The awkward silence at work when everyone knows a project is going off the rails.

The simmering resentment in a marriage over an issue neither spouse will confront.

The dysfunction in a church where certain topics are understood to be off-limits.

My guest, Joseph Grenny, says that some of the biggest problems in every organization, from businesses to families, aren’t the issues themselves, but people’s inability to talk about them. Joseph is a business social scientist and consultant, and the co-author of the bestselling book Crucial Conversations. For decades, he’s studied why people shut down or blow up when the stakes are high, emotions are strong, and opinions differ.

Today on the show, we talk about what makes a conversation “crucial,” why our brains betray us in conflict, and how to escape the false choice between maintaining a relationship and speaking honestly. From figuring out what kind of conversation you need to have, to creating the right conditions for connection, to dealing with criticism, we unpack how to have the conversations you’ve been avoiding — at work, at home, and everywhere else.

Connect With Joseph Grenny

• Crucial Learning website
• Joseph on LinkedIn

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Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. The awkward silence at work when everyone knows a project is going off the rails, the simmering resentment in a marriage over an issue neither spouse will confront, the dysfunction in a church where certain topics are understood to be off limits. My guest, Joseph Grenny, says that some of the biggest problems in every organization from businesses to families aren’t the issues themselves, but people’s inability to talk about them. Joseph is a business social scientist and consultant and the co-author of the bestselling book, Crucial Conversations. For decades he studied why people shut down or blow up when stakes are high, emotions are strong and opinions differ from figuring out what kind of conversation you need to have to creating the right conditions for connection to dealing with criticism. We unpack how to have the conversations you’ve been avoiding at work, at home, and everywhere else. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/CrucialConversations.

All right, Joseph Grenny, welcome to the show.

Joseph Grenny:

Happy to be here with you, Brett.

Brett McKay:

So you are a business social scientist and researcher. You’re a speaker and a corporate consultant who specializes in organizational performance and human behavior. And something you observed decades ago in companies really shaped your career, and that was that some of the biggest problems in companies are the result of people not feeling able to speak up about problems. And you wrote a book over 20 years ago, it’s called Crucial Conversations about how to fix that. So you train corporations and companies in this skill of crucial conversations, but this problem of not being able to talk about hard things, this happens in personal relationships too, like in families. It’s not just business. 

Joseph Grenny:

Yeah, in fact, the general way we’ve come to describe our findings is that you can pretty much tell the health of any relationship, any team or any organization by looking at one simple thing. And that is the lag time between when people see it and when they say it, between when they feel it and when they discuss it, between when it’s a concern and when it’s a conversation. And so you look at a marriage and if there are undiscussable things that both of us are bothered about, but neither is talking about, it comes out in passive aggressive ways. If you don’t talk it out, you act it out and it shows up in your behavior. And that always makes matters worse and tends to make the problems persevere and even worsen. And so the general finding that any social system, it could be a church congregation, it could be a community organization, a nonprofit or what have you, even entire nations suffer from this. Our inability to have emotionally and politically risky conversations is at the heart of most all of our persistent problems.

Brett McKay:

So what makes a conversation a crucial conversation?

Joseph Grenny:

So there are three characteristics of a crucial conversation. One is that it is high stakes. There’s something on the table that matters a lot to me. Now, it doesn’t necessarily have to be that the entire economy is going to crash. It could just be that my ego feels threatened, there’s something important to me. High stakes. Second, I come into these moments expecting the other person to disagree with me. I expect you to have an opposing opinion. And the third is there’s an emotional piece to this or it’s emotionally salient to us. And so the combination of high stakes, opposing opinions and strong emotions causes us to show up differently in these moments than we would most any other time. There are a lot of us that are quite princely or regal and effective diplomatic and so forth, and how we show up in a lot of communication, great at small talk, but in these moments, these moments of emotional stress and threat, we behave differently and that has enormous consequences for our outcomes.

Brett McKay:

Why do we behave differently? Because you take a step back and say, well, it’s just a conversation. It’s not like someone’s got a gun drawn on you.

Joseph Grenny:

Well, it is kind of like someone’s got a gun drawn on you, unfortunately. So I’ll give you a brief anecdote. One of my business partners, Kerry Patterson, and I had a long, long history of writing together. We did a lot of the writing on these books together and worked in very close collaboration. And as you’d expect, there were crucial conversations along the way. What happened on a particular Saturday where our pattern was one or the other of us would write the first draft of a chapter, send it to the other, the other would do critiques, and then we’d get together on the phone to talk about it. So I sent it over on Thursday. Kerry got the chapter and then he rewrote it. I sent it back and with some rewrites. So here we are, Saturday, seven o’clock. And I said, so Kerry, did you get it? And he said, yes, yes I did. I said, what’d you think? He said, you ruined it. I said, I didn’t ruin it, I fixed it. He said, you didn’t fix it. It’s all disjointed now. I said, it’s not disjointed. It has a soul. I mean, here we are. And this was a chapter of Crucial Conversations.

As I tell that story, and I recall that moment, I think I knew better than this. I knew how to respond in this moment, but it wasn’t coming out of my mouth. It wasn’t even accessible to me. Our problem in these crucial conversations is first and foremost, physiological, literal changes. Physiological changes happen in our bodies when we’re under stress or threat. Cortisol starts to increase and adrenaline starts to occur in our veins in higher concentration. Literally parts of our brain shut down and we behave like idiots. We behave like raw animals that only know how to fight, flight or freeze. And so there’s a physiology you’ve got to overcome. And much of what we learned about how to deal with crucial conversations are skills for addressing that physiological problem. We’ve got the fact that I feel stressed and tight and angry or aroused, that’s the first thing we have to contend with.

Brett McKay:

So whenever we find ourselves in these high stakes moments, so crucial conversations, the stakes are high, there’s differing opinions, and there’s a lot of emotional salience going on. A typical response is that people just don’t say anything. And it’s because I think oftentimes people feel like we have these two choices. It’s like, okay, I can speak up, be honest and ruin the relationship, or I can stay silent and just keep the peace and don’t rock the boat. And you call this the fool’s choice. Why are we so conditioned to believe those are only two options in a tough conversation?

Joseph Grenny:

Well, yeah. You think about it and what I just described, when the prefrontal cortex of our brain starts to shut down because in moments of stress and threat, our body doesn’t think we need complex problem solving. What we need is to be able to run very fast or hit really hard or hide or something like that. Very simple tasks. And so portions of our body get starved for blood and the oxygen associated with it. So we don’t think particularly clearly. And so this fool’s choice is evidence of this simplistic view of the world that I’ve got. I either have to kill my enemy here or I have to run from my enemy. That’s what I’ve got to do. So it’s expressed in that same way, silence or violence. And so the real challenge is juicing your brain back up and starting to recognize those aren’t your only options.

One of the consequences of how we feel during crucial conversations is we start to adopt this false belief and we don’t even realize we have it, but I’d urge all of your listeners to write this down and to commit it to memory so you recognize the next time you’re framing your reality in this way. We often believe we have to choose between telling the truth and keeping a friend. And when you’re thinking those are your only two options, that thought is the problem because the real challenge is to figure out how to do both. And most of us in rational moments realize you really can’t keep a friend without telling the truth. The only way forward in a relationship to high trust and real collaboration or connection is for us to be able to work through the problems. In fact, crucial conversations are intimacy accelerants.

We’ve all had the experience with somebody of dreading a crucial conversation, but getting to the other side of it. And there’s almost this euphoric sense of connection of intimacy if it was a loved one at home, a feeling of trust and relating again. And that doesn’t come without going through this difficult process together. So reminding ourselves, there usually are ways to both tell the truth and keep a friend. In fact, doing one is the way to do both. And so the fool’s choice has to be transcended before we’ll even entertain the possibility that there’s something better on the other side.

Brett McKay:

And I imagine there’s a lot of social conditioning going on there too because I mean, you grow up, you watch Bambi, you hear Thumper say, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” And if you go to church, there’s emphasis on being nice. Don’t rock the boat. You got to keep the connection. And I’ve seen that in family life, friends and church congregations and trying to be nice often isn’t the nice thing. It just makes the problem worse.

Joseph Grenny:

Yeah, yeah. We had a reprise Thumper to say, “If you can’t say something nice, grow a tumor,” because that’s the outcome. We’ll just suppress all of these concerns that we’ve got and it doesn’t show up in great ways. And interestingly, you mentioned the church or the religious context too. So many will misunderstand their own religious texts and assume that what their religion is calling them to do is just put up with stuff. And there is not a more robust example of a community that dealt with hard conversations than some of the Christian texts. And you could say the same about Muslim and Hindu and others and their great examples there, but if many of your listeners are familiar with that, Jesus wasn’t somebody that pushed it under the rug and it was a pretty fractious thing at times. The people that he gathered around him, they dealt with stuff, but for some reason we misunderstand, we misread that and we start thinking, turning the other cheek means not dealing with stuff that is not anywhere in Christian text.

Brett McKay:

If you read the gospels closely, a lot of it’s just Jesus being annoyed at people. There’s the Pharisees or the scribes or his own apostles, and he would confront them very directly. So what is the goal of a crucial conversation? Is it agreement? Is it compromise? I think when people think about having a hard conversation, they think the purpose is to come to some kind of agreement.

Joseph Grenny:

It’s unwise to make agreement the goal because then you tend to force competition. What we tend to do in a crucial conversation in unhealthy moments is I’ll share my point of view and then you’ll try to pick holes in it and then I hear your point of view and I debate back, but we think of agreement as the natural outcome of a healthy conversation, not the objective. So the objective of a crucial conversation is just to fill a pool of common meaning where we get both of our perspectives and experiences and preferences and everything out there accessible between both and make ’em swim together, stir it all together and see if there’s better combinations or better points of view that come out of having both of those most synergy and most problem solving happens more naturally if we just create a climate where we’re just understanding and appreciating each other’s points of view and not trying to drive for agreement. The agreement tends to follow naturally as we develop more of a sympathy for others’ perspectives, more of an appreciation for where they’re coming from. And so filling the pool of meaning creates a common pool of meaning is our objective.

Brett McKay:

I thought that was really useful. I typically go into these kind of conversations with the idea like, okay, we got to figure this thing out, but you really don’t know what you’re trying to figure out and you can’t even conceptualize the potential outcome because you really don’t know the other person’s side of things and what they’re thinking until you create that shared pool of meaning. And once you do, that’s going to change what comes out of that conversation.

Joseph Grenny:

Yeah. Some people will hear that and say, well, that sounds like a pretty wimpy approach to conversation. You got to come in with a point of view, argue for it, prosecute it, and that’s how you come to be persuasive. Well, that might be good on a TV game show or a reality show where there’s no ongoing relationship or need for mutual commitment and executing on things, but the real point here is it doesn’t make you weak, it makes you effective. I once watched a conversation between a senior executive who believed that another executive was embezzling from the company, so really difficult thing to deal with. And the two of them get together to talk this through, and one obviously expected denial and obfuscation and redirection and all that kind of stuff, but he approached it as filling the pool of meaning and how do you do that?

He started very honestly with laying out what he believes was going on and then all the evidence to support that. And then says, you know what? I might be wrong. Maybe you’re not embezzling from the company, but here’s all the evidence I’ve got. Here’s where I’m coming from. And I watched the other guy kind of staring at this for a moment. He had expected hostility. He expected to be able to try to redirect by saying he was being abused and accused that this was any other sort of thing, but instead as it was just laid out factually and calmly and appropriately and confidently not apologetically, the other guy basically looked at it and said, I think I need to resign and basically confessed. And it was remarkable to watch. When you suck defensiveness out of a conversation, the likelihood of people coming to a common view increases dramatically. And the way to suck out the defensiveness is to make the objective to ensure that both sides are completely heard and to just inquire and explore and be curious about the other point of view to all the meanings in the pool, and then confidently and appropriately place your meaning in the pool as well. And better things tend to happen when we do.

Brett McKay:

So something you talk about is before you have a crucial conversation, you need to kind of prepare your mind for it. And a big reason a lot of crucial conversations fail is because the person is having the wrong conversation. They think they’re talking about the right topic or having the right conversation, but they’re not. You say there are three different kinds of conversations and you got to pick the right one for the issue.

Joseph Grenny:

We have this little acronym we call CPR that many people find incredibly useful because it helps you to tease out the different kinds of conversations we could be trying to have or should have. The C stands for content. So let’s say you and I rideshare together and we take turns driving, and whenever it’s your turn to drive, you tend to show up 15, 20, 30 minutes late and it really compromises my schedule. And we’ve been driving together for about a year, and this happens about 50% of the time. So now it’s Thursday, you show up and you’re about 30 minutes late. I get in the car and I say, “Doggone it, Brett, you’re late.” So there’s the first mistake. The first mistake just let’s take out of this that then I’m being too energetic or aggressive about this. The real problem here is the topic is wrong because I’m talking to you at the content level, the C level, the content level is the immediate problem, the immediate instance of whatever the concern is.

The reason I’m so angry and upset is because I haven’t been dealing with what is a longer pattern. That’s the P. I’ve never addressed it as a pattern. So I wait for one more instance and then I blow all of that upset and energy out through this particular instance. That’s a big mistake. Don’t talk about content when your issue is pattern. And I’ve set it up as a content issue as well, which also makes it less likely I’ll get satisfaction because you might very well say, gosh, I’m really sorry Joseph, I apologize. I got up this morning and there was only five pounds of pressure in my tire and my pump at home didn’t work. And so I had to find a gas station and I put coins in one and it didn’t work. And so I had to find two other gas stations. I’m really sorry.

It won’t happen again. I’ll leave a little bit earlier so I make sure I’m on time. Now, in that moment, what many people will do is feel like, oh, all right, well, he kind of apologized, kind of owned it. Let’s move on. No, he didn’t because your problem was a pattern and all you did was just solve the content problem. If you wait for a new content issue, a new instance of the problem to occur before you try to talk about pattern, you lose because it’s going to get mired down in all of the idiosyncratic things that are part of this particular instance when that isn’t your concern. It’s that 50% of the time over the last year we’ve had this issue. So one of the first pieces of advice on this is when you have a pattern conversation, don’t wait for a new instance of concern to raise it because then you’re going to lose the point, create a special opportunity just to talk about the pattern.

“Brett, we’ve been driving together for a year over the last year. Shame on me, haven’t brought it up, but I want to do it now so we can figure this out. You tend to show up late 15 to 30 minutes late about half the time.” Now we’re on the right topic, the final kind of conversation, the R in CPR, so content pattern, and then the R is a relationship conversation. This is a conversation where it isn’t that there’s a pattern of concern anymore, it’s that I don’t trust you anymore or I don’t respect you, or I don’t think you respect me. So trust, competence, and respect are the three things that tend to describe relationship concerns. So for example, if I keep giving you faulty work, you delegate assignments to me and I’m getting back to it poorly. And the real issue is that it looks like I’ve got bad grammar in some of my written communication, and you want to talk with me about this concern you not just say, “Hey, Joseph, the last two things you wrote had some mistakes.”

That would be content stuff or this tends to happen consistently. That would be a pattern conversation. If your real conclusion is “Joseph, you’re not good at written communication,” that’s a competence problem. And that isn’t solved by you just pointing out a couple of mistakes and me trying to be more attentive. You think I have bad grammar, you don’t think I know how to construct a paragraph, and that requires a much bigger solution. So before you open your mouth, identify, is this a content pattern or relationship conversation, tease that out and then hold yourself accountable to address the right thing.

Brett McKay:

I can see that happening, that confusion happening in marital disputes, like the husband doesn’t turn on the dishwasher at night or something, and for the wife, it’s like a relationship thing. It’s not the fact that he’s not turning on the dishwasher. It’s like what it represents about the relationship. Like, well, you don’t respect me, you’re not considerate. And the husband might say, okay, sorry, I’ll turn on the dishwasher. But for the wife, she’s not feeling like he’s competent. She feels like she can’t trust him to take care of things. So it’s like it’s not really about the dishwasher, it’s a relationship issue.

Joseph Grenny:

Yeah, I’ll give you an example of that. So I’ve traveled a lot in my career and I think I’ve been married for about 13 years or something at the time. And so our kids were getting a little older and were aware of different dynamics between us. And at one point the kids said, dad, we want to have a conversation with you. And I got that little tummy tickle and nervousness and sat down and they were pretty prepared for this. And basically they started out with saying, dad, we don’t like it when you come home. That was a big bomb to drop. Now, there could have been better ways for them to open this topic, but they had a relationship conversation to hold. And their grievance with me was that mom has a certain way of doing things and all of a sudden when dad comes home, the rules all change and it’s miserable to try to have to deal with two different regimes and we don’t like that. And so I’d come home and I realized as they said this, I did feel like I had to reset things to the truthful and proper way for things to operate because she wasn’t managing it. And so she had issues with me that she wanted to address. They were relationship things about respect and about care and compassion for other people. They were not just about patterns of behavior and much of the improvement that later came in our family came because we had that relationship conversation with each other.

Brett McKay:

So a conversation can happen on three levels. There’s content, which is an immediate instance of whatever the problem or the concern is. There’s pattern. That’s when a problem is occurring regularly. And then there’s relationship. That’s where the problem is causing an issue that’s making it hard for someone to trust or respect the other person or feel they’re competent. And you got to know which kind of conversation you’re having. 

So another thing you talk about is that each person is coming into the conversation with a story that they’re telling themselves about what’s going on and their feelings are flowing out of that story. So it’s important to get a handle on that story and make sure it’s true.

Joseph Grenny:

Oh boy. I mean this is, of all of the personal work I’ve done on crucial conversations over the last 35 years, this has been my central focus. It’s learning to master my story. If you can develop control over your emotions in your life, a mastery and an understanding of your own emotions, you can master your life. This is the key to intimacy, to connection, to being able to work well and build trust with other people. It’s recognizing that when emotions flare up, they can corrupt your capacity to have a crucial conversation. They are not a function of what happened. They’re not a function of what somebody just did. They’re a function of them doing something and then you telling yourself a story about it. So I share this example of, again, early in our marriage when I was traveling a lot, we would have kind of an adjustment.

When I came back home, I remember at one point I came home late at night, kids were in bed, and it had been a long week. It’s a Friday, and I walk in, and this was when we had wall phones, if any of your listeners were alive during that time. And I remember walking by this wall phone and I looked across the room and my wife is sitting there, she’s relaxed. It’s the end of her day. She’s got a book open. And I looked at her with this adoring kind of gaze, and all of a sudden the phone rang. And that was a moment of decision for me. It was a moment of decision of whether I’m going to pick it up or not, right? I’m looking at the love of my life. The two of us have an opportunity to have a little quiet moment and reconnect, but the phone is ringing, and I picked it up.

Now, a lot of people won’t believe what I’m about to say, but as I turned towards the wall and put the phone up to my ear and heard the voice of my administrative assistant saying, “Hey, I knew you were getting home right now. There were just three things I needed to address before tomorrow morning.” And then she launches in on this. I felt this burning sensation in my back. I mean, it was a physical, tangible kind of thing. And I looked around to find the source of it, and there was Sila across the room staring at me with just this absolutely deadly stare. And that was a moment too. I had an opportunity there. I experienced some emotion when I saw that look on her face. Now, it would’ve been easy for me in that moment to tell myself the reason I’m feeling how I’m feeling right now resentful and hurt and defensive is because she’s being insensitive, because she’s being uncaring, because she’s judging me, because she, so we tend to tell ourselves that our emotions are a function of what’s happening to us, of what others do.

And the beginning of all capacity to manage my emotional life begins with me accepting the fact that it does not, that it comes from the story I’m telling myself about what that other person is doing. I was telling myself a story that she was being judgmental, that she was being rude, that she was being inappropriate. I had these stories. I was telling myself about how insensitive and how impatient and how selfish she is. And so I looked back at her and rolled my eyes, not my best shining moment, but completely dismissed the frustration and concern she was experiencing and continued my conversation. I heard her book slam shut. She stomped upstairs, and we didn’t talk the rest of the night. Now, this is a long time ago, and I think I’ve grown a little bit since then, but as you break all of that down, none of that had to do with me answering a phone or with her staring at me in a deadly looking way.

It had to do with the stories we were both telling ourselves about that. The three kinds of stories we tend to tell in these crucial moments are, number one, a victim story. When something is happening that we don’t like, we tend to make ourselves out to be innocent sufferers. And that’s what I did in that moment. I’ve been working all week. I’ve been on the road, I come home and this is the kind of treatment I get. I look at all my virtues and absolutely none of my vices. And then with the other person, we tell a villain story. If I want to be rude to the love of my life and feel good about it, if I want to be able to justify myself in doing bad things to good people who don’t deserve it, I need three kinds of stories. First, a victim story, second, a villain story.

I need to think about her and think of only her vices and none of her virtues. Think of all of the worst weaknesses I can paint on her, and then I feel justified and mistreating her. And finally, I need a helpless story. I need a story that makes me helpless to do anything other than the petty little thing, the hiding or the sneering or whatever it is that’s coming out for me right now that I’m doing so victim, villain, and helpless. That’s what we mean by master my stories. It’s learning to take responsibility for and be aware of our tendency to tell those three kinds of stories during these crucial moments, and then to set them right?

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I know I do the villain thing whenever someone does something that I don’t like, the tendency is to jump to the worst conclusion. Like, oh, this guy, he’s out to get me. And then when you actually talk to him, it’s like, oh, man, I’m really sorry. I’ve had a lot going on and I didn’t really address that. I think there’s that story I think Steven Covey talks about in his book where he’s on the subway and there’s these kids just going crazy and the dad’s not doing anything, and Steven’s like, look at this deadbeat dad. He’s not taking care of his kids. And he says, sir, can you do something about your kids? And the dad was like, oh, I’m really sorry. We’re just coming back from my wife’s funeral. And I imagine they’re feeling bad. It’s just like a gut punch, like, oh man, I made this guy a villain, and he’s going through a hard time.

Joseph Grenny:

And we get there so naturally, so quickly. Now, some people will listen to this conversation we’re having and say, but there are villains out there, and that’s true. There are times where somebody lied to you, they stole from you, they embezzled from your company as we talked about before. But oftentimes the story is more complicated than just that too. Does that mean we let ’em off the hook? No, but it would change our emotional response to them. We had a guy that worked for our company many years ago who we were in a building with another firm and we owned the building, so they were subletting from us. And we found out from this tenant of ours that somebody from our company had stolen from them, had broken into their office and stolen things. And I had to sit down with this particular employee and address that.

And I remember first of all being incensed and embarrassed and all of that. And of course he was let go. But it turned out that he was struggling with drug addiction and his marriage was falling apart. He had seven children at home and there was a lot more to the story. And I ended up after letting him go, taking him to lunch a few times and checking in, and just because I cared about whether he was going to get through this awful time in his life as well. So there is no necessary opposition between holding people accountable, dealing with things truthfully, and also making sure you get to the right story, that you get more meaning in the pool so that we have a proper appreciation for even villains aren’t just villains, and you’re not always a completely innocent victim, and you’re not helpless to show up in a more mature and appropriate way too. There are better ways through this. We can tell the truth and keep a friend.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so that’s what you do before the conversation. Prepare yourself for this crucial conversation. Figure out what is the topic of the conversation actually? Is it content, pattern, relationship, get my story straight, master my stories. Am I painting this person as a villain? Am I painting myself as just a victim who’s as pure as the newly driven snow? Or am I painting myself as helpless? And then I think the important thing, you talked about it earlier is once you decide you need to have the conversation, don’t delay, because I thought that was really key, that if you have too much lag between the event and the conversation, it’s just going to get worse than that idea. If you don’t talk about it, you act it out. I think that was because I’ve seen that in my own life. I think if you’re in a marriage or even in a business or a church, you see that where you don’t talk about the thing and then you just start acting resentful towards the person.

You kind of just give them a sideways look. You ignore them, you dismiss them, and nothing’s ever solved. So you got to rip off the bandaid basically. So you mentioned the typical response people often have to crucial conversations is silence or violence. So they either just clam up and just ignore it and try to not rock the boat or violence, which is just lashing out, arguing, being combative. And a big reason why people do that is because they don’t feel safety. They don’t feel psychological safety. And I think often people misinterpret this idea of safety as comfort or being nice, but you argue that safety actually allows you to be more candid and unapologetic with the truth, not less. Tell us about that.

Joseph Grenny:

And so here’s the thing, we’ve done a lot of consulting in healthcare, and it’s fascinating to me that I think I’ve got a friend right now who’s in the hospital that there are people on this planet that you’re willing to walk into a room with, lay down at a table and let them cut you open with a knife. You’re willing to do that. And the reason you’re willing to do that is because you feel safe with them. You believe that they care about your problem. You believe that they’re competent to help you solve it. We call them surgeons obviously, and we ought to limit it to just people with that classification. But we are willing to go through uncomfortable things with people if there’s a reason to do it, and if we feel safe with them. What we know about crucial conversations is that you and I tend to believe that the best predictor of the outcome of a conversation is how risky the topic is, and that isn’t true at all.

We think I couldn’t approach somebody and tell ’em I think they stole from the company or that they’re incompetent or that they’re racist or whatever it is. We couldn’t do that without them getting defensive. Well, that just isn’t true. We’ve seen over the years that there is no correlation between the outcome of a conversation and how risky the topic is. The only correlation is with how safe the people feel discussing the topic. I mentioned Kerry Patterson, my writing partner early on, and one of the first conversations I had with him about writing, I had written a white paper on some topic. I handed it over to him, he gave it back, and I said, what’d you think? And he said, it’s boring. He said, it’s turgid, it’s vapid. And it was interesting to me because normally I would’ve felt really tight and offended inside, but for some reason that information got through to me perfectly fine.

Why? Because I knew he invested a lot of time reading that paper, and he wanted me to be a good writer, and that was his sole motivation in sharing that. When you believe that, when you believe two things, you feel safe with people, and this is your first task in a crucial conversation in the first 30 seconds, you’ve got to generate evidence for them of two things. The first is that you care about their problems, interests, and concerns almost as much as they do. Just like the doctor, that doctor cares about the fact that I’ve got racking back pain and he wants to help me fix it. You care about their problems, interests, and concerns. As soon as they believe that they do this, they go. So I needed to have a crucial conversations with an employee many years ago who I had concluded was incompetent at some really fundamental parts of his job.

He was terrible at managing projects and terrible at managing people. He was a great designer, a great graphic designer, but we tried to grow a department underneath him, and he was terrible at projects and managing people. And so that was the message I needed to get across. It was a big relationship conversation, and I started that conversation not giving myself all the credit. A lot of it goes to him that he cared about these things, but I said, Hey, I’ll call him Paul. I said, Hey, Paul, I need to have a pretty heavy conversation with him. And he knew, of course there was stress and disappointment. He knew that things weren’t working well, but I said, I want you to know that my sole motivation in this conversation is to help you win here. I want you to have a wonderful work experience here. I want you to be here for a very long time.

You’ve made a great contribution in the past and things just aren’t working right now, and I want to talk about that and figure it out. And I watched him take a really deep breath, and you could almost watch his soul open. He just sat back and it was kind of like somebody saying to the doctor, go ahead and do surgery here. I know something needs to be done. I felt such permission from him, such vulnerability from him. Why? Because he trusted my motive. He trusted that I really did care about his problems, interests, and concerns. So that’s point 1. In the first 30 seconds of a crucial conversation, you need to make it clear that you have mutual purpose, that you care about those problems, interests and concerns. And second, you need to make sure the other person knows you care about and respect them. So mutual purpose and mutual respect are what we call the conditions for psychological safety.

They believe that not only do I care about your problems, but I also just care about you as a human being and I respect you. So Paul, this person that I’m talking to here, he got it that I love him and that I like working with him and that I respect him, and he’s then able to take a deep breath and open himself up and be vulnerable. And we had a great conversation where at the end, he agreed to take a salary reduction. Eventually we grandfathered him and kind of moved him gradually there to move out of a management position more into a technical position, and that this was best for him. It worked. It went there. Why? Because he felt safe. You and I tend to believe that when others get defensive and combative, it’s because they’re arrogant or mean or rude or manipulative or whatever. It’s generally about a lack of psychological safety, and that’s an empowering thing for us to learn.

Brett McKay:

So how do you do that? I imagine in longstanding relationships, what helps is you’ve already established a track record over time that shows that you care and can be trusted. But you’re also saying that you can establish that psychological safety in the first 30 seconds of a conversation. So how do you convey that? How do you convey, Hey, I respect you, I care about you, right In that moment.

Joseph Grenny:

I’m going to differentiate here between some gimmick or technique and just what really needs to happen. Your job is to generate evidence, and that can happen in a lot of different ways. If it’s with a loved one, sometimes it’s putting your hand on their knee. Sometimes it’s leaning forward and offering a warm smile. Sometimes it’s breaking tension with a joke because sometimes a joke shows that it’s a relaxed situation and that you feel safe, and therefore they can too. There are lots of nonverbal ways of doing it. One of the best ways to do it verbally is what we call a contrasting statement. It’s telling people what you do and don’t want. That’s what I did with Paul. I told him, look, I don’t want to come in here and just criticize and tear you down and point out everything that’s wrong. I want to get to a place where you are joyful and happy and feel successful in your work.

