If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?

by Alan Alda

  After an agonizing series of failures, I had a sudden awakening one day when someone came to me without my seeking her out. She was a masseuse who had a few thousand dollars she wanted to put into a good investment and was interested in hearing about my mutual fund. For the first time, I saw myself as helping someone. Now she was the one who needed something, not me. Suddenly, I was engaged by what she was feeling and thinking. I’m sure most good salespeople know their job is to help the other person get what they want, and even better, what they need, but for me it was a revelation.

  SOCIAL AWARENESS AND THE EMPATHIC STRATEGY

  When things go right in selling, the salesperson is using social awareness, a term that was first used by the Columbia University psychologist Edward Thorndike in the 1920s. Social awareness became one of the key attributes of emotional intelligence as described in the work of Daniel Goleman. Goleman has refined the notion of social awareness to three separate steps: first, having an instantaneous, primal awareness of another’s inner state (empathy); then, grasping their feelings and thoughts (Theory of Mind); and, finally, understanding—or, as he says, “getting complicated social situations.” Goleman has described social awareness as “the ability to identify a client’s or customer’s often unstated needs and concerns and then match them to products or services.” He adds that “this empathic strategy distinguishes star sales performers from average ones.”

  In my own experience, and in the research I’ve read, empathy also seems to lead to a greater ability to be patient. If so, it probably plays a part in enabling a successful salesperson to take “the longer view” that Goleman says is valuable to both sides of a sale. As he says, social awareness

  also means taking a long-term perspective, sometimes trading off immediate gains in order to preserve customer relationships. A study of an office supply and equipment vendor indicated that the most successful members of the sales team were able to combine taking the customer’s viewpoint and showing appropriate assertiveness in order to steer the customer toward a choice that satisfied both the customer’s and the vendor’s needs.

  Interestingly, Goleman speaks positively of assertiveness. Not assertiveness aimed at getting what we want, but assertiveness in providing what the customer really needs. And isn’t this what happens in a loving relationship when one partner helps steer the other toward his or her best instinct and values, regardless of the short-term benefits to either of them? (As in, “Are you taking that job because it pays more, or is it really what you want to do with your life?”)

  Very much like in a close personal relationship, success in selling has been shown in a number of studies to improve when the salesperson listens to the client and actively expresses an understanding of their thoughts and emotions. It leads to more trust and higher sales, and I would guess more satisfaction on both sides. For some people, this comes naturally, and for others it’s eventually discovered. But somehow, it doesn’t happen often enough.

  Why? If there’s a connection between deeper listening and the bottom line, you’d think the connection would be self-reinforcing. But for most of us, it takes extra effort to pay deliberate attention to what the other person is thinking. Even if it’s the one person we’re most devoted to. In fact, my guess is that good communication with the person you’re closest to may be the hardest challenge of all.

  COUPLES: REALLY ACTIVE LISTENING

  He leaves his socks on the floor; she can never find her purse. He always tells jokes, but forgets the punch lines. In the shallow waters of such petty annoyances do great marriages run aground. These little irritations tend to mount up, but if what I’m hearing from researchers is true, then a richer kind of listening can produce a little cooperation and a lot less friction. For instance:

  When men share the housework with their wives, it leads to more sex. No, really. It does.

  Dan Carlson and his colleagues at Georgia State University did a study in 2014 and found that “couples who shared routine housework equitably had the most sex, about 7.74 times a month.” And those couples achieved the highest level of satisfaction, too.

  But even if men believe this to be true, how motivated are they to act on this theory? In the United States, and across the world, only about 30 percent of men who live with women share the housework equally.

  Why? Many men have known for a while now that doing the dishes can be foreplay. But it’s not so easy to remember the connection between scrubbing a pot and connubial ecstasy when all you’re facing is the pot.

  What if empathy is brought into play? Research suggests that people cooperate more as empathy increases.

  When a husband looks at the dishes in the sink and thinks, I guess I ought to do something about that, chances are iffy that he’ll act on that impulse. But if he looks at the pile in the sink and imagines his partner seeing it in the morning—in other words, if he sees it through her eyes—he’ll be more aware of what she’ll feel, and that brief moment of empathy could engender some cooperation on his part. And then, who knows? Washing the dishes might seem easier to do, it might feel more authentic, and it might lead to something interesting later in the evening. At least, it couldn’t hurt.

  There’s another great cooperation killer, the Sound of Certainty: the triumphant, but self-defeating, tone of voice that announces, I know what I’m talking about and that ends the discussion. It’s a tone that doesn’t invite the other person in, but, instead, diminishes them to the rank of outsider. Sometimes, this tone is a sound we make without even realizing it. We might not be aware that we’ve just closed the door on the other person until we see it register on their face (if we’re actually paying attention to their face). The tone of what we say can be deadlier than the words themselves. It can change a perfectly well-intended phrase into something disastrous, and it’s not largely under conscious control.

