You’re at a business convention chatting with a colleague, when up walks a man, the head of some major department, a guy you know you’ve met before. “Hey there, Sam!” he says as he shakes your hand. Then he waits for you to introduce him to your colleague. The only problem? You cannot for the life of you remember his name. Awkwardness ensues. And a potential business deal evaporates.

The key to being a charismatic gentleman is making others feel important. And what better way to make someone feel important than by remembering their name? Remembering someone’s name tells them that they were special enough to have made a real impression on you. And everybody wants to feel special. Thus there are few better, and easier, ways to build rapport than to answer, “You probably don’t remember my name,” with, “Of course I do!”

And saying someone’s name is a powerful persuasion tool. It makes people feel at ease and comfortable. Legendary success writer and Mr. Charisma himself, Dale Carnegie, once said that “a person’s name is to him or her the sweetest and most important sound in any language.”

But if you’re like me, remembering names isn’t your strong suit. I can remember faces, but I can’t always put that face together with a name.

It’s a common problem. Research has consistently found that people are much better at recognizing faces than remembering names.

But fear not. With a little bit of savvy and know-how, you can overcome this shortcoming and become a master at remembering names. You can be the man who walks into a party and works the room like a pro.

Today we’ll discuss some of the most effective methods for remembering people’s names, as well as what to do when your best intentions fail and someone’s name slips your mind.

How to Remember a Person’s Name

Commit to listening and remembering. Most of us are lousy listeners. In social situations, we fall prey to conversational narcissism and are always waiting for a moment we can jump in and add our two cents. If you’re concentrating on what you’re about to say when someone introduces themselves, their name will go in one ear and out the other just like that. If you aren’t intently tuned in during that tiny window, the opportunity to learn their name passes in mere seconds and you’re sunk.

Before going into any social situation where you’ll be meeting new people, commit yourself to being as attentive as possible during introductions. There’s often a rush of nerves as you meet someone, and you have to intentionally tell yourself to calm down. Just having that extra mental focus can go a long way in helping you remember names.

Repeat early, repeat often. When you first meet someone, repeat their name as soon as you learn it. That will help sear the person’s name into your memory. Say something like, “Hi Jill, nice to meet you!” or “Pleasure to meet you, Jill.”

After that initial repeat, use the person’s name as much as you can throughout the conversation without coming off as a cheesy used car salesman. “Where are you from, Jill?” “How’s the weather in Toledo this time of year, Jill?” “How do you know the bride and groom, Jill?” You get the idea. Again, be natural and don’t overdo it.

To really burn the name into that noggin of yours, make sure to end your conversation by repeating the person’s name one final time. “Great meeting you, Jill. I hope we can stay in touch.”

Not only does this technique help you remember someone’s name, it also makes you seem charming. As we mentioned, people love the sound of their own name.

Have them spell it out. Hearing a person spell their name can help you remember it, especially if it’s an unusual name. If it’s a common name, but has different spelling variations, ask the person which variation he or she uses. For example, if a person’s name is Bryan, you can ask, “So is that Bryan with a y or Brian with an i?” He answers, “It’s Bryan with a y.” Now whenever you see that person, you can think, “That’s Bryan with a y.”

Visualize the person’s name on their forehead. As soon as you hear the person’s name, visualize their name stamped in big block letters across their forehead. Keep that mental picture on their forehead the entire time that person is in your presence.

Associate the person’s name with an easy-to-remember picture. After hearing a person’s name, make it as tangible as possible to you by associating their name with a picture. Be as creative as you want with this. There’s no right or wrong way to do it. The association just needs to be meaningful to you. For example, if a person’s name is Teddy Thompson, you might imagine a teddy bear holding a Thompson machine gun.

Associate the image that represents the person’s name with an outstanding facial feature on the person. To especially seal a name memory, take that visual representation you made of the person’s name and associate it with an outstanding physical feature the person has.

Let’s use our example of Teddy Thompson. Our picture for his name was a gun-wielding teddy bear. Now we need to associate that image with a feature of Mr. Thompson. Let’s say Teddy has big ears. You can imagine a teddy bear with huge ears holding a machine gun. Your association can be different — just use whatever works for you.

Take notes. If you’re a salesman or in another profession that involves the frequent and vital making of new contacts, be sure to carry a pocket notebook with you. After meeting someone new, write down his or her name in your notebook (or the notes app on your phone), along with some notes about who they are and what they do. Before a meeting where you may see them again, take a moment to review your notes.

Practice, practice, practice. Remembering names is a skill that takes practice to develop, so put yourself in situations where you’ll have to learn new names. Use these techniques as much as you can.

What to Do When You Forget a Name

No matter how hard you try, you’re bound to forget a person’s name every now and then. If you do, just politely and apologetically say, “I’m terribly sorry, but I’ve forgotten your name. What is it again?” Simple. Ask them as soon as you realize you’ve forgotten their name. The more time you spend together, the more offended they’ll be when they realize you don’t know their name.

But having to ask for someone’s name again can make you look bad. I mean, you’re basically telling the person, “You weren’t important enough for me to remember you.” If your memory fails you, and you don’t want to ask for someone’s name again outright, here’s how to recover it as smoothly as possible in several different situations.

When you part ways. If you realize as you part ways with someone that you can’t remember their name, ask if they have a business card you can take home with you. This is great, because not only do you now know their name without having to ask again, you’ll always have something you can take out and review at home.

When you see someone you’ve met before. If you encounter somebody you know you’ve met before, but you can’t put a name with their face, don’t guess their name if you’re not sure. For some reason, having someone say your name wrong always feels more offensive and noticeable than simply being asked for your name again.

So if you can’t remember someone’s name, you have a couple of options. The first is a little trick I’ve used several times with success.

You ask the person, “Excuse me, what was your name again?”

The person will likely respond with their first name.

You then respond with a charming laugh and a smile, and say, “Oh no, I meant your last name.”

People seem to be more forgiving of someone forgetting their last name — less so their first. With this technique, you’ll get the person’s first name without them knowing you had forgotten it. And if you forgot their last name, now you have that, too.

Of course this little trick can backfire if they respond by asking, “My first or last name?”

If you’re not a gambling man, you can simply walk up, stick out your hand, and say your name. “Brett. We met at the Christmas party last year.” They’ll likely respond in kind by saying their name. Chances are, he or she had forgotten your name too! By taking the initiative, you remove their burden of anxiety as well. 

When you’re making introductions. What if you’re standing with a friend, and someone walks up and waits for you to introduce them, but you can’t remember their name? Say to the person, “Have you met my friend, Mike?” The person will then hopefully say to Mike, “No, I haven’t. Nice to meet you. I’m Luke.”

With our archives now 4,000+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in June 2011.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

At AoM, we’re champions of the lost art of letter writing. Emails, texting, and the wide variety of other digital mediums available to us in the modern age are convenient and efficient, but they can’t hold a candle to the warm, tangible, classy nature of handwritten correspondence. Letters are the next best thing to showing up personally at someone’s door.

Of course, snail mail doesn’t need to replace our digital messaging — it’s just a satisfying activity to take part in from time to time. 

It’s hard to get letters of correspondence going these days — you can write to people, but they may not write back (this makes postcards a nice option, as the one-way intention is built-in). 

But there are 7 other types of letters we suggest every man write at least once before he turns 70. Each kind of letter described below covers a different part of the human experience, and provides a benefit to both the writer and the recipient (though you don’t have to send them all). The former gets to participate in the exercise of putting words to feelings, a process that can hone gratitude, humility, and perspective on life. The latter gets to open an envelope filled with comfort and encouragement. It’s win-win.

With most of these types of letters, doing it once is definitely just the minimum goal. Making their writing a regular habit will keep the benefits flowing to you and the lucky recipients of your notes — until you’re 70 and beyond.

7 Letters to Write Before You Turn 70

1. A Letter of Congratulations

The personal pride one feels from reaching a goal is certainly satisfying. But having others recognize the accomplishment definitely makes it all the sweeter. We want others to see in us, what we see in ourselves.

Acknowledging the milestones of others with a letter of congratulations warms the heart of the recipient, and helps keep us humble as well. Watching for and describing the achievements of those around us not only serves as an antidote to narcissism, but inspires us to keep striving for our own goals.

Congratulatory notes can strengthen both personal and professional relationships, and regularly sending them to loved ones and colleagues is a great idea. But you should also consider occasionally writing a longer letter of congratulations when someone close to you reaches an important milestone, makes a particularly positive decision, or achieves a goal that leaves you especially impressed. Such a letter provides both the writer and the recipient the opportunity to reflect on how far they’ve come, the setbacks they’ve surmounted, and the positive attributes that helped them reach their goal and will continue to serve them well in the future. Maybe your brother just joined the Marines. Maybe your friend set a new record in the 400-meter dash. Maybe your daughter is about to become the first person in your family to graduate college. Let them know that you’re proud of them — that you see them.

For tips on how to write a letter of congratulations, check out this guide.

2. A Letter to Your Father

No figure looms larger in a man’s psyche than his father. For better and for worse, our dads are our first models for manhood.

Every boy hopes for the “perfect dad.” Our fathers sometimes fall so short of this model that we ache in disappointment for what might have been. Or they may be so close to the ideal that we worry we’ll never live up to the example they set. Either way, our relationship with our father shaped us as no other, and our feelings about that relationship run deep, whether we can even acknowledge them or not.

Most of us have never taken the time to really thank our dads for everything they’ve done for us, or on the flip side, fully faced the painful realization of how much they’ve hurt us. Yet if we don’t understand how we feel about our dads, we can’t understand how they shaped us, and we can’t understand ourselves and why we turned out the way we did.

Writing a letter to your father is an excellent way to reflect on these questions. You don’t have to send this letter if you don’t want to — it can be an exercise you do just for yourself. The purpose is simply to articulate, and thus better understand, your feelings about your dad.

For some ideas on what to write about and how to structure your letter to your father, see this article.

3. A Letter of Condolence/Sympathy

Of all the letters you will write during your life, the sympathy note is arguably the hardest to pen. It can be very difficult to find the right words, or any words really, to say. We worry about saying the wrong thing, or we feel awkward talking about such a serious matter. It’s thus often tempting not to dabble in this correspondence category at all. We tell ourselves that the grieving person knows we love and support them anyway.

And they probably do. But everyone would rather hear it from you themselves. They want a tangible reminder that you are thinking about them during their hard time. Your words can bring a brief, but very real moment of comfort. I can tell you that it really does mean a lot when someone takes the time to say, “I know you’re in pain and I hurt that you’re hurting.”

The sympathy letter is not only one of the hardest on this list to write, it’s one you should work the hardest to make a recurring habit rather than a one-time event. Whenever a friend or loved one loses someone close to them, take the time to pen them a note. Whether you live close to the person or far away, whether you knew the person they lost well or not at all, make it a priority.

For a full guide on how to word a sympathy note, see this article.