You describe what you don’t want and what you do want. The most important part of that message is the don’t want part because their brain, the threatened part of them is going to tell them that that is what you want, that you want to hurt them, that you want to insult them, that you’re just trying to downsize. You just want to get rid of an employee, or they’ve disagreed with you in the past, and this is revenge. They’re going to make all that stuff up, and that’s their story. So letting them know what it isn’t is a critical part of constructing that first sentence. But if that sentence doesn’t work, you’ve got to keep generating evidence. Sometimes it’s apologizing. Paul, I’ve let this go for a long time. I’ve let this build and accumulate. That’s my fault. I’m sorry. And I apologize that this conversation is now bigger than it should be, and I’m willing to take my responsibility for that in it. Any of those things that you do that demonstrate I care about you and respect you, and I care about your problems, interests, and concerns, can possibly help the other person get the signal that they’re safe and then be able to engage in the conversation. This does not mean the conversation will be pleasant. It might be really hard, might be really difficult, but you’ll feel safe. You’ll be able to hear.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, and then you can add to that shared pool of meaning. Exactly. One of the hardest conversations to have is whenever you disagree with someone on a value level. So maybe it’s a political disagreement with your loud uncle at Thanksgiving, or maybe a strategic disagreement at work or maybe a disagreement with your spouse about how to raise your kids. How do you find a shared goal when your immediate objectives are completely opposite?

Joseph Grenny:

Yeah. Now you’ve used a few different words there that I want to parse out because they’re very important. I think it’s very, very rare when we have value disagreements. It’s very, very common for us to have strategy disagreements. It’s all about the way something is being executed. So you think about the massive political divide we’ve got in the United States. Now, I defy you to find two people with polar opposite views that can’t sit in a room long enough to understand that a lot of their strong advocacy of polar opposite opinions is trying to achieve values that both of them value. And so sometimes digging down deeper and understanding, no. So let’s say we disagree on immigration. Most people at the end of the conversation will agree that we have a primary responsibility to the citizens of our country, and we also ought to care about citizens of other countries too.

But we have a primary responsibility there that we need to make sure our economy works and that it can sustain support for the people that it has primary responsibility for. When you start getting down to the values level, you’ll find there’s usually more ready agreement. I’ll give you an example of that. So I once had a late night flight to London, had a speech the next morning, the flight was delayed, got in at like one o’clock in the morning, got into my black taxi at the Heathrow Airport, and I just wanted to rest on the way to hotel to sleep as much as I could before the next day. And I noticed the taxi driver kept turning around and looking at me, and finally he said, in a really aggressive voice, he said, are you American? And I said, yes, I am. And he said, your president is a murderer.

And I thought, oh, great. Here we go. Here goes my rest. And at first I was going to try to just ignore it, but then I thought, you know what? I’m going to talk about crucial conversations tomorrow morning, and how lame is this that I can’t even engage in one right now? And so I thought, all right, I’m going to do this. And so I said to the guy, I said, look, we’ve got 40 minutes before we’re going to get to my hotel. I said, I’m willing to talk with you about this, but I want some ground rules. I said, first of all, you’ve got 10 minutes and I want you to say anything you want to say to me as an American, and I’m going to listen to absolutely everything and just try to understand it. And then afterwards, you’re going to have to listen to me for 10 minutes.

And I wasn’t saying I disagreed with him necessarily. I just wanted to make sure we had ground rules in place. It would keep us both safe. And he got this silly grin on his face. He said, you’re really strange, aren’t you? And I said, do you want to do this or don’t you? And he said, yeah, let’s do this. And we had a wonderful conversation. And I can’t say that I agreed with all of his beliefs or perspective on US foreign policy, but I was way more sympathetic to it when I got there. And I don’t know that he necessarily agreed with me on everything, but he was probably far more sympathetic to my point of view than he was when we first started. We started realizing we had some common values that both of us cared about decency and honesty and human life. And we didn’t think that economics should come above human life. And so we realized there were common values. So often our disagreements are at the strategy level, not at the values level, but the problem is we never discover it because we don’t spend enough time listening and asking and filling the pool of meaning so that we can appreciate where the other person’s coming from.

Brett McKay:

So to help people guide a crucial conversation, you’ve got an acronym state, S-T-A-T-E. What does that mean?

Joseph Grenny:

Yeah, we tend when we want to make our points, so let’s say for example, we were talking about immigration or something like that. What we tend to do is we start at the wrong end of the conversation. We just say, I think we need to build a wall and we shouldn’t have any illegal immigration in our country at all, and we got to kick out everybody. That’s illegal right now. That’s my point of view. So I tend to start there and people then react to that. I’m starting with my conclusion. I’m starting at the end of the story, not the beginning of the story. When I came to whatever conclusion I’ve got on immigration or any other topic, it started with me having some experiences, concrete experiences. It starts with my belief about what’s factual and true. And then I tend to tell myself stories about that and then I have feelings about it, and then that results in how I’m going to act.

So we call this the path to action starts with facts. Stories come next, emotions come next. And then the actions, the proposals, the opinions that I form, follow from the end of that. If you want people to be able to understand your point of view, you’ve got to take ’em by the hand and walk ’em down that whole path, start with the factual basis. What do you think is going on in our country today and how is immigration affecting that? What facts do you have to put on the table? What stories do you then tell yourself about it? What feelings does that create for you? And then what policy positions do you advocate as a result? Walk them through that. And even if they don’t agree, at least there’s more meaning in the pool. So they can see how a reasonable, rational, decent person might come to the point of view that I’ve got.

And then help them do the same. We call this state because the acronym S-T-A-T-E describes the five things you need to do in order to be heard non defensively. First, share your facts. S second, tell your story. That’s the T. A ask for others facts and ask for others’ point of view and then talk tentatively and encourage testing. Encourage testing means you encourage the other person to challenge, to question, to interrogate your point of view. Invite that when you do that defensiveness decline. So those are kind of the five ways of showing up when you start to share your opinion in a way that reduces defensiveness.

Brett McKay:

Let’s talk about that talk tentatively part because I think a lot of guys listening might think, well, that’s just being weak or in unconfident, what does talk tentatively actually look like?

Joseph Grenny:

Yeah, it just means to tell the truth. Most of us overstate our point of view. We think that banging the table and overstating the fact of the matter is, and as all thinking people know, and the only reasonable conclusion is when we overstate our point of view, when we act as though we’re absolutely certain that I’ll use immigration again, that this one immigration policy is the only right way for us to do this. When you do that, what tends to happen is number one, you lie because you probably don’t really believe that that’s the only point of view that has any reason or factual support for it. And secondly, you provoke defensiveness. So the other people who tend to feel like your goal is to try to convince compelling control, you’re trying to convince them of your point of view. They tend to start poking holes in it.

People naturally look at what’s wrong with your argument when the argument is overstated. If you want them to be able to listen, then state an opinion is an opinion. That’s what tentative means. So in my point of view, this is what I believe, or in my long experience, this is my point of view or after long consideration, I’m quite confident that all of those are perfectly appropriate things to say because they’re honest. They aren’t overstating your level of confidence or your level of omniscience about the topic. We find that people are more persuaded when you’re less aggressive, when you state your opinion as an opinion and allow room for testing.

Brett McKay:

So as part of a crucial conversation with a loved one or at work with a boss or colleague, you might receive feedback and criticism, and that’s always hard because it sets off for flight or fight response to feel criticized. But you say feedback can stop being threatening once you treat it as information rather than indictment. Even when it’s given emotionally or clumsily, you can still separate what’s being said from how it’s being said, and instead of reflexively defending your ego, you can start getting curious and ask, what does this person see that I might not even poorly delivered? Feedback often contains a fragment of truth worth examining, and one thing people can do to get value from criticism without being crushed by it, is to take your time with it. You can say, alright, thank you. I’m going to take that and sit on it for a bit, and then you go through it by yourself and think, okay, this doesn’t mean anything. That’s not true, but like, oh, that comment, he’s got a point here.

Joseph Grenny:

Yes, that’s a powerful, if you can recognize that in a crucial conversation, you can control the parameters of it. You’re not powerless. You’re not a victim of it. One of the best ways to take control is to control the pacing. So if somebody’s coming at you with some really hard feedback, it’s okay for you to set the table like I did with the guy in the taxi cab and to say, I want to hear you out. I’m going to ask a lot of questions, and if it gets a little overwhelming to me, I may ask for a break, but I want to get to the other side of this and understand it, and then I don’t know that I’ll respond right now. I’m going to need some time to reflect on this. So there it is. That’s how I’m okay with engaging in this conversation. So if you’re sitting down with your boss in a performance review and she gives you some feedback that’s surprising to you, don’t respond right? Then let her know that you want a chance to sort through it and absorb it, and then you want to respond in a way that’s respectful of the feedback that you’ve been given, and then go and deal with whatever emotions you need to work through to get to a good place, sort through it and come back and then deal with part two of it.

Brett McKay:

All right, so we’ve had the conversation. We have a shared pool of meaning. Everyone feels heard, but I’ve seen this happen a million times in groups where these hard conversations happen, but people get on the same page, the meeting ends, everyone feels good, but nothing actually happens.

Joseph Grenny:

You’ve been there too.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So why do people mess up the transition from meaning to action?

Joseph Grenny:

Yeah, because I think we let ourselves sell out at the end, and we all know that we should always end a conversation by clarifying who does what by when, and how we’re going to follow up. We need to make sure that we confirm our agreement, and if it’s a politically sensitive one or there’s a low trust history, writing it down so that everybody can confirm, yeah, that’s what we agreed to, that’s what we understood, and then how are we going to follow up? What changes are we going to make as a result of this? That’s the work at the end of the conversation. And if you don’t do that work, you will have deja vu dialogues. You will have to have Groundhog Day, and it’s not fun to do it, so why go through all the trouble of having a good crucial conversation if you’re going to just waste it at the end? Always end with who’s going to do what by when, and how do we follow up? 

Brett McKay:

Well Joseph, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Joseph Grenny:

Cruciallearning.com is our website and lots of great resources there to get the training virtually or in person or online with public classes. The book is called Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, and I’m happy to have a chance to share it. Thank you, Brett.

Brett McKay:

Thanks, Joseph. It’s been a pleasure. 

My guest here is Joseph Grenny. He’s the co-author of the book Crucial Conversations that’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, cruciallearning.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/crucialconversations where you can find links to resources to delve deeper into this topic. 

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

We’ve all had that feeling — you meet someone new, and the conversation just flows. You’re in sync. You click. But what’s really happening when that magic occurs?

My guest today is journalist Kate Murphy, author of Why We Click: The Emerging Science of Interpersonal Synchrony, and she says this experience isn’t just a vibe, it’s a measurable physiological phenomenon and the most consequential social dynamic most people have never heard of. In our conversation, we dig into what happens when people click, why syncing with others feels so good, and how it influences everything from friendships to teamwork to romantic relationships. We also talk about why some people have a knack for connection, how you can become more “clickable,” and why video calls are the worst.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Dying Breed article: Resonance as an Antidote to Social Acceleration
• Kate’s previous book: You’re Not Listening
• Sunday Firesides: Be Someone’s Atmospheric Getaway
• AoM Article: The Importance of Eye Contact

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 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. We’ve all had that feeling: you meet someone new and the conversation just flows. You’re in sync, you click. But what’s really happening when that magic occurs? My guest today is journalist Kate Murphy, author of Why We Click: The Emerging Science of Interpersonal Synchrony. And she says, this experience isn’t just a vibe, it’s a physiological phenomenon and the most consequential social dynamic most people have never heard of. In our conversation, we dig into what happens when people click, why syncing with others feel so good and how it influences everything from friendships to teamwork to romantic relationships. We also talk about why some people have a knack for connection, how you can become more clickable, and why video calls are the worst. After the show is over, check out the notes and resources at aom.is/click.

All right, Kate Murphy, welcome to the show.

Kate Murphy:

Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure.

Brett McKay:

So you got a book out called Why We Click. It’s all about that feeling that we’ve all experienced where we’re clicking with someone socially. It could be the first time we meet them and we’re just like, man, I’m on the same page with this person. I’m vibing with them. And there’s actually a name for this in the scientific literature: interpersonal synchrony. And you call it the most important social dynamic. So why is interpersonal synchrony so important?

Kate Murphy:

Well, it is the way we connect, just like you said, it is the physiological mechanism, the under-the-hood mechanism for connection and interpersonal synchrony. The way I define it is, and I still think it’s magical, that moment of clicking, but it’s the magical but now scientifically documented tendency of human beings to fall into rhythm with one another. And what I mean by that is when you gather two or more people together in a room instantaneously, usually in less than 30 seconds, they will not only begin to match or mirror one another’s gestures, facial expressions and postures, they will also start to sync up their heart rate, their respiration, their hormonal activity, their pupil dilation, all these physiological signals that we cannot detect, but we sync up to them nevertheless. 

And why do we do this? We do this because when we internalize and embody one another, we are able to get a read on one another’s thoughts and feelings. And so when you smile, when someone else smiles, you get a read on their joy. When you flinch, like when you’re watching a football game and you see a quarterback get sacked and you flinch, you are actually intuiting their pain. And also when you sync up with somebody else’s racing heart, you start to feel their anxiety. So it’s really an evolutionary advantage of human beings of being able to tell very quickly, instantaneously friend or foe, what are they thinking? What are they feeling?

Brett McKay:

I think all of us have probably heard this idea that we mirror each other. So if someone puts their hand on their chin, we have a tendency to put our hand on our chin if we’re syncing up with them.

Kate Murphy:

Yeah.

Brett McKay:

But you go into the fact that there’s a lot more going on with our physiology than just that. Besides mirroring gestures, you mentioned your heart rate syncs up, your hormonal activity syncs up, and there’s also research that shows that when people are syncing socially, their brain activity, their brainwaves sync up.

Kate Murphy:

Yeah, that’s key. And that really shows that there’s been this transfer, particularly during meaningful conversations. It doesn’t happen, interestingly, during vacuous conversations, very superficial conversations — only during meaningful conversations, and I learned this when I was writing the listening book and it really got me started on this next book about synchrony. But when the listener and the speaker are really understanding one another, their neural patterns, their brainwaves start to sync up. And that is a measurable way of seeing, okay, there has been a transfer of thoughts, memories, and feelings. So that’s really critically important. 

But also when you are having these meaningful conversations, particularly when you’re in the presence of another person and eye contact, we’ve always been told, look people in the eye. It’s really true because we start to mimic other people’s pupil dilation and there are all these things happening like micro expressions on your face that you are mimicking totally subconsciously and that aren’t really visible, but we’re mimicking them just the same. And it helps us again, embody, internalize one another and really feel and get in the rhythm, in the groove vibe sounds very West coast, woo, but to really get a read on the other person’s vibe, people have energy, they have negative and positive energy, and that’s how we pick it up.

Brett McKay:

And as you were talking about how we all have this desire to connect and click with people and how we want to sync up and basically almost become the same person, it reminds me there’s that myth from Plato talking about where men and women came from, and the myth was that there was a time before in primordial time where there’s these creatures that were kind of like a donut shaped, like a circle looking thing that had four arms and four legs and two heads, and they were together and they kind of connected at the belly button. They kind of wheeled around like cartwheeled to get around and then they separated.

Kate Murphy:

I know exactly what you’re talking about.

Brett McKay:

And then they separated and that became men and women, and then we just had this desire, we want to become that one person again.

Kate Murphy:

Yeah, the idea Plato had was that we’re roaming the planet looking for our missing other half that we’ve been separated from, but interpersonal synchrony tells us that what we’re really looking for is we are looking for the person with whom we effortlessly sync the person who harmonize with us, the people that we are on their wavelength. I love how all these turns of phrase things that we have said for time immemorial, being in sync, in step, in tune on the same wavelength and on the other side, discordant, that kind of thing, that those are all actually true, these things that we were feeling. Now we have the technology to actually see that’s actually what’s happening. We’re syncing up in this way and that’s what feels so good.

Brett McKay:

So syncing feels good in the moment, and then when you consistently have those clicking moments with someone, that’s what makes for fulfilling long-term relationship. What contributes to our ability to sync with others? Is there a genetic factor? Does it have something to do with our early childhood development? Is it a mixture of both?

Kate Murphy:

Yeah, I think it’s all of that. And I love that you’re bringing up the genetics because I really want to say at the outset that this is an emerging science and we don’t understand it exactly why it happens when it happens. That’s why it’s still magical. I mean, why did John Lennon and Paul McCartney click on so many different levels and were able to produce and have the impact that they did? And the same thing with all of us. When we click with somebody, it’s still somewhat magical. 

But yes, I do think everything comes into play there. It’s genetics, it’s your history, it’s everything that has happened to you in life is embodied within you. And every neural twitch, everything that you do is a product of all of those pieces all the way back to when you were in utero. So I like to use the analogy that we’re all kind of like we’re made up of trillions of oscillating cells and what we’re all kind of like, are these massive symphony orchestras with all of these different instruments playing at different frequencies and and you meet another person and they’ve got their whole orchestra from all these different pieces that came together.

And it’s just a matter of whether or not you two are able to harmonize that you are able to, it’s not necessarily you’re going to start playing their song and get on their tempo entirely or they’re going to do the same to yours. What’s really remarkable is how we both somewhat accommodate to one another and play this even more beautiful tune together. And we also, the key point is we interpret it as pleasurable. So it’s not so much of putting each other in an exact common state of arousal. It’s more accommodating one another and playing this beautiful song together that we both are really in the groove, if that makes sense.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, it’s a dance.

Kate Murphy:

It is a dance. 

Brett McKay:

Well, what you talk about is stuff like genetics and upbringing influences someone’s general ability to sync with people. It’s like their overall capacity to connect with people, but those things, they also influence your personality, your disposition, which also influences whether we click with people. There has to be some kind of alignment there, not that you have to be perfectly parallel and the same. You can still sync if you compliment each other in some way, even if you’re different.

Kate Murphy:

Yeah. What’s sort of cool about this is if there are so many people that we can think of who are odd couples that come together and that we never would’ve like God, I never would’ve put those two together, whether it’s friends or a romantic couple, so you can sync with people that you never thought you would sync with.

Brett McKay:

Something else you talk about is that there are certain people who are just especially good at syncing with other people.

Kate Murphy:

There are people that have, and I talk about this in the book, we have something called effective presence, and we’re all familiar with this personality and that’s sort of the general state of how we feel, but effective presence is this consistent way that we make other people feel. There are some people that just, for lack of a better word, have a really good vibe that people just sync to very easily. And you can call it charisma, you can call it a vibe, you can call it just somebody who’s just really has a compelling personality. And it doesn’t mean they’re always upbeat. It’s not just that it’s just people are drawn to them, but we all carry around an effective presence. That is something that is I think, useful to think about is how do I leave people? Am I leaving people better or worse than I found them? Are they more uptight? Are they happier after they’re around me? And what does that mean and what can I do about it?

Brett McKay:

I think that’s worth remembering that we all have this personal atmosphere that can influence how people feel and that we should be mindful and thoughtful about how we want to leave people feeling after we leave their presence. As we’re talking about this, people might be thinking that these good syncers, these people who can click easily with people, people probably think, well, they’re probably all extroverts. They’re bubbly. They’re charismatic in that sort of stereotypical way we think of charisma. But you highlight examples of individuals who have that great effect of presence and they’re not super dynamic, but people are still drawn to them.

Kate Murphy:

And I think that’s because they’re able to put them in sort of a calming cadence, for lack of a better word. They calm you down, they make you feel more secure. There are also lots of people that can just make you feel more competent or there’s something about their presence that you find pleasurable. Again, it’s like tuning into them and you find it pleasant. I also, I think it’s worth noting that we’re not going to sync with everybody. And as much as we might like to, I think we like to, we’re really not meant to. And so part of maturity is realizing that there will be people that you can really hum along with and you’re really going to click with them. And other people, you’re just, no, that’s not going to work. And it instantly, and there’s no use really forcing the issue. And it’s also, people usually have two reactions to that failure to connect is to say, first of all, there’s something wrong with that person that I didn’t connect with them. There’s something wrong. There’s something wrong with that person, or there’s something wrong with me that I wasn’t compelling enough or that’s why we didn’t connect. And sometimes no harm, no foul. You’re just not a good fit and that’s okay.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, you’re not for everybody and everyone’s not for you.

Kate Murphy:

Exactly.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So there’s some individuals who just, they’ve got some sort of knack for clicking with a lot of people. They got that effective presence. What about individuals on the autism spectrum? Something that you hear about, it’s hard for them, people with autism to socialize because maybe they don’t pick up on cues as much. Are they still able to sync?

Kate Murphy:

That’s an interesting question. I actually found it really fascinating. There are two schools of thought about that, and one is that just having a really difficult time noticing syncing that they’re so internally directed that they have a hard time syncing with other people. There’s another school of thought is that they’re so overwhelmed by all the signals they’re receiving that they’re flooded and so they aren’t able to sync. 

There’s also some absolutely fascinating literature that, and this is the case for also people who have some learning difficulties, also perhaps with ADD, but certainly autism is that their deficits in their ability to keep time, keep a beat essentially. They have a really hard time keeping a beat to music and also apparently keeping a beat with other people because we all have a rhythm. Neural patterns are rhythmic, inherently rhythmic. Everything in the universe is pretty much because atoms in and of themselves inherently rhythmic. And so the inability to keep time is an indicator and is also how they’re actually using that as a way to diagnose people who do have some of these neurological difficulties to find out whether or not that’s sort of a marker. And also it’s coming into play as a type of treatment to help people with their music awareness with rhythm, perhaps dance, to try and help with that timing deficit that translates into our ability to sync up with other people. Isn’t that fascinating?

Brett McKay:

It is. I thought that was really interesting that your ability to keep a beat with music translates over to your ability to keep a beat socially. I thought that was really interesting. But I mean, it makes sense because one of the things you see people do in groups, sometimes an organization will have people participate in a drum circle and then beating on the drums, it gets people in sync because they’re creating a rhythm together.

Kate Murphy:

Well, I think just in general, that’s the other side of this, is that when we are syncing with other people behaviorally, meaning we’re doing the same thing at the same time, particularly to a beat, to your point, it fosters feelings of rapport, of trust. People volunteer more information, they’re generally kinder and more helpful. Even babies strapped into face forward carriers and bounced in time to music are significantly more likely to favor an experimenter who is also bouncing in time to music versus an experimenter who’s bouncing out of sync or who is not bouncing at all. So there’s something about, I mean, I myself am in a line dancing class and a lot of this people in this class, I mean just really probably little else in common, but I mean, we are so cohesive and there’s such a sense of joy of doing the same thing at the same time.

You lose this sense of yourself, you become more of this larger organism moving together, and it does stimulate joy. 

And if you think just even back in history, synchronized behaviors, movements have been used as a kind of social glue. Think of religion, people singing together, praying together, kneeling together, standing at the same time together and in the military marching to a beat. And also all soldiers are really pretty much on the exact same schedule, doing the same thing at the same time. And it builds this incredible sense of cohesion. It brings this feeling of emergence. So when soldiers see something happening to one of their own, it’s like it’s happening to them.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I think we’ve all maybe experienced that. I know when I worked in a restaurant when I was in high school or I worked at Jamba Juice making smoothies and you get really busy and whenever the crew, they were just synced up and in the zone. We didn’t have to talk to each other, but we could look at each other and knew what they were going to do and what I needed to do. And it just felt awesome. This is amazing. We’re just cranking out smoothies. 

Kate Murphy:

Yeah, I love that. And the same with the greatest sports teams, the ones where everybody’s cohesive and really clicking. You can see that, and those are the ones that succeed.

Brett McKay:

Another factor that plays a role in our ability to sync socially is something called interoception. What is that and what role does it play in our ability to sync with others?

Kate Murphy:

Oh, I’m so glad you brought that up. It’s really, I found this, well, I found everything in the book really fascinating, but this was a revelation to me. We like to think of our feelings come from, okay, something happened. We process what happened in our mind and that results in our feelings. But the research is really coming to show that really feelings start in our body and our brain interprets feelings from these experiences, these feelings in our body, and then we translate that to emotions. So interoception is the ability to read what’s going on in your body. It’s essentially body awareness. It’s the flip side of perception. Perception is what you’re perceiving outside of your body, whereas interoception is being really in tune with what’s going on within your body. And that’s super important because if you don’t understand the sensations and what they mean in your body, you really can’t sync up to another person or embody another person and take on their feelings and be really in tune with them.

So for example, we all experience, if you think about what does fear feel like for you? Do you feel it in your stomach? Do you feel it in your chest? Do you feel it in your head? Do you feel it in your feet? Some people feel it in their genitals. I mean, all of us have a different physical signature for fear. And if you’re not in tune of, okay, what does that mean? What am I feeling right now is that anger? And where we get into trouble as human beings is when we start to misconstrue or get detached from those inner feelings within us and what they mean. 

A lot of people have a different sense of what hunger means. I mean, what the feeling is. Is it gnawing in your chest or do you get kind of irritable? People have different ways of perceiving hunger, but where we really get messed up is when we misconstrue things like you can feel a little bit irritable or lethargic and think that’s hunger when it’s really boredom and people get mixed up with that. And particularly in our culture where we’re so busy, and it’s almost a badge of pride to say you didn’t sleep when you were tired. You didn’t eat when you were hungry. You pushed yourself through when you were in a lot of pain. Exercising that detachment from your body, and you can see how this would be a problem is if you are trying to internalize, embody someone else’s feelings. And again, this is all subconscious, but if you’re not in tune with your own body, how can you be in tune with someone else’s body?

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I think that’s interesting. One of the first things you can do to help develop your own ability to click more with people is just get more in tune or more aware of your own emotions and what they feel like in your body.

Kate Murphy:

Yeah, just do an internal review because if we’re internalizing other people’s heart rate, their respiration, all of these things, and we’re not even aware of our own heart rate, you’re not going to pick up someone else’s anxiety if you’re not even aware of your own heart rate. They’ve done a lot of research with particularly heart rate, but there are lots of other things where people work on their interoception going through different parts of their body and what are you feeling? And there was one study I thought was just fascinating, where it had high frequency traders at a hedge fund, and the ones that had better interoception were better traders. They made more money and they stayed in the job longer because they had more of that sense of, okay, this is danger or what these other people are doing. I’m getting sucked into something that maybe I shouldn’t. Where they really had a sense of their own self. And again, this is all subconscious, but the fact that they had better awareness, higher awareness of their heart rate and whether it was up or down versus another person made them a better trader.

Brett McKay:

So personality can influence whether we click with someone, but there can be situations where the fit has potential, but you’re not syncing because you’re just not generally good at syncing with people. And we’ve talked about that some people are just better able to click with people and more people than others. I mean, some of that is genetic and upbringing, but there’s also things we can all do to improve our clickability. And we’ve talked about some of those things already. I mean, be aware of your own emotions, do things in a group, like some kind of physical activity together where you’re all in sync, but what else can we do to make ourselves more clickable? And you actually have a chapter on what the world of speed dating can teach us about this. So what can speed dating teach us about being open to interpersonal synchrony?

Kate Murphy:

Well, your listeners should know there’s a vast scientific literature on speed dating, which was news to me at not only speed dating, but speed networking. And they’ve done a lot of studies to find out that’s how they really figured out what is happening when people are clicking. And the people that reported a sense of attraction and they wanted to see this person, again, whether it was in a professional or a personal context, romantic context, it was that they were syncing on all these different levels. The thing that I think people can do that we discount, and of course that’s what my first book was about is to, you really want to be present, of course. And really, if you can be in person, in person, you’re going to pick up all these different signals that you don’t pick up online or in a two dimensional or even three dimensional.

If it’s virtual reality, you’re not going to pick up. Syncing is a multisensory dynamic, and so you’re losing a lot of information that helps you sync up with somebody if you’re not in person. So there’s that piece of it. But also learn to be a really good listener when you are really trying to inhabit somebody else’s narrative and really trying to understand them. And listening isn’t just being quiet. I mean, it is really trying to almost be with someone in the sense that you’re watching a movie where you’d get totally lost in the other person and to almost let yourself go in what the other person has to say, get rid of your own personal agendas and really be a good listener. That is something that helps with that neural syncing we were talking about with brainwaves. So that’s a piece of it too.

But I just think in general, what’s so powerful about this knowledge is to be aware that this is even something that happens. I mean, I don’t know if you knew this before, but I certainly didn’t know that on all these different levels we’re syncing up with other people and to try and be sensitive to that, and you kind of let yourself go with it if it’s something that’s working for you. But if you get that feeling, that discordant feeling or sort of like that needle across vinyl when you meet someone to also pay attention to that too, because you have intuited, you have felt something that’s pretty important to pay attention to.

Brett McKay:

Can you hack social syncing? Because some bit of advice you always see in magazines or blog posts is if you’re on a date or maybe even you’re on, you’re networking or a job interview, well, if you really want to sync up with someone, you should just do whatever they do. So if your date crosses their legs, you cross your legs and be intentional about that. Does that actually work?

Kate Murphy:

No. Short answer, because we are really fine tuned to authenticity. Human beings are. You talk about a superpower, we’re really, and even subconsciously, anything that’s a little bit off or that we don’t perceive as being authentic, we pick up on that. And then also when there’s a big disconnect between, that’s another thing about syncing, is to actually be authentic. Because if there’s a disconnect between what you’re feeling and what you’re doing or saying, people pick up on that, that’s sort of crossed wires. And so people, they pick up on that, whether they are aware of it or not, they’re aware of the end feeling, which is discomfort.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Another bit of advice I’ve seen people use to try to sync up is, but if you don’t do it right, it’s a total turnoff, is using people’s name.

Kate Murphy:

Oh yeah.

