Rethinking Communication

Imagine I'm standing right across from you and I tell you I'm thinking about eating a steak. Psychology tells us that you likely would assume that was true, and that actually, you assume the things most people tell you are true.   But how can you be sure?   In this episode, I speak with Dr. Kurt Gray, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina and the Director o...

Is there anything a person can do that makes them unworthy of our empathy, curiosity, or compassion?   What if they've done something truly heinous?   This episode features my conversation with Robin Steinberg, who spent 35 years as a public defender in New York representing people in court who couldn't afford a lawyer, many of whom had undeniably committed horrific crimes.    In her book, "The Co...

There's an unanswered question lingering in the air amongst all the talk that focuses on dialogue and bridging divides and finding common ground.   And that question is: What happens when we have to move beyond conversation and achieving understanding and we actually have to start producing solutions to problems? What do we do then?   It's an important question because dialogue can only get us so...

Understanding yourself better by exploring the makeup of your ideas and beliefs about the way the world works — or perhaps even the way the world should work — is a must if you are to have better, more productive, more actionable conversations when conflict is present.   And often, this soul-searching work creates a psychological safety that allows you to show up more confidently as yourself in al...

What shifts in the moment someone tosses aside your unique humanity in favor of a damaging and hurtful stereotype? Where you become a caricature of a certain type of person in someone's mind rather than the nuanced and intricate person standing in front of them?   This week's guest, Tim Wenzel, believes that for so many of us, we're conditioned to be thoughtless in our response to being mislabeled...

What is the purpose of conversation?   Well, Fred Dust believes it's change.   Fred is the author of the book Making Conversation, and in this, well, conversation, Fred shares why creating change is an elemental component of the most valuable and creative method we have of communicating with each other.   And here's the trickiest part: the best, most productive, most creative conversations that ac...

What you hear in this episode is the rawest and most emotional interview I've ever done. And it's not even close.   When I first connected with Racquel Garcia, I was intrigued by her story of starting her organization, HardBeauty, where she and her team help people overcome and survive addiction, depression, homelessness, mental health issues, sexual assault, and domestic violence, among many othe...

I'm more than 100 episodes into this podcast now, and along the way, many of the guests I've had on the show have introduced me to some words and phrases that I'd never heard before yet have helped give me the vocabulary to appropriately express the things I see in this messy world.   My guest in this episode brings with him another word and another definition that I was previously unaware of that...

Here's the thing about listening: the person being listened to has to feel heard for true listening to have taken place. And not just what they say, but how they say it, and what they mean by what they say.   My guest this week is Oscar Trimboli, host of the Deep Listening podcast, author of the book How To Listen, and a man on a mission to create 100 million deep listeners specifically in the wor...

The polarized nature of American politics, the zero-sum nature of seemingly every issue, the ways our leaders act and create policy not because they stand for something, but because they want to oppose the other side … it's all just … exhausting.   Many Americans are in what's called "the exhausted majority," and this exhaustion can quickly turn to political apathy if the power of a collective voi...

I'm switching things up in this episode, as this time, it's my turn to be interviewed.   This is an interview I did with Kwame Christian on his Negotiate Anything podcast in late 2022.   In this conversation, Kwame and I discuss how to communicatively hold space for someone, the psychology of change, and what it means to ask curious questions.   You can listen to Kwame's podcast at https://podcast...

Lately, I've been fascinated by the psychology of change.   There came a point in late 2022 when I started to notice that many of the conversations I've had here on the show have carried with them an undertone of change. I've gone back and listened to many of the interviews, and change pops up quite frequently.   In fact, based on what I've gathered, one of the chapters of the book I'm currently w...

One of my favorite discoveries over the course of hosting this podcast is the concept that in order to communicate across divides and begin to better understand each other, we must learn to adopt the language of those we disagree with and speak in their terms.   Many guests here on the show have touched on this point, but t his week's guest exemplifies this approach more than perhaps anyone else I...

The first episode of 2023 my conversation with Karen Joy Hardwick. Karen recently released a new book, The Connected Leader: 7 Strategies to Empower Your True Self and Inspire Others.   And while it is a leadership book aimed particularly at business leaders, as I read The Connected Leader, I found that so much of the uplift Karen advocates for can be extended into our conversations outside of our...

We all — myself included — have this ineffective little habit of wanting to be better at something and desiring to show up differently in the world and talking about how we can be better, yet we struggle to practice the skills necessary for us to do so.   Perhaps nowhere is this more true than in conversations about race. And to be more pointed with it — conversations about race in the workplace....

This week's guest lays out plainly the role our emotions play in how we communicate with each other across differences and divides.   Ari Wallach calls this consideration of our emotions as being full-spectrum human beings who can go forward, backward, and inward in our thoughts, and when examining a path forward through conflicts and how we envision our future as a society and as people, we must...

My guest on this episode equates conversation to being on a playground, where there is humor, joy, curiosity, exploration, and yes, some arguments and hurt feelings. And feeling bold enough to invite others onto our own personal playgrounds requires us to first uncover some things about ourselves and how we wish to interact with those around us.   You're about to hear my conversation with Dr. Core...

In this episode, I'm bringing the political field of vision down to the local level, where honestly, I believe we're more likely to enact significant change. Because at the local level, we have more ability to effect said change. There's more within our control. We're closer to the problems, and we're closer to the solutions.   This mentality is at the heart of what my guest on this episode does f...

It's nearly impossible to hear the word polarization and not immediately think of nasty political feuds. And many point to the fact that we even have political parties as the source of much of our division.   So imagine my surprise when in the course of researching my guest's background for this episode, the organization he is a part of actually takes the stance that polarization isn't always a ba...

Take a moment and think about the hopes and dreams you have for your life.   Beyond your goals for your career or your relationships. Not the planned out path that you might already be working on.   I'm talking about the irrational, blissful, pie-in-the-sky dreams that perhaps captured your attention back when you were younger and the world hadn't caught up with your imagination yet.   Now, think...

One of the things that drives me crazy about modern society and culture is our tendency to call people names and assign them labels to avoid leaning into the uncomfortable conversations that exist when we disagree.   These names and labels — which are often untrue — carry with them enormous power to shut down productive conversation about important issues and they have the power to crush lives.  ...

This episode explores the nuance of trust, and how we create more of it.   My guest is Dan Vallone, the Director of More in Common USA. After spending 6 years as an active duty Army infantry officer, which included a tour in Afghanistan, Dan got into the work of education policy and innovation, and eventually began to explore the common factors that exist in broken societies — alienation, isolatio...

My guest this week believes there's a lot more good in the world than there is hate, you just have to avoid getting sucked into the hate machine and instead look for the many instances where good occurs in the small things.   In this episode, I chat with Adam Wilkinson, or Wilk, for short. He's a firm believer that light drives out darkness, and when we focus on bringing a little more light into t...

My guest this week is Dr. Christia Spears Brown, author of the book "Unraveling Bias: How prejudice has shaped children for generations and why it's time to break the cycle."   Christia explores how biases passed down through generations and through systems have time and time again come to a breaking point with children standing at ground zero of the struggle.   In reading Christia's book, I was s...

What if you lost your voice? What if you lost the ability to communicate with the world in the ways you love?   How would your life change? In what ways would your priorities shift?   That's the story this week's guest brings to the show.   Greg Offner lost his voice — literally — in 2015.    As a singer, Greg was stripped of the communication outlet that brought him the most joy.   He endured mor...