your body weight and carry it for distance?

8. Can you standing long jump your own height?

9. Can you bench press your bodyweight?

10. Can you deadlift 150% of your bodyweight?

11. Can you get off the ground without using your hands?

12. What is the ratio between the time you spend watching other men play sports and the time you spend playing sports yourself?

13. When was the last time you pushed yourself so hard you couldn’t help but put your hands on your knees?

14. When was the last time you did a flat-out sprint?

15. When was the last time you crawled on the ground?

16. When was the last time you jumped up to something? Down from something?

17. When was the last time you climbed something other than a ladder?

18. When was the last time you did an explosive movement — kettlebell swing, plyometrics, etc? 

19. When was the last time you felt you couldn’t do one more repetition of a weightlifting exercise, but dug deep and ground out another rep anyway?

20. Do you spend at least an hour of time outside each day, or do you spend more time inside than the average prison inmate?

21. When was the last time you did a workout outside a climate-controlled building?

22. When was the last time you swam in a natural body of water?

23. How many miles did you walk over non-man-made surfaces last week?

24. How many miles do you think you could walk in a day — could you make it fifty?

25. When was the last time you did something that truly made you physically uncomfortable?

Mental

The ironic thing about Soft Suburban Dad Syndrome, is that things soften up . . . because they harden up. With age, a sort of slow, progressive process of petrification takes place; not only do our physical movements become constricted and calcified, but so does our thinking. 

When you were young, you probably had deep discussions with your friends, journaled your reflections, read, studied, pondered — and changed and refined your ideas as a result. Unfortunately, most people feel that once they get their college diploma, their life’s education is done. They stop learning; they start passively accepting ready-made answers from the media; they outsource their thinking to others. Because they reject new mental inputs, their ideas become stagnant and eventually set like cement.

Learning shouldn’t be a one-and-done thing that ends with your formal schooling, but a lifelong pursuit. Keeping your mind sharp means committing to being an ever-curious autodidact, no matter your age.

26. How often do you feel bored?

27. When was the last time you changed your opinion about something?

28. When was the last time you read an entire book?

29. When was the last time you read a work of philosophy?

30. When was the last time you read, and finished, a book you truly found challenging?

31. When was the last time you spent more than five minutes, without distraction, simply thinking about an idea?

32. When was the last time you wrote something, just because you wanted to — a poem, an essay, a journal entry?

33. When was the last time you learned a new skill?

34. Do you have a hobby?

35. Do you engage in any pursuits you can sincerely call “creative”?

Social

In high school and college, it’s easy to have a robust social circle; you’re surrounded by peers all the time, and don’t need to put in much effort to maintain friendships. In many ways, this experience “spoils” men; having never learned to be intentional with relationships while growing up, they struggle in adulthood to make and keep friends. 

When work, spouse, and kids fill your life, it takes truly deliberate effort to maintain relationships outside the family unit. Absent this effort, men tend to let friendships fall by the wayside, relying exclusively on their wives for social interaction and emotional support. Such a dynamic is fragile, unsatisfying, and contrary to the male make-up, which evolved to spend ample time in a “gang” of other men. 

36. You still count your buddies from high school and college as your best friends — but have you actually kept in regular contact with them?

37. When was the last time you called or texted an old friend just to catch up?

38. Do you have a few close, local friends who you can do things with on a day-to-day basis?

39. If you had a problem, do you have a friend you could call up to talk about it?

40. Are you a part of, or have tried to start, a slightly more formal group of men organized around some activity or interest?

Miscellaneous

Not all the areas in which a man can fall victim to Soft Suburban Dad Syndrome and in which he’ll want to maintain his edge fall neatly into the above categories. But these questions are equally worth reflection:

41. When was the last time you took a genuine risk, whether social, financial, professional, physical, or otherwise?

42. When was the last time you did something that truly made you nervous?

43. When was the last time you undertook an outing/trip you could legitimately describe as an adventure?

44. Do you have future plans for undertaking something that could legitimately be described as an adventure?

45. How many hours a day are you on some kind of screen?

46. If you made a list of all the tactical, survival, and DIY skills you’re adept at, how long would that list be?

47. Do you seek to live simply and minimally, or have you accumulated a lot of stuff that weighs you down?

48. When was the last time you entered a competition — athletic or otherwise? 

49. Do you currently have any goals you’re working towards?

50. Do you have a strong sense of your life’s purpose?

Fighting Soft Suburban Dad Syndrome doesn’t mean trying to approach every stage of life exactly as you did as a young man. A man’s life cycle has distinct seasons, and it’s unwise to ignore the changes in mood, desires, number/extent of responsibilities, and simple physiological realities that each season brings. As you age, you’ll find certain activities more or less rewarding than you once did; you’ll have less to gain and more to lose in taking risks; you’ll understand more about what you actually like to do, want to do, and can do. Nonetheless, achieving real fulfillment across every season is premised on finding new horizons befitting the stage you’re in, not letting change lead to stagnation, and staying physically and mentally sharp, socially connected, and ever engaged in the grand game of life.

With our archives now 4,000+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in August 2021.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Note: This is a rebroadcast.

Have you ever known one of those people who seemed to be able to connect with anyone? The kind of person who had the ability to make others feel understood and smoothly navigate even the trickiest of conversations?

Charles Duhigg calls these folks “supercommunicators,” and he’s the author of a new book by the same name. Today on the show, Charles explains that what underlies supercommunicators’ skill in connection is something called the matching principle, and he unpacks how it works and how you can put it to use in your own conversations. We discuss several techniques for how to figure out what kind of conversation you’re having, so you can align your language and energy with the other person. And because emotional conversations can be particularly difficult, we dig into tactics for successfully navigating them, even when they contain a high degree of conflict. We also get into how to carry the skills of connection into your digital conversations.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Charles’ previous appearances on the AoM podcast:
  • Episode #61: The Power of Habit
  • Episode #196: The Science of Self-Motivation & Productivity
• AoM Podcast #559: How to Handle Difficult Conversations

Connect With Charles Duhigg

• Charles’ website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don???t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Have you ever known one of those people who seemed to be able to connect with anyone, the kind of person who had the ability to make others feel understood and smoothly navigate even the trickiest of conversations? Charles Duhigg calls these folks supercommunicators, and he’s the author of a new book by the same name. Today in the show, Charles explains that what underlies supercommunicator’s skill and connection is something called the matching principle. And he unpacks how it works and how you can put it to use in your own conversations. We discuss several techniques for how to figure out what kind of conversation you’re having, so you can align your language and energy with the other person. And because emotional conversations can be particularly difficult, we dig into tactics for successfully navigating them, even when they contain a high degree of conflict. We also get into how to carry the skills of connection into your digital conversations. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/supercommunicator.

All right, Charles Duhigg, welcome back to the show.

Charles Duhigg: Thanks for having me on.

Brett McKay: So the last time we had you on was back in 2016, to talk about your book Smarter Faster Better. It’s all about the secrets of being more productive in life and business. We’ve also had you on to talk about The Power of Habit and The Habit Loop. You got a new book out, though, called Supercommunicator. How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection. I mean, this is all about how to have better, more meaningful conversations. What led you to take a deep dive into this topic?

Charles Duhigg: Well, when I wrote The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better, it’s very much focused on the self, and it’s about how we succeed as individuals, what do we need to do to be successful? But the thing I realized is that a huge amount of our happiness and our productivity and our success, it depends on other people. We work in teams. We have partners or spouses and kids and parents. And so I realized that at the core of dealing with other people, coordinating with other people is communication, it’s conversations. And then when I started doing the research, I learned that we’re living through this golden age of understanding communication, actually for the first time in ways we never have before because of advances in neural imaging and data collection. And I just thought it was fascinating. And more importantly, I thought it could help a lot of people, including myself.

Brett McKay: Was there a moment you had in your own personal life where you realized, boy, I really need to get better at talking because I’m not good at it?