Brett McKay:

Dale Carnegie famously said something like “The sweetest sound a person can hear is their own name.” And I think a lot of people hear this advice and they feel like, okay, I got to drop someone’s name as much as possible in this conversation.

Kate Murphy:

It’s so aggravating.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. I mean, I’ve had salespeople do this to me and I’m just like, okay, I know what you’re doing, and it’s just really annoying, so you can just stop it. Please stop. But I’ve also had podcast guests who say my name throughout the conversation and it sounds natural, and I’m like, oh wow, that does feel really good. Even when I think someone is doing it intentionally to be charming, it still feels good if it’s natural, but when it’s really forced, it’s irritating. It’s a complete turnoff.

Kate Murphy:

No, absolutely. There is a natural way to do it. I have a friend who’s an airplane mechanic and he’s absolutely delightful. And he does that. He uses people’s names partially it’s to help him to remember, but it’s so natural. And I mean, Dale Carnegie’s, right? It is like music to your ears when he’s authentic, he wants to know me, he wants to be friends with me. And you feel that, and when someone just drops it every once in a while, Brett. That’s right. Lemme tell you, Brett.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Okay. So you can’t do the whole mirror somebody to sync up with them. That’s just going to happen naturally if you’re syncing up with them. What about looking people in the eye? You mentioned that eye contact is important.

Kate Murphy:

Yeah, that’s huge. Look people in the eye.

Brett McKay:

But how much is too much?

Kate Murphy:

Well, there’s creepy staring people in the eye, but I think when that happens, there isn’t a synchrony going on. The person is just in their mind thinking, I’m going to stare at this person. Do you know what I mean? There’s a difference between really looking with a sense of interest and a sense of exploration and really wanting to sync with somebody. And then there’s this, okay, I’m just going to look at you because that’s what I’m supposed to do. And also I think there are people who, everybody’s not as good at this. People have different tuners. And so some people really can try and look at somebody and it’s almost like a blank stare. And that’s where it’s creepy because you don’t, on a certain level, you know that your pupil dilation is not syncing up, they’re not syncing up with your heart rate. You feel that disconnect. So I would say when you’re looking at someone, if you’re really looking at someone with interest and curiosity, then that’s going to come across. But certainly I think people have different tolerances for intimacy and sometimes that all the signals that you’re getting from someone can be a little too much, and they need to look away every once in a while, and that’s okay too.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, that’s fine. So I mean, it sounds like if you want to be more clickable with people, it’s not so much about tactics or techniques, it’s more about an attitude or a stance you take to whatever social interaction you’re in. And that attitude is just one of presence and curiosity and wanting to know about this person. And if you have that attitude, the clickings going to happen naturally.

Kate Murphy:

Yes. If you’re compatible with the person, right? That’s important. And that’s so hard being a nonfiction writer, which I’m mainly a journalist, and now I’ve written my second book after my first, I said, I’d never do this again. But if you look at the landscape of nonfiction books, I think you’re probably more familiar with this than most people, that it is all about this hack. If you just do this and then this’ll happen, and interpersonal synchrony and the things that I write about, it isn’t something where if you do X, then Y will happen. And actually nothing about life is like that. And it’s as you said, and I think it’s really apt. It’s a dance. And so if you go in wanting to dance and you go in with that curiosity and that openness and just generosity of spirit, you will find people who are on your wavelength who will want to join in with your music, who you will play a beautiful song together or dance well together. And then there will always be people who will just sort of be on their own tempo and they’re maybe distracted. They may not even notice you or you’re just not compatible. But again, that’s okay. We’re not meant, we don’t have the cognitive or emotional resources to sync with everyone. And also what would make it special when you do.

Brett McKay:

So you mentioned one of the important things for interpersonal synchrony is you have to be with the person in person.

Kate Murphy:

Yes. 

Brett McKay:

And you have this whole section about the research on our ability to socially click with people via digital mediums. What does that research say?

Kate Murphy:

Well, as I touched on earlier, synchrony is a multisensory experience. And in fact, interpersonal synchrony suggests that we have more senses than the five we take for granted. How do you sense someone’s heart rate, their respiration, their hormonal level, even these subconscious smells? I mean, we have all these pheromones that we’re throwing out that they think is responsible for why women sync up their menstrual cycle. So they’re all these things, and you’re not going to get that online. You’re not going to get this full panoply of signals that someone is throwing out that you could potentially sync up to. And that doesn’t mean you can’t sync on certain levels. I mean, we certainly see things go on viral online, or people’s outrage gets stirred up online. So it’s not like you can’t have synchrony or feel like you have synchrony with people online. But oftentimes, and people who’ve done online dating know this better than most is you might think you have a connection with someone online and then you meeting them in person and you think, oh my God, no. All you can think about is how long do I have to sit here before I can break this off without seeming rude? It’s just you really do not get the full sense of another person online.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, that’s an interesting point about online dating because it also could happen, there might be people in your in-person social circle, maybe at work or at church, where your filters on the dating apps wouldn’t have brought you to that person.

Kate Murphy:

Absolutely. 

Brett McKay:

Because the filters on dating apps are very superficial, like how tall you are, money, income. But there might be people in your interpersonal social circle that you never would’ve thought you would’ve like, I want to date this person. But then you get to be around them and you interact with them and you’re like, oh, wow, I kind of like this person.

Kate Murphy:

Yeah, you swipe. You would’ve totally swiped left if you had read their profile, but then you see them in person and you totally click.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So yeah, in-person, important. Let’s talk about this. We’re on the podcast. I don’t do video podcasts and a lot of podcasts are going the video route. I’m talking to you, I cannot see you. You cannot see me. I do all my interviews remote without video. I don’t like video. I do video calls every now and then. I don’t like it. What is it? Help me justify myself here. Why do I have this aversion to video calls and why do I prefer voice only calls?

Kate Murphy:

Well, the science backs you up on that. I mean, I’m not just trying to make you feel better. I mean, the science totally backs you up on that, and I salute you for resisting it because that is the way of the world right now where everybody’s moving to video. But the problem is that because we have this instinct to sync, looking at video is very disruptive and makes us feel ill. I mean, zoom fatigue is a real malady. And that is because the way the technology is at this point, the way that video images are encoded and decoded and buffered and all these things that are manipulated about the image, and not to mention pixelation, it distorts all these tiny little cues, these facial expressions. And then back to eye contact, you are making eye contact with your, or maybe you aren’t with your camera, so nobody’s actually looking at you.

And so you in your brain, again, this is subconscious, you are just rapidly spinning your wheels trying to do this adaptive evolutionarily entrained thing with another person to sync up with them. You’re looking for all those microexpressions, you’re looking for that eye contact and you’re just spinning your wheels trying to do that. And it ends up making people feel uncomfortable, vaguely disturbed, a little bit off. And I have never met a single person who says, oh, goody a zoom meeting. And I don’t know why it’s become something where everybody thinks is to rigor, because I mean, I’ve had people that I’ve talked to that I’ve worked with who say, oh God, I loved reading that in your book, and I hate Zoom calls. And yet they’ll schedule a zoom call with me. And I feel like, why is this? But I totally agree with you that we are able to connect and sync on a much more authentic real level just by hearing each other than getting all that faulty information that we get from the video that throws us off. And at some part of our brain is really struggling, and it makes it really hard to connect in any way, shape, or form.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I love talking to people on the phone. I’ve been doing that a lot more lately. I’ve got a friend who’s moved and once a month I’ll take a walk for an hour and we just talk to each other on the phone and it’s like we’re together even though we don’t see each other.

Kate Murphy:

Yes, I agree. And there’s also you think there’s kind of an intimacy having someone right in your ear. There’s that piece of it too. 

Brett McKay:

No, I agree. Whenever someone does a zoom call, I always feel kind of like a heel. I’ll do the zoom call, but I’ll keep my video camera off. And then the other person’s like, Hey, is your video camera not working? And I say, no, it’s fine. I’m just going to do audio only. It’s a phone call.

Kate Murphy:

Well, but let’s be honest, Brett, people are mostly looking at themselves on these calls.

Brett McKay:

You’re checking yourself out. 

Kate Murphy:

They’re looking at a little image of themselves, they’re really not looking at you, or they’re getting distracted by looking at what’s that art in the background? Is that a cat crossing in the back? And then when people blur all around them and they look so peculiar with that blur stuff around them, I mean, you do kind of feel like a jerk. I have nothing to hide. It’s not that. It’s just I really want to pay attention to what you’re saying. I really want to connect with you in some way, and I want us to be productive and sync in a way that we can solve problems or get to an agreement. And the video just subverts that.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so let’s use this as a clarion call on Zoom video calls.

Kate Murphy:

Boy, if that came out of my book, I would feel like I had just accomplished something great in the world.

Brett McKay:

You have a chapter about the importance of interpersonal synchrony and romantic relationships. What happens whenever a romantic relationship is not synced up?

Kate Murphy:

Well, it’s not good. I mean, when we are not in sync with another person, we experience it as discomfort, romantic or otherwise. And I think it’s particularly painful when you have been in sync and then you move out of sync. And actually that’s not a bad thing because you do want to have periods of asynchrony in any relationship. It’s natural and healthy because that’s how you get back in touch with yourself and recalibrate and makes you better able to, when you do sync back up with the other person that you each can bring something to the dance. I like your analogy, so that’s okay. But I think a lot of times, particularly people who have anxious attachment styles, they get very upset when there is a sense of asynchrony. And so they really spin their wheels trying to what’s wrong,

Which only drives people apart. And they often will do things that provoke the person. If they’re really agitated, they will provoke the other person. So they’re agitated too, just so they’ll be in sync on that level, which is not good for a relationship. But if you really find that you’re really on different wavelengths and really feel like a real distance is coming between the two of you, go back to those things of make sure, are you spending enough time together? Are you with each other enough to establish those physiological, synchronous and also activities, those joint activities we talked about, go for a walk together. I mean, make time. So you’re doing things, having these shared experiences and these joint activities that help you sync up more readily.

Brett McKay:

Okay. That’s great advice. So make sure you’re syncing up regularly. People are busy as a couple. You can just sync up in the morning when you’re having a cup of coffee together, talk about what’s going on with your day, and then maybe at the end of the day, have another chat where you just hang out, talk about how the day went.

Kate Murphy:

Well, I mean that’s one of the greatest things about being in romantic relationships is they used to call it pillow talk, but just when you’re laying in bed at night and just talking and that quiet, and again, you’re not necessarily looking at each other, but you’re so synced up physically by proximity and just talking about your day and sharing things that really promotes that synchrony and that sense of intimacy.

Brett McKay:

So we’ve been talking about the benefits of interpersonal synchrony. It allows you to feel connected to people close. It feels good. It allows you to get stuff done efficiently and effectively. But are there downsides to being too in sync with somebody?

Kate Murphy:

Oh, yes. Because we have this instinct to sync, it makes us vulnerable to getting sucked into other people’s emotional vortex. I mean, I think we’ve all had the sense that when we are with somebody who’s just high drama, incredibly manic, that it’s exhausting. I don’t think everybody has a great emotional vocabulary, but we all can recognize someone who’s hard to be around versus easy to be around. And the people that are hard to be around are the ones that sort of sweep us up into this emotional cadence, resonance that we’re not comfortable with. And it is difficult, and it’s also difficult because when we embody and we internalize other people, it feels like it’s coming from ourselves. So I think we’ve all had the experience of why did I do that? Why did I say that? Or there was sort of a blow up and you’re like, how did that happen?

And that’s because you climb the ladder of emotion, arousal, agitation with another person because of this instinct to sync and you lost sight of yourself. You lost sight of where that person begins and you end. And so that’s why things like interoception are really important. And also just by reading this book, just to have an awareness that this is what’s happening. And when you start getting those feelings, you can kind of think within yourself, okay, what am I doing with this? I’ll give you a really good example. When I was first working on this book, or I had really gathered most of the data, I hadn’t really finished writing the book. I was invited to speak about my last book at a major university, and I won’t say which one, which will become clear in a minute. And I was invited to lunch with one of the deans, and we were at lunch and he was, let’s just say he was socially very anxious, and he was spinning and he was having a hard time looking me in the eye.

He was just kind of agitated. And as a result, I was pretty miserable. I was really uncomfortable and I was feeling really anxious, and I was feeling very socially awkward. And I realized, which is not me. I love meeting new people. And I realized, oh my God, this is what’s happening. I’ve totally internalized this guy. And once I was aware of that, I was able to pull back and do things like think about, okay, where am I putting? I realized, okay, my shoulders are hunched. Let me bring them down. Let me take some deep breaths. I even slowed the cadence of my speech, crossed my legs the other way, and I totally changed the rhythm of the encounter. And not only did I feel better and bring myself back to myself, but he started to relax. He started to sync to me. So there’s a real power in catching yourself. And it’s hard. It seems like an easy thing to do, but it’s really hard because it’s so instinctual and you become so wrapped up in the moment that you don’t realize it’s happening as it’s happening and you do the debrief kind of afterwards, you realize, oh, that would happen. But if you get good at reading yourself and reading other people, and the degree to which you are matching, mirroring that other person, it really can make a total difference in your social life.

Brett McKay:

So the Osmond’s famous saying, “one bad apple, don’t spoil the whole bunch, girl,” but you say the Osmonds were wrong. One bad apple does spoil the whole bunch.

Kate Murphy:

Yes. And I think the best example of this was an incredibly interesting study that was done in the early two thousands by Will Phelps, who’s now in Australia. He’s at University of South Wales in Australia, but at the time he was at University of Washington. And what he did is he created all of these work groups out of University of Washington business students, and he created all these work groups, but he introduced a confederate or an accomplice who was to go in and either act like a jerk, a slacker or a depressing downer, and see what happened, what the effect was on group functioning. And actually, he didn’t know Will Phelps did not know about interpersonal synchrony at the time. He was just looking for the effects. But he said, now knowing what he knows now, he would’ve done the study totally differently because if you look at the video, it’s striking that during the slacker condition, he’s leaning back in his chair, he is eating, he’s acting like he couldn’t be bothered with the task at hand.

And sure as shooting, everybody else starts leaning back. They’re starting to say things like, let’s get this over with. And they performed really badly. And the really heartbreaking one was the depressive downer one. And the guy comes in and he’s acting real depressed and really lethargic, and it’s really sad. You start seeing everyone else slow down, putting their heads down on the table, and you get this sense, and they actually verbalize it. It’s not only the task at hand was meaningless, but life in general seem meaningless. And so you can see how this contagion happens in situations, and I think we’ve all experienced where somebody new comes into a group and it just totally upsets the dynamic and pulls people in one direction or another. And there can be good apples too. It can be positive or negative, but it’s true that one bad apple, the greatest predictor of the success of a team or organization is not how stellar the best person is or even the average abilities of the rest of the people, but how awful the worst person is that predicts the success or failure of a group.

Brett McKay:

So if you’re a leader of a group, what do you do when you’re dealing with a bad apple? Do you just have to get that person out of there, or do you try to rehabilitate them? What’s the strategy?

Kate Murphy:

Well, most CEOs that I’ve interviewed are just like, yeah, you got to get rid of it. It’s going to ruin everything. But I think what they try to do more on the front end is hire very carefully.

And again, don’t interview by Zoom. Don’t rely on an algorithm that’s going to pick the right resume. As you rightly said, sometimes with dating apps, the people that you swipe left on are the people that are the right person. So there’s that. There’s also, when I interviewed Danny Meyer, he allowed me to go and I watched, I mean, you talk about synchrony in his Michelin starred restaurants, the synchrony between the kitchen and the front of the house. And there’s just a tempo. It’s a ballet in there. And I was talking to one of the managers and he said, with hiring, they typically bring in somebody and have a trial run, which I think is probably a really good idea with a lot of organizations to the degree that you’re able, because it’s to the benefit of the potential hiree as well as the employer, because they all get a sense of, am I clicking here? Is this somewhere where I can flourish? Is this someone who’s going to fit in with the vibe, the rhythm of the team? So I think more to really try and head it off from the beginning.

Brett McKay:

So you got this one chapter. I want to end on this. I thought this was really interesting. You explore our sometimes uncanny ability to sync with people from afar. So for example, I’m sure some people have experienced this where they get a feeling that someone they know who lives far away is having a hard time, or maybe something bad happened to them and they think I better check on them and come to find out something bad did happen to that person. What’s going on there?

Kate Murphy:

Well, I’m not sure, but I do talk about this in the book. And again, this is very, people don’t agree, this is highly speculative, but in the physics world, they are coming to think that our brains operate much like a quantum computer. And again, I really want to preface this, that there is a lot of disagreement among physicists, but there is a camp that believes our brains work like a quantum computer. And quantum is subatomic particles, and their behavior is very unique. And one of the things that is a factor of quantum mechanics is something called quantum entanglement. And that is where these subatomic particles, they can become synced, but then when they are separated by time and space, they maintain that synchrony. And since they think that our brains are operating like quantum computers and obey the laws of quantum mechanics, including quantum synchrony, you can see this really trippy notion that if the quantum particles within your brain are synced up and can become entangled, you can imagine how the quantum particles in another person’s brain that would sync up to your brain would be operating in that same synchronized way. And that might, and I emphasize, might explain why we are able to intuit feel, predict telepathic types of things, and we’ve all had them happen and thought, whoa. I mean, how did that happen? And you could see how that might be an explanation of why that would happen.

Brett McKay:

That’s interesting. Yeah, I know people like that. My wife is able to do this. She’ll have those moments where she’ll just be lying in bed and she’s like, I got a friend who’s having a hard time. I need to call them. And then sure enough, she calls and they’re having a hard time. I’m like, what’s going on there? So yeah, it could be quantum entanglement or it could just be the romantic. We’re just so combined that we just are on the same wavelength no matter where we are. So who knows what’s going on there.

Kate Murphy:

But I do like that there’s still some magic to this that we don’t quite understand it all. For me, there’s something intellectually as well as kind of spiritually satisfying about the fact that synchrony binds us not only to one another, but also to the universe as a whole. Because synchrony has been observed throughout the natural and life sciences, everything from the tiniest quantum particle to supermassive quasars exhibit synchronistic properties. And so it really shouldn’t be a surprise that human beings do it too.

Brett McKay:

Well, and you have a section on this. I mean, we can get a little more, let’s go more woo-woo. I like this about syncing with nature. I’ve had that experience where I’ve been out backpacking in the Rocky Mountains and I’m just staring at a mountain by this lake, and I feel like the mountain is talking to me.

Kate Murphy:

Right?

Brett McKay:

And I know it’s not talking to me, but it feels like it.

Kate Murphy:

But on some level it is. I mean, the science is pretty clear on this because, I mean, think about it. We are ruled by nature. The sun coming up, the sun coming down. We have all these internal clocks that are based on the rhythms of nature. And the research is very clear that people feel better out in nature. And they think that is because we sync up with the regular rhythmic patterns of not only what you hear in nature, but also what you see in nature, which is not what happens in urban environments. So we probably need to have another conversation if you’re actually seeing lips moving on the mountain and talking to you. But the sense of communion and feeling in sync while you’re out in nature and with the mountain, I think that’s perfectly valid and accurate.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, humans are designed to click. We love to click. 

Kate Murphy:

Yes.

Brett McKay:

Well, Kate, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Kate Murphy:

Well, I think the best way is just to go to my website. It’s www.journalistkatemurphy.com, and you can read about the book and any journalism that I’ve done, and that’s probably the best place to go.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well, Kate Murphy, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Kate Murphy:

Thank you, Brett,

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Kate Murphy. She’s the author of the book Click. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere you find more information about our work at our website, journalistkatemurphy.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/click where you can find links to resources to delve deeper into this topic. 

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. If you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts 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 you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

You’re at a party and start chatting with another guest.

Twenty minutes later, you’re still talking with them one-on-one. You feel trapped, and you wish you knew how to break away from the conversation.

Maybe the person is annoying, and you’d like to escape their tedious orbit.

But you also might be talking with a friend and are very much enjoying the interaction. It’s just that you want to catch up with some of the other guests, too. He or she might feel the same way, actually, but neither of you wants to risk seeming rude in ending the exchange.

So how do you navigate this situation? You ideally don’t want to break things off abruptly and leave the person awkwardly standing there on their own.

Here are some options from social and etiquette experts for politely bowing out of a conversation:

Option #1: Introduce the person to someone else.

In my AoM podcast interview with etiquette expert William Hanson, he said that his go-to strategy is to try to pair your conversational partner off with someone else. He described how this would go:

‘Brett, it’s been so lovely talking to you. I’ve just seen someone over there I’ve got to go and get and speak to before they leave. Have you met Susan, however?’

And I’ve sort of seen Susan floating around and I grab her as she comes past and go: ‘Susan, may I introduce Brett? Brett has just flown in from Sydney. And Susan, I believe your mother is from Australia. I’ll leave you two talking.’

And off you go.

Basically, introduce the person to someone else, giving both people a bit of context — a conversation starter — to kick off the new interaction before you slip away.

If someone you can introduce the person to doesn’t happen to pass by, you can actively lead them over to a new conversation partner: “My friend Rob is also in the cyber security field. I want you to meet him; I think you’d enjoy talking shop.”

The strategy of introducing your current conversation partner to someone else is a good one if you think the former and the latter will actually get on. However, if you’ve found the person you’ve been talking to a bore, it would, of course, not be very generous to pawn them off on a friend. It is well that Jeanne Martinet, author of The Art of Mingling, calls this technique “the human sacrifice.” If it’s not a situation where you want to throw an unwitting victim to the gum-flapping wolves, try one of the other options on this list.

Option #2: Use the buffet bye-bye.

When I talked to Martinet on the podcast, she noted that one of the most common categories of conversational exit is what she calls “the buffet bye-bye and other excuses.” That’s where you say something like, “I’m going to go grab a drink/some food. It’s been nice talking to you.”

Martinet says that this option can be effective, but carries a risk: the person may follow you to the bar/buffet line. So the excuse she recommends instead is to step away by saying you have to make a phone call:

Even in today’s age of smartphones, everyone knows that if you’re at a party you can’t just whip out your phone right there, so they know you have to go off by yourself. Then you actually have to go off and look like you’re making a phone call for a second, then go to another group.

You can also excuse yourself to use the restroom, though this one tends to read more nakedly as a way to make an escape.

Option #3: Say there’s someone you’re supposed to meet.

Another strategy Martinet shared goes like this:

You find a pause hopefully to interrupt, and you say, ‘I’m so sorry, but someone just walked in the room that I’m supposed to talk to because my boss made me or my girlfriend said I had to,’ or some excuse like that. So it’s like you have a mission, and you’re so sorry but you have to go.

Martinet calls this technique the “counterfeit search,” as you may only be pretending that there’s someone else at the party you’re supposed to meet (though that may legitimately be the case as well). 

Your willingness to use strategies like the counterfeit search — or the phone call excuse from option 2 — will, of course, depend on how comfortable you are with telling a white lie in the name of social grace.

Option #4: Be self-deprecating.

Hanson says you shouldn’t leave someone on their own unless you truly do need to break away to do something like catch a plane. In that circumstance, he recommends making your exit on the back of some self-deprecating pretense:

You can make it sound like you are the bore. So I would say something like:

‘Well, Brett, look, I know I’ve monopolized so much of your time this evening, and I know there are lots of other people you want to go and talk to. But maybe we’ll see each other in a few weeks’ time at that fundraiser.’

Shake hands and off we go.

Acting a little apologetic for having taken up someone’s time is a graceful way to exit without causing offense.

Option #5: Travel together to a new group.

In a situation where you are enjoying talking with someone, and just want to be able to mingle with some other people as well, you can simply say something like, “I’m going to go sit down near Mike. Come with me.” Now you can talk to your current conversation partner and Mike as well. Or the person, who has also been waiting for an excuse to break away from you, will tell you that they’re going to go hit the buffet instead. This strategy works best when the person you’re talking with, and the person you’re going to go join, are mutual friends.

In addition to these options, a couple of other easy lines to use are, “You know, I’d better check in with the host before the night is through,” (a natural, legitimate reason), and “Well, I won’t keep you any longer — I’m sure you’ve got lots of folks to say hi to” (makes your exit seem complimentary to the other person).

Parties are for mingling. So rather than getting locked into talking to the same person for the whole night, use one of these strategies to set yourself free to enjoy both the full buffet of food, and of sociality.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

You may have heard of hormesis — the idea that intentionally embracing small stressors activates the body’s repair and defense systems, building resilience, improving how the body and even the microbiome function, and ultimately protecting against the harms of chronic stress.

We typically think of these hormetic stressors in terms of things like exercising, taking ice baths, sitting in a sauna, and ingesting certain plant compounds. But you ought to consider adding socializing to that list.

As my guest today explains, while we tend to avoid socializing as we do all stressors — even the good ones — it’s something that can strengthen our health, resilience, immunity, and sense of meaning. Jeffrey Hall, professor of communication studies and co-author of The Social Biome: How Everyday Communication Connects and Shapes Us, joins me to discuss why relationships are harder to build in the modern world, how our adolescent approach to making friends needs to evolve, and why we must intentionally “exercise” our social muscles in a world where they’ll otherwise atrophy.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Jeffrey’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #772 — How Long Does It Take to Make Friends (And How Does That Process Work, Anyway)?
• AoM Article: 3 Things No One Ever Told You About Making Friends in Adulthood
• AoM Article: The Importance of Developing and Maintaining Your Social Fitness
• AoM Podcast #863: Key Insights From the Longest Study on Happiness
• AoM Article: Love Is All You Need — Insights from the Longest Longitudinal Study on Men Ever Conducted

Connect With Jeffrey Hall

• KU’s Relationships and Technology Lab
• Jeffrey’s faculty page
• Jeffrey on LinkedIn
• Jeffrey on IG

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

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. You may have heard of hormesis. The idea that it intentionally embracing small stressors activates the body’s repair and defense systems building resilience, improving how the body and even the microbiome function, and ultimately protecting against the harms of chronic stress. We typically think of these hormetic stressors in terms of things like exercising, taking ice baths, sitting in a sauna and ingesting certain plant compounds. But you ought to consider adding socializing to that list, as my guest today explains. While we tend to avoid socializing as we do all stressors, even the good ones, it’s something that can strengthen our health, resilience, immunity, and sense of meaning. Jeffrey Hall, professor of Communication studies and co-author of The Social Biome: How Everyday Communication Connects and Shapes Us, joins me to discuss why relationships are harder to build in the modern world, how our adolescent approach to making friends needs to evolve and why we must intentionally exercise our social muscles in a world where the otherwise atrophy after the show’s over, check at our show notes at AoM.is/socialstress. 

All right, Jeffrey Hall, welcome back to the show. It’s so good to be here. So you research human relationships from friendships to romantic relationships. We had you on the podcast back in 2022 to talk about your research on how long it takes to make a new friend, and the short answer is longer than you think, and we’ll let people listen to that episode to get the details on it. You got a new book out called The Social Biome that you co-authored. Let’s talk about that title. Social biome. What do you mean by a social biome?

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah. Well, I’m really glad to be back again. I always like our conversations and it’s an honor to be a multiple guest appearance. Yeah, Andy and I came up with this idea of the social biome back in about 2019, so pre-pandemic, and the reason that we started thinking about it is that people are very familiar with this idea of a gut microbiome and the idea is that there’s this interdependent system within your guts that make the ability to digest food easier or harder. It gets destroyed if you take antibiotics, but it affects everything from your mood to your sickness, your wellness, even your brain health is affected by our gut microbiome. Microbiome also happens then when we touch people it kind of affects how we are. Well, Andy and I thought, well, there’s also a social biome. It’s this interdependent system of relationships, social interactions, which we have with one another that we both occupy. We live in it, but we also are dependent on other people within it. So how people treat us, whether people accept us, whether people introduce their own germs, if you will, like negativity or conflict or whether they’re actually increasing things to increase our health. And what we know from social interaction research is that these things make a big difference in mortality, morbidity, just like your gut microbiome makes a difference in your health too.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I’m sure people have heard about the health benefits of a social life, but for those who aren’t familiar, can you just recap the benefits of having a robust, healthy social life?

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah. The thing that’s crazy about this is something that’s been building for about 15 years of momentum. Some of the earliest studies on these things began to say, well, let’s follow up with folks that we surveyed 10, 15, 20, 30 years ago and see whether they live longer or they live shorter lives, whether they had some disease or otherwise. And what they found was one of the most consistent predictors was whether or not people had strong social relationships, whether they had frequent social interactions, whether or not they could say, I have more quality friends or quality romantic partner relationships. So quality frequency and also social interaction all ended up being these important predictors. And what’s fascinating is you also look at the famous Harvard Men’s Study and other studies of longitudinal health. It finds that even if you change in the middle of your life, you can make it better later.

So let’s say that you are in your twenties and thirties, very career focused, and you’re really not making time for building relationships with other people and you move around a lot, but if you change in your forties and fifties, you can actually live a longer healthier life later too. So what’s fascinating about these different longitudinal studies is that it doesn’t really matter when you start investing in your relationships in other people. It’s always beneficial, at least it seems to be always beneficial to your health, your wellbeing, your sense of purpose and meaning, and of course whether or not you are likely to die earlier.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, that’s the interesting thing is the longevity research on social relationships, how there’s really a tight correlation between the two.