  I’ve read a lot of tips on communication for couples. And many of them are useful, like active listening (letting the other person know you’ve heard what they said) and making “I” statements (concentrating on how the other person’s behavior makes you feel, rather than simply denouncing their bad behavior). The problem is that some of these tips can have the opposite effect if you’re not aware of what’s going on in the other person’s head—or in your own. Or if you’re not aware of how your own feelings are affecting your tone of voice.

  Active listening can easily morph into veiled hostility. There’s a difference between “Let me see if I heard you correctly,” and “Let me see if I heard you correctly!” (with a stern face).

  If you were just collecting tips, a good tip would be to remember not to listen actively in a hostile way. But it’s difficult to tiptoe our way consciously through the hostility patch on the way to genuine connection. We need to get there effortlessly, naturally, because the more conscious we are of producing a neutral tone, the more manufactured it’s liable to sound. I know from my experience as an actor that an authentic tone of voice is produced deep inside the brain, not in the voice box. My layman’s guess is that an authentic tone, a tone that means what it says, relies heavily on the social circuits in the brain. This kind of tone is produced less by a decision to sound a certain way and more by our relationship with the other person.

  I’ve seen this happen over and over in improv classes. When people manage to tune in to their partners, there’s an effect on muscles in the throat and face that are not under their conscious control. The tone of voice changes and the expression on the face softens, not because they decided to, but because that’s what happens when you connect and make contact with someone.

  You can hear the difference in people who have been trained to make social contact more mechanically.

  For instance, there’s that eerie moment when I’ve checked into a hotel almost anywhere in the country and realize that room clerks everywhere have been instructed to behave in a welcoming way. It’s eerie because they all say the same thing in the same disembodied tone of voice: “How was your flight? H
ow’s your day been so far?” Usually, my day has been okay until I hear the robotic sound of their scripted questions, a sound that’s less than welcoming. I would think that training clerks to make real contact with guests would be more fruitful than telling them to use a specific set of words and that all-purpose cheerful tone—a dry formula. It shouldn’t be that hard to do.

  Checking in is not a complicated interpersonal action. It’s not the subtle exchange that couples go through, filled with hidden meanings and subterranean messages involving life-changing decisions—like loading the dishwasher.

  Filling up the dishwasher is, apparently, a loaded activity for couples. Bosch, a company that makes these machines, has published a study in which they found that 40 percent of us fight about how we load the dishwasher. Sixty-one percent of those fights are about whether or not to prerinse the dishes. This seems like an excessive number of people fighting about rinsing dishes, but that’s what Bosch claims. Thirty-nine percent are arguing about whether forks and knives should point up or down. This I can understand; it’s surprising that more people don’t die by falling on forks in the dishwasher. On the other hand, thirty percent argue about whether to put plastic containers on the top rack. These people should get a hobby.

  I don’t know if this was a rigorous study, but it is a reminder that everyday events in our lives can be loaded with volcanic emotion and tectonic slippage.

  Couples might have an especially hard time with communication because so much of it is nonverbal. We might not think our true feelings are showing, but our partners can read our feelings nonetheless. All the more reason to be good at reading our own emotions, as well as the emotions of the other person, and then being able to regulate those emotions. Or the volcano could blow.

  And it isn’t easy. We have to practice until it becomes second nature, and even then, it can feel like a burden if only one person is doing it. I was talking to a friend who had seen the power of the improvising mantra “Yes And” in an improv class and thought she would try it at home with her husband.

  “I did it for two weeks,” she told me. “It worked. I finally quit.”

  “You quit? Why did you quit?”

  “Because I couldn’t stand doing it anymore.”

  It’s probably better if both people do it.

  LESSONS FROM M*A*S*H AND MUSIC

  I learned something during the eleven years we were filming M*A*S*H that changed for the rest of my life the way I prepare to go in front of an audience. When we began the show, we knew that somehow we had to become a tight-knit group. The characters in our stories lived together in harrowing conditions of overwork, extreme cold, extreme heat, and the barbarity of war. They knew one another better than any family. We had to create that sense of intimacy, and yet the actors had never met before. I don’t think any of us consciously devised a strategy to bring this sense of closeness about, but we gravitated to a solution that was utterly simple. And it transformed us.

  During a film shoot, there are long stretches while the set is being lit. Actors will often spend that time in their dressing rooms, apart from the other actors. They’ll meet for a brief moment before the scene is shot, rehearse once or twice, and then the camera rolls and it’s opening night.