4. A Letter to Your Future Self

At a certain point in your life — if you’re like me, it will happen in your late twenties — the person you were as a young man will begin to seem like another individual, someone separate from your grown-up self. It’s a strange thing to experience. It’s not that you lose memories of your past, or change so radically from your younger self you don’t recognize him (though that might be the case), but simply that your boyhood self and your current self come to seem like two distinct individuals. Almost like the younger is an ancestor of the older; the child is truly the father of the man.

Because of this cleaving between our past and present, we are able to fairly objectively reflect on and examine who we were as a young man. But what would that young man say if the tables were turned and he was sizing up your current self?

Writing a letter to your future self gives you a chance to find out. Pen a letter that you don’t intend to open for a period of years or decades. Express your hopes for the man you will be when that envelope is finally ripped open. What do you hope your future self is doing for work? Does he have a wife and kids? Is he still active in his faith? What ideals do you hope your future self hasn’t given up on? You may find when you eventually read the letter many years hence that your goals and ideals have changed a great deal, but that you actually don’t mind, because you traded them in for better ones. The naiveté and earnestness of your youthful voice may cause you to smile and chuckle. Alternatively, the passion of the younger you may create a great sinking feeling, as you realize how far you have strayed from how you once hoped to turn out. Perhaps you have become a man that your younger self would be ashamed of. His time-traveling entreaties may bring you to your senses, revive your old dreams, and inspire you to change the course you’re then taking.

5. A Love Letter

It’s not always easy to express our feelings to our significant others. We’d rather show our love through our actions. While women definitely appreciate these concrete manifestations of our commitment, their brains are often more language oriented than ours. They want to hear the words behind the actions. They want to know exactly what’s in our hearts.

Yet it’s hard to not only find the right words to express how we feel about someone, but to also make it flow and sound real purty. It’s especially difficult when you’re sitting down with someone and trying to remember exactly what you wanted to say. Enter the love letter.

We often associate love letters with days gone by — the eras past when men went off to war and left on journeys that took them away from their loved ones for months or even years at a time. In reading biographies of great men, I’ve been continually impressed with the passionate love letters they penned to their wives; while we often think of men of the past as being more stoic than us, some of them definitely had us moderns beat in the romance department.

Yet your sweetheart doesn’t have to be far away for you to write a love letter to her. A love letter is appropriate even when you’re sleeping alongside her every night. It’s a chance to express your feelings in a more ardent way than you do on a day-to-day basis.

A fervently romantic letter (or a whole year of them) becomes a testament in the history of your love. Such a letter constitutes a record of your relationship that she’ll hold onto for the rest of her life, and that your grandchildren will read and “awwww” over.

For tips on how to write a love letter that’ll make her swoon, check out this guide.

6. A Letter of Encouragement

We’ve all had times where we’ve struggled mightily with setbacks and doubt, times when we were tempted to abandon our path and beat a retreat. If we were lucky, someone we trusted stepped in at the right moment to offer us some words of encouragement — a shot in the arm that helped us gain perspective on our challenges, see a vision of the light at the end of the tunnel, and gain the strength to keep journeying on.

Receiving such reassurance face-to-face is always quite effective and desirable. Nothing like a literal arm around the shoulder. But in many ways, it’s even better to have such encouragement delivered via letter. Not simply because being physically present with someone is not always possible, but because a letter offers the struggler a permanent record to which they can return again and again for succor. In the midst of a pep talk from a friend or parent, our spirits soar, but when we’re back alone their words become fuzzy and our hearts sink. A letter can be read and re-read during times when the sojourner once again falters; it serves as a prick to his memory — something to which he can hold fast and renew his confidence.

A letter of encouragement tells someone in the midst of a hard time that you’ve got their back and have faith in their ability to continue on or find a way out. Perhaps your niece has gone away to college but is feeling depressed and thinking of dropping out — you had a similar experience and can share some advice on how to cope. Perhaps your son has broken up with his first love and thinks it’s the end of the world, and you can offer your assurance that it’s decidedly not and there are plenty of fish in the sea. Or maybe your friend has been hit with a wave of homesickness while at boot camp; you were part of the process he used to make the decision to join the military, and you can remind him of how he arrived at that choice.

7. A Letter of Gratitude

Gratitude is one of the hallmarks of a life well lived. It is a virtue that we intuitively know profoundly impacts our personal happiness and the quality of our relationships. And research has repeatedly proven the validity of this viscerally understood truth.

Nothing else can buoy up both our personal and professional relationships quite like gratitude. A warm word of appreciation can instantly thaw the ice between people, and strengthen an already solid bond.

Taking the time to articulate our gratitude humbles us with the realization of how dependent we are on the kindness and help of others, and how lucky we are to have them in our lives. Expressing our gratitude also helps us put the not-so-good things in our lives in proper perspective by showing us that even in tough times, we still have a lot to be thankful for.

Write thank you notes early and often, for things both big and small. While it’s often tempting to send a message of gratitude via email (and it’s certainly better than nothing), it’s incredibly heartwarming to receive such a message inscribed with pen and paper. If something happens during the day that brings a smile to your face or warms your heart, jot off a quick note to the person responsible. If someone goes above and beyond at work, leave them a short note to let them know how much you appreciate and recognize their efforts.

In addition to these quick notes, at least once, hopefully several times, take the time to write a longer letter of gratitude to someone who’s had an especial influence in your life — your wife, your favorite teacher growing up, a best friend. Reflect on all they’ve done for you, and the difference it’s made in your life. Get as specific as you can as you recall these things — people’s hearts are truly warmed when they see that you noticed their attributes and efforts, and remember them well.

With our archives now 4,000+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in June 2014.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Note: This is a rebroadcast.

A lot of young men today struggle in finding their footing in adulthood. They feel lost, directionless, and unsure of who they are and how to confidently and competently navigate the world.

Part of the reason for this is that most young men today lack something which was once a part of nearly every culture in the world, but has now almost entirely disappeared: a rite of passage.

My guest today didn’t want his son to flounder on the way to maturity, nor to miss out on having an initiation into manhood, so he set out to create a 6-year journey for him that would help him move from boy to man. His name is Jon Tyson, and he’s the author of The Intentional Father: A Practical Guide to Raise Sons of Courage and Character. Today on the show, Jon unpacks the components of the years-long journey into manhood he created for his son, beginning with how he brainstormed those components by doing “The Day Your Son Leaves Home” exercise. We then discuss how old Jon’s son was when he started his rite of passage and why it began with him having a “severing dinner” with his mom. We get into what his rite of passage consisted of, from the kickoff ceremony to the challenges, experiences, trips, and daily rituals Jon used to impart values and teach his son the “5 Shifts of Manhood.” Jon shares how moving his son’s focus from being a good man, to being good at being a man, helped him get remotivated to continue the process, why his rite of passage included a gap year after high school, and how Jon celebrated the end of his son’s journey into becoming a man. We also discuss whether Jon did something similar with his daughter. We end our conversation with some key principles any dad can use to start intentionally helping their kids become well-rounded individuals who can confidently step out on their own and into the world.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Article: The Importance of Fathers
• AoM Article: The Importance of Male Rites of Passage
• AoM Article: Male Rites of Passage From Around the World
• AoM Article & Podcast: Man’s Need for Ritual
• AoM Series on the origins, elements, and future of manhood
• AoM Article: The 7 Habits — Begin With the End in Mind
• AoM Article: The 3 Families Every Young Man Needs to Grow Up Well
• James Hollis
• AoM Article: Carry the Fire
• Art of Manliness’ Carry the Fire Zippo Lighter
• AoM Article: What Is Manliness?
• AoM Podcast #527 With Richard Rohr
• The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact by Chip and Dan Heath
• The Way of Men by Jack Donovan
• AoM Podcast #49 With Jack Donovan
• AoM Series on the Four Archetypes of the Mature Masculine
• AoM Article: 100 Skills Every Man Should Know
• AoM Article: 80+ Quotes on Men & Manhood

Connect With Jon Tyson

• Primal Path
• Jon on Twitter
• Jon on IG

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. A lot of young men today struggle in finding their footing in adulthood. If you’re lost, directionless and unsure of who they are and how to confidently and competently navigate the world. Part of the reason for this is that most young men today lack something which was once part of nearly every culture in the world, but has now almost entirely disappeared: A rite of passage. My guest today didn’t want his son to flounder on the way to maturity nor miss out on having an initiation into manhood, so he set out to create a six-year journey for him that would help him move from boy to man. His name is Jon Tyson, and he’s the author of The Intentional Father: A Practical Guide to Raise Sons of Courage and Character. Today on the show, Jon impacts the components of the years-long journey into manhood he created for his son, beginning with how he brainstormed these components by doing the day-your-son-leaves-home exercise.

We then discuss how old Jon’s son was when he started his rite of passage and why it began with him having a severing dinner with his mom. We get into what his rite of passage consisted of, from the kick-off ceremony to the challenges, experiences, trips and daily rituals Jon used to impart values, teach his son the five shifts of manhood. Jon shares how moving his son’s focus from being a good man to being good at being a man helped him get re-motivated to continue the process, why his rite of passage included a gap year after high school and how Jon celebrated the end of his son’s journey into becoming a man. We also discuss whether Jon did something similar with his daughter. We end our conversation with some key principles any dad can use to start intentionally helping their kids become well-rounded individuals who can confidently step out on their own and into the world. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/passage.

And away we go. Alright, Jon Tyson, welcome to the show.

Jon Tyson: Good day, mate. How are you? Thanks for having me on.

Brett McKay: So you got a book out called The Intentional Father: A Practical Guide to Raise Sons of Courage and Character. And in this book, you walk readers through on how you developed and carried out a years-long rite of passage into manhood for your son. So let’s talk about this. When did you first get the idea of doing this sort of… This was involved. This started… This was years long, right? Started when he became a teenager, went through… Till he left the house. When did you come up with this idea?

Jon Tyson: I think the first moment it really hit me was driving back from the doctor when they told me, “Hey, do you wanna know if your son’s a boy or a girl?” And I said, obviously, “It’s a boy.” And I just had this profound sense of being overwhelmed that I personally did not have what it took to help my son become a man. I got married young and faced all the challenges of my own inadequacy, dealing with the complications of life, and I thought, “I have got to do better for my son.” And that’s where the idea was born. So I think another key moment, I was meeting with a local faith leader, and he was talking about the way their community helped young men move from adolescence to manhood, and I thought, “I don’t have anything like that, and I have got to build something like that.” Yeah, so very, very early on, and I spent about a decade reading, trying to figure out how to do it.

Brett McKay: Did you have something like that in your own life when you were a boy transitioning to manhood? Did you get a rite of passage?

Jon Tyson: I had absolutely nothing. I mean, zero. So I was working from a pretty big deficit, and I think a lot of dads are. A lot of folks out there sort of feel there’s a hole in their life, and they’re trying to figure out how to catch up, fill that and then do something better for their own kids.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think a lot of men are like that. They didn’t have that experience but they want it for their own sons, so they’re trying to give their sons the experience that they didn’t have.