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah, there are a couple processes that people think about are probably why the one that Andy and I spent some time exploring, so interesting is Hess’s idea of stress. So I was talking to a good friend of mine in California and she and I were talking about how lousy it is to approach 50 years old. We’ve been friends for a long time and we’re like, yeah, I exercise pretty regularly. I watch what I eat. I don’t eat a lot of bad food or bad diet, but the thing that my doctor’s always telling me is, you got to reduce your stress. And I’m like, dammit, this is so hard to reduce my stress. And I think that we all kind of have this intuitive sense that when we feel relaxed, when we feel truly at peace with ourselves or accepted, we can feel our stress levels go down.

I don’t know about you, but when I hang out with a friend over lunch or catch up over drinks or have them over to my home or talk to ’em on the phone, I feel like my body almost unwinding, relaxing, feeling safe. 

So researchers believe that one of the most important processes of feeling close, connected and meaningful to other people is that it actually reduces our overall stress response. It kind of turns it off. It turns off our stress. And what we also know about that is our body cannot marshal the resources that it needs to fight off infection unless that it is able to kind of put those sort of stressors away. So there’s a famous study that actually found that people who had better social connections and relationships or people who were also able to fight off a virus that the researchers injected into participants to find out how sick they got. So folks who were really social and had really good relationships were able to fight off sickness better. So one of the main reasons we think that it actually contributes to longevity is that over your whole life when you have meaningful relationships, people, you can count on close connections with others. You’re basically living in a de-stressed environment a lot more frequently than you would if you had nobody. And we know that loneliness is extremely stressful for the people who endure it.

Brett McKay:

I want to go back to this idea of stress because okay, you’re saying here that socializing can reduce stress, but then later on in the book you talk about how socializing is a stressor. We’re going to return to that. I think it’s interesting. Definitely there’s a lot of metaphors we can extract from that. But before we do, so we talked about all these great health benefits, mental wellness benefits of regularly socializing with other people and avoiding loneliness. People probably know about that. There’s so many articles about the loneliness crisis, the loneliness epidemic, and you shouldn’t be lonely nonetheless, people are still hesitant to socialize. What do you think is going on there?

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah, Andy, and one of the things we really shot for when we were writing this book is to be sympathetic rather than to be sort of like a school marm shaking your finger at telling other people how to behave. You really should be more social for your own good. What we really wanted to do is try to explain, well, why aren’t we? What are the barriers why we don’t? And people have very good reasons for not being social. So I think there are structural reasons, there are personal reasons, and then they’re just sort of routine related reasons. Let’s start structurally, one of the strongest negative associations with time spent socializing is work. We are in a curious economy right now in part, not in 2025, but I mean in modern history where people in the top income brackets in the United States who don’t have to keep working work more.

So it doesn’t matter how success you are, people who are professionals and working harder work even more hours. We also have the emergence of gig economies where people are basically on call all the time to try to make money to Uber somebody around or to DoorDash. We’re in an environment in which we are constantly working in order to make time to be able to live. All of that is creeping into our ability to be social. And there’s really good evidence that the more that we’re working, the harder that we’re trying to make ends meet, the less time we have for being social. The other structural reason I think is really important is we don’t have a lot of third spaces, which are basically these places where we feel comfortable just gathering together and being together. Robert Putnam did amazing work in all the way back to 2000 or 2000 when he released bowling alone.

And at that time it was demise of bowling leagues, of rotary clubs, of Elks clubs and all these kinds of things. Since that point, it’s been the decline of churches and synagogues and places of worship where people aren’t showing up or not attending weekly. Although in the last two or three years we’ve had an uptick, which is good news for socialization. So there are these structural changes that are happening around work, around third spaces or around organized spaces for being social that are in decline. And the other reason is people suck. People are disappointing. People let you down, people hurt your feelings. And one of the things that Andy and I really want to communicate a message on here is, but we have a system of repair. We have a need to belong that pushes us towards continuing to work at those relationships even if they are frustrating.

And I think what people find and lots of researchers to confirm this is we imagine worse outcomes from relational mistakes or things that we feel hurt about or things we think we screwed up like we’re boring or we didn’t make a good impression or we said something wrong. We exaggerate those things in a way that make us feel like we can’t do it. We don’t want to socialize anymore, just not enough. So part of it is because people are disappointing. We don’t want to continue to work at having our relationships with people because we’re like, why bother? It’s just never going to get any closer or this person really stunk and I don’t want to be part of their lives anymore. But the last reason it’s so difficult is routine. One thing that’s been very healthy in my lifetime is I’ve seen people have a lot more consciousness about the importance of a good health routine around exercise.

I think I always knew it growing up, but I feel like people are even treating some exercise opportunities almost like in a religious way. They just really truly believe that this set of exercise routines that they have are going to help them be better. And there’s a very good reason to think that it will. People are only recently waking up to the idea of having a good social routine. And one reporter asked me, do you think there’s been a change of heart about whether or not people actually need to prioritize spending time with friends or create a routine about being social? And I’m like, I hope, but I don’t think so. I think our current way of thinking about it is being social is the very last thing we’re going to do if we have time for it, because we got to make time for exercise.

We got to make time for our families, we got to make time for work, our commute. And then of course, I think a lot of it is we want to make time for the things which are hedonistic pleasurable in the moment, but do nothing for a socially, which is I need to finish that next Netflix series so I can be up on the new episodes that I love. So there’s a sense in which of accomplishment and access to easy media as making it even harder for us to realize that those routines are worth fighting for and they are a fight. We have to find ways to make social life be part of our routines and people generally don’t.

Brett McKay:

Speaking to that idea of the decline of socializing as a routine, one of the things that I’m always struck by when I read biographies of individuals who lived in the first half of the 20th century was how busy their social calendar was every night. They were either at a dinner party or hosting the dinner party or they’re playing bridge or it was like every single night. And I think about, I don’t know if I could do that, but for them it was a given. That’s just what you were expected to do that, and we no longer have that expectation.

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah, the expectation part is key. I think you’re absolutely right, Brett. I mean, when I grew up, my parents hosted bridge events in our basement and I remember them pulling out the card tables. My dad told me this great story is when he was a bachelor for the first time, and this would’ve been in the late fifties? No, this would’ve been in the late sixties. Sorry. First thing he wanted to do was set up a bar at his apartment because that’s what you did. You had friends over to entertain them so that drinking wasn’t something you did alone. You had to have it so that you could entertain. I did actually research project recently that found that how many nights a week that people are going out to visit their friends has gone down a lot. But what’s even more surprising is when people idealize what a good night would be, they idealize a less social one.

So in the past when you ask them that question, what’s an ideal night? A lot of people say, oh, time with friends out doing interesting things or spending time together with people who I’m really enjoying or a visit from someone who I care about or visiting someone I care about. Now, when I did the survey just last year, what I found people were saying is spending time alone, quietly in a room watching my favorite program and relaxing in pajamas, there was this glorification of a feeling in which detachment is actually pleasurable. It feels better to be away from others. And so what’s curious is that we’ve had an expectation shift that’s so dramatic, not just I think from the early 19 hundreds, which is absolutely true, but even from the 1950s and 1960s, 1970s and eighties, it’s even palpable if you look at just how people respond to these survey questions from that time period.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I mean you see it sort of anecdotally when people tweet things or Instagram things, they talk about, well, I’m just so happy that people canceled the plans at the last minute. Now I don’t have to do that thing. And that’s the expectation. Now people, the expectation is I just want to be by myself, not be around other people. And you call this world we’re living in now the age of interiority.

Jeffrey Hall:

Yep. Yeah. The age of Interiority idea came up a while ago. I got a report for the Wall Street Journal on this topic of declining time spending being social, and then it was this time decline was not just in the United States. It happened in UK data and data from Australia and other less precise measurement throughout the global north, but also places like Japan and so industrialized world in general. And what’s interesting about this is this decline of sociality happens it seems over longer periods of time and kind of a pendulum swing. So on one side of the pendulum is this idea that being alone is something to be glorified. So we can see this in the romantic era where people are like, I’m wondering lonely like a cloud or to move away from civilization is the only way to find oneself and the monastery or the monk or the aesthetic who is completely in denial of social contact, almost to a hermit like status.

These people were glorified as being either closer to being divine, which kind of was the contemporary understanding of what it meant to be enlightened or maybe your full self, right, unencumbered by others. And then there were other periods of time. If you look at the discourse and the time, it was like people who are on the margins of society or outcasts, people who are hermits are misanthropes. People who are seeking their own time are selfish that we are obliged to one another and that obligation to one another carries incredible benefits in terms of democracy and discourse and comradery and a sense of purpose and meaning or community or I think people of faith talk about this as a brotherhood or a sense of this is what communion looks like. What’s interesting is when that pendulum swings back and forth, people seem to turn either towards or away from the idea of being solitary is a good thing.

I think we are in a time of interiority. The pendulum has swung towards Putnam forecasted it and his bowling alone time use trends are forecasting it. Now you offer that example of people having top Google searches, how do I get out of plans or how do I stop showing up? But we also see that at my daughter’s, one of my favorite places, her favorite places to shop for socks, and she’s a fan of fun socks, is a place called Attic Salt. And I took a picture of socks that say, friends don’t make friends hang out. It’s curious. It’s everywhere is the sense that not interacting with others is something to be celebrated. And I think when we think about this in one way, this normalization of being alone and isolated is something that I see everywhere throughout our media and our representations of what’s being valued, but in another way, it’s making sense of something.

We’re collectively trying to come to terms with the fact that we don’t have a social life, we don’t have opportunities to connect. We’re too tired, we’re too stressed out, we don’t have the bandwidth. So we need a remedy. We need a solution that makes us feel soothed and comforted by the fact that this is the reality we live in. And the age of interiority is also basically making sense of a situation we don’t like, but we need to make sense of it. We say it’s okay to be alone. It’s okay to spend more time away from others because other people suck and friends don’t make friends hang out.

Brett McKay:

We’re engaging in some ex-post facto reasoning, some after the fact reasoning because we find ourselves not having much of a social life. And instead of facing that fact and maybe letting ourselves be a little sad or disturbed by that lack, we tell ourselves, well, you know what? I’m glad I don’t have to socialize. I didn’t want to socialize anyway, okay, so the reason why things are so hard or people have social inertia to socialize the structural aspect of it, we’re working more. Our work schedules are completely different. It’s not like 50 years ago where everyone nine to five, then everyone’s got different schedules. I think related to that, the structural aspect too, I’ve noticed as a parent with pre-teen and teenagers, kids are just doing all sorts of different stuff. It used to be maybe 60 years ago you either did boy scouts and you did the little league in your town and that was it. Now your kids can be involved in volleyball and dance and student council. And so you have parents who are trying to shuffle their kids to these different things. And because these things are all out of sync, parents can’t get together and hang out and the kids can’t get together and hang out. That’s another structural aspect to that. 

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah, I think you nailed it, man. I think you nailed it. And I’ll point out something I will tell you is a bright spot in the data. So the bright spot in the data is that people who are families who are married with children are spending as much if or more time at home with their kids in social time. And that’s a good thing. We know that strong bonds with children are good for children. We know that strong bonds with children are good for parents, and we see a particular uptick, and I would say this for your listeners out there, for men, it looks like married men with children are spending more time with their kids than they have in the past. And this is a good thing and it’s something to celebrate. I think it’s kind of one of those things you don’t often hear good news about men and boys, and I think this is something that’s really great.

Fathers are more invested in the context of a married relationship with their children, and I think that what’s important about that is where does that time come from though? And you’re alluding to the ideas that time has to come from maybe time parents went with each other. And that’s what cracks me up when I think about it. I’m like, well, where was I when my parents were down in the basement playing cards with their friends or when my parents did stuff, did they expect to be entertaining me? We’re in this kind of curious time where I think a lot of parents, especially ones who are upper class or upper class aspiring, are trying to cultivate this sort of perfect experience for their kids because they’re concerned in a broader sense. Their kid won’t have every opportunity that they need to be successful to get into college or six career-wise because they have felt this broader sense of social anxiety or economic anxiety, and frankly, the age of AI and the kind of conversations like pretty soon we won’t even have any jobs because AI will take all of ’em, does not help.

As a parent of a 15-year-old and a 12-year-old, I’m like, God, I have no clue what’s coming to pass. So it makes you feel more anxious that you need to be making your kid is studying and learning and engaging in extracurriculars. As a consequence, this cultivation of childhood has the positive consequences of parents spending more time with their kids, and that’s good, but has the negative consequences of us trying to micromanage a perfect experience, which means parents aren’t spending time with each other, they’re not going out with their friends. They feel like they can’t prioritize their own time one-on-one with their own friends because in some ways that’s really not a good long-term economic decision for their families. So one of the pieces of advice that I give a lot in these things is couples should support each other. Having friends that are not couple friends that are individual friends.

So if you are in any kind of marriage or long-term relationship, you should encourage your partner to have friends and go spend time with their friends. And that may seem obvious, but there’s actually a lot of counter discourse that say, don’t go out with your friends because maybe they think that their friends are going to have a bad influence on them in early parts of relationship, or you’re not spending enough time with your own kids. If you’re married with children or you shouldn’t be going out, you should be at home with us. But what’s interesting is there’s lots of good research that says A happier marriage is also one where couples, each member of that partnership has friends.

Brett McKay:

I’ve seen that in my own life. Whenever I hang out with my friends, I just show up better with my family.

Jeffrey Hall:

And it also shows that you’re being cared for and nourished by the folks. As a person who actually studies friendship a lot, I’ve thought very deeply about the idea that one person can’t provide everything for you. You need a community of people to help you feel a fully robust and rich person. And frankly, my wife is wonderful, but my friends provide different advice. They have different stories. They’re willing to talk about NBA basketball with me, they’re willing to shoot the shit about politics in a way that my wife and I just don’t. So there’s a different communication. There’s a different topic, there’s a different depth, there’s a different way of knowing me, and I think all of those things make me better in my relationship and more able to have a long-term meaningful relationship with my partner.

Brett McKay:

So barriers to socializing the structural aspect, work intensive parenting. Then the other barrier is just people suck. People let you down. They can disappoint you. And then the third one, third obstacle is just routines of socializing. We don’t have them anymore. There’s no longer the expectation that there socialize regularly. What’s interesting though, so socializing is hard, as you said, you’re trying to be very sympathetic and letting people know, yes, yes, it’s good for you. But yes, it’s very hard to come by. But what’s interesting, I still think a lot of people have the expectation that socializing should be easy even though there’s all these obstacles. How do you think that mismatch between expectation and reality also gets in the way of socializing?

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah, it plays a big role, and I am very sympathetic to this because I have a group of high school friends that we try to get together and it is really hard to schedule something. There’s five of us. We have very different schedules. Some of us work jobs that have to commute a lot. Some people have busy travel schedules or family schedules. It’s hard. So it’s legitimately difficult to get people together. Part of the reason that we have this weird expectation that should be easy though, I think comes from the fact that during developmental times in our life where we found the most friends, which tend to happen during elementary school to high school period, and then for some people go to college, that’s also an important time as well. During all of those times, the structure created time. So I’ll just give you enough, for instance, I went to a high school that I knew a lot of the folks that went to high school with me from middle school and some of them from elementary school.

I lived within driving distance of most of them as most people who go to high school in the United States do. I did activities with them during the day, such as we took similar classes, but I also did activities with them After the day was over, we did cross country or swimming. The creation of a school system necessitated lots and lots of my time being spent with the same people over and over again. That is the recipe for friendship. So when I say that those times your life were easier to make friends, that’s just fact, but it’s fact because it was necessary to spend time together in order to do any of those things. What’s interesting is if you think about or you disaggregate what school does and put that into your regular life, what would that mean? That would mean you would see people during the day, you would pick activities you enjoy together and do them together.

You would also date from that same group of people and be single, which is usually characteristic. Not only high school students have a partner. What that means though is you’re open to the possibility of new relationships. As we mature and move into emerging adulthood, which is roughly between 22 and 30 and then later middle age adulthood, what we start doing is closing off all of those avenues. We say, I’m now living with a partner, so I’m not going to go out without her or him. We say, now I have children, so I can’t go out because I need to be a good parent. We say, well, I have to work extra hours because I’m committed to this. All of those foreclosures of our time and openness to making friends makes it harder and harder to make friends. But we don’t remember that school was a time in which you had tons of time, tons of people available to be made friends with lots of activities to do together, and this is critical.

You were in a time of your life where it was developmentally important to be connected with other people that were not people from your family of origin. What happens in later life is your developmental period focuses on new family, new connections that you now solidify and bring into fruition. So what’s interesting is that people don’t see the developmental changes, and frankly, academics like myself do a very bad job of talking about adult development. We just don’t talk about it very much. We don’t think about it, but essentially that means is people don’t even understand. The reason it was so easy in the past was the circumstances created that ease and we just can’t see it, So when we’re young, we’re brought together with peers by default, it’s automatic. It’s built into the structure of our lives. We don’t have to try. It’s just really easy to make friends, but then we carry that expectation over into adulthood even though we’re in a very different stage of life, and that old pattern from our youth where we don’t have to be intentional doesn’t work anymore. We’re going to take a quick break for you word from our sponsors, and now back to the show. I’ve seen this mismatch of expectation and reality when it comes to socializing, making friends and different groups that I belong to, and it’s frustrating for me people’s inflated, inflated expectations.

Brett McKay:

I was in charge of the men’s group in our church, I think it was 10 years ago, and a common complaint was there’s not enough fellowship. So okay, well let’s do something about it. Let’s plan some events. We plan some events, and we would do a lot to communicate that this isn’t the time we’re doing it. Here’s what’s going to happen, who’s going to come? And we get show of hands and we get this buy-in, and then the day of the event would show up and it would just be the leaders there. You’re like, okay, then. So you’d go like, oh, hey, we had this event. People couldn’t make it. And the common excuses were like, I was just busy, or I was just tired. I had something else going on, and well, okay, we’ll plan another event, and no one would show up. And then people would just continue to grouse. Well, there’s no fellowship. And you’re like, okay, guys, we’re trying to create this for you, but it’s going to take some effort to make this happen. And they just get upset. It’s like, why don’t we have fellowship? And it’s like, well, it’s hard. You got to show up. You got to make the effort. You got to make it a priority. And if you don’t, then you’re not going to have that thing you want.

Jeffrey Hall:

You have to make it a priority. And what does that mean to make it a priority? It’s very something we should really dwell on in the sense that people think about, oh, I prioritize friendship, but what does that actually mean in practice? One thing is showing up. Because I wrote this book, I’m very aware of showing up, so I really work hard to show up. If people invite me to a wedding, I’m like, I’m going, it’s going to be uncomfortable or difficult, or maybe I want to do something that day, but I’m going to go anyway. And I tend to have a better time than I thought. People invite me to a going away party or retirement party or a baby shower. I show up, I show up because it sucks to have a party and no one comes. I mean, is there something more insulting to someone to have a party that no one shows up to?

I’m going to be the person that shows up. I show up to funerals because I figure that I would want someone to come to my funeral if I was to pass away. I show up to everything that I possibly can, and I almost in some ways work with my wife because we almost joke with each other and my wife will be like, I don’t really want to go. And I’m like, come on, show up. Because showing up means that you show your care and concern for other people. But fellowship is showing up, right? Friendship is showing up. You cannot have the benefits of conversation, friendship, or fellowship without showing up. And so the key part of what it means to make it a priority is to show up for others when invited and say yes, not to make excuses and go anyway. And one of the things that I think is critical here is that the research evidence bears out that this is good for you.

There’s plenty of excellent research that says that people way overestimate how bad of a time they’re going to have at these things and underestimate what good things are going to come from it. So they are negatively forecasting something and it’s not true. It’s a false belief that’s not helping. But the other thing they forget about is showing up once makes it easier to show up the next time. So one thing we talk about in this book is this idea of a social battery or basically your social energy. And what we know is the more familiar you are with people, circumstances and conversations, the less work it takes from you. So every showing up is easier. So in the case of your men’s group, let’s say that you’re a person who shows up the first time and you’re a little uncomfortable. You’re worried that people don’t think you have to say is good.

Maybe you haven’t done the reading. If you’re having a Bible study group or something like that. I didn’t do the reading, maybe I couldn’t come. And then you go, and then you’re feeling those anxieties. They work themselves out. The next time you go, the research would suggest that you fill all of them less. It’s less work. So what’s happening is simultaneously, as your brain and your social behavior adapts to a new circumstance, it becomes less work. What’s also happening, which is great, is you’re actually contributing an investment of time into a relationship with other people. So each time you show up is more time kind of put in the piggy bank of investment towards friendship. So what’s fascinating about this is when you start thinking about it as I’m showing up over and over again, makes it easier to keep showing up and there are additional benefits of comradery, friendship and all those things, you begin to realize that this routine has this wonderful self-sustaining ability. In the same way that we talked about the negative feedback loops. There’s also a positive feedback loop, but you have to start with showing up.

Brett McKay:

Well, this idea of showing up, this goes back to that idea that I wanted to explore further. We mentioned earlier where, okay, socializing actually reduces stress in your life, but this idea of showing up in overcoming these barriers to socializing, it makes socializing sound like a stressor. It is stress. That’s why a lot of people avoid it. It’s like, well, there’s all these obstacles. People are terrible. It takes a lot of effort to socialize. So in that sense, it is socializing is a type of stressor.

Jeffrey Hall:

It absolutely is, and people are a major source of stress. But there’s also some fascinating research that suggests it’s maybe good stress, it’s good stress for you. I’ll give you an example which I find really fascinating. There are several studies that have found that they count up questions of who are your close friends or who are the family members you can count on? And then survey researchers will ask another question, which is, so who’s a stressor in your life? Who are family members that are really stressing you out and frustrating you? And what’s weird is that even the people who are frustrating or difficult are also people who help abate loneliness or keep it at bay. And what that means is, is that even when we’re contributing to people who are difficult, we are still feeling important to a community. I’ve actually also started to rethink when people stir up stuff.

I don’t know if you have a family where there are members of family who are stir something up, create conflict when it’s not there or get mad about something. In some ways, what’s curious is now that I’ve kind of taken some time to step back from it, I’m like, well, part of this is that they understand by engaging in this, they’re actually getting people to talk to them to have something to talk about. They have emotional drama to be able to resolve, and it makes them feel connected to part of a broader system. Now, it’s not a particularly functional way of doing it, but that stress interestingly also probably makes them feel valued and connected by the group because they’re trying to work on something in that family or in that dynamic that’s struggling. And we need people in those communities. In my mind, people like my mom who worked really hard to keep everybody engaged with one another and it’s a thankless task, but if she wasn’t doing it, my brothers and I probably wouldn’t talk to each other as often as we would otherwise.

So what’s interesting is social stressors are not necessarily bad things in the long run. They bring us into a community of connection. But the other thing I think is important for us to keep in mind is that’s also the good stuff. Being important to other people means you also have to see them through difficult times. One thing that Andy and I talk about in the book is if I’m a good listener to a close friend and they’re struggling and I have had friends go through divorce, I’ve had friends go through major losses in their life, I’ve had friends struggle with their parents, ill health and all of these things I imagine will continue to come as my life continues on. It is work for me to listen on the phone. It is work for me to show up for them and know that they’re going to do 80% of the talking, and it’s mainly going to be about them.

It’s work for me to check in on them and send a message and sometimes send a message that they won’t even respond to because they’re overwhelmed with the circumstances they’re in. But guess what? Every action of putting that work in is good for you as the giver, but it’s even better for them. It’s even better for them to feel cared for better for them to feel like they have someone they can talk to. And you might be the only person in their life that’s reaching out like that. When we begin to realize that our actions to put work into and the stress into these relationships are actually things we do for other people, it reorients our thinking rather than going, well, I got to do this for myself. I need to go to the gym so I’m not unhealthy. We begin to go, I am engaging in social activity, good for other people, and it’s giving to other people to check in on them and make plans with them and care for them and listen to them. It warrants our thinking, I think, in a way that really helps us get out of our own sense of interiority and towards another people which is healthy.

Brett McKay:

No, I love this idea of socializing as a good stressor. It made me think about how exercise is a stressor in our physical life. Exactly. And so when we exercise, we stress our bodies, but by stressing our bodies acutely regularly, we actually diminish chronic stress in our lives. And I think the same thing goes with socializing. So if we think of socializing as a good stressor, if you get doses of it every single day, it reduces our overall chronic stress and increases our overall wellbeing. And like you said, it’s something we can do for the good of others, but at the same time, it does do a lot of good for us. 

Jeffrey Hall:

Absolutely, there’s a quote that I have in the book that I really like Nick Cave, for those of you who may or may not known, Nick Cave was actually a member of a pretty hardcore kind of post punk band. And at the time, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, and then there was one before that as well. And he lost his teenage son to a tragic accident. And he talks about the importance of communication. When you’re at your worst, you feel, I mean, I cannot imagine the grief of losing my own son. And Cave says, it seems to be essential even if just a corrective for the bad unexpressed ideas, we hold in our heads to communicate with others. And what I really love about that quote is that he’s conveying this idea that it is healthy for us to get out of our own heads and relieve our stressors that are internal by being stressed socially.

So I’m stressed out about all kinds of stuff, my kids, my work, my situation, and whatever it is, there are stressors in my life. There’s plenty of really good data and excellent research that says when we express those stressors to other and share them and laugh about them and see them outside ourselves, they actually have this wonderful restorative power to not only bring people together and sharing that burden, but also you actually feel less stress in the long run. So it’s like the stress in the moment of caring for others is not only great for building a relationship and a sense of belonging, which prevents long-term chronic stress and loneliness, but the stress of thoughts unexpressed in our head that we’re not sharing with others because we’re afraid of being vulnerable or afraid of admitting weakness also can be benefited by communication, by talking about it and by talking about it, we can laugh about it and see perspective. And another person says, oh yeah, I’ve gone through the same thing and it stinks and it’s not fair. And then you go, oh, I’m not alone. My ideas are not just corrosively sitting inside of me, but they’re actually being expressed in a way that another person can see me more clearly and I can see them.

Brett McKay:

And also the reason why I like this idea of socializing as a stressor and kind of relating it to exercise as a physical stressor, it made me think of that theory of an evolutionary biology of evolutionary mismatch. 

So people talk about, it’s so weird that people go to gyms and walk on these treadmills and lift these weights. Why do we do this? Well, we live in a world where you don’t have to do a lot of physical work to live. You just sit at a desk all day. So we need physical activity. So we have to intentionally put our bodies under physical stress by going to these weird buildings with these contraptions that look like torture devices to get that stress. And it’s the same thing with socializing. We are evolved to socialize, to connect with the group. We now live in an environment where there’s a mismatch. Opportunities to socialize aren’t as automatic and built into modern life as they used to be. They’re not going to happen by default. So we have to intentionally inject social stress in our life the same way we intentionally inject physical stress into our life.

Jeffrey Hall:

I think that’s really brilliantly said. We’re living in a time where it seems conceivable that you can be in a room, never interact with another human being, have all of your food delivered to you as long as you’re making enough money to pay for it, never socialize even with another person. And in the age of ai, have your therapist, your girlfriend, and your best friend all be an AI program. We have created an environment where we can take all of the friction of human society and take it away and replace it with technological affordances of being delivered our food, our comforts, even our social life. So we are at a very huge evolutionary mismatch right now. And it wasn’t even all that long ago in the past where the concept of friendship was deeply born by the fact that we are in the world making exchanges and building trust with one another.

Brett McKay:

So how can we socially exercise?

Jeffrey Hall:

There are simple steps. So if you think about the idea of first thing is enough reflection of where you’re at, where are you at in the continuum? Are you a person who have plenty of social life? You’re given out to everybody around you. You’re the person that people can call on. You’re very busy. And in that case, the book probably is just in some ways just kind of patting in the back and saying, good job. We also do say in the book, you can be overtaxed, you can go too far. You can get to the point where you’re spread too thin and you need some time alone. You need solitude also to balance that out.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, that’s a good point. So socializing is a good stressor, but any stressor, it’s on that U-shaped curve exactly as you go up, it’s good. And then at a certain point you have diminishing returns and actually is bad. Same thing with physical exercise, moderate exercise is good, but if you go past a certain point, it’s going to be detrimental.

Jeffrey Hall:

And I give a talk recently in Kansas City about social, and I was surrounded by young women professionals who were social networking professional reasons, but also to give back to the community. And I said to them, I’m like, I’m guessing I’m in a room of people who are such deeply committed to their social life that they actually need to hear the solitude part of my talk. So I’m going to start with the solitude part of my talk, and I really want to reinforce for folks out there. I’m not saying if you are on the far end and the reaches of being socially stressed to keep doing what you’re doing, nourished solitude is critical for restoring our sense of connection to one another, that shutting off and letting go of our social responsibilities, particularly the social responsibilities that come through our phone is really important. We need to find time to restore restorative, solitude, critical.

And that use shape curve, you describe exactly in the middle part of the curve. Small acts of sociality are probably all you need for a person kind of in that middle part. You’re not too social and you’re not totally alone. Things like talking to your neighbor, talking to a stranger, making small talk at work, making time to make sure that you meet up with friends once a month. Recognizing that small talk gets such a bad rap that we have to reorganize our thinking about it and realize just checking in with another person and showing them dignity and respect, whether that’s your barista or the person that works at your office or a neighbor, is critical in building community. So small steps, nothing big. Some things once a day, like checking in with a stranger or person in your world, something once a week, checking in with a close friend or with someone that you want to really talk to. And once a month, maybe that’s a longer sort of, if you have time for it and you should make time for it, like a dinner together or out together to do something fun, whatever it is that you like. So you can make that work. But it’s really important to realize you have to know where you are to start. So the big thing about breaking social inertia is knowing where you begin.

