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Looking for a gift for that person in your life who's into self-improvement, who wants to be a better communicator?
I'm going to list the top five communication books that make excellent gifts this holiday season.
I've read each of these. Most of them multiple times.
I've talked about all of them on this channel, at least in part before.
I think they make excellent gifts for anyone in your life who's interested in improving their communication skills, or who's generally interested in self-improvement and wants to do a better job at communicating in work, home or their relationships.
These books are in no particular order. They're all excellent. They're all relatively inexpensive. I recommend them all equally.
I'm going to list each recommended book, describe two or three key points from the book, and then move on to the next one. In this way, I hope you'll get a summary of what each book is about. I hope to give you at least a brief summary of each so you have an idea of which one is best for you or the person who you're buying a gift for.
Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It, by Chris Voss
Chris Voss is a former lead FBI hostage negotiator. You never would have expected that a book by an FBI hostage negotiator would really be about empathy and empathic responding. I was surprised to find that's exactly what this book is about.
It's all about what Chris Voss calls tactical empathy, the particular use of open-ended questions and empathic responding, listening, mirroring, etc to succeed at negotiations. He teaches in terms of really extreme negotiations, like with terrorists and hostage takers and kidnappers, and in everyday life negotiations and in business negotiations.
There are four particular points I thought were useful in Chris Voss' book, or at least memorable enough to highlight in this brief summary.
Tactical Empathy: a combination of about six different empathic responding techniques that Voss uses to succeed in negotiations. If you go back just a few videos ago, I did a video on combining six different empathic responding techniques. This is really Chris Voss' tactical empathy.
The Accusation Audit: when you go into a difficult conversation and before your counterpart can accuse you of anything, you list for them the things that they might accuse you of. It's really an effective technique for diffusing the most controversial issues and for dealing with the elephant in the room. Here is my video on the subject.
Calibrated Questions: particular open-ended questions that you can use in sticky parts of a negotiation or difficult conversation to try to move your counterpart along and get them to keep talking about how you can reach a resolution.
Examples of calibrated questions are things like, “What about this is important to you? What could I do to move this along?” And one of his favorites is, “How am I supposed to do that?” I think these are great open-ended questions to use when you get stuck in a difficult conversation and you want your counterpart to keep talking.
If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face? by Alan Alda
Alan Alda was a great TV star and movie actor. I was fascinated to see how Alda moved from his career as a famous stage actor, movie actor and television star, to a career talking about science on television in his series, “Scientific American Frontiers,” and now in the later stage of his life to a communications skills teacher at the State University of New York. It's really an amazing transition.
I think he's an excellent teacher of communication skills. There are three particular points I thought were worth noting from Alan Alda's book.
Empathy. Anyone who's watched a few videos on my channel will know that I believe that empathy and empathic responding is core communication skill that you need to master before you can move on to some higher level communication skills. You have to be able to connect with other people when you're communicating with them or else you're not going to really be able to succeed at any of the various kinds of tasks we need to achieve in communication.
Improvisational Exercises. These exercises are used to train actors and improvisational comedians. They are fantastic tools for getting people to loosen up, warm up, and learn how to empathically connect. It turns out that many of the skills actors and comedians and improvisational artists need are the same kinds of skills that all communicators need. There is a whole set of improv exercises that have been developed to train actors and improvisers that are equally useful for training communicators.
Stories. I guess we shouldn't be surprised that someone who spent his life telling stories on television and in the movies would believe narrative or stories are important, but he goes at great length in this book to talk about the form and importance of stories to get your point across. In fact, if you listen to the book on Audible, you'll see that the entire book is really just a series of stories that Alan Alda tells. They are about his communication skills and the various realizations he had about how communication was important and how to teach it.
Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When the Stakes are High, by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Rion McMillan, and Al Switzler
This book is always one of the top selling books on Amazon in the general category of business communication or difficult conversations. There's good reason for this – it is also full of useful tips and examples and acronyms for remembering the various strategies that they recommend to use during crucial conversations.
There's three points I'd like to highlight from the book, Crucial Conversations.
Silence or Violence. They say when important conversations are going wrong, we can notice that they're going wrong by noticing when our counterpart, the person who we're talking with, retreats into either silence or violence. By silence, they mean the person shuts down, becomes completely defensive, withdraws, and then it's just no good talking to them anymore. The cause has been lost in that particular conversation. Nothing else is going to be accomplished. That's silence.
Violence is when the person becomes verbally aggressive, insulting, overtly antagonistic, and defensive in an aggressive way. This is the violence end, and both of these are signs that things have fallen apart in the conversation. They say to use this when you detect that someone's retreating into silence or violence, it's time to use all the tools in the book to restore safety and move forward with your crucial conversation.
The Sucker’s Choice. The sucker's choice is the choice between keeping a friendship or telling the truth. They said you have to avoid the sucker's choice in any difficult or crucial conversation. They say that often in a very difficult conversation, we're faced with the choice of either saying what needs to be said and perhaps losing the friendship, or avoiding the difficult conversation in order to maintain the relationship. This is a sucker's choice.
You don't have to make this choice. You have to actually say what needs to be said and it's possible to do so while preserving the relationship. The book gives you all sorts of tools and techniques for doing so.
Our Emotions Reflected as Internal Narratives. They go to great length to talk about how our emotions are often the end result of stories we tell ourselves about things that happen to us. We don't just immediately have emotions when things happen to us. We normally tell ourselves a story about what people's intentions were and what they meant and what they were trying to do to us. It's that story that really locks in our negative emotions like anger or sadness or frustration or despair.
They say one way to approach our emotions more constructively is to talk about the story we're telling ourselves that led us to feel in a particular way. This opens up a space to talk about emotions in a more constructive way. I thought that was a really useful contribution.
Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most, by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen.