Jon Tyson: Yeah, totally.

Brett McKay: And something you start off in the book talking about is the research. You’ve done a lot of research about what happens when boys don’t have fathers, don’t have involved fathers. What does the research say as to what happens to boys when they lack a strong father figure?

Jon Tyson: Well, it’s actually very, very clear. Sort of the go-to research most people reference is from fatherhood.org, but it’s basically what you think. Kids are four times more likely to live in poverty, more likely to suffer emotional behavioral problems, higher levels of risky and aggressive behavior, two times the risk of infant mortality which is crazy, more likely to go to prison, only one in five inmates grew up in a home where their father was present, twice as likely to be involved in early sexual activity. So the presence of a dad in a home makes an incredible difference. With all of our conversations about justice in the world today, I don’t know why this one doesn’t get more attention, because one of the greatest cultural advantages that someone could have in life is a present, loving father figure. So yeah, the impact is massive.

Brett McKay: Well, and besides, you’re trying to move beyond just having a present, involved dad. Your ideal of a good dad is an intentional father, where a father intentionally thinks about walking their sons through an initiation process. What do you think men lack when they transition into adulthood without having almost like a ritual to carry them into manhood?

Jon Tyson: Well, I think there’s some kind of deep, internal inadequacy. There’s some sense of a desire to bless, pass on, and help, but they don’t have a source to get it from. So I think there’s a lot of confusion. I think there’s a lot of pain. Our culture has gotten rid of most of the sort of life passages other than formal education, and so there’s a lot of people walking around really wondering, “Am I even a man?” When are you a man? When you lose your virginity? The first time you drink alcohol? When you get your first paycheck? When you leave home? No one seems to know when manhood is conferred on them, and then how they distribute it to other people. So yeah, I think there’s a hole in the soul of most men and they’re seeking and striving to catch up with it.

Brett McKay: And something you talk about in the book, one way men often fill that hole is they create self-initiations for themselves.

Jon Tyson: Yeah. You see this… Young people… I mean, you obviously remember this. When you hit puberty, the whole world changes. Your body is filled with testosterone, you got chemicals pumping, you got all of this energy. And the number one thing you’re trying to figure out what to do with it is, how do you channel this in a life-giving rather than destructive way? And that’s what these rites of passage historically were designed to do, to create guard rails, so the gift of male energy could be channeled for the good of the community and the man. Without those guard rails, you see all the damage we see in our world today. Without initiation, young men will seek to do something with their energy that confers a sense of confidence and blessing.

So, whether it’s risky behavior, whether it’s underaged drinking, whether it is sexual behavior or whatever, you’ve basically got young men saying, “Help me figure out what to do with this energy.” And when you look at some of the other rites of passage that other cultures have had, they are… Some of ’em are harrowing. And we would probably take kids away from parents who did some of these ancient rites of passage. They can sound kind of barbaric. But when you look at the levels of anxiety with our young people today, depression with young men, the challenges that teenage boys face, our lack of initiation at scale is more damaging than the initiation cultures, no matter how intense they were, of other societies. So, yeah, I’m a big believer that we have to reclaim rites of passage, create guard rails, so that male energy can be channeled for the good of society. And that’s definitely what I’m trying to address in the book.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I like that… The idea of… This is… The idea is to channel male energy or masculine energy. And it’s one of the analogies I’ve used throughout the years when I’ve tried to explain difference between masculinity and manliness. Masculinity is just that energy and vigor that’s borne through testosterone, right?

Jon Tyson: Yes.

Brett McKay: And then manliness is a culture that you use to direct that energy, or manhood is a culture that you direct that energy. So it’s kind of like electricity. Masculinity is electricity. You create a culture of manliness or manhood to funnel that energy. But if you don’t have any wires that’s directing that masculine energy, it becomes dangerous.

Jon Tyson: Yeah, definitely. Totally agree. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Okay. So let’s talk about… You had this idea, your son was born, you’re like, “Okay, I’m gonna… I wanna create an initiation for him, to give him things that I didn’t have. And so when you started this planning process, you went through this exercise you call, the-day-your-son-leaves-home exercise. Walk us through that. What kinda questions are you asking yourself as you guide yourself through this thought process?

Jon Tyson: Yeah. I got the idea from Stephen Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, where it talks about, Begin with the end in mind. And it has that exercise where you pretend it’s your funeral, and then you go back and sort of ask yourself the question, “What sort of life and legacy do I wanna leave?” And I thought, that’s a great framework to apply to a ton of different areas of life. And I thought, I’m gonna apply this to the day where I send my son off to either college or some sort of gap year or whatever. And I did… I thought about this when he was really young. And I basically just worked my way backwards, try to keep that day very, very vivid and real in my heart, and then ask a series of questions to design this pathway for him. The first one was like, What do I want my son to know? I want him to be a man of wisdom. I want him to be able to navigate the complexities of life. Number two, Who do I want my son to be? And this was about his moral, ethical and character formation. Then, What do I want my son to be able to do? And this is sort of skill acquisition. A man should be able to do stuff, step in a room and add value through skill acquisition. And then, What experiences do I need to design to make this happen? With all the best intentions in the world, without a conscious pathway and designing experiences where these things are developed, it’s never gonna be there.

So, yeah, I basically worked backwards. And just like you do with a college degree, sort of you say, “Hey, in order to get a degree, you’re gonna have to do X amount of classes, and it’s gonna have to either be a two-year associates or a four-year or a graduate degree.” I just worked backwards, starting at around age 13 when he was hitting puberty, and then worked it out till he was 18, and then created a pathway around knowledge and character and skill development and the experiences to help him do that. And then one of the things I did was to basically ask the question, Who can help me with this? I’m a big believer that dads are fundamental in a young man’s formation. But we’re living in a world where a lot of people don’t have dads or step dads or they’re asking the question about mentoring. And so I sort of came up with this idea of building a tribe or a cohort of fathers who do this together, and then coming up, with those dads, with an asset map. And sort of everybody puts in the middle of the room, What assets do you have available in your life? Someone may say, “Hey, we have a lake house.” Someone may say, “I got a second car, and I’m willing to let the boys learn to drive in it.” Someone may say, “Hey, I’ve got a series of key relationships in my industry, and I can… ” Or that, “I’ve got access to some cool sporting events.” And then you sort of start dreaming from there.

So it was like a big white board exercise. And then I worked my way backwards, and that was how I basically designed what I call the Primal Path, which is the sort of six-year journey I came up with.

Brett McKay: No, the-day-your-son-leaves-home exercise is really powerful. I went through it through my head and trying to imagine what my son… He’s 11 right now, and imagine when he’s 18, and he’s leaving the roost. It’s just… It really gets you…

Jon Tyson: It’s heavy. Yeah.

Brett McKay: It’s a gut punch. You’re just like… And you wanna know, like, What is he gonna be like? What do I want him to be like?

Jon Tyson: Yeah, totally.

Brett McKay: And I like this idea of developing an asset map. So it’s… You get the idea of what… The things that you want your son to know, understand, be able to do. But then try to figure out, Okay, what do I have at my disposal to make that happen? And not just things, but, Who are the other people in my life that can help me make this happen? I think that was… I loved how you focused on that in making this a community project. Oftentimes, when I think… When I hear dads talk about, “I wanna do a rite of passage for my son,” it’s just him and their son. That’s fine. But I think something… There’s a power when you bring other men into the process as well.

Jon Tyson:Yeah. If you put too much pressure on a dad… No dad is gonna be a perfect father. And so to put all that psychic pressure on a dad can be overwhelming, but to distribute that through a community of men where a father or a mentor plays a primary role, but is surrounded by this cast of other sort of like wise, passionate, helpful men, I think that is a real gift. And I think it’s actually something that young men ache for. Why is there such devotion to teams, team sports, having coaches around? It’s ’cause we need that sense of community and belonging as we grow and develop. So it was very important for me, not just to be, my son and I, but it was like my son and I and a cohort of other guys walking through this.

Brett McKay: Well, I think too, part of the… What you’re trying to do in an initiation or rite of passage is help the boy cut themselves off in a way from their family. So if it’s just the dad, that’s a problem. That’s gonna be hard to do. ‘Cause if you’re always there in the process, it’s hard to cut yourself off away from your father. But if you have another man there, you can have those periods where you can experience that. And I’ve noticed in my own life, I look back in my own life, my dad was always there and he taught me a lot of important things. But I remember, it really… Like a lot of times, oftentimes, the things that he told me or he modeled hit home when there was another man that wasn’t my father…

Jon Tyson: Yeah, totally agree.

Brett McKay: Showing me that. Okay. So you came with this idea what you wanted your son to be like, then you did… You started off an initial ceremony, but it was with your wife. It was mom that kick-started this thing off. What’s… That’s… I think that a lot of guys think, what’s going on there? Why’d you do that?

Jon Tyson: Well, that was interestingly enough, the most controversial piece of this period. And this is the place I get the most feedback. Just to take a little half step back, James Hollis who was I think the president of the Jungian society, he’s written a ton of books on midlife, on pathways, on stage development and theory. He basically said all societies have a six-step process of walking boys through adolescence into manhood, and one of those stages is what he calls the death of childhood thinking.

And it’s an environment where you’ve gotta be cut off from the primary influences of childhood in order to enter liminal space. And one of the things that a lot of societies did was consciously severed an overemphasized bond between mother and child, so that he could learn to be formed by the community of men. So I did what I called a severing dinner, which the publisher reduced down to a directional dinner, which sounded less threatening. And it was basically, I talked my wife into doing this, and my wife’s an absolute legend. She’s an incredible woman. And I said,” Hey, look, I need Nate not to shrink back to you for comfort, but I need you to push him back to me for formation and for challenge.” And so she took him out for a dinner to his favorite restaurant. Even though I’m from Australia, she took him to Outback. It’s a cliche, but it is what it is. [chuckle] And he’s at Outback steakhouse and then she gave him a series of gifts.

And then, I come from a faith background, so she prayed a prayer of blessing over him, sort of like an important marking moment. And then she said to him, “Hey, I’m your mother. I love you. I’ll always be here for you and I’ll care for you, but you need to be handed to your father to learn how to become a man. This is gonna be hard. It’s gonna be a challenge, and you’re gonna want to come back to me to ease and find comfort for the discomfort and challenges you’re facing. And I want you to know I’m gonna push you back to your dad and I’m not gonna nurture your immaturity.” And that was a really powerful moment. Now, to fast forward several years, when I was with my son closing out our journey together, I said to him, “Hey, Nate, I’m getting quite a bit of pushback on the dinner that you did with mom.” And he said, “No, no, no, no, you have to include that.” He said, “I cannot put into words how psychologically powerful that was for me, to realize I was entering this journey primarily being formed by men.” And he was like, “That jump-started this whole thing in my heart that I was actually entering into a different stage together.” So, yeah, it began with my wife and then sort of moved to a formal initiation ceremony on a beach off the coast of New York City.

