August 22, 2016
Interview with Mark Robert Waldman, co-author of the book Words Can Change Your Brain: 12 Conversation Strategies to Build Trust, Resolve Conflict, and Increase Intimacy
Mike Carruthers:
When you communicate with someone the words you say are not as important as you might think.
Mark Robert Waldman:
The most important element of a conversation is the person’s facial expression; the second most important element is the person’s tone of voice.
Mark Robert Waldman, co-author of the book Words Can Change Your Brain…
I can say, “I LOVE YOU” and I don’t think that anybody’s going to feel particularly enamored of me. Or I can say, “I really love you” and so it’s the tone of voice not the words themselves that convey the essence of what we want to really say to the other person.
The tendency for most of us is to say as much as we can to make our point over and over again, it doesn’t work and here’s why.
If you speak for 2 minutes the human brain can only hold onto 4 chunks for about 10 or 20 seconds then it dumps it out of consciousness and it uploads a new set of information. So you talk to somebody for 2 minutes and the other person can only remember 20 seconds of what you’ve said.
So when you have to communicate with someone…
If you simple slow down your talking, shorten your sentences and to speak very briefly you can literally within a couple of minutes take an ordinary conversation and turn it into an extraordinary event.