There are several points worth summarizing from this book as well.
The Three Conversations. They say in any difficult conversation, there's really three separate conversations going on.
One is the “what happened” conversation. This is the thing factual conversation about what happened that led us to this difficult circumstance where we have to have this difficult conversation.
The second is the ‘feelings” conversation, where we have to talk about how I'm feeling, how you're feeling, how we got to these feelings, and how we're going to resolve them.
The third conversation is what they call the “identity” conversation, which is when we talk about what kind of person I think I am or need to be, what kind of person you think you are and want to be, and how issues about our identity are at stake in this particular difficult conversation.
Mapping the Contribution System. This is an alternative to talking about blame. Often in a difficult conversation, we're tempted to blame the person we're talking to, or they're attempted to blame us. This makes the conversation difficult, because we're blaming one another for what happened.
They say an alternative to talking about blame is talking about contribution. What they mean by that is to think about how you and the other person each contributed to the circumstance you're in now. This is a more neutral way of talking about blame or talking about how we got to where we are instead of talking about blame.
They recommend that you, the person taking the initiative in the difficult conversation, should first acknowledge how you contributed to getting into this situation as a way of opening up the other person. Then they might be willing then to talk about how they contributed to the situation.
Instead of having a binary, either you're to blame or I'm to blame, we can talk about a variety of factors got us into this situation. I contributed part, you contributed part, maybe others or circumstances contributed part. That's how we got here. And this is more neutral and constructive than talking about blame, which is sort of binary and not normally constructive.
Intent vs. Impact. What they mean by this is that someone can say something and they don't intend to hurt you. They don't intend to insult you. They don't intend to belittle you or do anything mean to you, but it might have that effect anyway. So people's intentions and the impact that their words have are different things.
Sometimes we can say things with no ill intent, and yet we can have a significant negative impact for reasons we didn't understand. There might be things about the other person feels or their life circumstances or background that we didn't get. Sometimes through no bad intentions, we can have bad impacts on people.
They talk a lot in their book about disentangling our intentions from the impact that our words have, or disentangling other people's intentions from the impact that their words have on us. Again, this allows us to diffuse a lot of intense emotions when we realize, “Oh, maybe although their words had a negative impact on me, I can be a little bit more imaginative about what their intentions were and maybe they didn't have any malevolent intention towards me. They just said something that hurt me. If I can disentangle intent and impact, I can approach the situation in a more constructive manner.”
Humble Inquiry by Edgar Schein
Edgar Schein is a retired teacher from Harvard. He’s a consultant who has also written a series of other books, one about helping and others I haven't read yet but hope to read in the future.
Humble Inquiry is an excellent book especially for someone in business but also for anyone who manages a large group or does knowledge work.
There are three points I wanted to highlight from Edgar Schein's book, Humble Inquiry.
Ask, Don’t Tell. Schein talks a lot about how the art of asking questions is really underdeveloped and under-emphasized in American education and in American culture. It is simply not as valued as telling people what to do.
He makes very persuasive arguments that asking people good open-ended questions backed by genuine curiosity and humility is the key to getting people to open up and build the kind of relationships which we need when we do complex knowledge work, which is what most of us now do in our jobs.
He also talks a lot about how American culture actually presents obstacles to this. American culture emphasizes competition and winning and individualism, all of which are counter to what he's suggesting, which is humility, cooperation, asking questions, and so on. It is a fascinating conversation, well worth reading and trying to understand and integrate into your own behavior.
Here and Now Humility. Now, obviously in a book called Humble Inquiry, there's a lot about humility. He says it is hard for us to be humble. I'm reminded the old country song that said, "Oh Lord, it's hard to be humble when you're perfect in every way. I can't wait to look in the mirror. I get better looking each day."
He says we’re not all that humble but that it's critical to be humble in order to be successful in complex distributed intercultural teams that are very diverse and that do complex knowledge work. We need humility. He says the kind of humility we need is not where we have to bow down to people, but it's what he called here and now humility.
Here and now humility is the humility that comes from recognizing we depend on one another. “I can't get my work done without you, and therefore I'm humble enough to ask questions so that I can build trust, learn what I need to know for us to work together effectively.” I think this idea of here and now humility is just so valuable in teamwork, across cultures and disciplines and time zones. If we can have more of this here and now humility, it would allow us to ask better questions, listen better, and just be better team members.
Connection Between Emotional Vulnerability, Humility, & Complex Knowledge Work. Schein says it's not easy to be emotionally vulnerable in the American workplace, especially. I know that most of my audience comes from the United States. In American culture, it's hard to be humble. We're not really rewarded for being humble, but to get knowledge work done, we actually have to show some emotional vulnerability.
It's difficult to do, especially for men. I know from YouTube statistics that most of my viewers are men. We're not rewarded. There's a kind of toxic masculinity which tells us not to talk about our emotions or be emotionally vulnerable. But in order to succeed in complex teams that do knowledge work, we have to build relationships. To build relationships, you have to have trust. To have trust, you have to be able to have dialogue that requires open-ended questioning. To ask genuine open-ended questions, we have to be humble. To be humble, we have to show a little bit of emotional vulnerability.
It all ties together in a way that I've never heard anyone describe it before. And I thought it was really refreshing and enlightening.
Summary
So those are five great books. They would make fantastic gifts for anyone in your life who's interested in improving their communication skills or just self-help, or getting better and succeeding at work. I think these are all really, really useful. Let's go over the list one more time.
Never Split the Difference, by Chris Voss
If I Understood You, by Alan Alda
Crucial Conversations, by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Rion McMillan, and Al Switzler
Difficult Conversations, by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen
Humble Inquiry, by Edgar Schein
I hope you enjoy this content. If you do, check out our one-on-one coaching, and download the free eBook on empathy.