Brett McKay: And what did that ceremony look like? Who was there and what did you do?

Jon Tyson: So I basically got three other dads together. I’ve been in New York city for the last 17 years. So, it was a few other dads who were my son’s closest friends, and basically cast this vision for him about building this pathway from adolescence into manhood. And then we designed an initiation ceremony. So we hyped it up for a few months, so they’d be a little nervous and also excited. And then when the day came, when all the boys had turned 13, this is late summer, we took them out to the beach and sat them in the sand and gathered around, told them a series of stories, shared some of our own personal lessons and learning. And then sort of tried to put… To say it in a good way, sort of inspire them and paint a picture of what was coming, and put the fear of God in them about how hard this was gonna be.

So there was sort of like that anticipatory terror. And then they ran into the water sort of like a religious baptism into this journey, dying to their old ways of childhood. And then, rising into this journey. And then we took them to Coney Island where they played a bunch of games together. And that was the kickoff. I then gave my son some gifts. I’m a big believer in the power of artifacts. And there’s something potent of one generation passing on something to the next generation that they can handle and know that they’re in a part of a continuing story. So I gave my son a really strong leather journal, I gave him a really nice pen. And then along the way, a whole series of gifts to sort of like mark it out and get along. I had this vision before I started where I wanted my son to start on the coast of New York. And I wanted his journey to end on the coast of Spain. And there’s a little town called Finisterre, and it’s a place where pilgrims, after they do this long hike, leave behind something at the end of their pilgrimage. And I had planned to sort of like go into the ocean in New York and go into the ocean in Spain. And so I had it planned to bookend and so that’s why it was done at the beach, and that’s why water was an important part of that.

Brett McKay: You were thinking way… You were thinking with the end in mind, again going back to Stephen Covey.

Jon Tyson: Yeah. That’s exactly right. Yeah. And when he leaves home, I really just… And this is one thing I would encourage dads or mentors to do. A lot of times men get into the workplace and they have…

They’re casting vision. They’re thinking abut sales or strategy or how to build things out, how to take ground, and they’ve got a ton of energy and gifts of vision casting, and that sort of stuff. But when it comes to their own kids we don’t apply any of the skills we have in our jobs to our parenting. And, if you were to put me on like a strength finder test, strategic would be number two for me. So I was like, “Hey, I’m a pretty strategic person. Why not apply this to fatherhood and then build this out?” So yeah, I had thought through this journey and tried to figure out the core components of it, and that certainly took away a lot of the panic and fear, even though there still was a ton of that being a dad.

Brett McKay: So when do you think a son should start the rite of passage? Like how do you know that they’re ready?

Jon Tyson: I think, universally through history, it’s sort of around the age of 13 or so. And I don’t know if that is… I don’t know if there’s anything culturally specific around that. Certainly not in our world anymore. Turning 13, I guess you’re a teenager, but that’s not that big a deal. I think it’s more connected to puberty. It’s when your body’s beginning to change. It’s when testosterones coming in. It’s when you start to think about sexuality. It’s when you start to think about your strength. It’s when competition really sets in. That’s when you start thinking about even a sense of vocation. You stop wanting to be the things you say when you’re four or five, and you’ve got a bit more of a realistic sense of where it is. You’re getting into sports or into academics in a new way. And so I think, again, it’s about that male energy. You’re trying to figure out “What do I do with this?” It can be very, very confusing and disorienting energy too. So right around the time this is happening within you, you want a community of men to come around you and to tell you the energy is good. It’s a gift. It must be channeled the right way and here is the path. So yeah. Universally, it seems to be sort around 13, around the age of puberty.

Brett McKay: Okay. So your son does the ceremony with his mom. You have the initiation ceremony with his friends and some other dads at the beach. The first part of this initiation, year’s long initiation process, was you actually took your son back home where you grew up. Why did you do that? What was the point of this?

Jon Tyson: Well, I mean, if I could sum up modern culture in one phrase, it would be this, project self. Project self. We live in a world that’s telling you all the time, “You are the center of everything.” Narcissism is at epidemic proportions in our world today. And particularly when you’re a teenager, you can be pretty inwardly focused. It is a confusing time. And you can think that there’s nothing outside of yourself and that there’s nothing that mattered before you showed up. And I wanted my son to have a bigger picture of life. I wanted my son to realize what shaped me, what was gonna be shaping him, and I wanted him to step into sort of a family narrative. Various family traditions, some ethnic, some religious, record family trees for different reasons. I happen to have a cousin who was a history buff, and has got a PhD in history, and he traced our family line back to the 10th century. And so he presented me like this hundreds of pages of book of our family story. And, I mean the whole thing, family crest, family mottos, it was amazing. And so, I presented that to my son, “Hey, you’re a part of a long line of Tyson men and this is what it means.” And then I wanted him to see where I grew up and what it was like for me to develop my own values.

So I took him back to Australia where I grew up, I’m from a city called Adelaide, and basically had him go through the places that formed the values of my life so that when I talked about something, he’d knew where it was. I wanted him to have a context for the story that he was stepping into. And I think without… Alastair McIntyre said this, “We can only ask the question, what am I to do if I can answer the previous question, what stories am I a part of? Or what story or stories am I a part of?” And so if you’re gonna figure out your role you’ve gotta figure out the story that you’re in, and I really felt it was important to give my son the sense of continuity and history so he could understand the story that he was extending.

Brett McKay: Now, I think that’s important. I think another way you could sum up modern life is lack of context. A lot of people were just… You’re kind of thrown into this milieu where it’s just, you’re getting bombarded by all these different stories, and you don’t have a story that you’re embedded in. And so, you’re disoriented. And I think telling your kid like, “Hey, this is… You’re part of this story. This is our family story. This is what you’re part of,” gives them some context. Now, I think this is important because it can give them, one, they could step into that and lean into it. But even if they decide not to, by giving them that story, they’re able to know like, “Oh, how can I make myself different?” It gives them something to push back against if that makes sense.

Jon Tyson: Yeah. Yeah, totally.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think a lot of young people, they’re just kind of flapping their arms. They don’t know what they’re doing.

Jon Tyson: And I think there’s a… I think it’s important too to tell the family story in a compelling way and an honest way. The whole idea of a family reunion where it’s like a bunch of people you don’t really like wearing weird t-shirts, I wasn’t trying to do that with my son. I was trying to let him know, “Hey man, our family has an incredible history. It’s a history of people who have taken big risks. It’s a history of people who’ve sacrificed. It’s a history of people who’ve paid a real price for you to be where you are in the world today. And I want you to know you come from good stock. To be a Tyson, Tyson means fire brand, like carry the fire.” I have the Carry the Fire lighters from Art of Manliness.

But like that whole concept man, this you are born into a legacy and you don’t get to invent a universe from nothing. And there’s good things I want you to have. There’s bad things I wanna warn you about that could flow into your life because of the things we’ve been through, and then I wanna figure out how to help you carry this forward through your calling and your personality. And that was actually a really, really amazing time. I’ve had a pretty wild life. I dropped outta high school, worked in a meat factory, bought a house when I was 19, immigrated to another country. I’ve had pretty wild teenage years, and I wanted my son to sort of like see that and feel the weight of that so he could understand the context that I was parenting out of. So he really enjoyed that time even though I was heartbroken that he came back saying, “Dad, American food is better than Australian food.” But what can you do?

Brett McKay: And what I like about what you did too is you would take him to places where you made really big decisions in your own life.

Jon Tyson: Yeah.

Brett McKay: And I think that’s a really great idea cause it allows your son… It gives him a pattern to follow, when he’s making his own big decisions.

Jon Tyson: Yeah. My values were vision, passion, discipline and risk. When I go back through history, I’ve always valued visionary men. They look beyond the horizons of what is possible, and they dream bigger dreams for themselves and for the culture. I’ve always loved men of passion. I’ve respected men of discipline, who have channeled again their energy to something redemptive and something good. And then if you’re good at those things, if you’ve got vision and passion in your discipline, you’re gonna get opportunities that’s gonna require risk. So, I took him to the four places I learned those values. And again, I totally agree, when something emerges in your life, in order for it to be internalized and to become a sacred part of your story, you go to market. The power of ritual and recognition, so our life is not just a blur of ordinary days. So yeah. And I see my son doing that now. My son will take time and say, “This place matters to me. This is an important part of my story. Those sorts of things.” So yeah. He learned that by seeing it on that trip.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So one of your big goals through this whole entire process was to teach your son values, family values, to help him develop his own personal values, but you also had this idea like, “I wanna inculcate masculine values into my son.” What were those values and why do you think that was important?

Jon Tyson: It is a confusing time in our culture to ask the question, “What is a man? What does it mean to be a man?” There’s a lot of stereotypes out there. There’s a lot of negative press in there. One of the things I try to emphasize to sort of get away from the controversy, and there is a lot of controversy, was the power of classical virtues. So the four classical versus: Justice, wisdom, courage, and self-restraint. I felt like the men we need in our world today are embodied in these values. We need just men in a world of tyrants. We need restrained men in a world of excess. We need wise men in a world of fools. And we need courageous men in a world of fear. Again, as someone from a faith tradition, the most important values according to St. Paul are faith, hope and love. And so to extend that I’m like, “We need faithful men in a world of compromise. We need hopeful men in a time of despair. We need loving men in a world of hate.”

So, I try to take these noble historically proven virtues and make those the baseline. And, particularly in Greco-Roman culture, these were masculine values. These were values that were associated with men. And so rather than just sort of pluck from thin air, choose random cultural values, I tried to find something that was a little more timeless and rooted.

Brett McKay: And one way you passed on these values or taught your son these values, you did this, you’d take him on trips and you’d of you’d just show it. I think that’s a very… I think that’s probably the most powerful way. But then you’d have these… Every morning you’d sit down with him and you’d have these little talks, and you’d also assign him books to read. Tell us about that.

Jon Tyson: Yeah. Well, again, I think I got the vision of just college or high school, which is, “What do you need to cover in order to graduate? How do you graduate into manhood? What do you need to have passed?” And again, getting back to know be and do as the sort of core tenants there. So yeah. I got a calendar and I worked back through a series of months, and I just said, “Here’s the content I wanna cover in this time,” and then I just broke it up into little chunks and then we just talked through it. So yeah. I just wanted to have this point every day where I was connecting. When you ask the question, “How does somebody grow? How does somebody change? How are they really shaped or formed?” It’s normally two things. It’s big, powerful, catalytic defining moments, and then it’s like the ordinary everyday habitual repetitive stuff we do in our lives. And so, that’s what I was doing in the daily little check-ins. Sometimes they were 15 minutes, sometimes they were 40 minutes, depending on what we were talking about. But it was just getting up early before school and then picking the theme we were working on, whether it was like one of the archetypes or one of the shifts.