  But it was different for us. We would spend most of our time between shots sitting together with our chairs in a circle, making one another laugh. We would occasionally do something useful like going over our lines together, but I think the majority of our time was spent laughing. When they called us to the set, we kept the connection going as we walked across the sound stage. When the camera started rolling, we were still engaged, but now we were using the words and emotions called for in the script. That connection gave us a jolt of life. It was by far the best preparation for acting I had ever come across—for me, far better than sitting alone, summoning up emotion and memory.

  I need the contact with the other players to bring me out of myself and into the spontaneous moment. Every time I’ve done a stage play, I’ve tried to get the other actors to sit together for about an hour before every performance. Within a few minutes, there’s a general air of hilarity. You’re vulnerable when you laugh. You let the other person in. And when you get on stage, the channel between you is open, and whatever they do registers on you. You’re like a spider sitting on a web that responds to the slightest tickle of motion. But the secret, I think, is not so much the laughing; it’s the connection.

  Even performances of music seem to be enhanced by establishing that connection.

  I was having lunch one day with the clarinetists Stanley Drucker and his wife, Naomi Drucker. Stanley spent almost sixty-three years with the New York Philharmonic, starting with the orchestra as its youngest member and retiring as its oldest, and Naomi is a founder of the American Chamber Ensemble, and has often played with the Philharmonic.

  “Do you ever pay any attention to the audience when you’re performing?” I asked them.

  Stanley nodded. “It helps a lot.” I was a little surprised he noticed them at all.

  “How are you aware of them?”

  “Seeing their faces. If they look attentive, it helps. Sometimes it’s a challenge. I see them really paying attention and I want to say, You think that’s good? Watch what I can do.”

  We laughed, and Naomi said, “It’s really nice sometimes when you catch their eye, and they look at you and smile.”

  So it seems that, like actors, musicians can be in a dynamic relationship with the audience. They certainly are with their fellow players.

  When I see the great Yo-Yo Ma come on stage for a concert, no matter the gravity of the work he’s about to perform, he stops to greet other members of the orchestra. He waves at them, hugs them, jokes with them. Then he sits down, closes his eyes for a moment, and tears into the music, connected both to the music and to the players around him.

  Yo-Yo pays the same attention to what the audience is receiving as our scientists do. In an interview in Listen magazine, Yo-Yo said, “You have to keep both things in mind at the same time: What’s the story? Where are you in the story?…And what ultimately makes it memorable is that the thing that I care so much about lives inside somebody else’s head, and that it’s received.” He asks himself the same kind of questions we suggest our scientists ask: “Who is receiving it? Who are you? Why are you listening to this? Why would you care? Should you care?…I think,” Yo-Yo says, “that that is an unbelievably important and probably less explored part of music.”

  I saw this in action with Toby and Itzhak Perlman at the Perlman Music Program, a summer music school for gifted young musicians from all over the world. The kids had been telling Toby they were uncomfortable talking to the audience when they announced a piece before performing it. Toby invited me to teach a class to see if the work we did with scientists might be helpful to the young musicians. I was excited to try it, because I was pretty sure even a few hours of improvising could make standing in front of an audience a little easier. I also had a secret wish to see if improvising would have any effect on their music.

  We set up in a large dining room at the camp. There were about twenty young musicians and a group of faculty and students who were curious to see the workshop and were just daunting enough as an audience for the students to practice on.

  I had asked the students to bring their instruments and started by having them speak for a minute about a piece of music and then play the first thirty-two bars. Some were severely shy, especially a Korean girl who looked about thirteen, but she didn’t back down, and when it came time to play the improv games, she pitched in.

  I asked them to make imaginary objects out of space and pass them around in a circle, just as I would if I were working with scientists. Next, they tossed balls made of nothing to one another, but the kids had to make sure the ball they caught was the same size and weight as the one that was thrown to them. As always, the better they got at that, the more you believed you could see the ball passing from one person to ano
ther. The kids were delighted to see imaginary objects coming into existence simply because they were observing one another and responding—making contact.

  Then I asked them to toss not a ball, but an emotion around the circle. That was hard to grasp at first. It was confusing enough to toss around a ball that didn’t really exist; now I was asking them to pass around a feeling. To get them started, I made a sound and a gesture that I hoped conveyed a sense of joy and tossed it to the girl standing next to me. Her job was to catch it, the same way she had caught the imaginary ball, then mimic the emotion and pass it on to someone else. The emotion made its way around the circle, and soon the natural expressiveness of musicians took over and they were tossing passions to one another.

  But next, before they passed the emotion on, they had to let it morph into another emotion. They would now receive an emotion, copy it, allow it to turn into a completely different feeling—and then toss that to the next person. No one knew what to expect from the player next to them, but they would catch it, become it, let it change into something else, and pass it on. The grief they received, and responded to by acting it out, could turn into rage, which, tossed to the next player, might become uncontrollable laughter.