Brett McKay:

One thing you’d also do in the book, you talk about different ways we can communicate with others and socialize with others, and we have the internet. It’s just so many different ways you actually create a hierarchy on which ones are better than the others. If you’re going to reach out and connect with someone, walk us through that hierarchy. What are some of the ways we can and which ways are better?

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah, I do a lot of research on social media, on texting, on phone calls. It’s one of my major areas of research. And there’s a hierarchy essentially. And when we think about what that hierarchy is, is I’m encouraging people to move up the ladder of connection, is what I call it. And at the very, very bottom of this ladder of connection is actually scrolling mindlessly on social media. There are mixed studies. I don’t think the evidence is unequivocally that this is harmful for you, but there’s plenty of research that say, depending on the type of content that you’re consuming, it is, it can be very harmful in the sense like doom scrolling. I also think that for certain demographics, like younger adults seeing things that are constantly making them feel that they’re being left out fomo or they’re not as good or they’re not as accomplished, they’re not as successful as other people, those are all pretty bad for you.

And if you can think about ways to minimize the amount of time you’re doing those things, it’s good. So that one is not more or less. The next level up from that is texting. Texting is actually I think kind of an unsung hero of connection. There’s a lot of fun studies that have been done recently that finds that even people you haven’t talked to for a while appreciate a text that just says, Hey, I’m thinking of you people don’t use email anymore. But if you are of the demographic and also of the age group or email’s comfortable, send one of those. One step up from texting would probably be a phone call or a video chat, scheduling a time to check in, have a longer conversation back and forth, whatever. Also, a lot of young adults, interestingly, are more adept at using video chat just to hang out together.

So they just leave it on and then they go about what they’re doing. People long distance relationships do that as well. And then the top of that hierarchy is face-to-face communication. So if you are a person who finds themselves just lacking for time to do any of these things, all I’m asking is one step higher. Maybe if you’re pretty good at keeping in touch on text and you have group chats going on with lots of folks, you can have one you want to check in with and call in the next week, make an appointment to call them. And that’s the only way I keep in touch with my friends, by the way, is by an appointment. So it’s not like I’m just seeing if my friend Craig’s going to pick up the phone. I know he’s a busy guy with kids. We make it time to do that. So I’m just asking one step up, one step up at a time and to recognize that any step up is actually shows empirical evidence to be beneficial.

Brett McKay:

I thought it was interesting the research about the difference between video calls and just regular phone calls.

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah, that one’s interesting too because I think that’s an evolving norm. Some stuff suggests that video chat actually makes you feel a little more lonely because it actually makes you feel perhaps that you’re missing that person more when you see them. And some people really love talking on the phone. I would include myself as one of them. The sound of another person in my head makes me feel so close and connected to them. But when I’m on video chat, I get distracted and confused and I feel like I need to be more aware of my facial behaviors, which makes me feel weird. So I think kind of think a jury is still out. A lot of people are stuck on video chat all day long at work, which I think also degrades its sense of efficacy. But young adults have taught me that they seem to really get it. That video chat’s a good opportunity to just kind of have someone in your room while you’re doing other things.

Brett McKay:

It might be a generational thing. I don’t like video chat. 

Jeffrey Hall:

Me neither.

Brett McKay:

And it’s a reason why on the podcast, I don’t do video. I just like to do audio only.

Jeffrey Hall:

Hey, can I give you a shout out for out? Thank you. It’s a lot less work on my part. I think I can watch my words a lot more closely and really think about what you’re saying, but if I’m watching the interaction, I’m way too attentive to what I’m doing.

Brett McKay:

And you don’t have to worry about the lighting or what your hair looks like. 

Jeffrey Hall:

I’m having a good hair day though, Brett.

Brett McKay:

The tricky thing about socializing is it requires other people. And so it’s a collective action problem. So if you want to socialize, that’s great, but if the other person doesn’t or there’s no one else to socialize with, well then you’re kind of out of luck. It’s like wanting to play catch. There’s no one to play catch with. That’s what a conversation is.

Jeffrey Hall:

Totally.

Brett McKay:

So what do we do about that? Because that collective action problem, it’s structural, the way our time is scheduled up, how our space is arranged, what can we do to improve the structure of our lives so that socializing is maybe a bit easier, can’t be completely easy or completely frictionless. I think the effort is part of what makes it good for us, but how can we approach it to facilitate it being a bigger part of our lives?

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah. One of my good friends from high school, she had this phrase, she went to social work and she talked about the idea that you need to basically follow the weaker impulse. And I love that phrase because it gives you kind of a sense in which that how you need to be alert to the tendencies to not do this stuff. And what I mean by following the weaker impulse when it comes to being social is you had a hard day, there’s a social event that you haven’t been planning for a while, and you’re like, oh, I don’t want go. You need to follow the weaker impulse, which says it’s a good thing to go another way. Encourage the people in your life to be social. Maybe that’s your partner, maybe that’s your kids. Encourage the people around you to set a norm and an expectation that being social is something that’s worth fighting for and worth doing.

I think structurally and socially, this is a very, very hard problem. Robert Putnam, who I’ve mentioned before, has been counseling every president since Bill Clinton about how to build social interactions and build social community. And they have not been able to reverse the trend. I don’t know how our trends around work can be fixed, but some of this is about acknowledging that we are also engaging in trends that we have probably more control over than we perceive. And I think the big one is how we choose to use our leisure time around media entertainment. I think we have to reorganize the way that we think about what’s valuable about consuming media and say that maybe this is really not the thing that needs to be occupying my time the whole time. And if I make an exception by saying, this night of the week, I’m going to reserve for catching up with a friend or otherwise, it’s a worthwhile endeavor to do so.

What’s hard is I wish for a world in which we could return to a sense of social obligation to one another. I wish for a world in which that it became more normative, that people would reach out and care for the people, especially those who are needed and isolated. But the biggest thing that I got to recommend is the only change that I think you really have control over is to recognize that making it a priority in your life means showing up, doing so consistently and taking your knocks when people can’t be there for you. People can cancel on you, you forgive them, and you try again. If people don’t text you back It’s okay. It doesn’t mean the text didn’t matter. You chit chat with the bagger at the grocery store and that 16-year-old rolls their eyes at you because some middle-aged white dude telling them this or that. That’s okay. I take my knocks. I recognize that every social interaction is not going to be a great one. But the fact that I’m trying in my world and my community, I think makes me a person who’s trying to build a healthier biome for living for everyone.

Brett McKay:

So exercise your agency to change the environment around you.

Jeffrey Hall:

You got it.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. And I think the idea is if you start making it a priority in your life, hosting parties, hosting, even just small get togethers with your friends reaching out, the idea is that it can act as a social contagion. People are like, oh wow, this guy’s having a get together where he just has beers and sodas and it’s nothing really big, but I had a really good time. Maybe I could do that.

Jeffrey Hall:

And I think what’s curious about this is that we also know from other research on social norms and contagion is this is how it happens. People begin to understand that this is something that can be done and they see pathways to doing it. Any major social change happens because enough people have modeled it and demonstrated how it works to make it work again. And I’m hopeful. I mean, I think there’s a lot of reason to be hopeful.

Brett McKay:

So if listeners were to take one small action this week to build up their own social biome and the social biome around them, what would you recommend?

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah. I would say make a plan with somebody that you love. If that’s your romantic partner, if that’s your best friend, if that’s your family member or brother or sister, make a plan to talk to ’em. Make a plan to have lunch. Make a plan to check in, make a plan to make a phone call. Put it on your calendar and do it. And even if you’re just listening right now, send that text. Say, Hey, we haven’t caught up for a while. Would you like to get together? Or, we have this thing coming up. Or When are you available to have lunch? Again, do it while you’re listening to this conversation that Brett and I are having. And then keep being persistent. If that person says, oh yeah, definitely, but I need to get back to you. Get back to them. Follow up, keep working at it. And once you have that opportunity to connect with them, the best piece of advice is to say, let’s do it again. And not just do it out of politeness, but actually put it on the calendar to do it again. And once you start doing it, it becomes easier and easier.

Brett McKay:

It’s true. After I read this book, I told you this in the email that I sent you before this interview, it inspired me. I set up a ruck with some guys here in town. Very cool. Saturday morning, eight o’clock, eat some donuts along the way.

Jeffrey Hall:

That’s awesome.

Brett McKay:

And it was easy. I could have done this so many times, but that social inertia. But looks like a lot of guys are going to show up and it should be fun.

Jeffrey Hall:

And I would also say, if not all of them show up. Do it anyway. Yeah,

Brett McKay:

Do it anyway.

Jeffrey Hall:

Do it again. And maybe new people will show up next time because they weren’t available this time. I think we’re too quick to assume that social failure means it’s not worth doing, and that’s just not the case.

Brett McKay:

Well, Jeffrey, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Jeffrey Hall:

Absolutely. So my run of relationships in technology lab here at the University of Kansas, and my research is posted there, but also on LinkedIn. I’m really active on posting about research related findings on LinkedIn. The social biome specifically is something I promote on Instagram and I’m Jeffrey Hall, PhD at Instagram. So those two kind of places are in which people can kind of see updates on what my work is being doing. So I’d love to have you there too. Fantastic.

Brett McKay:

Well, Jeffrey Hall, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure. Hey, thank you. My guest today is Jeffrey Hall. He’s the coauthor of the book, The Social Biome. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Make sure to check out our show notes at aom.is/socialstress. You can find links to resources and we can delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the A one podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com. You find our podcast archives and check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action. 

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

The British just seem like a classier bunch. Part of it is that winning accent. But it’s also because English culture has long been steeped in the tradition of learning and practicing etiquette.

Here to share some of the essentials of modern etiquette that are important no matter which side of the pond you live on is William Hanson, a British etiquette expert and the author of Just Good Manners. William shares the difference between manners and etiquette, and why young people are especially interested in both. He then takes us through how to introduce yourself and others, the history behind the “no elbows on the table” mantra, the rules of small talk, some overlooked guidelines for table manners, how to enter a conversational circle at a party, considerations for elevator etiquette, and much more. Whether you’re dining at a fancy restaurant or just want to navigate social situations with more confidence, William’s insights will help you present yourself with the panache of a proper English gentleman.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Podcast #897: Answers to the FAQ of Modern Etiquette
• AoM Podcast #422: Men & Manners — Tipping, Emojis, and Much More
• AoM Article: The Importance of Good Manners
• AoM Article: How to Acquire Good Manners
• AoM Article: A Man’s Guide to Dining Etiquette and Proper Table Manners
• AoM Article: How to Make Introductions Like a Gentleman
• AoM Article: How to Make Small Talk
• AoM Article: How to Break Away From Someone at a Party
• AoM’s Complete Guide to Giving a Great Handshake

Connect With William Hanson

• William’s website
• William on TikTok
• William on IG

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. The British just seem like a classier bunch. Part of it is that winning accent, but it’s also because English culture has long been steeped in the tradition of learning and practicing etiquette. Here to share some of the essentials of modern etiquette that are important no matter which side of the pond you live on is William Hanson, a British etiquette expert and the author of Just Good Manners. William shares the difference between manners and etiquette and why young people are especially interested in both. He then takes us through how to introduce yourself and others, the history behind the no elbows on the table mantra, the rules of small talk, some overlooked guidelines for table manners, how to enter a conversational circle at a party, considerations for elevator etiquette, and much more. Whether you’re dining at a fancy restaurant or just want to navigate social situations with more confidence, William’s insights will help you present yourself with the panache of a proper English gentleman. After the show’s over, check out our show notes @AoM.is/etiquette. All right, William Hanson, welcome to the show.

William Hanson: Thank you very much for having me.

Brett McKay: So you are a professional etiquette teacher. How did you become an etiquette teacher?

William Hanson: Well, it wasn’t something I necessarily sort of woke up one day and thought, right, that’s it, I’m going to become an etiquette teacher. It wasn’t a profession I was even aware really existed. As a child growing up, I wanted to either be the Archbishop of Canterbury, for whatever reason, or a spy or a newsreader. That’s the trajectory I was heading in, I had decided. But then my grandmother gave me this book of etiquette for Christmas when I was 12. And sort of after a few sort of, have I read any of it type questions, I thought, well, I bet I just better read a bit and then I can tell her I’ve read it. And it was actually very interesting and very funny and I bought more books on the subject. And then when I was 16, 17 at my school, they came up to me and said, oh, we’re looking for someone to teach the younger years how to set a table. Do you think you could do that? And I said, well, when do you want me to do it? And they said, oh, Tuesday afternoons. And I said, oh, instead of playing sport? They said, yes. So I didn’t need to be asked twice, really. And that’s how the teaching side of things started.

Brett McKay: And so you got a new book out called Just Good Manners, where you take Americans and just anybody through the ins and outs of British etiquette. And we’re gonna dig into that because I think it’s applicable to whatever country you live in. But I thought it was really interesting, you talk about the history of etiquette education in the United Kingdom. Can you tell us a bit about that? Because I didn’t know about this.

William Hanson: Yes, I think Britain has always, or England even, we should say before it sort of became Britain, has always sort of led the way in education, in manners and etiquette and civility. Swiss finishing schools as well were very popular and they basically did the same thing, but they just had the mountains skiing. That’s what they could offer that we in Britain couldn’t. But even going back to the Dickensian England, not that long ago in the grand scheme of things, but men would sort of go on what was called the grand tour around Europe just before they settled down. And whilst that was happening, the ladies were being finished and you would have sort of characters like Dickens portrays one in Little Dorrit called Mrs. General, who is there sort of taking these group of sisters under her wing, finishing them and telling them sort of how to behave and what was expected of them. So this sort of education has always existed, certainly in the last sort of 300 years or so.

Brett McKay: And you’re the director of one of like the last English etiquette schools, correct?

William Hanson: Yes, so sort of at the height of the 20th century, which is when these finishing schools, we still had presentation at court, which is when young girls would curtsy in front of the king and queen, as it were, before they were sort of eligible to be married, completely outdated practice and one that Queen Elizabeth sort of quite quickly when she ascended the throne knocked on the head because she thought it was ridiculous. But you had finishing the schools such as Winkfield Place or Lucy Clayton. And Lucy Clayton actually in 2001 sort of regenerated into the English Manor, which is the company I’m now very pleased to run and own.

Brett McKay: So at the beginning of the book, you make a distinction between manners and etiquette. And I’ve seen this distinction before, but what do you think is the difference between etiquette and manners?

William Hanson: I would say manners are sort of the top line fundamental requirement for being a human being wherever you are in the world to treat people with civility, charm, grace, decorum, respect. How we do that is by using a set of rules. Most of the time, the etiquette is correct. Sometimes it isn’t. We actually have to break the rule of etiquette. But etiquette is, it can change from country to country and what is considered polite in one country can be very different and actually impolite in another. So you use the set of rules according to your environment.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and a lot of people, when I see them make this distinction between manners and etiquette, manners is just sort of how you comport yourself with other people to make sure things go smoothly, etiquette of the specific rules. They often say, well, manners are more important than etiquette. And you make the case, well, maybe not.

William Hanson: Yeah, I would say I think it is impossible to be a well-mannered person without knowing something about etiquette. You don’t necessarily need to know that a dinner napkin at its largest is 26 inches. For example, I think you will be able to get through life without knowing that pearl of wisdom. But I would say following the rules of etiquette makes you a more well-mannered person. You can be a well-mannered person without knowing etiquette, but I think you can be an even more well-mannered person if you use the two. I think they work together.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I agree with that. Because I think what etiquette does, it gives you something concrete to do. Because oftentimes people just don’t know what to do in certain situations. Like, I don’t know, what am I supposed to do? Well, here, follow these rules. You can be well-mannered by following these simple rules.

William Hanson: Exactly. As a child, I don’t know about you, Brett, but as a child, I liked to know what was expected of me. Because as a child, of course, we’re all petrified, or most children are petrified of being told off or grounded or whatever the form of punishment is. And so we sort of want to know when we go to this person’s house, what are we doing? What are we expected? How am I meant to behave at schools? For example, we were given parameters and boundaries. And that’s sort of all it is, really, in adult life. I think adults thrive with parameters and boundaries and knowing what is expected of them. Because we all want to get it right. And we’ve bizarrely got to a point in life where so many people will say, oh, I don’t need etiquette. Who knows etiquette anymore? And actually what they’re doing, rather badly, is masking the fact that they don’t know the rules themselves. And so they are sort of saying it doesn’t matter because actually they don’t know and they don’t want to admit their sort of blissful ignorance.

Brett McKay: And something I’ve noticed, and I think you’ve noticed this as well with your career, because I think you’re really popular on TikTok, I feel like a lot of young people crave that knowledge of etiquette because they want to know how to act in the world with other people in a way that’s well-mannered and smooth.

William Hanson: Yes, absolutely. I think there are so many sort of ways now for people to be sort of, rightly so in some instances, called out or flagged down for bad behavior. And so younger generations who have grown up knowing that actually they can’t really be an awful human being and get away with it, are more conscious of it. One of my biggest demographics on my social media videos is Gen Z. And actually when the Gen Z people come and sort of say hi to me in the street, if they pass me, whether it’s in London or New York or wherever, they’re so nice and so polite and cautious about coming up to me. Whereas some millennial followers that I have, and I am a millennial myself, will sort of charge up to me and almost demand immediately without sort of being conscious that I may not be working, I might be out in a social capacity and demand that I do a photograph with them. I don’t mind doing a photograph, but sort of ask me nicely. So Gen Z get a bit of a bad rap, but actually from what I’ve seen, I think it’s quite good that they’re interested in how to behave and just sort of being aware of how their actions affect other people, which is really all it is.

Brett McKay: So let’s dig in to some of the rules of etiquette that you highlight in your book that can help us guide our social interactions. I think a lot of etiquette is primarily about interacting with other people

William Hanson: Yes.

Brett McKay: And making those interactions as smooth and as comfortable and as pleasant as possible. Let’s start off with introductions. What’s the best way to introduce yourself?

William Hanson: Well, I think when I was writing Just Good Manners, this was one of the things that I found sort of faintly interesting was that in the etiquette books, the Emily Post original edition from the 1920s, for example, there is nothing about introducing yourself because it used to be the etiquette that it was incredibly taboo to introduce yourself, but there was lots of advice about introducing other people. Whereas now etiquette books, Just Good Manners aside, will have information about how to introduce yourself, but nothing about introducing other people. And certainly a lot of Brits or people that spent too much time in Britain and sort of picked up some bad British habits, when they go to introduce themselves to someone, whether it’s on the street or at a cocktail party or whatever, apologize for introducing themselves. Maybe that’s because we in Britain are programmed to know that it’s not really good form historically to introduce yourself, although absolutely fine now, but they’ll say, oh, sorry to interrupt, or, oh, sorry to come up to you today. And actually, well, I don’t know anything about you, but I have just, I do now know that you’ve just interrupted me and that you’re apologizing. So already I’ve noticed that you’re apologizing and you’re interrupting me, whereas I may not have noticed actually. So just, I think something positive and upbeat. Hello, my name’s William. Very lovely to meet you, for example, is all you need to do. And say your name clearly as well. It is so important to say your name that so few people actually bother to say their names when they’re introducing themselves, which is extraordinary behavior because otherwise I don’t know what to call you.

Brett McKay: Okay, so be positive, be upbeat, don’t apologize, say your name clearly. You mentioned people don’t know how to introduce other people. And I’ve noticed that as well. Whenever I’m interacting with individuals and let’s say they’re with their spouse or you’re going over to a friend’s house and their grandmother’s there, no one knows how to introduce people to other people. So I end up usually just having to introduce myself. So what is the proper protocol on making introductions?

William Hanson: So it can get quite complicated. And actually, when I started teaching etiquette 18 years ago, this was the bit that I would in class dread coming to teach because it can be quite wordy. But what you don’t need to do is you don’t need to say both parties’ names twice. So if you’ve got Bill and Ben, for example, you don’t need to say, Bill, this is Ben. Ben, this is Bill. You don’t need to reverse it. And the example I would give you is to sort of show you why that is wrong, is if you take the head of state in any country. In Britain, it would be the king, the president in America. Let’s take the president, for example, whoever that president is. If I said, Mr. President, may I introduce Bill, that is fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. I put the president first. I’m giving him the respect as head of state. But if I then switch it, Bill, this is the president, that second time I have elevated Bill and relegated the president, which in a diplomatic context is completely the wrong thing to do. So you only need to say the most important person’s name first. How you define who that most important person is, is up to you. And it depends on context. In a professional setting, the CEO of the company is probably going to be more important than the intern. A client to a company is going to be more important than the CEO. Socially, you probably now would go on age rather than looking at gender. So Granny being 85 is going to be sort of elevated above Annie, who’s 18.

Brett McKay: Okay, that makes sense. And then you also talk about whenever you make an introduction to add some context to the introduction.

William Hanson: Yes. None of us really like making small talk if we’re completely honest. I mean, small talk with complete strangers for some is absolute purgatory. So you can make life easy for the two people that you are introducing by saying, Bill, this is Ben. Ben’s just flown in from Sydney. And Bill, I believe, didn’t your mother used to live in Australia? If you can find a link, that’s perfect because then they do have common ground. But if not, you just say, Ben just flew in from Sydney, leave it at that. And then hopefully one of them goes, oh gosh, I’ve always wanted to go. And just says something. But if you just say the names and do the introduction, people just stare at each other like, great, you’ve introduced me, but who are you?

Brett McKay: We typically shake hands when meeting someone new. This is the art of manliness. We got to talk about the etiquette on handshaking.

William Hanson: Yes. I mean, handshaking, which of course it slightly went out of fashion during the pandemic, but is thankfully now back. It’s probably the only physical contact you will have with most people. And I think, and I don’t know about you, Brett, you can tell so much about someone by the quality of the handshake. Do you judge someone?

Brett McKay: Of course. If I get the limp fish, it’s an immediate like, yeah, yeah I don’t know, yeah, yeah.

William Hanson: Yeah. It’s an ick to use a modern parlance. Already in the first couple of seconds whilst we’re judging a new person, I’ve met them and it’s a limp fish handshake, as you say. And it’s unpleasant. Similarly, if it’s a bone crusher, you think, wow, why are they having to overcompensate and come across as overly assertive? So the handshake is so important. And I, again, in the book, when I was writing, I thought, well, actually maybe, maybe I’m being a bit harsh on people that have bad handshakes because I can remember, I think my parents telling me how to shake a hand age five, maybe, roughly around age five. But then no parent, I mean, maybe there are parents out there that sort of are the exceptions that prove the rule. No parent then revisits that handshaking lesson when their child is now 15. And actually the strength of their handshake is going to be very different for what they were doing when they were five. You’re sort of told what to do and then nobody revises it. And actually having a good handshake is often half the battle, particularly in business.

Brett McKay: No, I agree. Handshake is important. Something I’ve taught my kids. And I like a good firm handshake for men and women alike. I’m an equal opportunist when it comes to that sort of thing.

William Hanson: Oh, absolutely. And I would, again, one of the things I’ve enjoyed doing writing the book is sort of tracking where the changes have come in and what these changes are. And again, if you read the original Emily Post or books published in the 1920s, ladies didn’t massively shake hands. The hostess might’ve shook hands with guests, but other than that, ladies didn’t do it. Now, anyone of any gender, business or professional, everybody shakes hands. Everyone should take off their right glove if they’re wearing gloves. It’s flesh to flesh. Obviously, if you’re in absolute minus 40 degrees Celsius temperatures, fine, you can keep your glove on. There are always sort of caveats to it. But yes, a handshake is pretty equal.

Brett McKay: So this is related introductions, but this has happened to me a few times. It’s whenever you encounter someone you’ve met before, but you can’t remember their name. You’re not really acquaintances, but you know of each other. How do you make those, what we call reintroductions to each other?

William Hanson: Yes, I think a lot of people sort of can get quite offended that the other person hasn’t remembered you. But actually, you know, sometimes we’re the most memorable and interesting person in our own lives because we’re there, we’re the only person that is sort of the world expert on ourselves. But other people may not necessarily remember you like you remember them. So just say your name quickly. Hello, so lovely to see you again. It’s William, of course. What have you been up to since I saw you at Brett’s, for example? Just help them out rather than sort of expect them to remember every detail about you. Obviously, if they can remember everything about you, that’s fantastic. Actually, a really simple trick I often do in restaurants or hotels I go to a lot, I just write down the staff’s name in a note in my phone. And so when I’m going back in, I can remember that, you know, Grant is the tall waiter with the ear piercing. And so when I go in again, I can say, oh, hello, Grant, how are you? And generally, you find you get a thousand times better service when you actually bother to learn their names. It also helps, I think, trains your brain to remember people’s names better as well.

Brett McKay: I like that. That’s a classy move. I’m going to start doing that. What happens if you forget someone’s name? Any tips on navigating that?

William Hanson: Yeah, I mean, apologize and move on quite quickly. So, Brett, if I called you Ben, for example, and you say, oh, no, it’s Brett, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, Brett, I’d probably say, using your correct name and then move on. But again, it’s quite a British thing to make that into a drama and to over-apologize. Oh, my gosh, I’m so sorry. Oh, that happens all the time. And the more of an issue I make it, the more of an issue it becomes. So just say sorry, say the correct name, make a mental note not to get it wrong again, and move on.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s something I’ve learned after reading your book. British people like to apologize, very apologetic.

William Hanson: We do. I mean, look, hey, it’s better to over-apologize than not apologize at all.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

William Hanson: But it can go the other way as well.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about small talk. Any etiquette to small talk? Are there topics that are taboo that you definitely don’t want to go there?

William Hanson: Yeah, I would say this is something that has not changed very recently. Sex, money, politics, health, and religion still remain for small talk. And this is conversation with people you do not know well. I’m not saying when you’re talking to very good friends. But with strangers, avoid sex, money, politics, health, or religion to begin with because you just don’t know what people’s opinions are, what makes them engage, what disengages them, what offends them. And it’s so much better to sort of play it safe. And some cultures just don’t get small talk. The Germans absolutely don’t get it. The Dutch sort of get it but aren’t particularly good at it. But think about small talk as the slip road onto a major highway. If you didn’t have that slip road and you were joining the conversational highway going at 70 miles an hour, you would crash. And so you need that slip road to just sort of build your speed up into a slightly more interesting conversation. That is the point of small talk. I’m not pretending it is fascinating, but it is needed in order to have a proper conversation with someone.

Brett McKay: Okay, for our American listeners, a slip road in England is what we call an on-ramp over here. And that’s the metaphor I always use for small talk. Some people say they hate small talk and they just want to jump to the big talk. But you’ve got to take the on-ramp of small talk to get up to speed into that deeper conversation. So what are your go-to topics for small talk?

William Hanson: I mean, look, in Britain, we’re obsessed with talking about the weather. I was being interviewed yesterday. It was a British journalist. We spent five minutes talking about the weather at the start of the interview. But in Britain, our weather, we often can have three or four seasons in a day. If you’re in gorgeous California or you’re in the Middle East where the weather is sort of fairly consistent, the weather’s not going to be spoken about. But beyond the weather, I just talk about the environment that you are in there and then. You’re trying to find a shared experience or something in common with that person. And if you have nothing else in common, you don’t sort of have lots of hobbies in common, what you do have is the room you’re in. Gosh, what a beautiful ceiling. Aren’t the band fantastic? Something upbeat and positive is what we want. Talk about the canapes. How do you know the host? That’s safe and better small talk than, gosh, well, it’s a lovely sunny day, isn’t it?

Brett McKay: In America, we’re obsessed with work.

William Hanson: Yes.

Brett McKay: So often work is a topic of small talk. What do you do? In Britain, apparently, that’s frowned upon to talk about work in small talk.

William Hanson: Yeah, well, I’ll be honest, your American tendencies are sort of creeping in. And I think particularly younger generations are slightly more work-focused and find it less taboo. But people really shouldn’t be defined by their jobs. I mean, I do speak as someone who’s an etiquette coach. I’ve got a slight vested interest in this and pushing my own personal agenda. But if I go to a party this evening, I’m going in my social capacity. Whether I’m a dentist, a tax lawyer, or an etiquette coach, it’s got no bearing on whether my friend has invited me to that party. And as much as I love my job, I mean, I have no other talent, so I don’t know what else I’d do, I don’t want to talk about it all the time, actually. There’s more to me than my job. And so certainly to begin with, and again, when you say to people you’re an etiquette coach, people sort of either freeze or start panicking. I’d quite like to talk about something else, thank you very much.

Brett McKay: Yeah, or if you ask someone about their job, they hate their job.

William Hanson: Oh, and then you’ll say, oh, God, I don’t really care, really. Especially if you meet someone, yeah, and they start moaning about their job, and you think, well, I was just asking it to be polite. I don’t really need a whole rundown.

Brett McKay: What do you do when you’re engaging in small talk and let’s say the conversation starts going into some of those taboo topics you mentioned earlier? Any way to navigate that deftly?

William Hanson: Well, I mean, hopefully, most of your conversation is listening and being able to pick up on what you’re being given back. And if you’re asking a question, especially if you think it’s controversial and you’re not getting much back from the other person, it is probably time to move on. But often it’s other people witnessing or listening into the conversation that will have to step in and could see the car crash, to use another driving analogy, about to happen. And so, I mean, it’s such a cliche, but it works, is just stepping in and going, well, what lovely weather we’re having today and saying it very pointedly. I’ve only ever had to do it once at a dinner I was hosting. And that should be a clue to the people that had started to get a bit heated, but also to the other guests. We need to move this on. Everyone needs to step in and help me here.