Charles Duhigg: Oh, yeah. There was more than one moment. I think we’ve all had that experience. For me it was, I fell into this pattern with my wife where I would come home after like a long and hard day and I would start complaining to her like, “My boss is a jerk, or my coworkers don’t appreciate me”. And she very rationally would say, “Oh, here’s a solution. Why don’t you take your boss out to lunch, and you guys can get to know each other a little bit better”. But instead of being able to hear what she was saying, I would get even more upset. And I’d be like, “Why aren’t you supporting me? You’re supposed to be outraged on my behalf”. And then she would get upset because I was reacting very poorly to this advice she had given. And so I started going to these researchers and asking them, “Why does this happen?” ‘Cause it’s not just me, this is a pretty common pattern. And they said, “Well, actually, here’s what we’ve learned”.

And this is one of the biggest insight from the last decade is, we tend to think of a discussion as being about one thing, we’re talking about my day, or we’re talking about the kids’ grades or the pets. But actually every single discussion is made up of multiple different kinds of conversations. And in general, those conversations fall into one of three buckets. There’s practical discussions like where we’re solving problems or making plans. Then there’s emotional conversations where, “I want to tell you how I feel, and I don’t want you to solve my problem. I want you to empathize and I want you to listen”. And then there’s social conversations, which is about how we relate to each other and to society. And they said, “The thing that we figured out is if people are having different kinds of conversations at the same moment, then they won’t really hear each other, they won’t really connect with each other”. And so the key is what’s become known as the matching principle within psychology. That in order to communicate with someone, we need to be having the same kind of conversation at the same time, because that actually causes our brains to align.

Brett McKay: Okay, there’s a lot to unpack here, and I hope we can do that throughout this conversation. And to get into this idea of the matching principle, you start off the book talking about this guy named Felix Sigala, who worked for the FBI’s Crisis Negotiation team.

Charles Duhigg: Yeah.

Brett McKay: He’s a master communicator, but from the outside he looks pretty unremarkable. He just looks like a middle aged dude, mustache, maybe wears sweater vest, I don’t know. And so you’d see like, “How is this guy… ” People just relate to him, they connect with him, he doesn’t look charismatic. And so a team of researchers went in to study Felix to figure out what made him so good at communicating. What did these researchers learn about communication from Felix?

Charles Duhigg: So, Felix is a really interesting test case, ’cause you’re exactly right, if you met him, he would not stand out for you at all until he opened his mouth. And what’s really, really interesting is that he’s very typical of supercommunicators. Supercommunicators are not necessarily the most charismatic people. They are not extroverts. Who they are, they’re people who think just a little bit like half an inch deeper about how to have conversations. And as a result, they can connect with almost anyone. And the thing is, it’s just a set of skills anyone can learn, any of us can become supercommunicators. And so in Felix’s case, what happened was these researchers sat down with him and they were like, “Look, tell us what you do that’s so special? Why did so many people tell us that we had to be in touch with you?” And he said, “Well, let me demonstrate. It might be better”. And he just starts asking them questions like, “Tell me about what’s going on in your life”.

Now what’s interesting is that the questions he’s asking are a special kind of questions, but they don’t appear that special. They’re what’s known as deep questions. And a deep question asks us about our values or our beliefs or experiences. But it doesn’t appear to be that deep at first. It doesn’t seem really probing or intrusive. It doesn’t force someone to reveal something. But it’s as easy, like if you bump into someone and you ask ’em, “What do you do for a living?” And they say, “I’m a lawyer”. A deep question would be to say, “Oh, how’d you decide to go to law school?” Or, “What do you love about practicing the law?” Both those questions are pretty easy to ask, but what they do is they ask the other person, provide an opportunity for the other person to tell us about their experiences, why they went to law school, to tell us about their beliefs, what it is about justice and the law that gets them excited every day.

And when they share that with us, then it provides an opportunity for us to engage in what’s known as reciprocal authenticity, where we can share something about ourselves and we’ll feel closer to each other. And that’s exactly what Felix would do. He would ask these questions that were deep questions that didn’t appear that deep, and then somebody would bring up something meaningful. They became a researcher because their parents were researchers, or they… The thing that they love about teaching is to see how students develop. And then he would share something about himself. He’d say, “Oh, that’s really, really interesting, ’cause what I hear you saying is that you love to help other people. And actually that’s why I joined the FBI, ’cause I love to help people too. And I found this way”. So what’s happening there is that almost invisibly Felix is letting people… Inviting people to bring their full self to the conversation. He’s proving to them that he’s listening to them, he’s sharing his own life with them, and as a result, they feel connected. They believe that he wants to connect with them. And that’s the most important thing that supercommunicators do. They prove to us they want to connect.

Brett McKay: So these questions that he asks is this what allows Felix to match up so he’s able to sync up with the person he is talking to. So they’re all on the same page and the person feels like they’re communicating?

Charles Duhigg: That’s exactly right. So, these deep questions, and I will say, so people who are consistent supercommunicators, ’cause we’re all supercommunicators at one time or another, but people who can do it all the time on demand, they tend to ask 10 to 20 times as many questions as the average person. And some of those questions are like throwaway questions. They’re like, oh, what’d you think about her? Oh what’d you say next? We don’t even register them as questions, but they invite us into the conversation. But then about half of them are these deep questions. And the reason why those questions are so powerful is exactly what you just said, is that it allows you to say something meaningful, like something that’s true and authentic about yourself. And it allows me as a listener to engage in reciprocal authenticity without it seeming like I’m trying to steal the spotlight from you. Or I asked where you went on vacation just ’cause I really want to talk about where I went on vacation. They’re really powerful.

Brett McKay: So the matching principle is figure out what kind of conversation you’re having and then match the other person, or invite them to match you. And by asking deep questions, Felix was able to create this matching. And we’re going to talk more about how to create this kind of alignment throughout our conversation today. But besides asking deep questions, how else can you tell what kind of conversation someone wants to have?

Charles Duhigg: Well, you just listen to what they’re saying. Because they’re going to tell you, I mean, they might not say I want to have an emotional conversation, but if they bring up things like feelings, if they mention something that feels vulnerable to you or feels kind of emotionally authentic, then they’re having an emotional conversation. The same way that when I get home and I talk about, my boss is a jerk and he doesn’t appreciate me. It’s not really about what my boss did, it’s about how I feel about it. And that’s obvious, just from listening. On the other hand, if I’m talking to my wife and I say like, “Look, let’s figure out the budget for our vacation next year, ’cause I really want to go someplace exciting, but I don’t want it to be too expensive”. Well, that’s clear that that’s a much more practical frame of mind. So it’s not hard to figure out what kind of conversation is happening, it’s just a matter of listening for it and understanding that there’s these different kinds of conversations.

Brett McKay: Another way you suggest creating alignment is to share your goals for the conversation and then ask others what their goals are. So instead of being opaque and then each person has to decipher what kind of conversation is going on and what it’s about, you’re just upfront about that.

Charles Duhigg: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And think about how helpful that is. I mean, sometimes this happens really naturally. Like we have an agenda, we’re in a business meeting, and we’re, look, we’re here to discuss the budget. So we know what everyone ostensibly wants out of it. But if you even just take half a beat and you start by just saying look, and again, this is a great deep question. “Tell me what the budget means to you. What’s important to you about this budget?” Then what I’m really doing is I’m opening it up. ‘Cause you might say, “What’s really important to me is that we hit our numbers”. Practical conversation. Or someone might say, “What’s really important to me is that I’m worried we’re going to have to do layoffs. And I don’t want to do that to people and their families”. Okay, now you’re signaling that’s a much more emotional conversation. And so simply by asking someone what their goals are, and the easiest way to do that is A, to share your own goals. And B, to simply ask them, “What does this mean to you? Why is this important to you?”

