Hello, thanks for listening to the Squiggly Careers podcast. I'm Sarah Ellis, one of your co-hosts,

and this is the first in our next series of the Ask the Expert interviews. Today, you're going to hear

my conversation with radio host and author Celeste Headley. I got in touch with Celeste because I love

her TED Talk, which is called 10 Ways to Have Better

Conversations. It's something I recommend all the time, and it turns out I'm not her only fan,

as her talk has actually had more than 23 million views. So I just got in touch with her out

the blue and just said, I'd love to talk to you about having conversations, about how we can have

better conversations and what that looks like. And she very generously, I suspect not really knowing

who we were or what we do, just said yes, which I really appreciated. She is brilliant to talk to

because she's a great example of an expert practitioner who's taken all of her insights

and her knowledge added to that with academic rigorous research and then made her ideas

really practical and helpful for us all to learn from. So very in keeping, I think, with

Squiggly careers and what we're trying to do. So I hope that listening to our conversation today helps you to have better conversations,

and I'll be back at the end to let you know what's next.

Celeste, thank you so much for joining us today on the Squiggly Careers podcast.

I'm really looking forward to our conversation together. I am too. Thanks for having me. You're really welcome. So I'm going to dive straight in with conversations very much part of our everyday lives. You talk about the fact that they are uniquely human. They're kind of part of who we are and what we do. And they are so critical for how we build

relationships. And yet, I have rarely seen it be a skill that gets lots of appreciation or really

kind of invested in within a kind of work context. Why do you think that is from all the research

that you've done, the people

that you've spoken to, to me there seems to be this gap between recognizing their importance

and then perhaps doing anything about it? There's a couple things going on here. And you absolutely

correct. In fact, one survey of all the business journals found that listening, for example, was one of the top

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