Supercommunicators, page 12
We exhibit emotional intelligence by showing people that we’ve heard their emotions—and the way we do that is by noticing, and then matching, their mood and energy. Mood and energy are nonlinguistic tools for creating emotional connection. When we match someone’s mood and energy, we are showing them that we want to align. Sometimes we might want to match someone exactly: If you are laughing joyfully, I’ll laugh joyfully as well. At other moments, we might want to demonstrate that we see their emotions (“You seem sad”) and, rather than match them precisely, offer our help (“What will cheer you up?”). But in each case, we’re sending a message: I hear your feelings. This clear desire to connect is an essential step in helping us bond.
This same pattern shows up in other nonverbal behaviors, as well. When we’re crying, or smiling, or scowling, we believe others hear us when they respond with a similar energy and mood. They don’t need to cry with us—but they need to match our arousal and valence. That’s what makes us believe they understand what we’re feeling. If they seem to be behaving similarly to us on the surface, but their mood and energy is different, something feels off. “Your facial expressions might be the same, and the words you are saying might be almost exactly the same—nearly everything might be the same—but if your valence is different, you’ll know you aren’t feeling the same thing,” said Elfenbein.
One of the reasons supercommunicators are so talented at picking up on how others feel is because they have a habit of noticing the energy in others’ gestures, the volume of their voices, how fast they are speaking, their cadence and affect. They pay attention to whether someone’s posture indicates they are feeling down, or if they are so excited they can barely contain it. Supercommunicators allow themselves to match that energy and mood, or at least acknowledge it, and thereby make it clear they want to align. They help us see and hear our feelings via their own bodies and voices. By matching our mood and energy, they make it obvious they are trying to connect.
WANNA HEAR A JOKE ABOUT ASTRONAUTS?
Terence McGuire was an avid reader of psychology journals, and as part of his work at NASA, he regularly attended academic conferences where scholars like Provine shared their latest work. So, as he reviewed his audio recordings from twenty years of interviews with potential astronauts, he was aware of the emerging research on nonlinguistic expressions and the importance of mood and energy. He began to wonder if there were any insights that might help him gauge applicants’ emotional intelligence in their sighs and grunts, chuckles and tone of voice. As he listened, he started making lists of how applicants had conveyed their emotions beyond using words.
Eventually, he noticed something about the recorded interviews: Sometimes, McGuire would laugh during an interview and some of the candidates—the ones who, later, became great astronauts—would often match his mood and energy. They chuckled when he chuckled, even if what he said wasn’t funny. They belly laughed when he did. These didn’t seem to McGuire like attempts at manipulation. They were too natural and spontaneous. They sounded like honest reactions. And McGuire remembered how, in those moments, he had felt relaxed, understood, a little bit closer to the applicant.
Then there were other candidates—including many who turned out to be less successful choices for NASA—who, when McGuire laughed on the recordings, would laugh along, but with very different moods and energy levels. When McGuire laughed hard, they chuckled. When McGuire laughed slightly, they responded uproariously, which sounded, as McGuire relistened, like pandering. These candidates had understood they ought to laugh along—it was basic social politeness—but they didn’t work too hard at it.
As McGuire made his lists, he found all kinds of other emotional expressions, besides laughter, where the same patterns emerged. In some of the tapes, when McGuire would mention an emotion, the applicant’s nonlinguistic expressions—their vocal inflections, tone of voice and pacing, the noises they made—would either match him or diverge. These kinds of “words, tones, postures, gestures and facial expressions,” McGuire later wrote to NASA’s leaders, “can be a gold mine of information.” The nonlinguistic clues were signals as to whether someone genuinely wanted to connect, and if they were adept at doing so, or if they didn’t consider emotional bonding to be much of a priority. If someone could connect this way during an interview, McGuire suspected, they’d also be good at aligning with colleagues in space.
So, for his next round of interviews, McGuire decided to try something new. He would intentionally express more emotions during each interview, and then ask candidates to describe their own emotional lives. And he would vary his mood and energy levels and watch to see if the applicant matched him or not.
* * *
—
A few months later, McGuire walked into a room to interview a man in his midthirties with neatly trimmed hair and a sharply creased uniform. The applicant was physically fit, with a PhD in atmospheric chemistry and fifteen years of exemplary navy service. In other words, he was the perfect NASA candidate.
As McGuire entered the room, he spilled his papers all over the floor in what seemed like an accident (but was actually deliberate), and while collecting the documents, he mentioned that his tie—garish yellow, with colorful balloons—had been a gift from his son. The boy had insisted he wear it today, he explained. “And so now I look like a clown!” McGuire said, laughing loudly. The candidate smiled but didn’t laugh back.