Brett McKay: Okay, so ask people what their goals are for a conversation and tell people your goals. Another suggestion you make in the book that I really like is to come prepared internally for a conversation. Like mentally prepare, think beforehand about what you want to get out of the conversation and what you want to talk about with someone. And that can help you get more out of the conversation.

Charles Duhigg: There was this study that was done by some researchers who went into an investment bank. And this was a place where people screamed at each other all day long. They just got in fights constantly. And they told everyone for the next week before each meeting, write one sentence where you describe what you want to accomplish in this meeting and the mood you want to establish. It took about 10 seconds for people to do this, they would literally scribble down one sentence about the upcoming meeting and then they’d usually just stick the paper into their pocket and walk into the meeting. And people didn’t even usually announce what their goal was. They didn’t announce what they had written down, but the incidence of conflict in those meetings went down by 80%. And the reason why is because everyone knew what they wanted and so they were able to express that to others. Knowing what we want. Just taking like literally two or three seconds before we start a conversation to figure out why we’re having the conversation. It pays enormous dividends.

Brett McKay: No, that’s something that my wife and I do whenever we get together with friends before they come over or before we meet them for dinner on the drive over, we might say, “What are the things we want to talk to these people about? What do we want to catch up on?

Charles Duhigg: Yeah.

Brett McKay: So we make like a list so that whenever we see a friend we haven’t seen in a long time, it’s like, “Oh, I want to follow up with this”. And our friends do the same thing with some really good friends of ours. We call the quality conversations. So QCs. And we only see each other maybe once or twice a year ’cause they’ve moved away from us. But we each come with our list of like, here’s the things we want to talk about. And we don’t get to all of ’em, but because both of us have an idea of what we want to talk about, we can go really deep with our conversations.

Charles Duhigg: Yeah, that’s really, really smart. And in fact, there was an experiment done at Harvard Business School by Alison Wood Brooks, she’s a professor there, where what she did is she had all of her students… She told her students, you’re going to have a conversation with a stranger. And then what I want you to do is I want you to write down three topics you might discuss. And again, this was like 10 seconds of thought, people would write down like last night’s TV show and the game this weekend and where are you going on vacation? And then they would just stick that list in their pocket. And most of the people never discussed one of the topics that they had written down, but almost all of them reported feeling much less anxious during the conversation and that the conversation went much, much better than they expected because they had this list to fall back on just like you and your wife. And my guess is that because you guys are creating a list of stuff you really want to discuss, you do get to a lot of it, ’cause it’s stuff that’s important to you, but just having that list, it makes the entire conversation easier.

And it probably doesn’t take you guys long on the car ride over to come up with what you want to talk about.

Brett McKay: No. Yes. Just a few minutes. Another useful tip you provide to help people figure out what the conversation is about. Because again, everyone could be going into conversation with a different agenda. You might be thinking, I’m just going to focus on just practical things. This person wants to have more of an emotional conversation. You talk about thinking of every conversation as a negotiation.

Charles Duhigg: Yeah.

Brett McKay: How can thinking of conversation as a negotiation help you get that matching principle going?

Charles Duhigg: So this is really interesting and there’s a lot of research on this, and the word negotiation might be a little off putting or misleading to people because within psychology, this is referred to as a quiet negotiation where the goal is not to win anything. The goal is to figure out what each person wants. So think about how most of your conversations start is subconsciously you actually probably conduct a couple of experiments at the beginning of every conversation without even realizing it. Like sometimes when you start talking to someone at the beginning of a conversation, you might try… You might interrupt them just to sort of see… And then you pay close attention to their reaction to try and figure out, are the rules of this conversation that we can interrupt each other? Or is it like, no, we each have to wait our turn. You might make a joke and then you’ll pay close attention to see if the other person laughs to try and figure out is this a casual fun conversation or is this a little bit more serious? We need to be a little bit more formal.

We already engage in this quiet negotiation when we conduct those experiments. The difference is that for supercommunicators, they just pay a little bit more attention to how other people react and they take lessons from them. And most importantly, if they tell a joke and the other person doesn’t laugh, they don’t assume that that means that the other person doesn’t like them. They don’t assume that that means that they made a mistake. Rather what they just did was conduct an experiment and they got data from it. And the thing about experiments is they’re not all supposed to work. Like, my wife is actually a scientist and if every experiment she did was a success, she’d be the worst scientist on earth. Like the reason you do experiments is to learn things. And so supercommunicators treat the beginnings of conversations just a little bit more like a series of experiments to figure out what does this person want?

Brett McKay: So you could… Okay, so you’re going to throw out a question, maybe you throw out one of those deep values questions, we’ll talk more about that. And the person doesn’t bite on it. They don’t really talk about what drove them to become a lawyer. It’s just like, well, it’s more of the practicality. They paid a lot of money. So you can understand, well, this person might want to talk about how to finance a 401 [k] or something.

Charles Duhigg: Totally. Or maybe they don’t even play along at all. Maybe you say like, “Oh, what made you decide to go to law school?” And they just say, “It just seemed fun. It seemed like a good idea”. “Okay”. I just conducted an experiment to figure out is talking about careers a way for us to connect? And the answer, the results you just gave me are, “No”. So then I might try a completely different topic and say something like, “Oh, the Super Bowl’s coming up. Who you’re rooting for in the game?” And then when someone says, “I’m rooting for the 9ers”. “Oh yeah, what do you love about the 9ers?” Like, why the 9ers instead of Kansas, by conducting these little experiments and just paying attention to how people react a little bit more, we figure out how they want to connect with us.

Brett McKay: Okay. So to figure out what kind of conversation you’re having and what it’s about, you listen, you ask questions, you tell the person what your goals are for the conversation. You ask them what their goals are. You think of the conversation like a negotiation. You throw things out there, maybe you throw in a joke and see how they respond to that. If they respond to the joke, maybe they just want to connect.

Charles Duhigg: Absolutely.

Brett McKay: So you’re going to…

Charles Duhigg: Or sometimes you don’t even have to throw out a joke, you could just laugh, 80% of the time when we laugh in conversations, it is not in response to something funny. It’s to show the other person we want to connect with them. And then the most natural thing to do is to laugh back, they’re showing us that they want to connect with us. So, I mean, think like, I’m laughing right now. Think about how many times in a conversation you laugh, but nobody’s told a joke. That’s a little experiment.

Brett McKay: Okay. We’ve talked about how to tell what conversation you’re having, and emotional conversations are some of the hardest. I’d like to dig in more into that. If you’re having an emotional conversation, your advice is to ask about other’s feelings and share your own.

Charles Duhigg: Yeah. Once we’re in emotional conversation, once I’ve said, you’ve brought up something that seems clearly to have to do with feelings, and the most natural thing for me to do is empathize. Oftentimes people are very scared of asking about this question. The best example of this in my life was that about six years ago, my dad passed away and I came back to… I was living in New York at the time. I came back to New York from the funeral, and like this was the most meaningful thing that had happened in a long time. The most profound, experiences of many people’s lives. And I would tell people I bumped into, they’d say like, how are you doing? They said, my dad passed away. I was there last week for the funeral. And they would usually, they would almost always say like, oh, I’m so sorry, or, my condolences.

And then because it felt uncomfortable to them, they would go on to something else. They would be like, I’m so sorry to hear that. But thank you for coming in today, ’cause I wanted to talk about the budget, but for me, this was the most profound thing I had been through. I was desperate to talk about it. I didn’t want to talk about anything else. And if somebody had said to me like, I’m so sorry to hear that. Tell me about your dad. What was he like? I would’ve appreciated that so much. And exactly what you said when we were having emotional conversations, oftentimes instead of asking about people’s feelings, we avoid asking. And as a result, we deny ourselves that opportunity to connect on an emotional level, which often is one of the most profound connections we can have.

Brett McKay: I’m curious, do all conversations have an emotional undercurrent even when it’s brass tacks, where going to go for vacation? Or who’s taking the kids where? Is there typically?