And then I’d just come up with content and we’d just talk it through. So, I think just sowing those small seeds every day over the course of years produces a massive kind of fruit. So, I asked my son like, “What are some of the takeaways that you got from that?” And a lot of it were like pithy little phrases. My son said the number one thing that I’ve taken away from all of these years of content was this idea, “You are who you are when no one’s looking. That’s your true self. When you’re accountable as your own man in the world before your creator, that’s who you really are, without people pushing you.” And that was just something like I winged one morning. It was just like, “Okay, let me just throw that in. You know?” So again, you never know by sowing those seeds what’s gonna stick and what’s really gonna like impact and help.

Brett McKay: And then also throughout the process, you’d read books together or you’d even watch movies. So if you were talking about courage, you would watch Band of Brothers, for example.

Jon Tyson: Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean we just churned through the movies. If you’re a busy dad, I can tell you, come up with a few discussion questions, watch a movie, make him thoughtful, and you can have a great night together. Yeah, the Band of Brothers and barbecue was a very, very strong season that we did. So we would just like talk about… Watch an episode, talk about what we learned in the characters, and then we’d go out and eat meat. And we sort of went through the… Because I used to be a butcher, we would go to different barbecue restaurants, and we honestly sort of ate our way around New York City as a reward for doing these nights together. So that was a lot of fun. Build your traditions. With my daughter, we did it with cookies. She didn’t wanna eat brisket every week, so…

Brett McKay: Yeah, I wanna talk about something, what you do with your daughter, in a bit here. Okay, so one of the things you did with this right of passage process is you used the work, or looked at the work of Richard Rohr. We’ve had him on the podcast before. Franciscan Monk, who’s thought and does a lot about male initiation. And you took this idea that Rohr has, of the five rules of manhood that every boy needs to learn in order to become a man, and then you modified it to… And you called them the shifts of manhood. So what are the five shifts of manhood?

Jon Tyson: Yeah, I mean, Rohr is obviously a sage. He spent half a lifetime thinking about this stuff and has some very, very strong works on that. But I felt like, I mean how do you say to a 13-year-old kid, “You are gonna die. You’re not that important. Life is not about you.” And then how do you help him see that he’s making progress on that? And so, I sort of converted him into these shifts. Yeah, so the shifts are from ease to difficulty. Boys embrace ease men embrace difficulty, from self to others. Boys are about themselves, men are about others. From the whole to a part, boys are all about themselves, men realize they’re only a part of a greater story. From control to surrender, boys think they can maintain control, men understand the mysterious power of surrender. And then, from the temporary to the eternal, boys only think about what matters right now, but men think out of a larger picture. And then, yeah. I designed these units to help him really learn these lessons.

And so, to be able to say, “Hey, boys are about ease themselves, the whole thing, control and temporary things, and men are about difficulty, others, humility, surrender, thinking big picture.” So yeah. I would take a couple of months on each of these, have a little daily talk about it, do this weekly thing that we call man school, and then at the end of it we would do a challenge.

So from ease to difficulty, for example, my son’s terrified of heights. So I took him in Australia to the highest ropes course and Mike, this thing was… I hate heights too. This was horrific but I wanted him to see, “Hey man, if you do this, you’ve passed like you have now embraced difficulty. Like you’re ready to move on to the next unit.” And so it was a real joy seeing him do an actual challenge that kind of scared him a bit where he had to overcome something. But it was just a way of showing progress. I think there’s nothing more demoralizing for men than working hard and seeing no progress from your labor. And so I wanted to build in this sense of “I am taking ground. I am moving down the path. I am heading down the road from adolescence into manhood” and this was something that, particularly with my son, was very, very effective.

Brett McKay: No. And I love one for the shift for temporary to the eternal like you took him to a graveyard and that was really impactful. That was one of those other things that really stuck with your son when you asked him, “What was some of the things that stuck?” And he was like, “This pithy off-the-cuff remark about “You look at a gravestone and you see the date someone’s born, then a dash and then the date they die.” And you said, “That dash, that was their life. And what’s gonna be what’s gonna be your dash?”

Jon Tyson: Yeah. What’s your dash? That was actually a really meaningful moment. And my son, anytime we go past a graveyard would to this day be like, “What’s your dash, dad? Make it count.” And it is kind of amazing to think there’s that person, their life is over. They’d do anything to get a second chance at it. Gosh. Don’t squander your life man. Time is a gift. Time is the most important commodity. And so, think properly and steward your time. And I think to this day, my son is very time-conscious as a result of that moment.

Brett McKay: Okay, so these five shifts, you would spend a few months and would you revisit like, say if you did… From whole story to part of the story, a year before, would you revisit it and say, “Hey, we’re gonna talk about this and more?”

Jon Tyson: Yeah. I’m always just… When we talk about how memory works, we forget in a week 75% of what we’ve heard a week earlier. And so you’ve got to do what they call deep encoding. And that primarily comes through spaced repetition. And we all know that you can cram overnight and pass a test and learn nothing, or you can study, which means like every couple of days you’re like loading it back into your mind, and yeah. I was constantly trying to reinforce the core ideas. And I did that over the course of several years. So yeah. Spaced repetition is really important. Keep hitting the same things again and again and again, and I think all people that educate well get this just like refocusing, putting the emphasis on these things, so they go from external into an internal component where they can carry with them for the rest of their lives.

Brett McKay: Another thing that I really, I like that you talked about in the book is this idea of preparing for moments that your adolescent’s gonna face as they go through puberty right into adulthood. And I think these moments are often, if you don’t have a conscious, intentional rite of passage, these moments often become the rite of passage.

Jon Tyson: Yeah.

Brett McKay: But what you’re trying to do with this idea of preparing for moments is making these moments part of a larger rite of passage. And so these are things like, first shave, when your kid gets their first cell phone, when they get a driver’s license. And you thought about like, “What can I do to make these… Make my son see, these moments are part of a bigger picture?”

Jon Tyson: Yeah. I’m a big believer that the book, The Power of Moments by Chip and Dan Heath, that was just a masterclass. As a leader… As a person, your life is really a series of defining moments that have shaped you. If you were to sort of map out your story, you’re basically gonna pull out some disproportionately impactful moments, either of pain or of wounding. And I was like, okay, so these moments like we’re gonna be shaped by these moments. Is there a way to consciously cultivate them, to prepare in advance when the young men ones happen, but then sort of have a framework on how to do it? And so I was very, very aware. And I think scientists tell us as well, like the memories we form in our late teens and early 20s tend to be the strongest memories we carry our whole life, because we’re going through so many firsts and they find their way into our long term memory, they’re converted into long term memory by the potency and novelty of the event.

So, yeah, I was trying to figure out how to do those things and how to and how to build them up. A classic, my son got his driver’s license. He passed his test in New York City, and you wanna talk about a harrowing adventure, taking your driving test in New York City. And when he comes back, he didn’t even know if he passed or not. The lady just said to him, “You need to work on your three-point turns.” And then hands him a sheet. And I was like, “Did you pass or not?” He was like, “I don’t know.” I thought, “What a missed opportunity.” She could have said to him, “Young man, congratulations. You now can drive to California if you want. The car is yours, the roads are yours. Welcome to freedom.” She could have built this into a thing, and he would remember that forever. Instead, he had a terrible moment and he barely remembers it. So I had to mark that moment for him.

So, how do you make these moments and use them in ways that bring healing and blessing to our kids rather than our wounds? One of the big ideas they say in the book that I love is “Beware the soul-sucking voice of reasonableness.” And you can blow a moment out into a lifetime memory by adding 15% or 20% more energy to it. So just by adding a few more little details to it, you can change the whole experience. So I’ll give you a practical example. I had some dads who read my book, who flew in from Colorado to have a cigar and talk with me about the book. So here’s what I could have done, I could have sat them down and I could have said, “Hey, thanks for coming fellows.” But that’s not what I did. I went and brought a couple of bottles of very, very exquisite beverages to pair with the cigars. I got them a box of these Melanio cigars. I had this elaborate presentation and when they sat down, they were kind of dumbfounded. “Who’s this for?” I’m like, “This is for you. You came all of this way, I wanted to create a great experience for you.” And at the end of the night, I let him keep the glasses so that every time they use that glass they can remember the story, and it’s like those guys will remember that for a very, very long time because a normal moment was turned into a powerful moment.

And so I wanted to get a black belt in creating moments that shape people. And so I encourage dads that to be intentional, to think about these in advance, to have a plan. What are you gonna do if you find out your kid’s looking at porn, which statistically almost 90% of kids at some point will look at porn. How are you gonna respond to that? Are you gonna create a culture of shame or are you gonna help them understand sexuality and who women are? Yeah, so I just went through those moments and I’ve got a list of them in a book. Some of the big ones that you can think through and begin to plan around, but to me, getting those moments right is a huge, huge part of helping our son move through the world with blessing rather than wounds.

Brett McKay: So as you went through this process, I’m sure your kid was really excited at the beginning, ’cause beginnings are always exciting and new ’cause you’re doing new things.

Jon Tyson: Yeah.

Brett McKay: But then your son hit wall with this process.

Jon Tyson: Yes.

Brett McKay: He kinda started to lose interest, he’s like, “Ah, jeez. Dad, do we really have to do these morning talks?”

Jon Tyson: Yes.

Brett McKay: But this is hard part in any endeavor, this is the part where whether you’re starting a business, you’re doing a fitness routine, start training, start a fitness routine, this is the wall.

Jon Tyson: Yeah.

Brett McKay: You made a shift at this point to make the process not just about becoming a good man. So here’s what your trying to do. You’re trying to help your son harness his masculine energy to be… For the good of the community, but then you shifted it to about becoming good at being a man. What’s the difference and why did that shift reignite the fire in your son?

Jon Tyson: Yeah, you’ve had Jack Donovan on before. In his book The Way of Men, and he’s a somewhat controversial figure, I wanna note. But he had a core concept and I think really, really shook me, and his concept was he talked about Christian men’s movements, and that’s a part of the tradition that I come from, and he talked about a vision of good men in our society today looks typically like an overwhelmed suburban dad struggling to get his life together, and that’s basically it. It’s an overwhelmed, somewhat bored dad driven by obligation, trying to get his life together, and that’s what we think a good man is. He’s defined by what he doesn’t do. He’s not cheating on his wife, he’s not out there wasting his money, and it’s actually a pretty kind of time vision. It’s not super compelling at all, and he says, “What men actually want is to be good at being a man.” Which means when a man walks in the room, he should have a sense of confidence that he’s adding value. And so when you’re good at being a man, which means like, “I am good at understanding how women work. I am good at understanding what money is. I am good at practical skills around the home.” Obviously which your website is a…

You are a part of our central curriculum. There’s thousands of articles on practical stuff. And so I said to my son, “Hey, why do you think we’re doing this?” And he says, “You want me to be a good man.” And I said, “I do not want you to be a good man.” And he was kind of like, “What?” I was like, “No, I want you to be good at being a man” I was like, “Do you wanna walk into a room and understand how women think and not be intimidated?” And he’s like, “Yes.” I said, “Do you wanna be able to get through your high school years and have social skills where you can navigate bullies and build friends?” He’s like, “Yes.” So just like I’m trying to do the Winston Churchill which is like, get them saying yes or no. And I said, “Well, that’s what we’re here for. Man, I am here to help you be good at being a man, not to be some opaque kind of good man.” And that’s when it really kicked in, and that’s when I sort of unleashed the archetype content which is about like how to understand women and be a lover. How to understand and influence and be a leader, how to get in the fight, or how to have a cause and be a warrior, how to be a friend. What does it mean to be a brother, how do you be a sage in the world of fools, that sort of a thing.