During the interview, McGuire asked the candidate to describe a difficult time in his life. The man said that his father had died in a car accident about a year earlier. It had devastated his family, he explained. He had spoken with a pastor about his grief and was slowly coming to grips with all the things he wished he had told his dad. It was a perfect answer, honest and vulnerable. It showed that the man was in touch with his emotions, but not beholden to them. It was exactly the response NASA sought in an astronaut candidate. In previous years, McGuire would have given him high marks.
This time, though, McGuire kept pushing: He told the candidate that his own sister had unexpectedly passed away, as well, and as he spoke, he let his voice waver. He described their childhood, how much she had meant to him. He made his own grief obvious.
After a few minutes, McGuire asked the candidate to describe his father.
“He was very kind,” the man said. “Kind to everyone he met.”
Then the man sat, waiting for the next question. He didn’t elaborate or describe his father’s qualities. He didn’t ask any questions about McGuire’s sister.
The man was not selected as an astronaut. “It was clear to me he wasn’t in the top tier for empathy,” McGuire told me. Perhaps he was the type of person who didn’t enjoy talking about his personal life. Maybe his father’s death was still too raw to discuss easily. Neither of those were character flaws—but they indicated he was someone who was less practiced at emotional connection. That alone wasn’t the sole reason for his rejection, “but it was part of it,” McGuire said. NASA had plenty of qualified applicants and could afford to be picky. “We needed the best of the best, and that meant people who were exceptional at emotional intelligence.”
A few months later, another candidate came in for an interview with McGuire. Once again, McGuire spilled his papers as he entered the room and made the same joke about his tie. The candidate laughed with McGuire and leapt up to help him gather his documents. When McGuire asked the applicant to describe a difficult moment in his life, the man talked about a friend who had passed away, but said he was otherwise lucky: Both parents were still alive. He had gotten married at nineteen and still loved his wife. His kids were healthy. Then McGuire mentioned his own sister’s death. The candidate began asking him questions: Were you close? How did it impact your mom? Do you think about her, even now? The candidate described how, for months after his friend’s passing, he would talk to him in his dreams. McGuire told me that “it was clear he wanted to understand what I’d gone through and share something.” That man was selected as an astronaut.
Eventually, McGuire developed a checklist of things to watch for during interviews: How did candidates react to praise? What about skepticism? How did they describe rejection and loneliness? He would ask questions designed to assess their emotional expressiveness: When had they been happiest? Had they ever been depressed? He would pay close attention to their body language and facial expressions as they responded, note when their postures seemed to tense up or relax. Did it seem like they were inviting him in? Were they showing him they wanted to connect?
Each time McGuire asked one of those questions, after the candidate had a chance to speak, McGuire would answer the same question himself—expressing happiness or regret, making sure to display his anger or joy or uncertainty. Then he would pay close attention to whether the candidates tried to match him. Did they smile back? Did they comfort him? “Virtually all astronaut selectees have strong cognitive bases,” he later wrote. “But it is a minority that have great awareness or sensitivity at a feeling level.”
The specific emotions a candidate displayed were less important than how they expressed them. Some were quick to show their passions; others were more sedate. What mattered most, though, was whether they paid attention to McGuire’s emotional displays and then matched his energy and mood. For some candidates, matching seemed like an instinct; for others, a learned skill. And for some, it didn’t happen at all. These distinctions helped McGuire differentiate between those who he suspected could easily bond emotionally with others, and those who, when stresses got high, were more likely to turn inward or become defensive or combative. “Long-term confinement in crowded quarters is generally less stressful for those whose sensitivity and empathy allow them to recognize human problems earlier and to engage them effectively,” he wrote to NASA command.
By the time NASA selected the class of 1990—five women and eighteen men, including seven pilots, three physicists, and a physician—McGuire had worked out what he was looking for: Did candidates make clear they were trying to align with his mood and energy? If the answer was yes, it indicated they probably took emotional communication seriously.
This framework offers lessons for the rest of us. It’s hard to tell exactly what someone is feeling, to know if they are angry or upset or frustrated or annoyed or some combination of all those emotions. The person, themself, might not know.
So instead of trying to decipher specific emotions, pay attention to someone’s mood (Do they seem negative or positive?) and their energy level (Are they high energy or low energy?). Then, focus on matching those two attributes—or, if matching will only exacerbate tensions, show that you hear their emotions by acknowledging how they feel. Make it obvious you are working to understand their emotions. And when you, yourself, are expressing your own emotions, notice how others are responding. Are they trying to align with your energy and mood? This technique is so powerful that, at some call service centers, operators are trained to match a caller’s volume and tone in order to help the customer feel heard. Software made by the company Cogito prompts operators, via pop-up windows on their screens, to speed up their speech or slow down, to put more energy into their voice or match the caller’s calm. (Companies that use the software told me it makes customer service calls go much better—as long, that is, as callers don’t know that a computer is telling the operator how to speak.)
When we match or acknowledge another person’s mood and energy, we show them that we want to understand their emotional life. It’s a form of generosity that becomes empathy. It makes it easier to discuss How Do We Feel?