Brett McKay: Let’s say you’re at a cocktail party, a mingling event, and you’re going there by yourself. You don’t know anyone and there’s already established little circles of conversation going on. How do you enter a conversational group with class and smoothly?

William Hanson: This is hard to explain on an audio podcast, but generally you want to, first of all, before you actually move in, make sure there are what we call an open body language group. And usually that means there’s a great big gap for you that you can go and stand in. If there’s no gap, don’t try and approach them because they’ve sort of subconsciously or consciously closed that gap off. And so you’re not going to get much success. But really, basically, if you know somebody in that group, much easier, you just make eye contact with them and hope they bring you in. But if you don’t know anyone in that group, it’s as shallow, basically, I hate to say it, it’s as shallow as picking the one that looks like you. So that could be you’re tall and blonde, they’re tall and blonde. It’s a group of women and one man, you look at the male, for example, or man in a tie, man in a tie, just anything that you will have most success joining a group if you basically pick the person who looks most like you, smile at them, make a really nice positive signal. If you get a smile back, you step forward and do your approach and would say, oh, hello, may I join? My name is William. Again, don’t say sorry to interrupt. If you don’t get a smile back and they sort of look away or close the gap, you just move on and try and find someone else.

Brett McKay: That tip of looking for people that look like you, you talk about in the book, you go into a party where the invitation had ambiguous instructions on dress code and it was either black tie or 1970s apparel.

William Hanson: Yes.

Brett McKay: So you’re the etiquette guy. You went black tie. Of course you’re gonna go black tie. But there was only three other guys that went black tie. You guys just ended up talking to each other the entire night.

William Hanson: We did, because again, it’s shallow. When people don’t know many other people, they don’t take risks. If you’ve got a group of mice, you’ve got a group of cats. Okay, the cats might want to play with the mice, but the mice don’t want to play with the cats. And it’s the same. So I didn’t know there were two dress codes. I was someone’s guest. I was going on secondhand information without having seen the invitation. I always ask to see the invitation now after that drama. But yes, there were, you know, in a room full of 100 people, there were three of us in black tie, tuxedo. And it was quite boring after a while because no one else wanted to talk to us. And it’s sort of playground stuff, but it does happen.

Brett McKay: I’m sure a lot of people have had this happen to them when they’re at a party and they start talking to someone and this someone does not want to let go of you. But you want to go talk to other people. How do you politely break away from someone who’s talking your ear off?

William Hanson: Well, ideally you want to introduce them to someone else and pair them off. It’s not great to leave someone standing on their own. If they’ve said something objectionable or you absolutely have to go because you’re going to miss your flight or something, then fair enough. But try to pair them off with someone else. Brett, it’s been so lovely talking to you. I’ve just seen someone over there I’ve got to go and get and speak to before they leave. Have you met Susan, however? And I’ve sort of seen Susan floating around and I grab her as she comes past and go, Susan, may I introduce Brett? Brett has just flown in from Sydney. And Susan, I believe your mother is from Australia. I’ll leave you two talking and off you go. So that’s what you ideally want to do. But if there is no one, you’re going to have to leave them standing on their own, but you can make it sound like you are the bore. So I would say something like, well, Brett, look, I know I’ve monopolized so much of your time this evening and I know there are lots of other people you want to go and talk to, but maybe we’ll see each other in a few weeks’ time at that fundraiser. Shake hands and off we go.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So I think we’ve handled introductions, we’ve handled small talk. Let’s talk about table manners. Let’s start with this question. Why do the British have what seems like such complicated and fastidious rules of table etiquette?

William Hanson: Well, I would say, I mean, thankfully, it’s not the case anymore in Britain. We have such a wide and varied cuisine. But historically, our food was always a bit rubbish. And I think a lot of these rules might have been developed just to sort of slow down eating it. You didn’t want to rush it because it wasn’t very tasty. And so we came up with these sort of rules to have very small mouthfuls and small portions. And we had a lot of alcohol with our food, different alcohol for each course. And also, you know, in Britain, we like a rule, we like structure. And I think British dining is the most complicated compared to European, which is a different thing from British dining, we should say. And that’s not a Brexit thing. It’s always been that way in sort of etiquette land. We’ve always had British and then European dining and then American dining. But we do like to overcomplicate things sometimes.

Brett McKay: And you recommend that people learn British etiquette because that’ll basically cover your bases.

William Hanson: Yeah, and that’s something I picked up from my great friend and colleague, Myka Meier, who’s the leading expert in America in etiquette. And she teaches British dining as the sort of the gold standard, because if you can do the top standard, you can easily do the bottom standard, whatever that one is. I guess it’s like driving. I mean, I know it varies now, but if you learn to drive on a stick, you can drive an automatic. But if you learn just on an automatic, you can’t drive on a stick. And so it’s probably best to learn the hardest one. And then you’re covered for all bases.

Brett McKay: So I think most of us growing up heard the rule, no elbows on the table. And you talk about the history of why we have that rule. So what is the history of the rule, no elbows on the table?

William Hanson: Yes, and this is what people seem to forget, particularly with etiquette and dining etiquette, is that we have not just come up with these rules to annoy people. There is a rich history behind all of our cultures. And the no elbows on the table one goes back to sort of medieval Britain and Europe, where the tables were not secure tables like we’re fortunate to eat from today. They were created from benches and sheets of wood twice a day when people were eating two meals a day back then, not three. And if you put your elbows on the table, because of the way the food would be laid out down the center of the table well balanced, if you put your elbows on the table, the table would tip and it would not be secure. And so thus it became the etiquette to not put your elbows on the table because you didn’t want the food dropping onto the floor. I would say now we as humans, we’re sort of so ingrained knowing all our ancestors have learned not to do that. We sort of subconsciously or consciously know it as well. And so something we still follow, even though our tables are by and large secure.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and it also doesn’t look good when you’re at a nice dinner to have your elbows on the table.

William Hanson: No. It’s horrid. I mean, it’s actually very difficult to eat with your elbows on the table. I challenge anyone to do it nicely. Maybe at the end of a dinner when you’re sort of chatting over a cup of tea or coffee with your host, maybe having a little bit of a chocolate or something, I can sort of see that it’s okay in that instance, especially if your host is doing it. But formally, whilst there’s proper food on the table in the middle, then no elbows off.

Brett McKay: When you’re a guest at a dinner, when should you start eating?

William Hanson: So once the host has started, basically, is the rule. If there’s a guest of honor, you would wait until the guest of honor has started. But generally on most meals that we have, there isn’t a guest of honor. And so once the host starts, and they should be served last, then you may pick up your cutlery and begin.

Brett McKay: I think everyone knows that when you’re out to eat, you don’t start eating your dish until everyone has been served. But if it’s like an informal dinner at your home with friends and family, do you need to wait until everyone’s gotten their food to start eating? I mean, is that the rule?

William Hanson: Oh, yes, yes. Everyone’s got to have food in front of them and be ready to go. And they’re not still waiting for potatoes or sprouts or anything like that. You wait until everyone’s got it. And that’s when the host then picks up their cutlery as a signal, we may now begin.

Brett McKay: If you’re a host of a dinner, how should you pace your own eating?

William Hanson: Yes, you want to sort of identify the slowest eater around the table. And obviously for family dinners, you can probably work out who that is quite quickly because you dine with them quite a lot. Growing up in my household, if my parents were hosting, it was always granny. Granny would do a lot of talking, but not a lot of eating. And so my father was always sort of there dissecting a singular garden pea or something because that’s all he had got on his plate whilst granny started, whilst still taught and did less eating. But host starts first, but host finishes last. And that’s a huge discipline. And the idea is that you don’t leave one person still eating with the rest of the table staring at them. So the host sort of picks who’s the slowest, follows them so that they can match pace. And so they are included and are not feeling like they’re holding things up, even though let’s be honest, they might be.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Let’s talk dinner place settings. This is how you got your start as an etiquette teacher. First thing you did was teach how to do dinner place settings. I’m sure if you’ve been to a fancy dinner, you see just this layout and you’re like, oh my gosh, which fork am I supposed to use? Which one’s the bread plate? There’s that whole advice that was in the Titanic, start from the outside and work your way in with the silverware. Does that really do the trick or are there nuances to that?

William Hanson: That does generally do the trick. I mean, all of these dining etiquette rules only work if a table has been set nicely. But working on the proviso the table is set nicely and correctly, that one generally works. However, in American dining etiquette there is what’s called the American informal play setting where a teaspoon, used for dessert, will actually precede the dinner knife. American etiquette books often will show both the standard play setting with outside in and then this American informal and the outside in rule does not work at all because it’s sort of zigzagging all over the shop. So I’m very against the American informal one because I don’t think it helps people and the whole point of etiquette is it’s meant to sort of help people whereas this is one exception too many and also nobody that I have spoken to and please if you’re listening to this and you know where that rule came from please tell me because my colleagues and I, even the American ones, just can’t work it out. Who came up with that? What was the logic behind that? I think with any rule if you can’t find the logic behind it it’s probably time to ditch it.

Brett McKay: What’s the etiquette of napkins? Apparently you’re a big napkin aficionado.

William Hanson: Yes, I’ve got an unhealthy amount of napkins for a grown man of my age but I love a good quality napkin. I’ve yet to get to the stage in life where I take my own napkin to a restaurant but I’m sure it’ll happen at some point because in Britain, I don’t know what it’s like in America as much but in Britain some places are obsessed with paper napkins and I’m just not convinced. I don’t think it doesn’t need to be paper because it’s bad for the environment so a perfectly serviceable linen napkin that can be reused is I think a bit better but yes, napkins on the lap, not round the neck. Historically you had different types of napkin for different types of meals. The larger the meal, the larger the napkin. Today it’s very unlikely unless you’re me that you have different sizes of napkin which is fine just as long as it’s sort of clean and ironed that’s all I ask.

Brett McKay: Should you put your napkin in your lap as soon as you sit down?

William Hanson: Not the second you sit down unless food is sort of hovering behind you ready to be placed down.

Brett McKay: Okay.

William Hanson: I would sort of within the first minute.

Brett McKay: Okay.

William Hanson: Is when you can do it. You don’t want to look too keen.

Brett McKay: What do you do with your napkin if you need to leave the table for the restroom for example?

William Hanson: Then it would go on the chair and again some people get sort of when I say this sometimes in class people will recoil because they’re like oh well the chair is so dirty. Well if the chair’s got arms put it on the arm of the chair never put it on the back of the chair because then we can see it but actually if you’re worried that the chair is that dirty what sort of establishments are you dining in? So just rethink where you’re going. So yes seat of chair or arm of chair and then on the table when you’re leaving but you’re not coming back.

Brett McKay: Okay that’s what you do with it when you’re done you put it on the table?

William Hanson: Yes

Brett McKay: Okay.

William Hanson: Absolutely I’m not coming back goodbye thanks so much and really everyone should do that at the same time as well.

Brett McKay: What do you do with your silverware when you’re done?

William Hanson: So it depends if you’re eating what is in America called continental style which is not a term we have over here but if you’re eating continental style or you’re eating zigzag style continental style again many American etiquette coaches advocate for that knife in right hand fork in left hand you would sort of place them in a triangle on the plate when you’re resting with the bridge of the fork going over the knife almost creating like a pizza wedge shape in front of you and that is just to show I’m paused I’m just going to take a sip of my drink I’m chatting to my neighbour I’m pacing myself whereas when you’re finished they would go together and you know different countries have slightly different angles in Britain we do 6:30 if you imagine the cutlery is the hands of a clock with Americans it’s generally 5:25 some Europeans it’s 4:20 some it’s 3:15 I don’t really care as long as they’ve gone together that’s all the wait staff are looking for they’re not going to look at your cutlery and go well they’ve done it in the Dutch way and we’re here in California so we’re not going to clear that plate they’re not looking for that as long as it is together that’s what they want to know.

Brett McKay: Let’s go back to handling utensils how to hold them so you mentioned the two styles the continental style and the zigzag style so the continental style is when you got your knife in your right hand your fork in your left hand and you got the tongs or the face of the fork pointed down right?

William Hanson: Yeah and they work together and in Britain or continental style we let go of both of them when we’re resting but other than that we have got one in each hand they’re almost extensions of our hands whereas in zigzag style you might cut one or two pieces up with the knife place the knife down on the upper edge of the plate turn the fork over into the dominant hand stab and eat and then transfer it back pick up the knife cut another bit set the knife down transfer the fork I mean that’s an aerobic exercise Brett.

Brett McKay: Yeah no I don’t like the zigzag style I like where you just use the utensils as extensions of your hands for the duration of the dinner.

William Hanson: I think it’s a lot easier but some people insist it isn’t but you know to each their own as long as the food’s going in their mouth and not all over the shop.

Brett McKay: The other benefit of it too is it allows you to take up less space because your elbows are tucked in you can keep your elbows tucked in you don’t have your elbows all jutting out and bugging the other person.

William Hanson: Exactly.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

William Hanson: Yeah. And that’s key as well, because some dining tables you’re really tightly packed. Now in American dining, you prefer round tables, and actually at state banquets at the White House used to be straight edge tables like we have in Britain a lot more, but Jacqueline Kennedy switched them over to round tables, and that seems to be how it’s stayed at a state level at the White House. And the beauty of a round table, other than being more sociable, is that you are less restricted and you aren’t immediately sitting next to somebody where you could elbow them. But on a big, grand, straight edge table, you do have to be very conscious of where your elbows are going.

Brett McKay: Let’s say you’re at a dinner where you’re being served family style, so all the dishes are on the table and you’ve got to pass them around to make sure everyone gets serving. What are the rules of passing dishes?

William Hanson: So I have to be honest, Britain is the only country that makes things difficult and passes things in the opposite direction to every other country. In Britain, we pass things around to the left, so clockwise around the table, whereas in America, in India, in the Middle East, in Africa, every other country, Europe, the plates or the dishes go counterclockwise to the right. That said, I would say most Brits don’t know that rule. I’m just telling you from an etiquette profession rule, that’s the rule. I think as long as you are offering the people each side of you, no one really cares whether it goes to the left or to the right.

Brett McKay: That is interesting. You talk about in Britain, it’s kind of faux pas, maybe it used to be, not so much anymore, but to ask someone to pass you a dish, like directly, hey, can you pass me the potatoes?

William Hanson: Oh, no, that’s a slap in the face in Britain, traditionally, because you’re sort of saying, look, William, if you had said that to me, the subtext to that is, William, you have not seen that I’m sitting here surrounded by no potatoes. You have failed, because again, good manners are about other people. And so we’ve developed this very passive-aggressive way in Britain, and we sort of say it now as a bit of a joke, but I can assure you it does work in practice. If you had, and I know you wouldn’t, Brett, but let’s, for sake of argument, say that you didn’t pass me the potatoes, I would say, Brett, would you like any potatoes? And you might say, no, thank you, William, but would you like some potatoes? Oh, yes, I think that I would, actually. And then they get passed.

Brett McKay: When I read that, it reminded me, I think the Dowager did that a few times in Downton Abbey.

William Hanson: Yeah, exactly.

Brett McKay: Or I just imagine the Dowager’s just saying some sort of passive-aggressive thing like that.

William Hanson: Well, exactly. And I think someone asked me a few weeks ago, do you think passive aggression is a good thing? And I think, you know, it’s better than active aggression.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s right. There’s also etiquette on passing the salt and pepper. What’s the rules of passing salt and pepper?

 William Hanson: Yes, so salt and pepper travel together is the mnemonic that we teach children, but it works beautifully for adults as well. They are a marriage couple, in effect, and you don’t want to split them up. So if someone says, please, could you pass the salt? You would pass both the salt and the pepper together in one hand if they’ll fit in one hand, but two hands is fine. And I think that goes back to necessity. When salt and pepper pots used to be teeny tiny, they weren’t great big mills or grinders like we have now. They were much smaller, and so you didn’t sort of want to split them up because then you might not find them.

Brett McKay: Tell us about salt cellars. I never heard of these things until I read about them in your book.

William Hanson: Yeah, salt cellars are sort of small little dishes. So I guess a lot of salt. What does your salt and pepper look like in your house?

Brett McKay: They’re just shakers that we just… Yeah.

William Hanson: Yeah, which is sort of the more contemporary style. But going back to the Downton or even pre-Downton era, salt was served in a little, it would often be a silver little pot, but with an inlay of blue glass, because if you put salt directly on silver, it will erode the silver and it doesn’t taste then very good and it doesn’t do the silver much good either. So you’d have this sort of blue little glass inlay that sat in there, and that’s where the salt was. And a tiny little silver spoon that you would spoon out granules of salt and put it in a neat little pile on the edge of your plate. And you would sort of add a couple of granules then using the tip of your knife. Sounds terribly complicated onto whatever was loaded up on the fork.

Brett McKay: Are they still used today?

William Hanson: I would say this one is being slightly relaxed. Most restaurants you go to now, you don’t get salt cellars. I would say salt cellars now, you would see it in a very grand private house, if at all.

Brett McKay: Okay.

William Hanson: But most restaurants, it’s the salt shaker with one hole in it. Pepper has several holes and you can apply it more or less wherever, but try and taste the food first.

Brett McKay: All right, but for listeners, they ever have a dinner at a manor, they know what to do when they see a salt cellar.

William Hanson: They do know what to do, exactly.

Brett McKay: Any other rules that a guest at a dinner party or maybe even an extended stay in someone’s home should follow to show proper hospitality, proper manners?

William Hanson: Yes, I mean, I think it obviously depends on context and whether you know them well or not. But, you know, particularly I get so many, I do a podcast as well, and so many letters we get in about, oh, I had my family to stay. They stayed with us for an entire week and they didn’t once offer to cook or they didn’t take us out for a dinner to say thank you. Yes, it’s an awful lot of work having someone stay in your house for anything over one night. And even that can be quite tricky. So if you are going to stay, don’t assume that your hosts will be entertaining you all three meals of every day either and the stuff in between. But do offer to take them out, to say thank you, to give them a night off cooking. I mean, that’s, I don’t know about you, most hosts don’t want other people cooking in their own kitchen.

Brett McKay: No, I wouldn’t like that.

William Hanson: You can get quite territorial.

Brett McKay: Yeah

William Hanson: But please, let’s order takeout or let’s go out for a nice meal in a restaurant. It’s on us. Just something to acknowledge the effort that they’re going to. Take a nice gift, write them a decent length thank you letter afterwards.

Brett McKay: What’s a good gift to bring as a guest? What’s your go-to? Because I think a lot of people say like wine or maybe that’s not a good one.

William Hanson: Yeah, I mean, it’s a good one if you know that they like Italian Merlot, for example. If you know that that’s their favorite wine, take them a couple of bottles and it should be a couple of bottles if you’re staying for several nights. It might even be a case of wine if you’re staying for a week plus. But if you don’t quite know what they drink, or indeed if they drink, and more and more people aren’t drinking now, particularly with the younger generations, alcohol is probably not the best thing. So chocolates, I mean, the practice of post-desk gifts goes back to Chicago in the ’30s and chocolates were the absolute sort of that was all that was acceptable. Most people like chocolates or can quite easily re-gift them if they don’t. But ideally you want to take something personal and personalized to them.

Brett McKay: You know, when I heard, and I would like if I got this, which is like a nice bottle of olive oil, because I use olive oil a lot.

William Hanson: Do you know, olive oil is becoming such a popular gift over here as well in London. And it’s great. I mean, a good quality.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

William Hanson: Particularly if it’s Italian olive oil. I mean, over here it might be easier to get that than with you. Yeah, it’s a nice novel thing. Doesn’t matter if you drink. I don’t think many people are allergic to oil. So it ticks a lot of boxes.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and it often comes in a nice bottle that presents well too. So I like that. Let’s talk about elevators. Is there an etiquette for elevators?

William Hanson: Oh, yes. If you’re in a really old building in Chicago or New York or London, the elevator is probably going to be a little bit tighter than in a great big new build somewhere in Los Angeles. And so the senior person, whether that’s the senior in the business or a lady or granny, whoever would go into the elevator first. The person who gets out of the elevator first when it arrives at the floor is the person closest to the elevator doors. And that’s the person who got in last. It winds me up in hotels where they’re taking you to your room and you turn up at floor seven and they put their hand in front of the lift doors and you sort of have to edge past them because they want you to go first. But that’s all very well, but I don’t know where I’m going. I’ve not been to this hotel before. So actually I want the hotelier to get out of the lift, put their hand across the lift doors from the other side of the lift and point me in the right direction, much more courteous than sort of awkwardly edging past them.

Brett McKay: Is small talk appropriate in an elevator or should you just keep to yourself?

William Hanson: I was having a heated debate about this only a few hours ago. No, in Britain, it’s so taboo to speak in an elevator. I’m going to film a social media video, I think, that just sort of has a group of us saying nothing in an elevator. And then I’ll just say at the end, we’re British, we don’t talk in elevators or lifts as we call them over here. But look, if you and I got in an elevator and we knew each other and there was no one else, you can absolutely speak. But with everyone else, Brits are so private with their conversation and thoughts, we couldn’t possibly have someone else over here what we’re thinking or saying. So there is normally this very awkward silence in an elevator.

Brett McKay: Well, I prefer the silence too. I’m a big fan of that.

William Hanson: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Brett McKay: So the British are famous for queuing, standing in line. Any etiquette for line standing?

William Hanson: Yes I mean just sort of, it’s so democratic it’s first come first served. It’s so straightfoward we get very irritated when someone tries to jump the queue. And so etiquette rule number one is, if you don’t mind the rules, don’t play the game, basically. So if you don’t want to queue don’t queue and I think you are all going to be shocked down in flames in Britain, if you sort of try to jump the queue. And I would say that is actually the commonalities between Britain and America, I mean, I think we are all sort of the Olympic gold medalist of queuing in Britain, but I would say you’re probably the silver medalist in America. Whereat it doesn’t even get bronze is the Europeans. And actually when you go to Disney in Paris oversee the American concept as British I’ve been to a lot of the Disneys the American ones are great, because everyone follows the queuing standing in line pressure call, but in Euro Disney or Disney Paris as it’s now called yeah it’s a little bit of a freeforall and it’s quite stressful.

Brett McKay: How do you handle line jumpers? Lets say someone tries to break that sacred social order, should you call them out?

William Hanson: Oh, yes. No we would and I think we would sort of call them out probably giving then the benefit of the doubt to begin with. We might say something like, oh actually the back of the queue is just here. For example because it might be an innocent mistake, if they then go “No, no I’m gonna join it from here” then well that’s a war crime.

Brett McKay: Is it proper to save places in line? Can you do that?

William Hanson: If its not a busy queue you could perhaps do it for maybe like a minute.

Brett McKay: Okay.

William Hanson: But I would be very careful even don’t so I would probably not advice that.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I agree. It has to be done in moderation [0:48:16.9] ____. Well, William, this has been a great conversation and we only scratched the surface of what’s in this book. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

William Hanson: Yes, the book is out now, Just Good Manners, published by Gallery at Simon & Schuster. It’s available in all formats. There’s an audio book. So if you’re not sick of my voice after this interview, there’s more of it on audio book, e-book and hardback in all good bookshops.

Brett McKay: And any other place on the internet where they can learn about you?

William Hanson: Oh yes, there’s my Instagram @williamhanson, TikTok @williamhansonetiquette or my website, williamhanson.com.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, William Hanson, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

William Hanson: Thank you so much, Brett.

Brett McKay: My guest today was William Hanson. He’s the author of the book Just Good Manners. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website williamhanson.co.uk. Also check out our show notes @AoM.is/etiquette where you find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives and make sure to sign up for a new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to my podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

A few weeks ago, I came across an article about how young people these days are tired of dating apps and want to meet romantic partners in real life. You know — the way people developed relationships in the good old days of the former millennium.  

The only problem? The kids today don’t know how to take part in the dynamic that kickstarts the in-person development of romantic relationships: flirting.

The Death of Real-World Flirting

Several factors have contributed to the lack of flirting ability among young adults.

The biggest one is smartphones. Because Gen Z and Gen Alpha have lived in a world where they could mediate all their communication through a device, many haven’t developed the social skills necessary for adept, in-person flirting. This has resulted in increased social anxiety when striking up conversations with potential romantic interests.

Dating apps have also exacerbated the decline in flirting ability. The nice thing about dating apps is that they guarantee initial, mutual romantic interest. You can only chat with someone on an app if they’ve also expressed interest. It takes the uncertainty and risk out of shooting your shot. When you flirt in real life, you don’t have the same guarantee. The person you approach may or may not be interested, and the only way to find out is by chatting them up and engaging in flirty banter.

COVID lockdowns didn’t help flirting skill development either. When I spoke with Jeffrey Hall, a professor of communication studies and the author of The Five Flirting Styles, he observed: “Post pandemic, there’s a lot of young folks who kind of missed out on some key developmental stages where you fall in love for the first time and interact with the opposite sex. A lot of young adults in their twenties right now, because of the pandemic, missed out on what it felt like to have those experiences.”

A final factor in the demise of flirting is the increased skittishness modern men feel as to what’s appropriate in terms of making romantic overtures towards women and what might come off as creepy or as sexual harassment.

To help young dudes who want to revive flirting and strike up relationships with women in real life, I took a deep dive into the research around this timeless skill. Here’s what I learned.

What Is Flirting?

Researchers define flirting as a mix of verbal and nonverbal behaviors that express attraction and gauge the other person’s receptivity to a romantic relationship. A coy smile, a playful tease, a casual lean forward, a compliment — all are flirtatious signals across cultures.

Here’s an important thing about flirting: it’s usually ambiguous. When you’re interested in a woman, you typically don’t just blurt out: “I think you’re hot and want you to be my girlfriend!” You’d risk immediate rejection from unrequited attraction. It would really weird the gal out. And it would be super ineffective: ambiguity is what makes flirting work and builds attraction; certainty is boring, while uncertainty turns our brains on and makes a situation or a person compelling.

The ambiguity of flirting allows you to show your interest without outright declaring it. It’s a way to test the waters in a low-pressure way. If the other person responds positively (smiles back, laughs, touches your arm), the flirtation can escalate; if not, both can save face by pretending it was just friendly banter.

There’s a thrill in trying to figure out if someone is picking up what you’re laying down. But because the uncertainty inherent to flirting is not just exciting but confusing, young people often want to avoid it. For those used to the security of dating apps, engaging in this dicey dynamic can feel too socially risky.

The 5 Flirting Styles

When we typically think of flirting, we think of it as something extroverted that you do in bars and clubs where you throw out pick-up lines with sexual innuendos.

Jeffrey Hall has found that’s actually just one type of flirting style among many.

Hall has identified five distinct flirting styles that people naturally tend toward. Understanding these styles can help you recognize your own approach and read others’ signals better:

1. Traditional: Follows conventional gender roles where men initiate and women respond. Values courtesy but can lead to missed opportunities.
2. Physical: Openly expresses sexual attraction through body language and touch. Great for quickly establishing chemistry but can come on too strong.
3. Sincere: Creates emotional connections through meaningful conversation. Most effective for starting long-term relationships but can be mistaken for mere friendliness.
4. Playful: Treats flirting as a fun game or confidence boost. Creates excitement but can send mixed signals about serious intent.
5. Polite: Emphasizes courtesy, respect, and subtlety. Comfortable for everyone involved but often so subtle that interest goes unnoticed.

Based on Hall’s research, there’s no best way to flirt. All the different styles can lead to romantic relationships. The best thing to do is to lean into the flirting style that’s most natural for you. Doing so will not only allow you to be more authentic, which is attractive, but help ensure you find someone who’s compatible with you. If you have a sincere flirting style, you’re probably not going to get along with someone who’s a more extroverted, physical flirt. And that’s okay! “I wrote this book [The Five Flirting Styles] to my younger self because I wanted to know that the way that I communicated attraction was okay,” Hall told me. “You don’t have to be some suave, dashing guy to flirt effectively.”

These styles aren’t mutually exclusive. You might be mostly sincere with a dash of playfulness, or mostly polite but become physical once you feel more secure with someone.

If you want to know what your flirting style is, you can take Hall’s flirting inventory here.

Science-Backed Tips to Improve Your Real-World Flirting

Research shows that flirting is a learnable skill. Here are evidence-based tips to help improve your game:

Have fun and keep it light! This is the most important tip. Studies suggest a lighthearted attitude makes flirting more effective because it puts both people at ease. “When you have a mentality of being interested and excited about another person and just having fun with them, it shifts your perception and your behavior,” Hall explains. “Being present for the moment and enjoying the excitement of meeting someone who has romantic potential actually changes your nonverbal behavior. You can become more attractive in the eyes of the other person.”

Make her feel good about herself. Flirting is about expressing attraction, and it feels good to feel attractive! If you approach a flirtatious encounter with the mindset of helping someone feel good about herself, you’ll do well.

Start with basics. Smile and make (non-creepy) eye contact. Studies consistently show these simple signals indicate approachability and interest.

Use humor. Both men and women rate humor as highly effective in sparking attraction. Telling a funny story or offering a little gentle teasing creates rapport. Equally important: laughing at her jokes shows you appreciate her sense of humor.

Be a good social dance partner. Flirting is a social dance. Ask questions and show genuine curiosity. When she asks you a question, answer her and then throw the social ball back to her.

Mind your body language and create light touch when appropriate. Uncross your arms, face the person, and lean in slightly. If the situation allows, brief touches — like a tap on the arm when making a point — can enhance connection.