Charles Duhigg: Absolutely.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Charles Duhigg: Absolutely. From the second you open your mouth, emotions in some small way are shaping what you say and how you hear other people, going on vacation. I say to my wife, I’d really like to go to Hawaii. [laughter] And she says, I’d really like to go to Japan. And suddenly I’m like, Japan’s twi… In my head I’m like, Japan’s twice as expensive as Hawaii. And that makes me anxious. And also, we went where you wanted last time. It seems like fairness would dictate I get to choose this time. Those emotions are all there. Now that doesn’t mean that we have to make this into an emotional conversation, but it does mean that if we’re having problems connecting with each other on this practical discussion of where to go on vacation, it might be because we want to have an emotional conversation and we need to recognize that and let that out.

Brett McKay: Sometimes too, people don’t even know when there’s emotion tied to something they’re saying. They think it’s…

Charles Duhigg: Yeah.

Brett McKay: They think it’s completely practical. You might see this in, I dunno, it could be a business meeting or a meeting that you have with a group you belong to, and you’re trying to make a decision that’s seemed… On the surface seems very brass tacks. What are we going to do for the budget? Who are we going to assign to this task? Whatever. And whenever you see people coming at it just loggerheads, it’s butting heads. In my experience, there’s always been… There’s some emotional hangup there.

Charles Duhigg: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Someone feels strongly about this. It’s not even logic, it’s you have to dig deep. Why is this person so stubborn about this thing? Or why am I so stubborn about this thing? And then once you get that on the table things, it might not resolve right away, but at least you know where everyone’s coming from.

Charles Duhigg: That’s exactly right. And one of the things you said is really important is listen for conflict. Listen for, this isn’t going the way I planned it going. Listen for, I just feel like we’re not connecting with each other. We all know when that happens. When we’re in that meeting and we’re discussing something that seems practical and you can feel at the table like, we’re not on the same page. Something’s happening here. We’re not agreeing with each other. We’re not building on each other’s ideas. That is a great clue, that you’re having a practical conversation and there’s something emotional that you need to discuss, that you need to shift a little bit so that you can get those emotions on the table. ‘Cause oftentimes, once we simply acknowledge them, they become much less powerful. Once I say, look, I know that you are worried, I hear you saying that you are worried that we’re going to have to lay people off, and that’s going to be incredibly stressful. And so I want to say, if it comes to that, you and I will be in this together. We will do this shoulder to shoulder. Now all of a sudden that anxiety is gone. Now we can talk about plans, but if we don’t even acknowledge the anxiety, then it’s hopeless.

Brett McKay: And the reason why people don’t acknowledge it ’cause they feel uncomfortable about talking, about emotions.

Charles Duhigg: Yeah. Or they simply don’t recognize.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Charles Duhigg: That this is an important part of conversations.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Going back to this idea that, you gave that example your father died, you get back and people are, I’m sorry. And then they just moved on to business as usual. And you talk about people do that ’cause they just… Yeah, they don’t know what to say. They feel uncomfortable.

Charles Duhigg: Yeah.

Brett McKay: They feel awkward. And a technique that I found really useful, I got from your book and we… You mentioned it earlier, this idea of deep questions is turning what are typical shallow questions into deep questions. I want to go into this deeper.

Charles Duhigg: Okay.

Brett McKay: What are some more examples of turning shallow questions into deep questions?

Charles Duhigg: The basic principle of a deep question is instead of asking someone about the facts of their life, ask them how they feel about their life. And anyone who’s listening who has kids knows how true this is. I have kids myself, if when my son comes home from school and I’m like, what’d you do today? That’s a facts question. He’ll be like, nothing. What did you learn today? Nothing. [laughter] It’s like pulling teeth. Whereas, when he comes home and I’m like, Hey, I was wondering what was the best part of your day? Or, I saw that you hung out with Jasper after school. What do you like about Jasper? What do you think is cool about him? Suddenly it’s like opening the flood gates because instead of asking him about facts, I asked him how he felt.

And this is the principle that underlies every deep question. The question doesn’t have to be very profound, and the question doesn’t have to be very specific, it has to be some version of, tell me what you make of that. What does this mean to you? Why is that important? Instead of asking someone like, Hey, where’d you go to college? You can ask them like, what was the best part of college for you? What you’re really asking them there is what was important to you about college? And it’s easy once you shift your brain a little bit to look for these opportunities. Deep questions are incredibly easy to find and they’re so much more fun to talk about.

Brett McKay: Yeah. You talk about, you get some other examples instead of asking where are you from? What’s the best thing about where you grew up? And…

Charles Duhigg: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Someone might talk about their friends and playing in the fields and memories with barbecues. And some people might say, it had a… I don’t know, a nice park system. You’ll be able to figure out what people value with their answer.

Charles Duhigg: That’s exactly right. What they will tell you is they’ll tell you what matters to them. I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, so if someone says, what’s the best part of growing up in Albuquerque, what I’d say is, it’s just, I had a lot of family around me and it was really easy to see them. It’s not a fast paced, high pressure place. And so what I told this person is I told them family is important to me. And so that’s something we can dive into. I told them that, I was born into a place where it was a slower pace, which also implies that maybe I’ve lived other places that are faster paced. I told you so much about myself simply by telling you what I liked about growing up in Albuquerque. And it gives you a chance to tell me about yourself to be like, I grew up in Boise. And, same thing. It was like slow paced and now I live in New York, it’s a little bit more fast paced and I like that too. Now we’re having a conversation where we can get real with each other and get deep.

Brett McKay: So you didn’t value Blake’s Ladi Burger? Green chili burger?

Charles Duhigg: [0:27:01.5] ____ You know Albuquerque.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Charles Duhigg: [laughter] I will say a Blake’s green chili cheeseburger is a pretty good way to go.

Brett McKay: It’s a good one, yeah. Okay. Ask those deep questions. You figure out what they value. And you can even do this with things that are practical. If you feel like there’s an emotional undercurrent here, you can turn these shallow questions into deep questions. I’ve been doing this with my kids, before we go to bed at night, we lie down next to ’em. We talk about the day with each of them. And I’ve been trying to ask these deeper questions instead of asking like, what’d you do today? What was… I asked, What was the best thing you did today? Or What’d you like about that?

Charles Duhigg: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And it opens up some great conversations. Another part of having these emotional conversations is we need to start paying attention to, how the other person feels during this conversation. We gotta pay attention to their mood and energy.

Charles Duhigg: Yeah.

Brett McKay: What do you mean by paying attention to mood and energy in the other person?

Charles Duhigg: Okay, when we’re kids, we do this almost automatically. Babies almost from birth, if you smile at a baby, they’ll smile back at you. But as we get older, instead of paying attention to nonverbal communication, we start focusing on people’s words. We ask someone like, Hey, how you doing? And they say, I’m fine, but their arms are crossed and their voice sounds really like lethargic and their eyes are downcast, but we pay attention to their words rather than how they look to us, the signals they’re sending us. And so a big part of this is, making ourselves a little bit more open to noticing what’s going on, beyond the words coming out of someone’s mouth. Are they leaning in towards us? Are they interrupting us? Interruption? We think of interruption as being a bad thing, but oftentimes when we’re interrupting each other, it shows that it’s a good conversation because it means that both of us really like what we’re talking about.

We really want to connect here. Or are they someone who’s just sitting there listening? Are they kinda like looking away? It’s really easy to ignore all of those signals, but once we train ourselves, and again, this isn’t hard, it’s a habit that we can develop really easily. Once we train ourselves to notice how people are behaving, how much energy is in their voice? Are they high energy or low energy? Do they seem upbeat or glum? That tells us almost everything we need to know about what’s going on inside their emotional mind, even without them saying a word about their emotions.

Brett McKay: And should we match them? If they’re high energy, should we respond by being high energy as well?