THE BIG (EMOTIONAL) BANG
By the time Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady learned they had a second chance to rewrite and reshoot their pilot episode, months had passed since they had taped the first one. “I was so close to picking up the phone and saying, I’m out,” Lorre said.
But they felt they had to give it one more shot. The actors, by now, had started exploring other projects, so Prady and Lorre needed to move quickly. Right away, they made some big decisions: Katie, the jaded neighbor, was axed. So was Gilda, the sexually adventurous Star Trek fan. Instead, they would introduce a new character: Penny, a friendly aspiring actress who is waitressing while waiting to be discovered. “We went the other direction and made Penny light and bubbly,” Prady told me. “Someone who, even though she’s not book smart, is smart about people.”
The question, though, was how to establish the relationship between Penny and the awkward physicists. The same conundrum still existed: The show needed to make clear to the audience what emotions the characters were feeling, while staying true to Sheldon’s and Leonard’s incompetence at emotional communication.
As Lorre and Prady worked on the new pilot, they considered the scene where the physicists meet Penny for the first time. They had decided it would happen as she is moving into the apartment across the hall. But would Sheldon and Leonard be frantic and nervous? Or subdued and aloof? Neither seemed right.
Finally, a different approach emerged: What if, rather than focusing on Sheldon’s and Leonard’s specific emotions, each actor simply said the same word—“Hi!”—over and over with the same basic energy and the same basic mood? If nothing else, it would be funny. And maybe it would show the audience that everyone is trying to connect, even if they’re too bumbling to know how. The writers didn’t conceive of the scene specifically in terms of mood and energy, of course—television writers “don’t think like that,” Prady told me, “and most of what we know about psychology comes from sitting on a shrink’s couch”—but their approach aligns with what we know about emotional communication: As long as the characters unmistakably showed they wanted to connect, the audience would intuit what they were feeling—even if the characters were terrible at expressing those feelings themselves.
The final version, when it was filmed, went like this:
SHELDON AND LEONARD SEE A BEAUTIFUL GIRL, PENNY, THROUGH THE OPEN DOORWAY.
LEONARD
(TO SHELDON)
New neighbor?
SHELDON
(TO LEONARD)
Evidently.
LEONARD
Significant improvement over the old neighbor.
PENNY SEES THEM IN THE HALLWAY AND SMILES.
PENNY
(BRIGHT AND CHEERFUL)
Oh hi!
LEONARD
(SAME VOLUME AND SPEED, BUT ANXIOUS)
Hi.
SHELDON
(SAME VOLUME AND SPEED, BUT UNCERTAIN)
Hi.
LEONARD
(NOW PANICKED)
Hi.
SHELDON
(CONFUSED)
Hi.
PENNY
(WONDERING WHAT’S GOING ON)
Hi?
A minute later, Sheldon and Leonard prepare to return to Penny’s door to ask her to lunch:
LEONARD
I’m going to invite her over. We’ll have a nice meal and chat.
SHELDON
Chat? We don’t chat, at least not offline.
LEONARD KNOCKS ON PENNY’S DOOR.
LEONARD
(UNCERTAIN)
Hi…again.
PENNY
(SAME VOLUME AND SPEED, BUT BUBBLY)
Hi!
SHELDON
(REGRETFUL)
Hi.
LEONARD
(PANICKED)
Hi.
PENNY
(EXASPERATED)
Hiiii.
When they filmed the scene a few months later in front of a live audience, it killed. The actors imbued each “hi” with a series of vocal inflections, gestures, and tics that made clear their confusion and uncertainty and eagerness, while also making it obvious how desperately they wanted to become friends. As long as the actors aligned their energy and moods, the audience understood: Everyone was trying to bond with each other, but they were too emotionally clumsy to figure out how. “It sounded like a real conversation,” Prady told me. They ended up shooting the scene multiple times and the audience laughed louder with each one. “We just knew, this is working. The audience understood exactly what they were supposed to feel.”
The secret, according to the episode’s director, James Burrows, was that “if they had the same intonation, and they were saying the same word, they could do it with totally different attitudes and you’d still know they liked each other. If one of them had said ‘hello’ instead of ‘hi,’ or if one of them had been loud and then Penny got soft, the whole scene would’ve fallen apart.” It would have become confusing: Is she scared of them and wants to get away? Or is she disdainful?
It also worked in reverse. Just a couple of minutes after Sheldon and Leonard meet Penny, the opposite tactic is used to make it obvious when the characters fail to connect:
PENNY SITS ON THE COUCH IN SHELDON AND LEONARD’S APARTMENT.
SHELDON
(LOUD AND BRUSQUE)
Um, Penny. That’s where I sit.
PENNY
(QUIET AND COQUETTISH)
So sit next to me.
SHELDON
(LOUD AND FAST, AND GESTURING TO THE SEAT)
No, I sit there.
PENNY
(SLOW AND QUIET)
What’s the difference?