Show clear intent and follow up. If things are going well, you should segue into making your romantic interest more explicit. Hall’s research has found that “when you make very direct requests like, ‘I enjoyed our time together, I want to see you again, can I get a way to contact you?’ and the other person says yes,” it clearly shows that the flirting between you and the other person was indeed flirting, and not just friendly banter. “It says, ‘I’m interested in you as a person for romantic reasons, not just having a nice conversation.’ Showing clear intent can help you avoid the friend-zone.”

Also, make sure to follow up if there’s mutual attraction. “Lots of young women’s complaints about men’s behavior on flirting is men don’t follow up,” Hall says. While men often think they need to increase their allure by playing it cool and making a woman wait to hear from them, this isn’t the case: “There’s very clear research that being consistently available, showing clear interest repeatedly in a woman when there’s mutual attraction is key to creating a romantic relationship.”

Will a Man Come Off as Creepy If He Tries to Flirt With a Woman in Real Life?

A lot of young men hesitate to flirt in real life because they’re afraid they’ll come off as creepy. Hall says this worry is unfounded:

“If you’re worried about coming off as creepy, then you’re probably not the creep. Creeps don’t think that they’re being creepy. If you’re concerned about whether you’re coming on too strong, that’s okay. It means that you’re actually aware that how you treat another person matters. You’ll be fine.”

Just observe how your overtures are received, reading a woman’s signals as to whether your advances are welcome or not, and proceed accordingly.

How to Tell if a Woman Is Flirting With You

Flirting is a social dance, but how do you know if someone wants to flirt with you? It’s hard! Research found that men correctly spotted flirting only 36% of the time.

Signs a woman might be flirting with you include: frequent smiling and laughing (especially at your jokes), maintaining eye contact or making coy glances, finding reasons to be physically close or lightly touching you, playful teasing, asking personal questions, and offering compliments.

The key is looking for multiple signals appearing together over and over again. One smile doesn’t mean much, but if someone is laughing, leaning in, making eye contact, AND asking about your weekend plans — that’s strong evidence of flirting.

Make sure to check out our detailed article on how to tell if a woman is interested in you.

Conclusion

If you’re a young dude wanting to meet women out in the real world, you’ll need to up your flirting game.

As Hall advises, “This is truly some of the best stuff you’re ever gonna do in life. So prioritize it — even when you’re like, ‘I could go out to this party and there’s new people and it could be uncomfortable.’ Go to the party anyway. Everyone feels uncomfortable when they’re talking to new people. Do it anyway. The stakes aren’t nearly as high as you’ve imagined them to be. And it’s fun!”

So get out there and practice. Strike up conversations at coffee shops, bookstores, or social events. Start small with a simple smile and hello and see where it goes from there. Keep your flirting light and fun and don’t worry about the outcome. By doing so, you’ll paradoxically find that romantic success naturally follows.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Think about a time you’ve had to speak in front of others — maybe during a work presentation, a wedding toast, or even on a first date. Did you struggle with using too many filler words, such as “um” and “like,” talk too fast, or awkwardly ramble?

Most of us try to fix these saboteurs of speech by giving ourselves mental mantras: “Slow down”; “Think about what you want to say.”

But my guest would say that becoming a more engaging and effective speaker comes down to realizing that it’s a very physical act that requires getting out of your head and into your body.

Michael Chad Hoeppner, a communication coach who has worked with everyone from presidential candidates to business executives, is the author of Don’t Say Um: How to Communicate Effectively to Live a Better Life. Today on the show, Michael explains why you need to treat speaking as a sport and shares embodied drills and exercises — from playing with Legos to talking with a wine cork in your mouth to throwing a ball against a wall — that will fix common delivery problems, including eliminating ums, enhancing vocal variety, and managing your gestures.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Article: Becoming Well-Spoken — How to Minimize Your Uhs and Ums
• AoM Podcast #698: The Secrets of Public Speaking From History’s Greatest Orators
• AoM Podcast #732: Tips From a Top TED Talker on How to Be Heard

Connect With Michael Chad Hoeppner

• GK Training
• Don’t Say Um website 
• Michael on LinkedIn
• Michael on X

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Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. Think about a time you’ve had to speak in front of others, maybe during a work presentation, a wedding toast, or even on a first date. Did you struggle with using too many filler words such as um and like, talk too fast or awkwardly ramble? Most of us try to fix these saboteurs of speech by giving ourselves mental mantras. Slow down, think about what you wanna say. But my guest would say, that becoming a more engaging and effective speaker, comes down to realizing that it’s a very physical act that requires getting out of your head and into your body. Michael Chad Hoeppner, a communication coach who has worked with everyone from presidential candidates to business executives, is the author of, Don’t Say Um: How to Communicate Effectively to Live a Better Life. Today on the show, Michael explains why you need to treat speaking as a sport and shares embodied drills and exercises, from playing with Legos to talking with a wine cork in your mouth, throwing a ball against a wall. That’ll fix common delivery problems, including eliminating ums, enhancing vocal variety, and managing your gestures. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/um.

All right. Michael Chad Hoeppner, welcome to the show.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Thank you so much.

Brett McKay: So you are a communication coach. You help people improve their communication delivery. So you help people speak more clearly, more confidently, and with presence. You coached Andrew Yang, when he ran for president to improve his delivery. You also coach executives. You teach on the subject. I think when a lot of people think about public speaking or even just speaking on a first date, they’re getting ready for a first date. They’re often thinking about what they’re gonna say, they’re thinking about the content. But why do you think people should focus on the delivery as well?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: There’s a few reasons. The first is every study ever done that looks at what matters more in terms of the impression you make on other people, validates delivery as the thing. But that’s just the first answer. The second answer, which I think is a much better one, is that I’m not even interested in debating or trying to weigh one versus the other, content versus delivery. What I’m always trying to do with my clients is to help them unlock a virtuous cycle in which both things make each other better. And you can remember this for the rest of your life, which is the following drill. Hold up your hands as though you’re looking through some imaginary binoculars. If you hold your hands up like you’re looking through binoculars, you will see that your left hand looks like the letter C and your right hand like the outer half of a capital D. So your left hand stands for content. That’s the words you say, the vocabulary. The right hand looks like the outer half of a capital D, and that stands for delivery. And that’s everything besides the words. Now, if you put your hands together, you’ll see that they create this reinforcing loop.

And what many people don’t know and they discover coaching with me, is that if you just focus on the delivery and make the delivery better, not only do you sound better in all the context you just mentioned, including first dates. Not only do you sound better, but you can actually unlock a virtuous cycle in which you think of smarter stuff to say. So the instructive example of course, is if you build the ability to tolerate silence and allow your body to take air in, and therefore have the fuel to have vocal variety in your voice. And also avoid saying um, because in that silence you can’t say um, not only does your voice sound better and you come across with more authority. But in that gap, you’re giving your brain the only two things it needs to think of smart stuff, time and oxygen. So this is something that people do not understand about delivery, and they ignore it at their peril. And it can be like an absolute light bulb moment when they discover it.

Brett McKay: I’ve experienced that in my own life. I know whenever I feel I’m the most fluid and the most articulate with my speaking, it feels like I’m saying better stuff compared to when I’m not.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Exactly. And that’s not an accident, by the way. We also get trapped where we think delivery is a bunch of stuff we should paste on the outside. And part of the reason that is, is because it gets taught, typically in a really reductive way. I’ll give you an example. We get told to make eye contact for 8-12 seconds. Why? What if your thought is longer than 8 seconds or longer than 12 seconds even. Or shorter than 8 seconds I should say. Any of those things. And we get this coaching that these tools are about things we should almost shellac onto the outside of us. But that’s an absolute mistake because the outputs of communication or eye contact and gestural ease and freedom and posture and enunciation, they are outputs. They come from focusing on the other person. And when you do that, both the delivery and the content gets better. So what you’ve discovered when you’re kind of in that flow state is exactly right.

Brett McKay: Speaking of common advice that people get when they think about delivery, a lot of it’s particularly bad. It’s not very helpful, like you said, you gave the example of the one just then. But also there’s other advice about, well just don’t say um, or be more confident or don’t do this. And a lot of it’s just about thought suppression. It’s about suppressing things. Why is that not a useful approach to improving your speaking delivery?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah. Well, let’s break this down in three ways. The typical guidance that people get about delivery is not just not helpful, it’s usually counterproductive. And the way it typically works is first, they get some thought suppression. Then they get such general feedback that it’s utterly unactionable. And then they get a suggestion which is a mental instruction for what is a physical activity. And I’ll walk you through this step by step. Let’s do one that’s very common, which is when people speak at a very fast rate. Now, the typical advice they get, first of all is thought suppression, which is don’t rush.

Okay, well, as soon as you hear a don’t, the first thing your brain is obligated to do, is to fixate on whatever comes after the don’t. I titled this book, Don’t Say Um, in large part as a trick to get people to pick it up, ’cause everyone wants to avoid saying um. But the challenge is that’s the very worst instruction you can give yourself. And I say as much in the preface to the book. So it’s a bit of a trick to get the reader picking it up and using it and hopefully improving because of it.

Thought suppression is the pink elephant trick essentially, it’s built off distinction. When you give yourself a don’t, you’re obligating your brain to fixate on the don’t versus everything else in the known universe. So if someone says to you, don’t rush, you are obligated to think about rushing. And also, even more damning, who are you thinking about? You and how bad you are, as opposed to where you should be thinking about, which is your audience. So thought suppression comes first, then what comes second? General feedback, and the general feedback usually is like, just slow down. Okay, when? All the time? Every word, in between words, in the length of words? When am I supposed to slow down? Utterly vague. And then the third thing, is a mental instruction for what is a physical activity. So that sounds like remember to breathe, but then you’re giving the person you’re coaching or suggesting this to, something else they have to remember in their jam packed brains, when in fact breathing is a totally physical thing. So these are some of the ways in which the feedback goes dramatically wrong. And really the problem is this. Is it people who are already struggling then tend to blame themselves and they think, “Oh God, I’m such a failure because I couldn’t implement all this really smart coaching or advice I got.”

And it wasn’t smart coaching, it wasn’t smart advice. And it’s not even their fault that they were not able to do it.

Brett McKay: Going to this idea that speaking is a physical act, that’s one of the main points that you drive home throughout this book, is that we have to remember that speaking is a full bodied physical act. I think oftentimes we think of it as just a mental act. Why is remembering that speaking is a physical act the foundation of improving your delivery?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Everything I just explained about how feedback gets messed up can be remedied by what you’re asking. By a physical approach. And particularly for the listeners of your podcast, this metaphor, either as a metaphor or even just as a thing that people actually do, will really hit home, which is speaking is a sport. So guys out there who are listening, but anybody out there who is listening, if you like sports, speaking is that same thing. It is moving. It takes over a hundred muscles to do what you and I are doing right now, Brett, which is taking air into our bodies. Our diaphragm drops down, our lungs expand as they fill with air. Our ribs move to accommodate those inflating lungs. And then we exhale that air over our vocal cords and it picks up some sound there. And then that sound gets amplified and altered and altered with a miraculous act of coordination, which is enunciation. Even saying the word enunciation, you can feel how much your lips and your tongue and even your soft palate and jaw have to move to accomplish that. It is a physical activity. Now, hopefully that’s interesting just to hear, but here is the amazing liberation and the amazing benefit of this shift.

Just like any other physical activity, like any other sport or dance or a discipline that is physical, you can build muscle memory and get a lot better at it very quickly and break habits that you think have condemned you to bad performance for the rest of your life. You can break them almost instantly.

Brett McKay: Yeah. What you do, and we’re gonna talk about some of these drills. You provide drills for people to help improve their speaking. They’re all very physical. You’re using your whole body oftentimes in these drills. And we’re gonna talk about that here in a bit. Before we got on the interview, you and I were discussing the connection between public speaking delivery and manliness. And one of those connections has to do with the improvisational nature of speaking. Tell us about that.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Men, as a behavior that we are suggested to embrace in our lives. And I don’t think it’s just men. I think it’s a good behavior in general. But we’re often suggested to really embrace decisiveness in our life, make a decision, take a risk, things like that. Well, here’s the miraculous thing about speaking. Talking is just a series of decisions. It is literally a flowchart of words in which your brain does as miracle of choosing one word after another and putting them together in a system that can be meaningful and powerful and persuasive to others in your life. So embrace that decision making that you get to do all day long, every day, and don’t shy away from it.

Brett McKay: I love it. I think improving your speaking can open up new vistas in your life, whether romantically, in your career, and just also friendships. And I think if you look at the history we’ve written a lot of about the history of masculinity and different cultures in time, public speaking in a lot of these cultures was a mark of manhood. It’s how you proved your manhood in ancient Greece, in ancient Rome and the Viking cultures, even your ability to tell a good yarn was a way you kind of showed yourself as a man. So maybe we can hearken into that today and revive that idea that speaking well is a manly thing.

So let’s get into some of these practices. I thought this was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed your book because I’m a guy who makes his living speaking as a podcast host. I thought this was very useful. And what I loved about it, all your practices are very physical. And one practice I thought was really interesting is you have people play with LEGOs. So why are you having people play with LEGOs while they’re public speaking?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Sure. The LEGOs are a practice exercise. And the reason I suggest people do it is because it helps them learn to do incredibly powerful things, like pause, like tolerate silence, like be concise, like structure their ideas, like remove filler. And the way it works is this. You consider some content you want to speak about. It could be a speech or even an elevator pitch or a presentation, whatever it might be. And you get a stack of LEGO blocks. But you don’t start just speaking right away. Instead, you pick up the first LEGO block before you begin speaking. And then you share just the first idea that you want to. You can also think of this, the first sentence of your content.

And at the end of that sentence or idea, instead of just powering through and going to the next thing, no, in silence, you place down that LEGO block and you live through that silence, pick up the next LEGO block, still in silence, and then share the second idea that you have, or the second sentence. Same thing at the end of that sentence or thought, you place down the LEGO block, but this time you click it in place with the previous, so that clicking action even takes a moment to complete, so it enforces some silence.

Then you pick up the third one, still being silent. Once you have it in the air, then you can say your idea out loud. Third thought, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is. At the end of that idea, in silence, you click the LEGO block in place. And you keep doing this. And then you’ll probably run out of LEGOs. Maybe you use six or eight or 10 or whatever it might be. And if you have more that you want to say, you simply unstack them and continue. But what you’ll probably find when you try this exercise, is that you can actually complete a lot of really powerful thoughts in just six main sentences or six main ideas, or even four sometimes. What this is doing is using embodied cognition. So not just thinking about stuff, but actually thinking or learning using your body. It is using embodied cognition to teach you how to do those remarkable behaviors of pausing, owning silence, sharing your ideas in a deliberate manner. And it’s a much faster and a much better way to do that than all the thought suppression traps we talked about.

Brett McKay: So if you have a problem with rambling for example, this is a great drill to do to help you not ramble anymore? And I have this problem. Sometimes I’ll start a thought and I’ll start speaking it, and then I’m like, oh yeah, there’s another thought I wanna get to. And I just go into that and it just sounds like a mess. What’s interesting about this drill is not only is it gonna help improve your delivery, you’re not gonna sound like you’re rambling and jumping from thought to thought. This is an example of improving your delivery improves your content, because you actually have to stop and think about what you’re gonna say before you click on the next LEGO.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, it’s not an exaggeration to say, that this drill, I invented this drill in 2010, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that this drill is one of the foundational things that allowed me to have a thriving career in this field. I started teaching at Columbia Business School in 2016 and was giving feedback in presidential races soon after that. And that’s not to brag about my journey. I want the audience to hear this very clearly. That is to emphasize the power of this one single exercise. Because to your point, yes, it doesn’t just teach you better delivery skills, but it gives you an opportunity to actually think of the brilliant, smart, insightful stuff that you have to say and helps you say those things.

Brett McKay: Okay, again, this is a drill. It’s not something you’re not gonna be playing with LEGOs while you’re giving your presentation or on your first date. Maybe you can do this before so you can get some practice. So, yeah, we’re not telling people to play with LEGOs. But you do say if you’re doing a zoom call, for example, you could have the LEGOs maybe beneath you and you can do it then ’cause no one can see your hands.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, it’s a great clarification. Thank you for bringing it up. This metaphor should really hit home for people as well, which is, in sports, we understand this. There are practice exercises you do in practice to build a certain technique that you would never do in the game. Imagine a soccer player who had a TheraBand around their lower ankles to try to strengthen their legs in some way. Or supposedly Victor Wembanyama, the amazing center for the San Antonio spurs, would practice dribbling a basketball with gloves on. Or you’ve seen pictures of sprinters running with a parachute that they’re dragging behind their back. Now, none of those athletes would use those same things in the game. They’re essentially exercises to build some muscles. And that’s exactly what this LEGO exercise is. It’s a preparation, practice exercise to build these abilities. And once you practice it enough, what happens is you build muscle memory, and you can do them without the tools. But to your point, one of the gifts of remote communication is, yeah, you have this, what I call a digital cloak of invisibility. And so you can do some of the exercises in the book, even real time, when you’re on remote calls.

Be versatile. And by that I mean, okay, maybe if the LEGO blocks are a little bit too loud on a zoom call, ’cause you hear some clicking, just substitute and use your hand instead. Place your hand gently down on the table or desk in front of you. And when you do that, your job is to actually pause for a moment and consider what is my next thought or my next idea.

Brett McKay: So something that I struggle with and I’m pretty self conscious about as a podcast host, is being articulate. I sometimes have a hard time saying the right word or saying the word I want to say. So what I do is I say those filler words, um. I say like more than I’d like to. And the thing is, we edit a lot of those out. Before it goes live. There are other filler words that other people struggle with. Something I’ve noticed talking to people on the podcast, a lot of our guests will say sort of or kind of a lot, even when what they’re saying doesn’t need that sort of modifier and it actually doesn’t make sense. Someone will say, “Yeah, they’re sort of pregnant.” It’s like okay, well you can’t be sort of pregnant. You’re either pregnant or not. So this goes to the title of your book, Don’t Say Um. I know a lot of people, when they’re thinking about delivery, they want to be better about not saying um or like. So what can people start doing? What are some drills people can do to be more precise with their language and stop using filler words?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, so the title of the book is, Don’t Say Um. It’s a trick. The antidote to that is a chapter on linguistic precision. Now, by linguistic precision, what I mean is exactly what you said, choosing your words. The exercise, the kinesthetic exercise that I teach in that chapter is one called finger walking. And I’ll talk you through it right now and then also talk about what filler is and how to think about it slightly differently. The exercise is you take your second and third finger of either hand, and you as though your hand were a tiny little person or pedestrian, you walk your fingers across the table or desk in front of you. Walk your ideas one thought at a time. So when you’ve completed a thought, bring your hands back to the front of the desk and walk them forward again. And what you’re trying to do here, is you don’t have to overthink it like matching syllable by syllable or word by word, you’re using the activity of walking your fingers to also walk your ideas across the table. If you feel yourself saying um or a like or a kinda or a sorta or have another non-fluency of some kind, you pause the fingers and you wait until you’ve regained your focus and then you continue.

Now if you say an um, it’s not a problem with your brain, it’s not a problem with your mouth even. It’s a problem with your fingers. You have not been specific enough placing your fingers. This is an incredibly powerful drill for people because it’s super versatile. You can do this on remote calls, but no one knows you’re doing it. You and I could be doing it right now, every single word, if we wanted to. I’m not right now, but I certainly could, because this is audio only, and it helps people do what linguistic precision is designed to do, which is choose words. I’ll give you another example. If a kid runs in front of a bus and you have a split second to try to help that kid, no one says, “There is kind of a, it’s kinda sort of like kind of a bus coming.” Because in that moment, we’re totally focused on that kid and that message. And in that moment, we choose words. So this exercise helps people unlock that profound and primal skill of choosing words.

Brett McKay: Yeah. What I love about this drill, I’ve been practicing it, is it gets you out of your head. Because the tendency that I have when I say I need to focus on not saying um, I do what you were talking about other the pink elephant. I said, don’t say um, don’t say um. And then I just end up. I’m thinking about saying um all the time. So I say um a ton. So what this drill does, it just gets you out of your head and into your body, and that will just lead to you being more fluid in your speaking.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, exactly. And filler language is a big topic. We could keep going about it if you want to. I don’t know, you want to dive deeper on filler? We got a lot we should get to, so we can also move on if you want.

Brett McKay: Yeah. A little bit more. What is something else about filler that you think is important for people to understand?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah. Well, the first thing is folks, be nice to yourself out there. And the reason I say that is because, let’s break it down with some math for a moment. Let’s say you say um every five seconds, which probably strikes you as a lot. Um is a single syllable. It’s a single sound. Average rate of speech is something like this. I’m speaking very generally here, but it’s something like this. Let’s call it three words per second. Let’s call each word an average of two syllables. So in a single second, you’re saying about six syllables. So that means every five seconds, you’re saying about 30 syllables. I hope everyone stuck with me on that math. Now, let’s say you say one um every five seconds. That means one out of every 30 syllables is a filler sound. And I’m guessing if in other parts of your life, you had a habit that only affected 3% of a given thing, you wouldn’t be that hard on yourself about it. So they may not be as big of a deal as you think. That does not mean, it’s not worth trying to be better at becoming more linguistically precise and choosing your words.

But be nice to yourself while you go on that journey. And as you’re going on that journey, I also invite you to broaden your idea of what filler language actually is. I’ll give you a couple criteria to think about it. If the answer to both of these questions is no, then this word is a filler word for you. Here’s the first question. Is it grammatically necessary? If the answer is no, let’s move on to the second one. Are you aware that you’re doing it? And if both of those answers are no, then that word is probably filler for you as well. Here’s a ridiculous example. I one time coached a client who used the word viscerally as filler. I swear, every couple sentences viscerally would appear, didn’t make any sense at all, didn’t fit grammatically, and he wasn’t even aware he was doing it. So keep in mind, there may be a bunch of words that you’re overusing that are not necessary and that are crutches.

Brett McKay: Going to that point of being nice to yourself. Something that I, maybe I’ll let people know. I’ve interviewed a lot of people on the podcast, over a thousand. And a lot of those people are in the media, they’re on radio, they have their own podcast, they’re on television. And even those individuals, they have a hard time with um and like, and well, and the like. So if even the pros have problems with it sometimes, it’s okay if you have problems, but we can make improvements to it. So yeah, don’t beat yourself up, if you do say um a lot. I think that’s useful ’cause I think beating yourself up just will cause the problem to grow even more. It doesn’t solve the problem, just makes it worse.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, this is my exact point. Instead of feeling bad about the same behavior for now, years or decades even if there’s something that you feel bad about, stop feeling bad about it by actually doing something about it. So as opposed to obsessing about your ums, no, just practice the finger walking drill and practice it a bunch and pretty soon what will happen is you will make improvement. And that improvement all of a sudden makes you actually feel great, makes you have an appetite to improve further. And that’s the entire point about taking such a physical approach in the book.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. All right, so another delivery issue I have. I’m gonna use this as in private, this podcast as some private coaching. But another delivery issue that I’ve been battling for a while is enunciation and speaking too fast. Sometimes I’m the micro machine guy. Do you remember the micro machine guy on the advertisements?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: You’re talking my generational language right now. So yes, I do of course.

Brett McKay: You talk bout how improving your enunciation can actually help people slow down their speaking. How does that work? And what are some drills for that?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, well, you don’t have to believe me. You can just test it. Say some huge bit of technical jargon or some multisyllabic phrase. Now notice that in order to enunciate that multisyllabic phrase, it takes some time. Enunciation takes time. I’ll give you a silly example actually, only silly ’cause it’s a single word. If I don’t give a little bit of time on the M in the word time, it could sound like I’m saying tide or tight, or type, as in typing on a typewriter or a computer. Enunciation takes time to actually make these sounds different from each other. And that’s just a single syllable word, time. So you could even think that saying time takes that thing time. But what about a multisyllabic word like hypochondria or exceptionalism, things like this? To get through those words with multi syllables, you actually have to take the time to make all of those precise movements. If you were thinking of a sport, again in order to do a complex move in basketball or dribbling or something, it does take time. So the very act of learning to enunciate more dynamically and committing to your enunciation actually can slow you down.

This is profoundly important to people, because part of why language is so incredible is it is onomatopoetic. And by that I mean, words often sound like the thing that they are. Slap, bell, snake. These are words that sound like the thing that they are. But if you don’t enunciate them, your audience will not feel the emotional impact of these.

So the question becomes then, if enunciation is important, which it is, and if focusing on it can actually have the side benefit of slowing you down. If you are a very, very rapid speaker, how do you use or how do you practice drills, I should say, to help enunciation? Now, in this book, everything that you’re gonna read is things that I’ve invented. So lots and lots of drills that I’ve developed working with professionals. But the next one that I’m gonna tell you for enunciation has nothing to do with me. I can take no credit for it. I will give a shout out to Andrew Wade. He was a voice and speech teacher I worked with at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. But he’s former head of the voice and speech at the Royal Shakespeare Company in London.

But even he doesn’t get the credit, because he learned it from someone who learned it from someone. And the principle goes all the way back to ancient Greece and an orator named Demosthenes. But we only know about this ancient orator named Demosthenes because Herodotus wrote down about what he was doing. So it probably goes back even further than that. So if that does not give it some historical cred and you don’t want to try it, I don’t know what will. Anyway, you put an impediment in between your teeth. And if a toothbrush works, and if a pen, your pinky finger, a slice of wine cork is a great one to use because it has a little give, so you have a little cushion there. But people, very important, safety first. If you use the wine cork, do not inhale the cork. That would not be a good outcome for speaking, okay? But you put the impediment in between your teeth just over to the side, so not right in front where it might block your tip of tongue sounds. Like T and D and N and L, T, D, N, L. Put it just to the side. And then you practice navigating around that impediment and making sure that every single syllable is totally clear, even with that impediment.

And of course, what happens is your enunciation gets supercharged, and of course, your rate of speech slows too, because you have to navigate around that impediment, whatever it is, in order to speak.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve done that before. I think it’s a very powerful tool. Another tool that actors have used for a long time are tongue twisters. Unique New York, unique New York. Is that something else you have clients do?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yes, absolutely. And by the way, back to the sports metaphor, folks this is not a wacky thing of like, “Oh, yeah, I saw Ron Burgundy and Anchorman do it. How silly that is.” No, people, if you accept this brave idea I’m putting forth that speaking is physical. It is a sport. Then you would never do a sport without warming up. You might pull a muscle, you might hurt yourself, or you just might not perform at your peak. Speaking is the same thing. So it stands to reason, if you are relying on the muscles of speech to perform well and accomplish whatever goal you have as a communicator, it stands to reason you should warm up. So those tongue twisters, those are a type of warmup, and there’s a whole bunch of them. I’ll give you the funniest one, which this is not for the faint of heart, folks. Do not try this at home. You might get injured. Here we go. I am a pleasant mother pheasant plucker, I pluck pleasant mother pheasants. I’m the best pleasant mother pheasant plucker. Whoever plucked a pleasant mother pheasant. You can see why that has some pitfalls.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Would you do that with the cork in your mouth too? Is that something you can do to increase the strenuosity of the drill?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah. You all have seen Steph Curry of the Golden State warriors doing his pregame prep when he dribbles multiple balls and makes the job harder and harder and harder for himself. Yeah. Increase the level of difficulty because you are a communication athlete. And here’s another fun thing. If you have a smartphone or even a cell phone, I’m guessing many people listening to this do, that gives you camouflage to do tongue twisters and warm up anywhere in the world, anytime, and no one knows that you’re doing it. So memorize some of the tongue twisters you can find in the book or on our website and talk into your phone and just do these tongue twisters like you’re having a conversation with someone else. And the reason I say this, is because I wanna remove any excuse you have that would prevent you from embracing this life practice, because it’s a great one.

Brett McKay: That’s a great one. That’s what I love about your book and your ideas, is that it gives you something to do. Oftentimes when you read public speaking books or how to improve your delivery, they don’t give you anything to do. So it’s just you read it and you’re like okay, well I’ll try to remember that next time. And we’ve got stuff to do. I love this. Let’s talk about vocal variety. That’s another thing people often think about when they’re presenting, like, “Am I being too monotone or am I doing too much vocal variety.” How should people think about vocal variety in their public speaking? Or should they not think too much about it?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: They should think about it for the next two or three minutes when I teach them about it. And then they should forget it for the rest of their lives. And here’s a cool reason why. You know it, you know how to do it, and you know it in your bones. Because humans use vocal variety for some really important things, like communicating the meaning of what they’re saying, like communicating the emotion of what they’re saying, like framing things with some context or orientation, and also crucially, to surprise each other. We use vocal variety to keep people engaged. Monotone voices actually don’t use any novelty. When there’s novelty, our brains tend to disengage. Think of this like the white noise of a fan in the background. Soon you hear that pattern will never change. And so now that you know it won’t change, you can ignore it forever because it’s no longer danger or delight. You hear that? So this is not something you should have to be dramatic. This is a core part of how humans reach each other. How do you improve it then? So here’s a quick system, and then you can forget it.

Vocal variety is something humans have been doing a long time. I just established that. So I didn’t invent that at all. But I did invent this naming system you’re about to learn to make it alliterative and therefore, hopefully easy. Pace, pitch, pause, power, and placement. Pace is speed. Pitch is high and low. Pause is silence, and varied lengths of silence.