And so when I sort of rolled out that those components, his motivation was so high, setting his own alarm, disciplining his life to get involved with it. So yeah, I kind of bland feeble morality with the stereotypical roles that has no passion, no teeth, no consequence, I’m not interested in that. And I think a lot of people today are sort of living half their lives because they’ve been shoved into these passionless scripts, and they think that this is what it is to be a man. I wanted to turn him loose, give him a bit of, as they say, fire in the belly. And that just had a massive impact on him. So it went from me trying to get him up to him voluntarily getting up. It was a real breakthrough.

Brett McKay: How old was he when this happened?

Jon Tyson: Oh gosh, he was 15.

Brett McKay: Okay, so you…

Jon Tyson: 15, so a couple of years in.

Brett McKay: And I liked how you took this idea of being good at being a man and tied it into these different roles that you started talking about. As a man, these are the roles you’re gonna have to fulfill as an adult. How can you be good at fulfilling that role? And I think that gives some direction for that, again, that masculine energy that teenage boys are starting to turn on.

Jon Tyson: Yeah, I totally agree. If you don’t… There’s nothing worse than standing in a room and feeling awkward. I don’t know how to talk to people, I don’t feel like I’m good at anything, and I don’t know why I’m here. If you’re projecting that sort of emotional field, it’s not gonna go well, for you, and that’s gonna lead… That’s gonna spiral into unhealthy places, so to begin to logically, sequentially, strategically break down the elements of how to be a man in the world and tell him, “You can do this, you can do this, man. And I’m gonna train you to be able to do those things.” That produces a ton of confidence, and I said… And then here’s what you do when you don’t know. You don’t fake it, you ask people who are better than you, and then you compliment them, and then they feel confident in themselves because they’re teaching you and they’re endeared to you, so… Now we did so much stuff on all the practical sort of like archetype stuff of how to be in the world.

When I asked my son today, he turns 22 this next week, I said, “Okay man, we’re a couple of years out for this. You’re a junior in college now. What’s your number one takeaway?” And he said, “The number one takeaway is the mental framework that I can figure out and handle anything.” And I was like, “Touch down, mate, that’s it.” If you can get that kind of internal confidence in a young man’s heart where he feels like he can face the challenges of life, that just felt like such a win for me.

Brett McKay: Oh, so just… You’d mentioned some of these roles. You had lover, so you talk about, okay, how can I be… How can I get along with women? How can I attract a mate? I think a lot of boys, they’re interested in that ’cause they just feel awkward. A leader, you had that.

Jon Tyson: Yep.

Brett McKay: I guess if you’re going back to union archetypes, to be the king, that would be the…

Jon Tyson: Yeah totally. Yes.

Brett McKay: Go ahead.

Jon Tyson: Yeah, the leader, the warrior, the brother, the wise man. There’s probably a few more you can put in there, but these… I try to sort of put these in things I felt my son from my tradition needed. And so one of it was a faith one, which is being a disciple, one was understanding women, one was about how to have the influence in the world through leadership, how to get the fire, there’s so much. In many ways, we’re driven by two forces, hope and hate, we’re driven by what we want to happen, and the thing that’s stopping it, the threat against the thing that’s stopping it. That’s what the warrior energy is, it’s like going after the thing you want, and then fighting off the thing that’s a threat to that. Then the power of friendships. Male friendships are so awkward, particularly that age, social media has definitely complicated it. But how do you be a faithful brother to somebody else, how do you stay the course, how do you build long-term friendships?

And I’m so grateful for that. My son did a gap year and in that gap year, he just got a crew, and because of some of the stuff we’ve talked about, they now do an annual reunion, so they’re three years removed, a couple of them have gone on and gotten married, but every year they’ve got this little tribe that gets together to mark the milestones of their life and just talk about the joys and sorrows they have been through the previous year. So it’s been a real joy to see him build a little brotherhood. And then how do you be a wise man? And the world’s filled with fools, it’s filled with pain, regret, lack of certainty, confusion, and how do you navigate some of the complexities of life? So we spent a lot of time talking about what is wisdom, what is the wisdom tradition? And how do you learn to grow in wisdom? The book of Proverbs talks about five kinds of fools, and there’s five ways of being foolish in the world and there’s five kinds of wisdom to overcome the five fools. So we spend time talking through that, that sort of stuff.

Brett McKay: One idea that I really liked and I’m gonna swipe from you, I’m gonna use it with my own kids is the life arc interview.

Jon Tyson: Yeah.

Brett McKay: What is that? And what did your son get out of them?

Jon Tyson: Well, the life arc interview is basically saying life is a series of seasons, it’s a series of stages, and without a sense of knowing what stage you’re in, what season you’re in, life can just feel very long and very painful and very, very confusing. But if you realize that hey, there’s certain things you gotta get right, certain things to look out for, certain things to avoid at these various stages, you’re gonna go in with your eyes wide open. And so it’s sort of a stage orientation. When you’re a freshman at college, they do a campus orientation, they do a freshman orientation and they’re basically trying to say to you, open your eyes, and here is how to navigate this well. So I wanted my son to go through life and figure out what to do with each decade or each stage of life. So to sit down with someone and basically ask, hey, what did you most enjoy about this stage and why? What are three or four of your favorite memories from this stage, what are the biggest regrets you had in this particular stage of your life? If you could do it again, what would you do differently? What do I have to get right? What do I… What must I absolutely avoid?

And then you begin to get a bit of an arc of what life is, and so one of the great challenges with young people today is they want the lifestyle in their 20s that their parents worked for in their 40s. And so if you say, hey man your 20s are not for wealth accumulation, as much as they are about vocational experimentation and understanding yourself, you’re gonna put some relief valves from the pressure of success and confusion. And then hopefully they’ve gotta have their own chronology, their friends got their own journey to walk, their own challenges and their own pace that they have to navigate, but then at least get some sense about like, “Here’s the territory,” if you go on any journey, at some point, you’re gonna break the journey down into stages. Hey, there’s a mountainous stage, there’s a flat stage, there’s a hot stage, there’s a stop here, see this. We do this on all trips in life, why don’t we do it for life itself? So that was my vision to sort of break that down and send him out talking to people older than him who have navigated this with some measure of skill, so he can get their accumulated wisdom and have an idea of where to go from there.

Brett McKay: Yeah, when I read that, I was thinking, man, I need to do this for my kid, like get… Or find an 18-year-old or a 20-year-old who’s just on it, who was a great kid, had a great teenage part of their life, and to be also to have my son just talked to him, what did you do? I was… I’m thinking when… If when I was a kid, when I was like 12, 13 and I got to rub shoulders with some really cool 18 year old that has a big impact.

Jon Tyson: 100%. And, you know, it’s amazing you’re actually helping form that 18 year old because you’re gonna make him sort of like codify what he’s learned. He’s gonna realize, hey, “I’m 18, but I’ve learned a lot.” So that’s gonna be a gift to him as well. And that’ll be something they could pass on to someone else, people… You do the best… You learn your lessons best when you teach it to other people. So yeah, I’m definitely grateful to be a part of a community that is multigenerational and living in the middle of New York City. My son’s growing up in Manhattan for 17 years before he left home. And… So for him, you know, he was surrounded by some like very, very accomplished people, but also people with a lot of pain, like, you know, unhealthy ambition and lack of focus. And so like, yeah, that being surrounded by a multigenerational community was a real gift. I encourage everybody to try and find that… This I think is… This sort of multigenerational long term thinking doesn’t happen in our world at large. And this is definitely something that I think kids will appreciate.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned your son took a Gap Year. Was this part of the initiation process?

Jon Tyson: 100%. 100%. All of these traditions, like when James Hollis talks about this, he says that all traditions have this thing called the ordeal. And the ordeal was to send the young man out into the world to see whether or not he has internalized and taken on the lessons that have been given to him from the community. And again, various traditions have done this. Some communities have a mission that they go on, they send people off. I grew up in Australia very, very common to do a Gap Year which is basically debaucherous hitchhiking across parts of Europe. Here’s what my vision was. I was like, “Okay, I’ve put a lot of content and a lot of experiences in my son, and college is such a formative experience.” I mean, it just swallows you whole. And I was like, I need to give him a little bit of space before he just rushes headlong into college to sort of see the kind of man he has become away from me where he could test it in the real world. So I also had a goal I wanna know, like I’m surrounded by a lot of wealth in Manhattan where he grew up and a lot of privilege. And I was like, “I wanna irreparably break my son’s heart for the global poor.” I want him to see that the privilege is growing in the disparity in the world. I want him to feel the pain of that gap, and I want him to be exposed to other places in other cultures.

So he’s not just like, “An American only in terms of his worldview and his thinking”. So he did a nine month trip. He went to a Swaziland, he went to Guatemala. He went all over the place and has since traveled all over the place. And he came back. And I gotta tell you, he was a different kid. He was like being being with a few friends. Like I said, “He built this little brotherhood, this little tribe and stuff that like so… ” The biggest example my son and I don’t say this to to sort of put him down. He’s actually a remarkable young man. But like he was a whiner. He would just complain. He just would just complain. And it was like such an unattractive quality to just complain. And, you know, I’d have my wife’s daughters come over and talk like how attractive… Like a little panel. So, like, here’s five women and here’s my son interviewing these five women on the panel. And I’d say, like, you know, do you think… What do you think about men who complain? They’re like, oh, it’s so unattractive. But even that these like attractive young women in their twenties on this little panel that my wife had formed, not none of that worked. But he comes back from this trip. My son is like, Yes, sir on it, sir kinda kid. And I’m like, “Where did this come from?” He said, “Dad, two weeks in, I realized I was a whiny, complaining child and I had a mirror amongst my peers of how unattractive it was.”

And I was like, “I do not want to be that guy.” And to this day, my son just like owns it and solves it. That that never would have happened with all of my years of effort, I couldn’t get that done. He gets in the world, sees the world, that sort of stuff is formed in him. He also just came back from… He just did another three month trip that he went on and he was in Turkey for that trip. And again he came back and I was like, “The maturity that was developed by getting out of his regular life in context was massive.” So I’m a big believer, you know, one bad year of college can undo 18 years of good parenting. And so I think there’s a lot of wisdom in having a liminal space where they can go through the world and sort of figure it out. So, yeah, that’s… That Was the vision for that. And he was willing to do it, interestingly enough, like my daughter did not want to do that. So that was something I had to sort of cast some vision for, for my son. He was worried like, hey, “All my friends are going to college, I’m gonna get left behind.” And we processed that. And eventually he came over and realized, “Hey, this probably be good for me.”