Charles Duhigg: It would feel pretty good if we do. Think about how, again, going back to laughter. And in fact NASA uses this to figure out which of their astronaut candidates or applicants have high emotional intelligence. Think about if you tell a joke and then you go, ha ha, [laughter] and you laugh really big at it and the other person goes, [laughter] Yeah. It’s funny. You don’t feel like you’re connected. [laughter] You like the fact that you’re high energy and they’re low energy. They’re laughing back. They’re doing the same thing you are. They’re matching you. But because our energy levels don’t match, we know that we’re not connecting. Whereas if we chuckle a little bit and the other person chuckles with us, then we’re telling each other, we’re on the same wavelength.

Brett McKay: Yeah. That story about NASA, there’s this guy, it was, Terrance McGuire.

Charles Duhigg: Yeah.

Brett McKay: NASA started putting astronauts up into space stations and so they’re going to be up there for months, even years, a year at a time. And instead they had to figure out how can we make sure these people don’t kill each other while they’re up there? And like, ’cause they’re annoyed, and the thing they found, he started studying their conversations, looking at psychological profiles. And the thing he found that determined, it wasn’t the determining factor, but a sign that someone had emotional intelligence and could get along with other people, [laughter] was laughing when other people laughed.

Charles Duhigg: And laughing the same way they laughed. What’s really interesting is when you make it to the final rounds of like astronaut, interviews, everybody there knows how to fake into emotional intelligence really well. These are the people who have the right stuff. They’ve practiced this for years, but the difference between someone who can fake emotional intelligence and someone who has emotional intelligence is pretty big when you’re like nine months into a mission and you’ve been living in a tin can for the… With five other people. And so you’re exactly right. What McGuire did was he changed how he interviewed people. So he’d walk into these interviews carrying a bunch of papers, and he would spill the papers as if on accident, but he would do it on purpose and he would always wear this yellow garish tie.

And he would turn to the person who he hasn’t even met yet who’s about to interview, and he’d say, my gosh, my son made me wear this tie today and I dropped all these papers. I look like a clown. [laughter] And he would laugh at himself in this big energetic laugh. And then, without the applicant realizing he would pay close attention, did the person laugh back politely? Or did they match his energy and his intensity of laughter? Because if they’re matching him, that’s someone who takes emotional intelligence seriously. That’s someone who has thought about how to connect with other people, and to that person it just feels like a habit. They’re doing what feels natural. But we develop those natural instincts by thinking at some point in our past about how we want to be in a conversation.

Brett McKay: Some of the most emotionally laden conversations are high conflict conversations.

Charles Duhigg: Yeah.

Brett McKay: And you, talk about this tool that can help you navigate these high emotion, high conflict conversation is the loop of understanding what is the loop of understanding?

Charles Duhigg: Yeah. And it’s looping for understanding, when we talk about how people do it. One of the interesting things is that when we are in a conversation that has any tension or conflict in it, even if it’s small, we’re disagreeing about something, we hold different political opinions, there’s this thing in our head that immediately makes us suspect that the other person is not listening to us, but they’re waiting their turn to speak. And that can be really frustrating and that makes us less likely to listen to them. The way we overcome this is this technique known as looping for understanding. And there’s three steps to it. The first step is, ask a question. The preferably a deep question. The second step is once a person is answered the question, repeat back what you just heard them say in your own words.

And then the third step, and this is the one most people forget, is ask if you got it right. And the reason why this is so powerful is because what we’re trying to do is prove that we’re listening. We want to prove to the other person that we’re hearing what they said, that we want to understand what they say. That we’re not just waiting our turn to speak. And this looping for understanding, it becomes real. It’s like a second nature. I do it all the time now. I’m like, what I hear you saying is, and tell me if I’m getting this wrong. And then I repeat what they said in my own words. And it’s important that it’s in my own words. I’m not mimicking them, I’m proving to them that I’ve heard what they said and processed it a little bit. And study after study shows, if you do this in a tough conversation, in a tension-filled conversation or discussing politics with like your uncle, it changes the entire dialogue for the better.

Brett McKay: Another, idea you talk about to navigate high conflict conversations is, try not to control the other person. ‘Cause that ratchets up the tension.

Charles Duhigg: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Why do we have a tendency to want to control the conversation and the other person, and what can we do to counter that?

Charles Duhigg: A lot of this research and insights comes from looking at marriage counseling and how married couples talk to each other. Everybody fights. Every married couple has arguments. Some of those arguments almost seem not to matter at all. People, they have an argument and then the next, 10 minutes later they’re fine. Some of those arguments become toxic every single time. And so researchers started looking, trying to figure out what’s the difference between these two groups. And what they found is that in the toxic conversations, the toxic fights, what happens is that we’re trying to control each other. And when we’re feeling attacked or when we’re discussing something that’s tense, it’s very natural to want to control something. We have inborn instincts to try and control a situation when we feel anxious.

And the most obvious thing to control is the person I’m talking to. And that control can be like, if I can get you to listen to me, then you’ll agree with me. If I can just get you to see things from my perspective or I can try and control your emotions, I might say, you shouldn’t feel that way. That’s not such a big deal. You’re making too big a deal of this. When people try to control each other, it becomes toxic. But we have this instinct for control and we can’t just repress it. What we should do instead is we find things we can control together. And there’s three things in general that even if we are in a fight with each other, we can control together. The first is the environment. If this fight starts at two o’clock in the morning, we can agree, okay, let’s wait until tomorrow when we’re both well rested and we’ve gotten a chance to think on this a little bit.

Let’s not talk about this until 10:00. That’s controlling your environment together. And that’s really positive. The second thing you can control is yourself. And you can make this obvious. You can say things like, look, I hear what you’re saying. I just want to take 10 seconds to think about what you said before I respond. That’s something that shows that we’re trying to control ourselves instead of the other person. And the third thing we can control, is the boundaries of the fight itself. There’s this pattern in a lot of marriages called kitchen sinking. That’s one of the most toxic things that can happen, which is, we’ll start by arguing about where we’re going to spend Thanksgiving and it becomes, your mom hates me and we don’t have enough money. [laughter] A fight about one thing becomes a fight about everything.

That’s terrible. Oftentimes you see what the best couples do is they say, okay, look, we gotta figure out where we’re spending thanksgiving. Let’s focus on the Thanksgiving question. I don’t want to talk about your mom, I don’t want to talk about money. We can talk about that stuff, but that’s a different conversation. And what happens is, when we try and control our environment and ourselves and the boundaries of the fight itself, what we’re doing is we’re introducing control that we can share, places where we can cooperate with each other. And instead of controlling each other, we’re controlling these things together. And again, that doesn’t mean that the fight disappears, but it makes it so much easier for us to get through it.

Brett McKay: No, you mentioned earlier, I’ve gotta watch myself for that ’cause I’ve done that a few times. I do that a few times is where you’re having a conversation and someone’s saying, someone says something and I’m like, you’re not listening to me, but they are listening to me.

Charles Duhigg: Totally.

Brett McKay: They don’t want to do what I…

Charles Duhigg: Exactly.

Brett McKay: They don’t agree with me, but I project on them and say, you’re not listening. No. And there’s times where people will tell me something and, I understand completely what you want. I just don’t agree with it. Yeah.

Charles Duhigg: And think about how good it would feel if you’re in that conversation and that person says, okay, look, I might disagree with you, but I want to repeat back what you just said to me to make sure I understand it and tell me if I’m getting this right. And that takes like 30 seconds to repeat that back. If they did that, then you would not say, you’re not listening to me. You would say like, no, you heard what I’m saying. And we might disagree with each other, but you heard me and this is hardwired into our brains that would make you more likely to listen to them. When we prove that we are listening through looping for understanding, we make the other person more likely to listen to us.

Brett McKay: A lot of this looping for understanding, it’s easy to do in person, ’cause you can do it real time.

Charles Duhigg: Yeah.

