1097: Turning Conflict into Connection with Charles Duhigg

How to Be Awesome at Your Job

How to be Awesome at Your Job

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4.5 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 29 September 2025

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Charles Duhigg reviews his communication techniques for finding common ground in any conflict.

— YOU’LL LEARN —

1) The three-step looping method for making others feel heard

2) The secret principle for keeping conversations aligned

3) How to uncover what people really want in a conversation

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— ABOUT CHARLES —

Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist and the author of Supercommunicators, The Power of Habit, and Smarter Faster Better. A graduate of Harvard Business School and Yale University, he is a winner of the National Academies of Sciences, National Journalism, and George Polk awards. He writes for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, and was the founding host of the Slate podcast How To! with Charles Duhigg.

• Book: Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

• Book: The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

• Substack: "The Science of Better"

• Website: CharlesDuhigg.com

— RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE SHOW —

• Study: Granovetter study on The Strength of Weak Ties

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Transcript

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0:00.0	And when we connect with someone, when we communicate with them well, even if we don't agree with them, we feel good.
0:14.6	And that good feeling is at the core of prosociality.
0:18.5	And prosociality is what's allowed us as a species to build families and
0:22.4	then villages and towns and cities and countries and to work together to build aircraft carriers
0:27.4	or video game consoles. Connecting with other people is really, really important. It is the thing
0:32.5	that has propelled us to success.
0:47.3	That's Charles Duhigg. He's a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist and the author of Supercommunicators,
0:51.4	The Power of Habit, and Smarter, Faster, Better.
0:53.7	He's a graduate of Harvard Business School in Yale, and it the winner of the National Academies of Science, National Journalism, and George Polk Awards.
1:00.9	He's here to share some more goodness from his book, Super Communicators, so you'll learn, one, the three-step looping method for making others feel heard, two, the secret principle for keeping conversations aligned.
1:11.9	And three, how to uncover what people really want in a conversation.
1:15.7	And if you want a quick summary write-up of the actionable takeaways,
1:17.9	I recommend you sign up for the free Gold Nugget email newsletter.
1:20.5	That's found at awesome at your job.com.
1:22.6	I'm Pete McItis.
1:23.4	This is How to Be Awesome at Your Job.
1:24.9	And now, here's Charles.
1:46.7	Charles, welcome back. Thanks for having me. Well, I'm excited to talk more about supercommunication. I think that is an important topic. And congrats. You're now in paperback. I understand, super communicators. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's great. You know, It's wonderful. Super. Well, tell us since February,
1:54.2	what sorts of things have bubbled up? Any new insights or twists or nuances or finer points of super communicating to share? I think one of the things that I've heard from readers in particular
1:59.6	is, and I don't think this will come as a shock to anyone, that we are living through this time that feels very polarized, right?
2:07.6	It feels like it's very hard to connect with people who hold different opinions from us.
2:11.8	It feels very hard to go online and see people saying things about our side or other people saying things about their side,
	...

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