Brett McKay: So part of this Gap Year, we’re getting to the end, right? This is the ordeal.

Jon Tyson: Yes. Six years.

Brett McKay: Six years. He goes through his ordeal, he passes it changes him. This mission accomplished. You have this capstone ceremony. How did you cap this journey off into manhood with your son?

Jon Tyson: Well, one of the things I realized by talking… So, I said, “There’s quite a few sort of different groups and different organizations that will facilitate a Gap Year.” I think it’s becoming more and more popular. And one of the things in my research about sort of the comedown from the high of the Gap Year is that they didn’t debrief him too well.

So I said, “I’m gonna to do the Camino de Santiago.” Which is a 500 mile hike across Spain. And it took us 33 days to do it. I said, “We’re just gonna walk 500 miles.” There’s nothing to do but talk and we’re just gonna debrief this journey together. We’re gonna debrief the Gap Year. What happened in him? What did he learn? We’re gonna debrief all the content we went through. So I did like a series of questions every day. So to recap, in the six year journey, just trying to again, deep in coding reinforcement and then we just had a ton of fun.

And at the end of the 33 days, you come to the city, and there’s this big cathedral, it’s actually like, it’s overwhelming. You weep, if you talk about it, it’s such a profound experience, and you come into this cathedral of the city, and then it’s another 80 kilometer walk or so where you end in this village called Finisterre.

And you know the idea of a pilgrimage was you’re leaving something behind. And our idea for this pilgrimage was his leaving his childhood behind, so we end up in the city called… This little town Finisterre, and we go to this cove on a beach, and I’ve got all these letters from these men who’ve been journeying with him spoken into his life, men he respects, and I take him down on this beach and I’m like, “May I wanna tell you right now, man, this is well done, you have passed every test, you have earned this for the rest of your life, you need to know in your heart you are a man. You’re a blessed man.” In the Christian tradition, there’s a scene in the life of Jesus where he is baptized at the start of the gospels, and a voice from Heaven says, “This is my beloved son, who I love, in him I’m well pleased.” And because Jesus knew He was beloved at the start of his ministry, he had the courage and security in His identity to heal the sick, confront hypocrisy, fight off evil forces in his confrontation with the devil, so he was blessed to…

His sense of identity enabled him to overcome, and I wanted to say to my son, “You have my blessing, you are moving through the world, a blessed man, and you can overcome anything because you have what it takes within you.” So anyway, so he runs into the ocean like he did when he was 13, but now he’s 19. And he comes out and I do this big booming voice, like my god voice or whatever, and I’m just like, “Who is this man emerging from the ocean? Behold this is my son.” And then he comes out and we just cry, it’s a super, super powerful and emotional moment, and it was just. It was a blessing ceremony, and we both have a tattoo on our arms, the only tattoo I have, he’s got a few more, but it’s of our journey together to my inner arm, it’s the route of that Camino that ends in this little bay, this little cove where we did this journey, and that’s it. He left his childhood behind. So if you were to ask my son, how do you know you’re a man? He will say, “I died to childhood psychology, I went on a journey, I’ve learned the archetypes, I’ve made the shifts, I’ve done the ordeal. I’ve been blessed by my Father, I know I’m a man because I’ve earned it.” Bingo what a gift. So that was such a definitive moment that was six years in the making. So it wasn’t just the moment itself, it was marking a journey that he had been through that we had sort of done together, and a really, really significant a real gift to be a part of.

Brett McKay: That’s really powerful. See you have a daughter?

Jon Tyson: Yes, yes, I have a daughter, 19. She’s in… Studying Nursing in university.

Brett McKay: Well, have you and your wife done anything similar with her?

Jon Tyson: We did. It’s a little different, my wife played sort of the primary role in the formation of my daughter, so she’s got a whole thing she did, you know starting when she hit puberty and walked her through her teenage years. In her senior year, she came to me and she said, “Dad like I want you to just give me a year of your best development into adulthood.” So I did a thing with her that I just, I’m a bit of a branding guy, I’m a bit of a program guy so I created this thing for her called 50 pieces of my heart, 50 key deposits every dad has to make in his daughter’s life before she leaves home. So I did 50 weeks, and it was like a little daily check-in, and then one dinner a week where we talked about like the 50 most important things I wanted her to know about life and… Yeah, so we did that for a year. Sadly, her senior year was in COVID, and my daughter loves beauty, like my son loved the challenge, so on the Camino, when we’re walking 500 miles, it’s a heat wave, we’ve got blisters that are almost down to the bone, we lost 20 pounds, it was like a wild ordeal, my daughter loves beauty.

So one of the only countries that was open in COVID was Iceland, and so we did a ring road together, we rented a car and we drove around the country of Iceland, and I sort of created this experience for her recapping these important things and just like filling her heart with beauty. It was framed by a Frederick Buechner quote. Buechner ‘s obviously a very, very prolific, gifted author. And the quote says, “Here is the world, beautiful and terrible things will happen. Do not be afraid.” And so our whole year was based around beauty and terror, like the terror of life and the beauty of life, and not being afraid to enter into it, and so that Iceland trip was an immersion in beauty and again, that was like a really powerful time, so very very different relationship with her. My daughter is a very feminine in the traditional sense, and wonderful, wonderful young woman, she’s a helper, very kind studying Nursing and so. But my wife will have to write the book of what she did with her, I was just intentional in my relationship with her, but really did a strong year with her to sort of close out her adolescence and not to send her off.

I tell you a very, very, very, very moving moment about the importance of seizing time, I was the last person to drop her at college, my wife left the day before and I had one bone to stay with her, and after 18 years of meeting with her, every week this really intense year. We spent an hour together every day for a year, and at the end of it, we had our final dinner, and I’m walking back to my car and she’s walking to her dorm so we have this one last hug, and she hugs me and she will not let go. And she says, “Dad, I need more time. I need more time with you, I don’t have the wisdom, I don’t have everything, I need you, I need more time.” And I was like, “Sweet girl, you’ve got what it takes. This is in you. You’re gonna be fine. I’m still with you. And I walked off in tears. But I was like, Oh, those words, I need more time. I was like, that was the thing. I was like, “Gosh, our kids had gone before we know it,” and so a lot of times people say, “Jon, this sounds pretty intense,” and listen man, I am a busy man in the middle of New York City, I got a lot on my plate, lot of responsibilities, lot of stuff I handle, so it was a real sacrifice to take the time to do this for my kids, but now that they’re both gone…

If I had my time again, I’d go harder, I’d sacrifice more. Those days like I just entrusted into the hands of God and say, “Hey, I did what I could, I did this with love, I did my best and I’m gonna have to trust Him and them.” But I tell you, I’d go harder again. So it probably yeah, maybe someone’s listening to this and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, this sounds like a lot.” Yeah, it is a lot, but it’s worth it. Absolutely worth it.

Brett McKay: Well, let’s say you guys listening to this is like, “Well, maybe I just… I can’t do everything. This is awesome, what you do is awesome.” Then maybe some guys just don’t have the bandwidth, creativity, etcetera. What would you say? Okay, just to get the ball rolling, ’cause I think oftentimes once you get the ball rolling, you pick up steam and you start adding to it. What are a few practices that you would think could help that?

Jon Tyson: I would say this, consistency is more important than intensity. I would say, it’s like if you wanna lose weight, yeah, you can do a liquid fast for 30 days and then intermittent fast and then eat one meal a day. And you’ll probably do that for six weeks and put all the weight back on. Or you can cut out soda for three months, and then you can cut out soda, and then you can cut out dessert. It’s just like it’s what can you do consistently? That’s what has the formative power. You gotta find like every kid that is different, you’ve gotta find that tension of like, is this actually making a difference in their life or not, and how much does each kid need in what season after that? I would say this, let me give you a larger principle rather than a specific because that’s so personal. I think the number one goal is to build and maintain an emotional bond, that is the whole thing.

Because if that bond is there in the relationship, you can pass anything through that bond. That bond can handle any teenage rebellion, that bond can handle any hard conversation, but if that bond is not there, it is very, very hard to reinsert yourself because it just sounds like moralizing or lecturing. To me it would be like whatever it takes to build that bond. You might do something as simple as I know on your website you’ve got a list of quotes, you might just do something as simple of like sit down and create a ritual where you read one quote a day about a thing. Or maybe it’s like one night a week. But whatever it is that keeps that bond alive that’s the most important factor, and then play the long game, put a date on your calendar and work backwards and just say, “Okay, here’s what I’m gonna do from now till then. And then I’ll also say two other thoughts.

Number one, something is better than nothing. Do what you can do, don’t be overwhelmed by what you can’t do. Something is better than nothing. And then secondly, if your kids are gone and maybe you’re sitting here with a sense of regret, I would just say to you, it’s never too late. You just don’t know the power of a father or a mentor’s heart moving towards a kid with repentance and with hope. They just like I’ve got so many stories. Part of what I do is I lead the faith community in New York, and over the past almost 20 years, thousands and thousands of stories of impossible relational reconciliations. When you’re willing to move with forgiveness and humility. So don’t give up hope, set your heart and move towards your kids slowly in love and you just… You’d be amazed at the blessing they ache for, the relationship they ache for, and the power of restoration if you do it with humility and consistency.

Brett McKay: Well, Jon, this has been a fantastic conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Jon Tyson: I’ve got a course on this, it’s at primalpath.co. That’s dot C-O. And on there there’s a link for a weekly email. Every week I send out like a short thought for dads and men about how to navigate the complexity of being a man in the modern world. You can sign up for that, absolutely free. And then if you go to Amazon and just look at The Intentional Father, you’ll see that that book is there available in all formats.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Jon Tyson, thanks for your time, it’s been a pleasure.

Jon Tyson: Okay, cheers mate, thank you.

Brett McKay: My guest here was Jon Tyson. He’s the author of the book, The Intentional Father. It’s available on amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at primalpath.co. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/passage where you can find links to resources where we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles written over the years about pretty much anything you’d think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad free episodes of the AOM podcast, you can do so on Stitcher premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code manliness and check out for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android or iOS and you can start enjoying ad free episodes of the AOM podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify, it helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out. As always, thank you for the continued support.

Until next time, this is Brett McKay. Reminding you all listening to the podcast to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

There are few places in modern life where we’re forced into such close quarters with strangers as the humble elevator. For a brief moment, people of all stripes — coworkers, neighbors, delivery drivers, and the guy who just reheated fish in the break room — are pressed together in a small, moving box. It’s a setting ripe for potential awkwardness and irritation.

That liminal space in an elevator also offers a small but meaningful opportunity to practice everyday courtesy. Like all etiquette, it isn’t about stiff formality, but rather a sense of awareness, restraint, and consideration for others. A few simple habits, as outlined in the guide above, can turn a potentially uncomfortable ride into a smooth, frictionless interaction. This is a situation that you actually don’t want to be memorable; if you make it into someone’s stories of an elevator ride, it’s likely that things have gone awry. 