Brett McKay: But it gets hard when you take that conversation online. And so online conversations can become really fraught. Dumpster fires as people say.

Charles Duhigg: Immediately.

Brett McKay: Immediately.

Charles Duhigg: [laughter] There’s a story in the book about, this experiment that was done where they brought together gun control enthusiasts and then gun rights activists. And the goal was to have like, teach them how to have a civil conversation. And so they taught them looping for understanding and a couple of other skills and it worked really well face to face. And then they go home and they had created a private Facebook group for them. And within 45 minutes people were calling each other jack booted Nazis. [laughter] It fell apart immediately. [laughter],

Brett McKay: Why is that? What’s going on?

Charles Duhigg: Well, I think what’s happening there, and this gets to everything else we’ve been talking about. ‘Cause you can do looping for understanding online. You have to think about how to do it a little bit differently. One of my very examples of how technology changes these conversations is if you look at when telephones first became popular about a 100 years ago, there were all these studies that were written that basically said, no one will ever use a telephone for a real conversation. Because we can’t see each other, we’re not going to be able to discuss real things. And in fact, the researchers were right at that time. There were all these studies where they would transcribe people’s phone conversations and they’re stilted and weird. People used phones as telegraphs to send grocery lists or stock, news of the day.

But of course, by the time you and I and everyone listening were teenagers, we could talk for like seven hours a night and they were the most meaningful conversations of our lives. And the reason why is because we learned how to speak on the telephone differently than we learned how to speak face-to-face. And in fact, one of the things we know is that without realizing it, when you talk on the phone, you tend to enunciate a little bit more than you would face-to-face. And because you know the person can’t see you, we tend to put a little bit more emotional signals into our voices. We do this unthinkingly. Now, when it comes to online communication, most people have only been emailing for like 25 years at the most. Slack, we’ve been slacking for four or five years, texting each other using emojis to text each other.

I still don’t know how to do that. And so we make this mistake when we go online, which is that we assume online conversations are like offline conversations, but they’re not. They have their own rules and we know those rules. We intuit those rules, but sometimes we just have to remind ourselves that if I’m talking to you over the phone and I say something sarcastic, you will hear the sarcasm in my voice. But if I email you and I can still, when I’m writing the email, I can hear the sarcasm in my head. You can’t hear it. And so you’re going to read that as being serious and you’re going to get upset. I need to use a different way to signal to you, I’m being sarcastic. Either not be sarcastic or maybe I put one of those little winking emojis at the end. Something to show you that I’m being sarcastic, which I don’t have to do when we’re talking to each other. And if we just take a second before we hit send to say like, what are the rules of email? What are the rules of texting? How are they different from the rules of making a phone conversation? Then we tend to communicate much better online.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you have some other rules. Overemphasize, politeness.

Charles Duhigg: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Express more gratitude, deference, greetings, apologies, and hedges.

Charles Duhigg: And studies back all of that stuff up. Study after study shows that like, in fact there was this interesting study of Wikipedia editors where people would be fighting with each other all day long online. And they just asked… They told one person to start saying, please, and thank you every other comment. And like everyone else stopped fighting. It’s like we start mirroring each other, we start matching each other and being a little bit more polite online, it has these totally outsized impacts.

Brett McKay: And you can use looping for understanding to deescalate these high conflict online conversations. If you see someone.

Charles Duhigg: Totally.

Brett McKay: Throw something out there, a total flame. They knew it was like a grenade is going to cause everyone to get angry. You can ask, you can get curious and be like, all right, it sounds like you feel passionately about this. Tell me why is that instead of responding with an immediate barb.

Charles Duhigg: Yeah.

Brett McKay: And you might find that it…

Charles Duhigg: Absolutely.

Brett McKay: It forces the person to get outta their own limbic system, their…

Charles Duhigg: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Reptile brain and start thinking like, a homo sapien.

Charles Duhigg: That’s exactly right.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Charles Duhigg: It takes advantage of those parts of our brains that have evolved to be good at communication.

Brett McKay: Charles, where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Charles Duhigg: Yeah, absolutely. The name of the book is Supercommunicators. You can buy it at Amazon or anywhere else that you, get books. If you want to reach out to me or learn about me, if you just Google my name Charles Duhigg, I’m the only Charles Duhigg on Earth, [laughter] D-U-H-I-G-G, or if you Google the Power of Habit or Smarter, Faster, Better, my website will come up and I’ll mention on my website is my email address, which is Charles@charlesduhigg.com. And I read and reply to every single email I get from a reader. It might take me a couple of days, but I want to connect with you and have a conversation. And so if you send me a note, I will read it and I will reply.

Brett McKay: Well, Charles Duhigg, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Charles Duhigg: Thanks for having me on. This has been so much fun.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Charles Duhigg. He’s the author of the book Supercommunicators. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, charlesduhigg.com. Also, check out our shownotes at aom.is/supercommunicator where you find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.

That wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website theartofmanliness.com. Find our podcast archives. And while you’re there, sign up for a newsletter. We got a daily option and a weekly option. They’re both free. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on at AoM. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to get your view off a podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member. Who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, is Brett McKay, remind you to listen to AoM podcast, put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Every morning in America, a lot of men stand in front of their bathroom mirror, lather up with shaving cream, and scrape their face clean with a razor. Probably a multi-blade cartridge razor. If they’re old-school, a safety razor. If they’re old-old-school, a straight razor. After that, they brush their teeth. Then they run a comb through their hair (if they have any). When they travel, they pack all their grooming tools in a Dopp kit. This is the standard, normal grooming routine of the 21st century man.

But almost none of it was completely normal before 1945.

It took two world wars to standardize and popularize these practices among men.

Yes, your daily shave and teeth brushing routine was forged in battle.

Below, we take a look at how total war in the 20th century shaped how men take care of their personal hygiene.

Before World War I, Many Men Didn’t Shave Themselves

You think shaving today is a hassle? At the turn of the twentieth century, shaving at home was a much bigger one. The dominant tool was the straight razor. While many 21st-century dudes romanticize the pleasures of putting a cutthroat to their face (we’re guilty of this!), shaving with a straight razor is kind of a pain in the ass. Straight razors are difficult to shave with and require a lot of upkeep. You’ve got to sharpen and strop them on the regular. What’s more, if you wanted hot water to lather up, you had to heat it on the stove. Because it was a chore to shave, many men either wore beards or relied on regular visits to the barber, who scraped off their whiskers while they sat in his chair.

That started to change in 1904, when King Camp Gillette was awarded U.S. Patent No. 775,134 for the safety razor. This device shielded the skin from the blade’s edge while still allowing a close shave. Shaving got a whole lot easier. But Gillette’s real genius wasn’t the razor itself but the business model behind it. He sold the handle cheaply and made money on the replacement blades. It’s the same model your printer company uses to gouge you on ink cartridges, except Gillette thought of it first.

Initial sales were modest — just 51 razors and 168 blades in 1903. But by 1915, Gillette was selling 450,000 razors and 70 million blades a year. During WWI, the British and American governments required soldiers to be clean-shaven in order to ensure a proper seal on gas masks so they didn’t inhale poison gas in the trenches.

To that end, the government included safety razors in standard-issue kits during World War I, giving the product a massive trial run with millions of young men. When soldiers returned home, many kept up the daily DIY shaving habit. By 1926, American men were buying over two million blades a day.

The Dopp Kit and the Standardization of the American Male Grooming Routine

While WWI made shaving a more regular practice among American men, it took WWII to make it, and other hygiene habits, near universal.

By World War II, the U.S. Army had contracted with a leather goods maker named Charles Doppelt to manufacture toiletry bags for American servicemen. Known as ‘Dopp kits’ (Doppelt, Dopp kit — get it?), the bags were issued to millions of recruits during the war. Inside, soldiers carried the essentials of their new military grooming routine: a safety razor, shaving soap or brushless cream, a comb, toothpaste, a toothbrush, a mirror, and a bar of soap.