Power is volume. So that’s loud and soft. Loud and soft. And then placement means where the sound is placed in your body. We are musical instruments. We have a reed in our throat. That’s our vocal cords. They vibrate and they get amplified throughout our whole entire body. So we can have our voice placed differently. If you have a friend with a really nasal voice, what’s happening technically is the sound is only amplifying in the mask of the face and the nasal passages. So we all can relate to that, of course. What we’re aiming for here is more vocal variety. For the most part. Most people contract their vocal variety when they’re nervous or giving a big presentation or public speaking of any kind. Or to your point, the example of being on a date even, when we’re under pressure, we tend to contract our vocal variety, and we should instead be trying to expand it. For the most part.

You can go too far, and we could talk about that if you want to, but that’s very, very rare indeed. For most people, the trick is to expand it. And the cool thing is they’re very interlocked, so you honestly can expand any one of them. And what they tend to do is bring all the others along for the ride. And I can tell you a couple exercises to do that, if you want to know.

Brett McKay: Yeah. What are some exercises that people can start doing today to improve their vocal variety?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, here’s a fun one. It’s called silent storytelling. I want you to talk, but you don’t get to use any sound. So you have to basically mouth the words or lip sync the words. You have to move your face a lot. Lots of facial expressions to help an audience know what you were saying. And you have to allow your hand to gesture with freedom and ease because you don’t have the advantage of sound. So think of this like lip syncing a little bit. You’re not playing charades. Let me be clear about that. You’re not acting things out, per se. You’re just heightening all of the physical aspects of your communication, because you don’t get to use sound. So you’re lip syncing words, but as expressively as you can. Do that for a few minutes. And then put sound back into the equation. But you’re not allowed to contract everything. Okay? Your enunciation and dynamic lip movement has to be just as big, your facial expressions just as big, your gestural ease and freedom just as expanded. And what happens, like magic, is all of a sudden your voice has much more vocal variety. I’ll teach you a phrase I learned from Ralph Zito, who taught at the Juilliard School when I trained with him.

And the phrase is your voice is your body. And I’ll say it differently. I’m gonna pound my chest for a second. You can hear this. Your voice is your body. And I’ll plug my nose now. Your voice is your body. So if you change how your body is operating, your voice changes dramatically too. And the silent storytelling exercise does that.

Brett McKay: I love that. That’s a great one. Okay, so we’ve talked about things we can do to improve our delivery with our voice. Enunciating, slowing down, being more precise with our words. Let’s talk about eye contact. I know a lot of people when they’re speaking in front of a group or a large audience, they might be thinking, okay, “Where am I supposed to look?” Do I just look at the back? Do I look at a random spotlight? Do I look at a group of people? So how do we do eye contact when we’re speaking to a group. And why is it important to even think about eye contact when you’re speaking to a whole bunch of people?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: It’s essential to think about it, because the way we talk about eye contact, it’s a misnomer. In fact, I don’t even like the phrase eye contact because it sounds like it’s something you have. Brett has good eye contact, like it’s a possession or a trait even, but it’s not. Eye contact is an activity. It is an activity of evaluating if your message is reaching your audience or not. That’s why we do it. And you can think of a whole bunch of thought experiments, talking to a lost tourist or helping a person who doesn’t speak English understand something. You would be looking at them and looking at them directly to learn as much information as you can. So eye contact is crucial. And it’s crucial when you’re talking to large groups as well. And this is one of the places we hear the worst kind of feedback, which is again, the reductive. Make eye contact for 8-12 seconds. Okay, why? Why that length of time? People have watched people, they say, well, that’s about how long they do it. So I guess we should make that the average. No.

Look at individual people and try to elicit some kind of nonverbal response or cue from them to see if your message is resonating. And look at different people around the room. Now, if it’s a huge audience, you don’t have to look at every single person. If it’s an audience of thousands, you will never be able to look at everybody. But if you do reach individuals in various places of the audience, what happens, because of how we’re put together as communication instruments, your communication will improve because of that eye contact. It will unlock a virtuous cycle because as you work harder to reach that person, you’re gonna gesture, you’re gonna enunciate more, you’re gonna use vocal variety and breathe. All of these things will unlock. So look at individual people. Try to elicit some kind of a nonverbal cue from them. You may not win, by the way. You may not get that. That’s okay. Even in the act of trying, you’ll still get some success. And then throw out all the garbage. 8-12 seconds, four different quadrants of the room. Look at people’s foreheads so you don’t get distracted. Scan above their heads. All this conventional wisdom that I would posit is not wise at all.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about one thing that a lot of people maybe think too much about, when they’re public speaking. They often get like, was it Ricky Bobby and Talladega Nights? Where they’re like, “I don’t know what to do with my hands.” So what are you supposed to do with your hands and gestures when you’re speaking?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, here’s the hilarious thing, folks. There’s a good reason that you’re confused about that, because you can probably think on your own of two, three, five, 10 don’ts about gestures. It’s like, don’t point at your audience, don’t make distracting hand gestures, don’t cross your arms, don’t fidget your fingers, don’t keep your hands in your pockets, don’t jangle the coins in your pockets, don’t put your hands behind your back. That looks like you’re hiding something. It just goes on and on and on. And so soon you have the question like well, okay, what the heck should I do with them? And all those don’ts, back to the idea of thought suppression and the title of the book of course, just makes people chronically self focused. Which is why you end up with these limbs hanging off your shoulders and you have no idea what to do with. So this goes back to the same idea of other focus. You have to figure out how you use your hands in real life when you’re focused on reaching the other person, not thinking about what you’re doing with your hands. For most people, that means moving your hands more than you might think.

I am not a fan of the don’t make distracting hand gestures advice for all of the reasons I just said. But one of the most brutal is this, is that when people tend to constrain their gestures, they tend to constrain everything else too. So their vocal variety vanishes, their face becomes totally stoic, and still oftentimes their enunciation even becomes less dynamic, and they just look like a more boring version of themselves. Who wants that? So what should you do? Well, you should try to liberate your hands to do what they wanna do. To speak with gestural freedom and ease. Now, I’m not saying make just like general hand waving repetitive motions. I’ll give you a funny example. I one time was involved somewhere where they had some curriculum that suggested that people think about gestures, like keeping a beach ball aloft. Okay? So everyone dutifully stood up and waved their hands like they were keeping a beach ball aloft, but they just kept doing the same gesture over and over again. Now, the idea of course, was to try to get them moving their hands a little bit, which is good. But the image and the activity was so arbitrary that it didn’t actually unlock how people speak in real life.

So instead, what I would suggest is there’s two exercises in the book that I list. One is the silent storytelling drill that I already described for vocal variety. And again, how this drill can work is you speak, but without sound. So you exaggerate your facial expressiveness. And yes, use your hands as much as possible to try to illustrate what you’re talking about so that an audience watching with no sound could understand your message. And what happens, of course, is your hands get liberated to move quite a lot. And then once you’ve done that a bit, let it go, put sound back into your speech, and then enjoy the freedom that your hands have just realized.

So that’s one. This next one is for you athletes out there. Get a ball, a bouncy ball you can throw against a wall, like a racquetball, tennis ball, something like this. And then practice speaking whatever content you want to, but throw the ball at the wall and catch it on the rebound. But now, this time, try to throw the ball in as big and as wide a range as possible. So you have to really reach to catch the ball on the rebound.

And then, talk while you do this. Now, it’s gonna be difficult ’cause your brain’s doing two things, catching the ball and talking. So it’ll take some coordination to get it down. But then what you’re gonna realize is, oh my gosh, my hands have this huge range they can actually occupy. And then, hold the ball in your hand, don’t throw it anymore and continue to speak. But allow your hands to tell a story too. All of those tools are to liberate people who tend to constrain their gestures way too much. The rare over talkers with their hands. It’s not that you’re over talking, it’s that you’re telling the same darn story over and over again. They’re just doing the same thing. So instead of giving yourself thought suppression of, don’t make distracting hand gestures or don’t talk with your hands. Instead, challenge yourself to be better. Make your hands tell a better story. And those would be some tools for gestures.

Brett McKay: I love that. So we’ve talked about some really concrete drills that people can start doing today in their daily life to improve their delivery. No matter how much you prepare, there’s a chance you’ll still get nervous when you’re speaking. Any advice for people to help manage their nerves when they do arise, when they’re in a public speaking situation? Or even it could be a first date situation.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah. I want to answer this with as much generosity as I can. And to prove that point, if you go to the book’s website, dontsayum.com, you get the Navigating Nerves chapter for free. And when I call it Navigating Nerves, because that should be the goal. Not stopping, not preventing, not battling, navigating. And we’re gonna keep that chapter free, because whether or not people buy this book. I desperately want to help folks who have been stuck in some sort of self defeating cycle for a long, long time to get some liberation about nerves in their life. So I called it Navigating Nerves, because most people make the first mistake by being in opposition to their nerves. So all those combative verbs, battle, suppress, fight, all they do is make the nerves worse. Again, it’s back to this idea of thought suppression. So if you’re telling yourself, don’t be nervous, don’t be nervous, stop being nervous. Or even putting some self judgment on there, like why are you always nervous? Why do you get so nervous? Why are you so bad at this? Don’t be nervous, stop being nervous. You can hear the voice. All you’re doing is actually amping up your nerves and also amping up your feelings of failure about that.

So step number one, you’re going to be nervous. And you might in fact be nervous for the rest of your life and they might even get worse. Why? Because you are going to attain bigger and bigger victories in your life, your career and your life and your goals and everything about your life will get better and better, folks. Especially if you do all the lessons they’re learning on the Art of Manliness podcast. You’re gonna get better and better, which means you’ll attain bigger and bigger heights. And when you do that, guess what? It might feel even more nerve wracking to be at that new height. That’s good. It means that you care. It means that you’re invested. It means that your central nervous system, by the way, is very reactive. These are good things, so stop trying to fight them. You will be nervous. Now that you’ve reset them, your goal is not to distract yourself with something utterly arbitrary. Just imagine your audience in their underwear, because now your brain has to multitask. Naked people.

And what am I trying to say? Naked people, my message. Naked people, my message. Naked people, my message. Naked people, ah. Instead, find something physical and unmistakable and measurable that you can focus on, that gives you a positive point of focus. That could be grounding your feet. That could be really being mindful of your tip of tongue, sounds in your enunciation. That could be your eye contact and trying to elicit a reaction from various faces in the room. That could be breathing, feeling your backside ribs expand as you allow air to come into your body. It could be any of those things. But put your focus on something physical and then allow that to help you navigate through the nerves. And the better and better you get at putting your attention 100% on that thing. What happens, is the nerves begin to fade away, but not because you fought them, but because you’ve put your focus elsewhere and some are more productive.

Brett McKay: Well Michael, it has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, for sure. Well, you can follow us on social if you’re a social fan, you can just search for GK Training and all the various socials you might want to. But more specifically for the book, the book’s website is, Don’t Say Um. Just the same title, dontsayum.com. And my company is GK Training. And the URL there is just gktraining.com and that’s where you can find all the warmups and tongue twisters and exercises I talked about earlier.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Michael Chad Hoeppner, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: My pleasure too. Thank you.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Michael Chad Hoeppner. He’s the author of the book, Don’t Say Um. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about the book at the website dontsayum.com, also check out our show notes at aom.is/um, where you find links to our resources, we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website @artofmanliness.com. You find our podcast archives and check out our new newsletter. It’s called DYING BREED. You can sign up @dyingbreed.net, it’s a great way to support the show. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time is Brett McKay. Remind each other to listen to the AOM podcast. But put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Note: Sinclair Lewis once said that one of the “two insults no human will endure” is “the assertion that he has no sense of humor” (the other is the “assertion that he has never known trouble”). Why is saying someone lacks a sense of humor such a damning indictment? Why do we like to think we possess this quality, and why do we value it in others? And why do we instinctively distrust people who take themselves too seriously?

In this excerpt from Influencing Human Behavior (published in 1925), H.A. Overstreet offers some insightful theories on these questions, as well as tips on how to improve your own sense of humor.

What a Sense of Humor Implies

Apparently, the possession of humor implies possession of a number of typical habit systems. The first is an emotional one: the habit of playfulness. Why should one be proud of being playful? For a double reason. First, playfulness connotes childhood and youth. If one can be playful, one still possesses something of the vigor and the joy of young life. If one has ceased to be playful, one writes oneself down as rigidly old. And who wishes to confess to himself that, rheumatic as are his joints, his mind and spirit are really aged? So the old man is proud of the playful joke which assures him that he is still friskily young.

But there’s a deeper implication. To be playful is, in a sense, to be free. When a person is playful, he momentarily disregards the binding necessities which compel him, in business, morals, domestic and community life. These binding necessities, for the most part, encompass our lives. We have to submit to them whether we wish to or not. We have to go to work — no play about that! We have to pay our rent, to watch our moral step, to obey the policemen, to be circumspect in our diet. Life is largely compulsion. But in play we are free! We do what we please. We make the rules. And if we lose, there’s no harm done; while if we win, there’s no sadness at having brought distress to another.

Apparently there is no dearer human wish than to be free.

But this is not simply a wish to be free from; it is also, and more deeply, a wish to be free to. What galls us is that the binding necessities do not permit us to shape our world as we please. They hand out the conditions to us. We must take them or leave them. What we most deeply desire, however, is to create our world for ourselves. Whenever we can do that, even in the slightest degree, we are happy.

To imply, therefore, that a person has a fine sense of humor is to imply that he still has in him the spirit of play, which implies even more deeply, the spirit of freedom and of creative spontaneity.

Poking Fun at the Respectabilities

In humor, the spirit of playful freedom gets frequent expression in delighted digs at “necessary things.” Why be so oppressively respectable? To be sure, we have to be respectable. We cannot do certain things. But at least we can take it out on the solemn respectabilities by saying certain things. This is what Freud calls “escaping the censor.” We all like to be a little wicked just because virtue is so uppish about it — and so confoundedly necessary!

It would almost seem as if the willingness and the wish to be somewhat flippant toward the solemn respectabilities — of state and church and sex and family — were a prerequisite for a sense of humor. For apparently the person who submits himself utterly to the social and moralistic compulsions can hardly possess that gay freedom which delights in building the world for itself; which delights, therefore, every now and then, in knocking the long-faced respectabilities endwise.

We Blunder

Not all humor, however, seeks to poke fun at the respectabilities. Much of it is concerned with our blunders. Now we can have the habit of taking all blunders seriously; then we condemn them. Or we can have the habit of playing with them. One of our newly-rich mothers made herself famous some years ago by declaring with great earnestness that she was looking up the best schools in Washington for her daughters, because, she said, she wanted her daughters to be macadamized. Stupid woman, says the serious person; she ought to have learned better English!

To see the humor of a situation, therefore, apparently requires not only the ability to blunder and to see blunders — we all possess that — but the ability to blunder and to see blunders with a certain detachment. The deadly serious person is all wrapped up in what he’s doing. The crusader, for example, is never humorous about his crusading. If he were, he would doubtless not crusade. In order to get himself properly worked up, he has to put his soul right up against one deadly, detestable fact and hold it there. He must see nothing else, particularly nothing that will mitigate the one fact. In the same manner, a person may put his soul so immediately up against himself, or his troubles, or his ambitions as to see nothing else in the universe. He then is said to take himself too seriously; and any joke made at his expense is not a joke but an insult.

Humor Is Not Censorious

But the humorous person is blessed among us because he has the habit of taking other people’s blunders rather lightly. He is not a perfectionist. There are few more deadly persons than perfectionists. They take the joy out of life because what they require of us is so dolefully beyond our powers. The finely humorous person, on the contrary, is felt to be one of us. He is not offensively our moral superior. He knows our weaknesses; but he rather suspects that he has similar weaknesses himself. Hence, when we are with him, we are comfortable. We know that he will not pry too severely into our shortcomings. He will not draw a long face and threaten us with eventual damnation.

Why We Like Humorous Persons

From the foregoing brief analysis, then, it should be clear why — other things being equal — we like persons who have a sense of humor. The humorous person has a number of delightful qualities: he is playful; free; creative; not priggish, nor fanatic, nor bigoted; he is not afraid of laughing at the too solemn respectabilities; he is not censorious; above all, he’s everlastingly and refreshingly unexpected. Therefore we like to live with him. And so because, by implication, we deny these delightful qualities, we offer the direst insult when we jokingly say to a person: “You’re all right, my friend; but you haven’t a grain of humor in you.” We mean that he had best not be around too much!

Can We Cultivate Humor?

And now we come to a difficult question: how can this fine quality of humor be cultivated? The foregoing analysis should cast some light upon the problem. Humor, we said, exhibits itself in a number of typical habits. Can we cultivate these? In the first place there is the habit of being playful. If we vaguely suspect that we have not a noticeable degree of humor, we might ask ourselves: Are we ever playful with serious things; or is it our habit always to take serious things — our work, our soul’s salvation, the salvation of our neighbors or the world — with prodigious solemnity?

The Puritan may cry out against this, but serious things apparently have to be taken with a touch of playfulness if we are not to surrender the freedom of our spirits. Why, for example, if we are scientists, be so deadly in earnest about our researches in chromosomes. Chromosomes are valuable, no doubt;  but there are other things in life. Besides, there is even a possibility that one may be mistaken about one’s blessed chromosomes and that a later scientist may have a good round laugh at one’s expense. Or if it is not chromosomes, then vegetarianism, or antivivisection, or fundamentalism or birth control. We can get the habit of being playful with our serious concerns. We can knock them about a bit; be irreverent towards them; consider them temporary nuisances. We can refrain from scowling when people disagree with what we hold certain or sacred; and we can heroically restrain ourselves from passing laws to compel them to bow the knee to our beliefs.

Are we timid towards the respectabilities? Then we can learn to poke fun at them. We can realize that the world is still in the making and that the last respectability has not been cast into the mold of eternity. We can at least be proud of our ability to be free spirits and can genuinely make faces at the oftentimes royal pretender, Convention.

The first thing, of course, that we have to learn is that humor is something far more than making jokes. It is an attitude. If we are of that unfortunate number who can never remember the right joke at the right moment, we may rest easy. There are more things in the heaven and earth of humor than made-to-order jokes. The important thing is that we begin to be free with our utilitarian and conventional concerns — playfully free; that we renounce the slavery of too strict allegiance and take mental and spiritual holidays. The effect is much like an actual vacation; we come back a little boisterous and contagiously happy.

It is good to be earnest about our convictions. But not too earnest. Humanity has had a long, hard march. It is often tired and blunderheaded. Apparently there is no use getting too wrought up about the mistakes it makes. Things straighten out far more quickly in the presence of the genial and understanding mind than in the presence of the mind all ugly to condemn and to crucify.

The Crucial Test

But now we come to our real test. It is fairly easy to laugh at the incongruities in the behavior of other folk; it is not so easy to laugh at the incongruities of our own behavior. Have we been disproportionately wrathful at something that really, in the long run, amounted to little? And has our life-companion rather caustically remarked that we seem to have lost our sense of humor? To be sure, life-companions should not be caustic in such crises. Far better if husband and wife agreed beforehand on a non-irritating signal to be given on all such trying occasions. But even the mildest and most kindly-intentioned signal might only infuriate us the more.

We had best, therefore, in time of fair weather prepare for storms. We might do well then to remind ourselves fairly frequently that the most liberating ability possessed by man is the ability to laugh at himself. With sufficient self-reminding, it is not impossible to build up a laughing-at oneself habit. Our irritations, frustrations, disgust and angers would take on a most delightful sporting quality if we began to watch ourselves under stress and to note the precise moment at which, our sense of proportion completely vanishing, our humor went into the discard.

A sense of humor, then, is not to be regarded as a mysterious gift which some fortunate individuals are endowed. It is a system of prevailing habits, habits which it is apparently within the power of all of us to develop. Primary among them is the habit of playfulness. Expressed briefly, this is the habit of taking things out of their conventionally accepted relationships, as, for example, when we use a good utilitarian pillow for a pillow fight instead of for a nocturnal head-rest. So the punster plays with words when he departs from the accepted utilitarian way of holding each word strictly to a single meaning. So, again, a contest becomes play when it is agreed that losing is bereft of its conventional meaning of disaster.

To be playful, in short, is to re-create our world of binding necessities, to do with it what is not conventionally expected or required.

It seems reasonable to assert that there is no fixed or inherited degree of playfulness in each of us, but that once we are aware of the basic relation of playfulness to humor, the degree to which the former operates can be noticeably increased.

So we can learn, with moderation, to play with the serious things of life. We can play with people’s blunders. We can overcome our habits of undue censoriousness. Above all, we can grow the habit of noticing incongruities, noting them, however, without bitterness and raising them by exaggeration to laughable conspicuousness. Finally, precisely as we can direct this fine playfulness towards others, we can direct it towards ourselves, learning this solid salutatory habit of not taking ourselves too seriously.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Ever feel like you can’t say no? Like you’re constantly doing things you don’t want to to avoid letting others down or having them think less of you? You’re not alone. Saying no to people’s requests is something I’ve had to work on throughout my adult life. I know a lot of other people who have trouble saying no, too.

And it isn’t just a modern problem.

My recent interview with Alex Petkas about Plutarch’s Lives led me to revisit the ancient writer’s Moralia — a collection of essays about topics ranging from how to manage your anger to knowing if you’re growing in virtue. Plutarch’s got an essay in there on the issue of people-pleasing. The Greek word Plutarch used for people-pleasing was dysōpia, which is roughly translated to “the embarrassment that makes us grant unjustified requests.”

In today’s article, we’re going to take a look at what Plutarch said about dysōpia and his ancient-yet-still-relevant advice on how to overcome it.

The People-Pleaser’s Paradox

Plutarch notes that excessive people-pleasing often comes from a good place. Courteous and conscientious people are the ones who typically struggle with dysōpia. Those who care about doing the right thing and about how they look in the eyes of others are capable of shame, and like other ancients, Plutarch thought shame could be a very healthy thing; shame was a virtue because it checked reckless and selfish behavior.

But, Plutarch observes, someone can be too sensitive to shame, and it is from this overweening sense of shame that people-pleasing arises. A person who struggles with dysōpia feels excessive shame for something they shouldn’t: saying no to annoying or unnecessary requests. Plutarch takes an Aristotelian approach to the virtue of shame: you should feel it at the right time, for the right reasons, and at the right intensity. Because dysōpia is an inappropriate experience of shame, Plutarch considered it a vice.

The Real Cost of Never Saying No

Plutarch catalogs the price we pay when we succumb to dysōpia:

• We make promises we can’t keep.
• We lend money to people who won’t repay us.
• We compromise our integrity.
• We sacrifice our needs and values to avoid momentary discomfort.
• We allow ourselves less time to focus on the people and causes that are really important to us.

Plutarch’s most keen insight about the cost of not saying no to people is that we often end up creating the very thing we were trying to avoid: embarrassment and a bad reputation.

Here’s Plutarch’s thinking:

• A people-pleaser says yes to requests to avoid feeling bad about saying no and to build a reputation as a helpful person.
• But because the people-pleaser never says no, they overcommit and fail to follow through on the commitments they’ve made.
• Consequently, they gain a reputation for being a flake and are looked down upon by others and feel bad about themselves.

Plutarch’s Guide to Breaking Free From People-Pleasing

Plutarch offers practical advice on overcoming the vice of people-pleasing:

1. Start Small

Don’t try to transform overnight. Start with low-stakes situations:

• Decline the extra drink offered at dinner when you’ve had enough.
• Send your meal back at a restaurant when it wasn’t made right.
• Exit conversations you aren’t enjoying.

2. Practice Strategic Silence

If someone makes an unreasonable request, Plutarch doesn’t think you always have to respond. Sometimes, you don’t need to say anything at all. As Plutarch puts it, “Silence is an answer to the wise.”

If a random person on LinkedIn messages you to “pick your brain” for an hour, ignore it. If a family member texts you asking for a big loan, delete it.

3. Remember Your Past Regrets

Plutarch recommends reminding yourself of moments when you said yes to something you didn’t want to do and how crappy you felt afterwards. Hopefully, the painful memory will keep you from making a similar mistake.

4. Adjust Your No Depending on the Person

Plutarch was a keen observer of human nature, particularly social status. He understood that how you refuse someone varies based on their status. Here’s Plutarch’s playbook to saying no based on social status:

Dealing With Power Players

You know the type — high-status individuals used to getting their way. Maybe it’s your boss or an influential client.

With these types of people, whose good graces you generally want to stay in, Plutarch recommends taking a subtle approach to saying no.

Instead offering a direct, terse no that may ruffle their feathers, try:

• Appealing to their sense of excellence and artistry.
• Making it about living up to their high standards.
• Turning their pride into your ally.

If a prestigious client is pushing you to cut corners on a project, frame your no in terms of maintaining the exceptional quality they’re known for. “I know you’ve built your reputation on outstanding work. That’s why I can’t in good conscience rush this crucial phase.”

Regular Folks

With people who don’t hold power over you but make requests to which you don’t want to acquiesce, Plutarch suggests using humor to tactfully decline.

So if a well-meaning, clueless person asks you to join their MLM, say something like, “Thanks for the invite, but I still have protein powder in my garage from the last multi-level marketing business I joined. Have to park the car in the driveway! Ha!”

If you can’t inject humor, Plutarch thinks giving a straightforward no is completely fine:

• I don’t lend out my tools anymore.
• I’m unavailable that evening to help.
• My policy is to only offer those opportunities to grad students.
• I don’t do morning meetings; that’s my focused work period.
• That’s not possible.
• No, but thanks for thinking of me.

The Shameless Ones

These guys are the professional boundary-pushers who treat “no” as the opening bid in a negotiation. You know who I’m talking about — the people who just. won’t. quit.

For these people, Plutarch recommends fighting fire with fire.. When someone’s being shameless in their demands, you have permission to be equally shameless in your refusal. Tell them to pound sand. Kick rocks. Jump in a lake. Sit on it.

As Plutarch says: “A handy arm with knaves is knavery.”

I found this bit of advice particularly helpful for some reason. If people can be bold with their asks, then I can be just as bold with my nos.

The Buck Stops Here

For Plutarch, learning to say no isn’t just about being assertive — it’s about being true to your telos in life. 

The goal isn’t to become cold or unhelpful, but to find a balance between kindness and self-respect. As Plutarch puts it, we need “a harmonious blend” of courtesy and firmness. The above advice can help nudge you more toward the self-respect side of the spectrum if you’ve had a problem with people-pleasing your entire life.

Go Deeper

We’ve put out lots of podcasts and articles over the years on how to overcome people-pleasing and say no. Check out these AoM classics to go deeper into this subject:

• How to Firmly Say No Without Coming Off Like a Jerk
• Podcast #915: Finally Learn to Say No
• A Better Way to Say No
• Quit Being a Pushover: How to Be Assertive
• Podcast #407: How to Stop Being a Nice Guy

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

How to Win Friends and Influence People may have sold tens of millions of copies, but its author, Dale Carnegie, wasn’t born a complete natural at embodying the principles the book espouses. Instead, the warm, low-key charm Carnegie was known for during his life was developed through intentional and consistent effort and practice.

One of the tools Carnegie used to hone his social prowess was a folder he kept called “Damned Fool Things I Have Done.” As detailed in his biography, when he made some kind of social misstep that reflected a behavior or quality he wanted to improve, he wrote down the incident and filed it away. “I put in that folder, month after month, written records of the damned fool things I have been guilty of,” Carnegie said. “I sometimes dictate these memos to my secretary, but sometimes they are so personal, so stupid, that I am ashamed to dictate them, so I write them in longhand.”

Carnegie’s “D.F.T” folder contained records of the times he stuck his foot in his mouth, committed a faux pas, made someone feel awkward, gave into laziness, arrived somewhere late, bungled a conversation, procrastinated, lost his temper or patience, and so on.

One of its entries said: “Wasted ten minutes in an unnecessary harangue with the phone company about their shortcomings.”

Another read: “H.P. Gant made an extraordinary success as toastmaster tonight. I should have complimented him highly, but I was so absorbed in myself that I neglected to say any words of appreciation.”

When an office clerk was slow to help him, Carnegie made this record of the interaction: “I was peeved. My voice showed it. I irritated the clerk and got very poor service in return…It affected nothing desirable whatever. I, who take money from people for telling them how to handle human nature, was as crude and ineffective as a caveman. I was ashamed of the incident.”

Under an entry he labeled “Don’t make sweeping statements that may offend someone,” Carnegie wrote: “I said, while teaching the 5-7 PM class, that ‘all Tammany politicians are crooks,’ or something nearly that. Joseph Davern, an ardent Catholic, took a feeling of exception to it. It was just at the time that religious controversy regarding Al Smith’s religion was developing. Davern made a most excellent speech on tolerance, decrying the fact that I should make such an unguarded and unfounded accusation. I apologized.”

While the advice often given today is not to dwell on one’s mistakes, Carnegie thought it was best to get your shortcomings out in the open and confront their cringe-inducing reality head-on. If embarrassing social failings only pop into your head while you’re lying in bed at night, and then get quickly pushed out of the mind, it’s not possible to learn from past foibles and figure out how to get better in the future. For Carnegie, writing down his deficiencies and then regularly reviewing the contents of his Damned Fool Things I’ve Done folder was a helpful habit — akin to the spiritual practice of self-examination. As he observed:

When I get out my D.F.T. folders and re-read the criticisms I have written of myself, they do more to help and direct me than anything Solomon could have written. They help me to deal with the biggest problem I shall ever face: the management of Dale Carnegie.

For more insights from Carnegie on how to develop your social prowess, listen to this episode of the AoM podcast:

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.