Dr. Sue Johnson on how to have a “Hold Me Tight” conversation with your partner | Watch my full interview with iconic therapist Dr. Sue Johnson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyN-H…
How To Speak by Patrick Winston
Patrick Winston’s How to Speak talk has been an MIT tradition for over 40 years. Offered every January, the talk is intended to improve your speaking ability in critical situations by teaching you a few heuristic rules.
Want to raise successful kids? Harvard, MIT study says doing one thing at age 4 could make them happier and wealthier in life
Thanks to modern science, there are a number of effective — yet obvious — strategies to smart parenting. But last year, a group of researchers at MIT, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania found that one of the best things parents can do for their children is to have frequent back-and-forth exchanges with them.
The findings suggest that doing this at an early age (typically between ages 4 to 6) will help develop, foster and improve what is perhaps one of the most important skills that contribute to success in life: Communication.
What’s more, a number of studies have supported the idea that children with stronger communication skills are more likely to have healthier relationships, longer marriages, higher self-esteem and overall satisfaction in life.
.. We talk to our kids all the time — both directly and indirectly. “Sit here.” “Hurry, we’re going to be late.” “Great job!” “No, don’t do that.” “Alexa, read us a bedtime story.” The secret, however, is to have back-and-forth conversations.
For the study, researchers evaluated 36 children using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify the differences in how the brain responds to different conversational styles.
They found that the Broca’s area, a region of the brain that focuses on speech production and language processing, was much more active in children who engaged in more back-and-forth conversations. Children who had more activation in that region of the brain scored higher in tests of language, grammar and verbal reasoning skills.
“The really novel thing about our paper is that it provides the first evidence that family conversation at home is associated with brain development in children,” John Gabrieli, the senior author of the study, told MIT News. “It’s almost magical how parental conversation appears to influence the biological growth of the brain.”
.. Back in 1995, a landmark study found that children from higher-income families appeared to have much greater language and communication abilities, and it was thought to be correlated with the fact that those children were exposed to about 30 million more words during the first years of life, compared to children of lower-income families.
But findings from this recent study suggest that the “30 million word gap” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
“The conversational turn-taking seems like the thing that makes a difference, regardless of socioeconomic status,” Gabrielli said. “Such turn-taking occurs more often in families from a higher socioeconomic status, but children coming from families with lesser income or parental education showed the same benefits from conversational turn-taking.”
The point isn’t to have deep philosophical conversations with your children, but to instead carry conversations that require back-and-froth dialogue.
It’s not difficult to make that leap, and they’ll benefit in significant ways in the long run; interactive conversations help improve communication skills as a whole, and that’s a necessity for success in any future career. When it comes to your child’s success, maybe talk isn’t so cheap after all.
What world-class communicators do differently: 3 lessons from neuroscience
Dr. Goulston is a clinical psychiatrist. At one point he noticed that the same techniques he used to mend broken marriages and help suicidal patients worked just as well in other realms, realms like hostage negotiations and poisonous workplaces. When he sat down to think about it, he realized that despite the vastly different contexts in which they occurred, social violence, personal squabbles and workplace disputes have something in common: they are all about people trying to get through to one another in a stressful and highly emotional situation.
In his experience, such problems often get out of hand when we apply too much pressure at precisely the wrong time.
Something similar happens when we can’t get people to do what we want them to do. We push harder, we argue, we shout, or we swing the other way, pleasing, pleading, cajoling. In short, we upshift. And the other person responds with even more resistance, lashing out, becoming defensive, shutting us out.
A better way is to downshift, to stop talking and start listening so you can discern the emotions under the seemingly crazy behavior. When you shift your focus down to the root cause, to the raw emotion, you create traction that pulls the other person towards you. And that’s when you can get through to them.
Peering at your own grey matter, you’d notice that you have not one but three brains laid on top of one another. There’s the outer layer — the neocortex, which we usually think of as our brain. It’s the most recent, most evolved part that controls our higher-order functions, all that intellectual brilliance and impeccable manners we like to show to the world. But there are two other, much older parts wrapped around each other below the neocortex: the reptilian, or lizard brain which triggers our survival instincts and fear responses; and the mammalian brain, our emotional center, the seat of all feelings and moods, and also memory.
The upshot of this arrangement, Dr. Goulston says, is a kind of Jekyll and Hyde situation where one moment you are a perfectly reasonable human being and the next you’ve turned into “a cornered snake” or “a hysterical rabbit”. Because our neurology hasn’t caught up with modern times, our lizard brain sees potential threats everywhere and when it does, it flicks a switch that diverts resources away from our brain and into our limbs, to prepare us for fight or flight.
The best thing to do in this situation is to recognize that and to somehow move people form lizard or mammalian brain back to human brain it before you deliver your message.
Here are three ways to do exactly that.
1. Make the other person feel “felt”
It’s hardcoded into our DNA, this need to feel understood, or “felt”, by others. And when it’s not met, people act out. Rage, resistance, and even more mysterious afflictions like procrastination and underperformance at work are often just a way of saying “I’m having a hard time and nobody gives a damn.”
But faced with such situations, we often do precisely the wrong thing.
We tell the other person oh you are overreacting or stop acting like a drama queen or okay, let’s calm down here. And what’s the message we are sending? That we are not taking them seriously. That their problems are silly and don’t matter to us. And so to the other person we are just like everybody else. Why should they listen to us let alone do what we want them to?
The key, counterintuitively, is show that you empathize by acknowledging their negative emotions.
Here’s a classic technique adapted from hostage negotiations that shows how this can work in practice.
First, attach an emotion to what you think the other person is feeling, for example frustrated or angry or afraid.
Then, when you have a chance to talk in private, say: I’m trying to get a sense of what you’re feeling and I think it’s frustration (or anger or fear).
Or say: I’ll bet you feel that there is no way you’re going to be able to do what I’m asking you to do, isn’t that true? Then wait for the person to agree or to correct you.
Keep doing this until you go over all of the emotions you think are playing out. For example, you can follow up with: And I’ll bet you’re hesitant to tell me straight out that you can’t get it done, isn’t that also true?
This does two things:
a) you show that you’ve put yourself in their shoes, and
b) you get them to say yes repeatedly, which creates a positive momentum, a cascade of yesses.
Then dig deeper. Ask them: How frustrated are you? Or: And the reason you’re so frustrated is because. . . ?
Then sit back and listen. Don’t interrupt. Even if you don’t like what comes out, even if it stretches the truth so much that you have to jump in and set the record straight, don’t.
Finally, ask the other person to suggest a solution. Here are three good questions to ask: Tell me — what needs to happen for that to get better?