Gillette also shifted their production to meet the needs of the fighting men. The company switched to bakelite (an early plastic) and light alloy razors to conserve strategic metals like brass and aluminum, and ramped up production to fill those Dopp kits. Intelligence agencies even produced special shaving sets for POWs. What appeared to be a standard razor and brush hid compasses, counterfeit German currency, and silk maps of enemy territory that soldiers could use to escape.

The troops even found creative secondary uses for their shaving cream. War correspondent Ernie Pyle reported that frontline troops at Anzio used it to treat sunburn and soothe fleabites, and thought it prevented trench foot if you massaged it into your feet once a day.

Besides shaving, daily toothbrushing was also mandated by the military. Before the war, most Americans didn’t brush their teeth every day. But the military required it to maintain overall dental hygiene and to prevent “trench mouth,” a debilitating infection involving bleeding gums and fever that had plagued troops in World War I. Soldiers were issued nylon-bristled brushes from DuPont.

When millions of veterans came home in 1945 and 1946, they brought their military-issued grooming habits with them. They were accustomed to being clean-shaven and fresh of breath and having easy access to the products that kept them that way.

While grooming practices have changed since then, the basics are still the same for most men. And those basics were established thanks to two world wars. So the next time you’re standing at your bathroom sink looking at your ugly mug while you shave or pack your Dopp kit for your next vacation, take a moment to think about the fact that the rituals you’re taking part in were forged in the trenches.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Remember the old hotel ice machines? The kind where you’d slide your bucket under the chute and hear the avalanche of cubes crashing into it? There was something so fun and strangely gratifying about that thing.

Or think about breaking an icicle off the edge of a roof. Such a gratifying feeling from such a small act.

My guest has written an ode to the outsized pleasures that arise from these kinds of everyday interactions with the physical world. His name is Ian Bogost, and his new book is The Small Stuff. Today on the show, Ian argues that a fulfilling life isn’t built solely by chasing the big components of happiness but also by embracing the small moments of gratification that are woven throughout ordinary life. We discuss how those moments can be found in tactile experiences like shifting a manual transmission, turning a well-made knob, or flipping through the pages of a real menu. We explore how these small opportunities for engagement — for contact, connection, and control— have been disappearing as the world becomes more digitized and automated and everything becomes a touchscreen. And Ian shares how opportunities for “sensory enchantment” can still be found in our increasingly dematerialized world.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Ian’s previous appearance on the AoM Podcast: Episode #247 — The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Antidote to Excessive Irony
• Ian’s Atlantic article “The End of Manual Transmission”
• Andy Rooney compilation

Connect With Ian Bogost

• The Small Stuff website
• Ian’s website
• Ian’s faculty page

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Transcript Coming Soon

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

The comedian Sinbad had a bit where he talks about how much he hates standing in line behind people at McDonald’s. The fact that folks would be hemming and hawing about what to order left Sinbad shaking his head in frustration: “People act like they ain’t ever been to McDonald’s! They got the same menu! You know what they got!”

You’d think that by the time someone reached the front of a line at a restaurant, especially one that’s offered pretty much the same menu for decades, they’d be ready to shoot off their order. But instead, folks still seem to be caught flat-footed once they step up to the cashier.

Restaurants are hardly the only places where you see this phenomenon.

When you’re renting a car, you’ll often stand for ten minutes in a line, along which have been posted multiple signs indicating that you’ll need to show the counter rep a driver’s license, a credit card, and your return flight confirmation number to complete your rental. Yet, it’s only when people reach the desk that they start rooting around in their pockets and scrolling through their phones to retrieve what’s needed. They sometimes act surprised that they need to show the required information at all.

This kind of obliviousness is on display whenever I go to my local post office. They do passport applications there, but you need an appointment. It’s on the website, and there are signs everywhere that say “Passport by Appointment Only.” Yet without fail, there will be people who show up without an appointment to try to get their passport, only to be told they’re out of luck. They then get angry, cause a scene, slow things down for everyone standing in line to buy stamps, and generally spread bad vibes.

Everywhere you go, you can observe a lack of what might be called “social situational awareness.” People are looking down at their phones instead of what’s going on around them. And because technology takes care of so many details of our lives for us, we’re less vigilant about keeping track of them ourselves.

As a result, a lot of people are sleepwalking through their interactions with the world, which can cause delays and bottlenecks that muck things up. While every unnecessary delay is small, multiplied across hundreds of interactions, it becomes friction everyone has to bear.

The world would be a better place if we all committed to paying attention and knowing what we were doing.

Read any signage displayed behind the counter or on the wall while you wait in line for something. Consider what information you’ll need to have at the ready and what items you’ll need to have in your hand before you reach the front. Anticipate what will be required for the next step.

Pay attention to the interactions between other customers and service reps or cashiers to see if any friction points are causing holdups. If you notice something, figure out how to avoid running into that issue yourself.

If there’s a question about a protocol that you weren’t able to find out through prior research or from the signs, promptly ask the agent/cashier about it once it’s your turn. For example, different airports have different policies these days about whether things like laptops have to come out of your bag when you go through TSA. Listen for whether the agents are making announcements about that kind of thing as you approach the checkpoint, but if you haven’t heard anything, then as soon as you step up to the X-ray machine, ask the agent what the protocol is.

Cultivating your social situational awareness is a win-win-win for everyone.

The cashier or customer service rep gets an efficient interaction. You get what you need quickly. And other customers, passengers, and queue-standers can be on their way sooner.

And the art of paying attention doesn’t just apply to standing in line for a double quarter pounder with cheese. It’s about having the situational awareness that allows you to navigate the wider world more effectively. In my experience, the people who are “sharp,” or listo as they say in Spanish, have developed the skill of paying attention and creating mental models on the fly of how to handle themselves in whatever situation comes their way. If they can’t figure it out on their own, they’re quick to ask for clarification. It’s an element of agency.

Don’t be a clueless potato head. Be a high-agency man.

Pay attention; be prepared; don’t make the world wait on you.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

In The Safety Trap by security expert Spencer Coursen, he describes a case where a wealthy client of his kept the key fobs for his luxury vehicles near the front door. A thief was able to quietly enter this man’s home, grab a fob, and drive off with a car. 

The owner was in his bedroom the whole time, oblivious to the fact that he was getting robbed right underneath his nose. 

This rich guy called Spencer for a consult on installing a sophisticated security system to avoid another brazen theft. 

“Was the front door locked?” Spencer initially inquired regarding the theft. 

“Well, no . . .” responded the client.

“Why not try locking your doors first before we spend a lot of money on a security system?” Spencer asked.

While this “Well duh!”-inducing story probably makes you think “I’d never be so dumb,” chances are, you are sometimes that dumb. Dimes to donuts, you do sometimes leave your doors unlocked, even when you’re sleeping.

That’s because you haven’t routinized the locking of your doors. You just do it willy-nilly, making yourself re-remember to do it each night. And sometimes your memory fails you.

Spencer says that a surprising number of burglaries occur because the homeowner left a door or window unlocked. It’s a small mistake, but it can be a costly one.

Burglars are criminals of opportunity. The easier it will be to burglarize your home without getting caught, the more likely they are to commit the crime. If you make burgling your house a bit more difficult, you reduce the likelihood of your house getting hit.

There are lots of ways to make your home a less desirable target for criminals, including these 8 low-tech methods.  

But according to Spencer, one of the easiest, most bang-for-your-buck things you can do to improve your home security is simply performing a set security check before you turn in for the night. He calls this the “9 p.m. routine,” though you can do it at whatever time works for you. The important thing is to simply be consistent. 

It only takes five minutes and requires doing the following things: 

• Make sure all home doors are shut and locked.
• Make sure all home windows are shut and locked.
• Draw the blinds.
• Ensure outside lights are on (to make this easier, install a solar timetable light switch).
• If you park a car outside, double-check that the vehicle is locked and valuables are removed. (I’m always surprised by the number of people on my Nextdoor feed complaining that a gun was stolen from the glove compartment of their car. When asked if the car was locked, the answer is often no.)
• If you have a home security system, enable it.

Many of you are already doing your version of the 9 p.m. routine. Consider this some friendly encouragement to keep it up.

But as Spencer noted, many people don’t do something as basic as locking their doors and shutting their windows. If this is you, take this as your nudge to start your own nightly security check.

Your home is your sanctuary. Develop this simple habit that can keep it that way. 

For more tips on personal security, listen to our podcast with Spencer Coursen:

With our archives now 4,000+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in August 2022. 

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Left of Bang: How the Marine Corps’ Combat Hunter Program Can Save Your Life. I had Patrick Van Horne on the podcast way back in 2014 to discuss this book, which he co-authored with Jason Riley. Left of Bang lays out the Marine Corps’ Combat Hunter program, which was developed during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to train Marines in staying “left of bang” — able to detect threats before they happen rather than responding after the attack. Full of accessible and potentially life-saving mental models, the book is really interesting and did a lot to shape my thinking and help me develop the skill of situational awareness. If you haven’t read it, pick up a copy.

Manhattan’s Fastest Bike Messenger. I love watching old videos about jobs that no longer exist or are on the decline. My latest find is this 1985 CBS Evening News segment in which Charles Kuralt profiles David Leopold, the best bike messenger in New York City. Back before email and e-filing, thousands of messengers tore through Manhattan traffic hand-delivering contracts, blueprints, and film reels, and at age 24, Leopold was the king of them all. Kuralt sets out to discover why he’s so good at what he does. Bike messengers still roam the streets of NYC today, but their numbers are significantly smaller than during their heyday decades back.

More Men Are Addicted to the ‘Crack Cocaine’ of the Stock Market. One thing I have a growing concern about when it comes to young men is the rise of online sports gambling. I did a really interesting episode of the podcast about it with Michael Lewis, who did a deep dive into the sports betting industry. Related to that trend is the increasing popularity of day trading via apps. This Wall Street Journal piece looks at the phenomenon of day trading addicts and the financial ruin it’s causing them. Guys are making risky option bets that can completely drain their savings in a day. One man profiled in the piece hid his trading from his Gamblers Anonymous group for years and ended up losing around $1 million from his portfolio’s peak. I’ve been having conversations with my 15-year-old son about staying away from this stuff and just sticking to boring index funds. 

Vintage Belt Buckles. I have a thick leather belt that lets you swap out the buckle. I wanted something with a little pizazz and stumbled upon this eBay shop that specializes in selling vintage belt buckles. They’ve got thousands of them in every category imaginable: railroad, rodeo, occupational, 70s hippie brass. I picked up a handsome brass buckle featuring the state seal of Oklahoma. It means business. Pairs real nice with bootcut jeans and cowboy boots. 

On our Dying Breed newsletter, we published Sunday Firesides: The Hills Will Find You Out and Should You Stay or Should You Go? How to Escape the Sunk Cost Trap.

DB’s Lonesome Dove Book Club also just came to a close. It was a huge success! We had over 800 people join us on the trail with the Hat Creek Cattle Company, and the engagement from members was plentiful and top-notch. I got so many new insights about the book from them, making this read of my favorite novel the most enjoyable one yet (besides the first time; you can never beat the first time). We’ll definitely do another book club in the future. Stay tuned.

Quote of the Week

Lost, yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered, for they are gone forever.

—Horace Mann

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

My wife Jane and I are celebrating our 15th anniversary this month. Hooray for us! It really feels like I’ve hit the jackpot, because my wife and I enjoy each other’s company more and more with every passing year. I don’t think there’s some big secret that has kept us blissfully happy this long — I tend to think that we genuinely just really like each other. 

A funny thing happens though after you’ve been married for 10 (or 15) years and you still seem happy: you’ll start to get folks asking for relationship tips or advice every once in a while. Honestly, I usually feel wholly unqualified to answer; people seem to want advice for the hard parts, but our marriage has not had many trials, and we don’t fight very often. 

I’ve often wondered why I don’t find marriage difficult, when the messaging around long-term relationships often says otherwise. Is there something we’re actually doing differently? Are our easy-going personalities suited to a higher baseline level of contentment? Are we just too passive and Midwestern to bring up problems and somehow it works for us? (There’s probably some truth to all of those!) 

A few years ago, however, I was forced to think through these questions a bit more when I was asked to officiate a dear friend’s wedding ceremony. Beyond just guiding the couple through exchanging vows, I wanted to give some solid advice! After thinking about it for a while, I realized there was indeed a specific framework that has helped my wife and I avoid the fights that seem more common among folks we know and even amongst couples in pop culture depictions of marriage. I don’t remember if we came by this idea naturally or encountered it somewhere else, but it’s really worked for us and might help you as well. 

Fight the Problem, Not Each Other 

It’s all too easy for any argument in a marriage — whether about work, kids, family, money, personality differences, whatever — to turn into a battle of you versus them. In this typical fight, there is a winner and loser, though it’s usually the case that you both lose to some degree and the original problem may or may not be resolved. 

Our culture and even our biology have wired us to approach conflict as an adversarial contest. When we encounter threats, even small ones, we interpret them as being a danger to our happiness and way of life. We get defensive, put on our armor, and prepare for battle. 

In this scenario, you and your partner are like two knights, fighting over a prized jewel. Only one of you can get it, so you duke it out until someone decisively wins or one of you simply becomes too tired to keep going. For some couples, this won’t look like actual fighting, but will be a war of silent looks and disdainful thoughts — which can be just as dangerous. 

I want to propose a different paradigm. 

Rather than framing your argument or issue as you versus them, think about it as you and your partner versus the problem. 

The baby is crying in the middle of the night and you’re mad at each other because you can’t agree on who should get up, which leads to an argument about who’s doing more diaper changes, what your overall sleep strategy should be, etc. Naturally, your exhaustion exacerbates the problem. Instead, what if you thought of it as you and your partner versus the fussy baby? It’s a funny image, I know, but it truly worked for us when our children were tiny — the silliness of the idea can work in your favor. How can you work together to solve this problem — to (metaphorically!) slay this baby dragon that’s standing in the way of the prized jewel of good sleep and happy parents? 

It works even when the problem doesn’t have a face. If your budget just isn’t coming together and the bank account seems a little low, it can easily turn couples against each other. Why are you spending so much? Why aren’t you working harder to get a promotion? Instead, think of it as you and your spouse versus that stupid bank account. How can you team up to save more money? How can one of you support the other for a season of putting in more hours on the job? 

Of course there are some issues that this framework can’t resolve. You and your spouse versus an affair won’t work the same. But for the recurring arguments that aren’t on an existential level, it can go a long way. 

You and your partner can create an almost playful mindset along the lines of, “The world is conspiring against us and trying to tear us apart; we have to figure out how to beat back the darkness, together.”

Stop thinking of problem areas in your relationship as you against your spouse, and start thinking: It’s us against the world.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

People are told their whole lives how important it is to find their purpose. But many find the search frustrating. They feel there’s one true calling or one grand goal they’re supposed to be pursuing, but they can’t seem to discern what it is.

My guest, Jordan Grumet, author of The Purpose Code, says that searching for what he calls your big P purpose can be fruitless and even harmful, and that a better path is to embrace a life of little p purposes. Today on the show, Jordan explains the difference between big P and little p purposes and argues that the former can lead to anxiety while embracing the latter can be the path to meaning, satisfaction, connection, and even the legacy you were looking for in the first place. We discuss how Jordan found his way to this philosophy after burning out as a doctor, practical ways to discover your own little p purposes, what he thinks we get wrong in making family our purpose, and what his work in hospice has taught him about living a life without regret.

Connect With Jordan Grumet

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.