Master these basics to become an elevator passenger with an air of gentlemanly grace.

Illustration by Ted Slampyak

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

The psychologist John Gottman famously spent decades watching couples fight in his Love Lab at the University of Washington. He’d wire them up with physiological monitors, point a camera at them, and ask them to argue about some real issue in their marriage while he and his team looked on.

After observing thousands of couples, Gottman and his team identified four specific communication behaviors that reliably predicted — with 94% accuracy — whether a marriage would survive.

The topic of the argument didn’t matter. A couple could be arguing about sex, money, chores, kids, or in-laws. The content of the argument didn’t make a difference in how likely a couple was to still be married over the following years.

What did matter was the extent to which four communication patterns showed up.

Gottman called them the Four Horsemen of the Marriage Apocalypse.

Here’s what they are and what to do about them.

1. Criticism

A lot of arguments in a marriage are about things that one person in the relationship isn’t happy about. Maybe the wife spends too much money at Costco or maybe the husband leaves the toilet seat up.

Gottman and his team noticed two ways couples approach these relationship frictions: complaint or criticism. Complaints are healthy. Criticisms aren’t.

A complaint targets a specific behavior: “You didn’t call when you said you would.”

A criticism targets the person: “You never think about anyone but yourself.” “You always do this.” “You are so inconsiderate.” Globalizing language — “always,” “never” “you are”— is what tips a complaint into criticism. It takes one incident and turns it into a generalized assessment of character.

When a conversation veers into criticism, the issue that started it tends to disappear. When you call your wife a reckless, thoughtless overspender, she won’t be thinking about her overspending. She’ll be defending her worth as a human being, which means the overspending problem isn’t going to get solved. You’ll be too busy arguing about her character. She’ll likely get defensive (more on that below) and start dredging up some negative character assessments of you.

Gottman’s antidote is what he calls a “Gentle Start-Up.” Say what your problem is, how it’s upsetting you, and what you’d like your spouse to do to resolve the issue.

“I start feeling stressed about our finances when I see how much you’re spending on Amazon. Can we take a look at our bank statements together and see if there’s a place you can cut back?”

Works a lot better than: “You’re a selfish spendthrift who doesn’t care about our family’s financial future.” That just kicks off a fight.

2. Contempt

Gottman identifies contempt as the single strongest predictor of divorce in his research, and it’s different from the other horsemen because it isn’t really about what your spouse did. Rather, it’s a stance you take towards her.

Contempt shows up as sarcasm, eye-rolling, mockery, and hostile humor. When you argue with contempt, you’re not arguing with an equal; you’re treating your wife as someone beneath you. No one likes to be treated as less-than.

Contempt often accumulates from resentments in a relationship that never get addressed. Basically, you’ve got a beef with your wife, you haven’t told her, and the more you stew on it, the more your negative feelings toward her deepen.

Contempt is also fed by a perception problem that Gottman’s research turned up: unhappily married couples undercount their partner’s positive behaviors by roughly 50%. Your spouse can be doing plenty of things right, but you simply don’t register them. You start to spin a negative narrative about her lack of caring and investment that doesn’t match reality.

In either case, your problem with your spouse can spread from being about a specific issue, to becoming what you feel is an indictment of their overall character. You start to have a lower and lower opinion of them. You begin to lose respect for them. A bit of disdain creeps into how you view them, and comes out in your interactions, especially your arguments.

So how do you stop contempt?

First, if you’ve got a problem with your spouse, instead of stewing on it and not telling her, and thus building up your feelings of contempt, address it. Don’t let things fester! As communications expert Joseph Grenny said on the podcast: you can “tell the health of any relationship by looking at one simple thing: the lag time between when people see [an issue] and when they say it, between when they feel it and when they discuss it, between when it’s a concern and when it’s a conversation.”

Gottman also suggests creating a culture of appreciation in your marriage. Actively work to notice what your spouse does right and express your gratitude for it. Tell her thanks for picking up the slack with the kids while you were sick or that you appreciated how she defended you in front of her mother. Deliberately look for the qualities in her that you respect; a healthy marriage is ultimately a mutual admiration society.

3. Defensiveness

Defensiveness is what happens when your spouse brings up an issue and it triggers your self-protection instinct. Instead of engaging with what they actually said, you deflect. The complaint doesn’t get addressed; instead, you’re managing a perceived attack on your character.

Defensiveness shows up in a few recognizable forms.

The most common is counter-complaining: your spouse brings up one issue, and you immediately bring up a grievance of your own.

“You never text me when you’re running late” gets met with “Well, you never tell me when your plans change.”

Now there are two unresolved complaints on the table instead of one, and you’re both more frustrated than when the conversation started.

Another version is what Gottman calls “yes-butting.” You appear to agree with your spouse’s point before immediately negating it.

“You’re right, but if you hadn’t scheduled three things on the same night, this wouldn’t have happened.”

The “yes” is a feint. What follows the “but” is the real message, which is that this is actually your wife’s fault.

A third version is a claim to innocent victimhood — the “I can’t believe you’re treating me like this!” posture that shifts the focus from the original complaint to the injustice of being complained about at all.

All of these maneuvers feel justified from the inside. That’s what makes defensiveness so hard to catch when you’re doing it. Maybe your spouse does share some culpability, and maybe her complaint was delivered too harshly. But while you’re busy making that case, the original issue doesn’t move toward resolution, and your wife comes away feeling like you didn’t hear a word she said — more alone than before she brought it up.

The antidote is taking responsibility for your piece of the problem, even if it’s small. If you genuinely think you’re 90% not at fault, even acknowledging the 10% you do own can stop the conversation from turning into a tit-for-tat exchange of recriminations.

“You’re right, I should have texted when I realized I was running late” doesn’t mean you’re conceding the whole argument or agreeing that your wife handled it perfectly. It means you actually heard her — which, more often than not, is all she wanted.

4. Stonewalling

Stonewalling is when one spouse shuts down entirely during an argument or discussion — goes quiet, looks away, leaves the room, gives one-word answers, or just starts scrolling on their phone. From the outside, it reads as indifference or contempt: I don’t care enough about you or this conversation to even engage.

Gottman’s research found that’s usually not what’s happening at all.

The stonewaller is, in a way, too engaged — they’re overwhelmed. Gottman calls it flooding, or Diffuse Physiological Arousal. When your heart rate climbs past around 100 BPM during an argument, your sympathetic nervous system — the same one that kicks in when you’re being chased — takes over. In that state, you genuinely cannot process what your spouse is saying clearly or respond to it without making things worse. If you’ve ever been in a heated argument where you felt like you literally couldn’t think straight, that’s flooding. The body has essentially gone into survival mode, which isn’t a good mode for working through marital conflict.

Men tend to flood faster and stay flooded longer than women, which is why around 85% of stonewallers are men. Worth knowing so you can watch for it in yourself. Because from your spouse’s perspective, the stonewalling looks like you’ve checked out, which typically causes her to pursue the issue more aggressively to get some kind of response, which floods you further, which makes you withdraw more. It’s the whole “my wife is nagging me” dynamic — except what she’s actually doing is trying to get a human response from someone who has gone completely offline. The cycle tends to end with both people feeling awful and nothing resolved.

The antidote is to take a timeout from the argument. Literally say “I need to take a timeout for a few minutes so I can think about what you said/get my emotions under control.” Then go do something else. Take a walk or do a chore. Just something to let your nervous system settle. Once you’ve calmed down, come back and actually talk things through

It’s advisable to tell your spouse you’ll need to use this technique from time to time during a calm, copacetic moment, rather than in the middle of an argument; just let her know, “I have a hard time responding well when things get heated, so when we’re in an argument, I might need to step aside for a little bit to process things.” This disclosure will likely be met with appreciative respect. But if you decide to leave an argument in the thick of it, without having given this heads up, your spouse may feel like it’s just another act of uncaring avoidance, which will make them angrier.

What Happens Between the Arguments Is More Important

The Four Horsemen show up during conflict. Now that you know what to look for, you’ll be able to rein them in when you see them pop up in your next marital spat.

But the even better news is that you don’t need to be perfect about eliminating these negative communication patterns altogether. Gottman’s research shows that what happens in between arguments — even the most heated ones — has an even more profound mitigating effect on the damage they cause.

When a marriage has at least five positive interactions for every negative one — giving the couple a surplus of positivity in their “relationship bank account” — it can absorb occasional blowups without it affecting the relationship’s happiness and strength. But when a marriage runs a relational “deficit,” every argument can feel fraught, like it’s a referendum on the sustainability of the relationship, bringing it closer to dissolution and creating lingering cracks of alienation.

So spend less time focusing on your communication style, and more time making continual deposits in your relationship bank account (here’s a list of specific ways to do that). Prioritize daily connection — plan good times, have fun together, and offer plenty of affirmation. And start doing a weekly marriage meeting — it will help you check off much of the above advice, from discussing issues promptly to sharing regular appreciation.  

Keep your relationship bank account flush, and the next time you and your spouse fight, even if the Four Horsemen do show up, they’ll quickly gallop away.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Studies show that people remember the beginning of something, and the end of it, the best. The middle of it is recalled a little more hazily.

Once a novel experience starts, your brain really starts focusing on what’s going on and quickly makes judgements about the new people you meet. And you clearly remember the last part of an experience, because it ends up being the freshest in your memory.

Given this phenomenon, people understandably spend a lot of time thinking about how to make a great first impression — which indeed has an outsized influence on how people see you, lasting for even months after you’ve gotten to know them.

But the other part of the equation is frequently ignored, though it’s also important. You not only want to make a dynamite first impression, you want to make a great last impression, too.

As Daniel Pink, the author of When, told me in my podcast interview with him, the end of something “has a disproportionate effect on how we remember things”:

You see it anecdotally in something like Yelp reviews. You want to kill 15 minutes, go on Yelp, look at restaurant reviews, and you’ll see a disproportionate number of them evaluate the restaurant by what happened at the end of the meal, ‘They gave me a check, and it was wrong, and they were jerks about it.’ ‘They gave me a free dessert, woo hoo.’ So, I think it’s really important in our personal encounters and in our professional encounters that we’re conscious of endings, and try to get endings to end not only on a positive note but in a way that elevates. Human beings prefer endings that elevate, we prefer rising sequences to declining sequences, and being conscious and intentional about that can improve our interactions.

Below are a few quick tips on how to improve the last impression you make in both business and social situations:

Gather your belongings in your left hand. When a job interview has come to a close, pick up things like your notebook or briefcase with your left hand; that will keep you from fumbling to free up your right hand when the interviewer reaches out to shake it.

Make physical contact before leaving. Physical contact promotes bonding; even a handshake has been shown to increase rapport and make you more likable and memorable. So make contact before you leave.

In a job interview or client meeting, shake hands with the other person as you part ways. Give a good, warm, confident handshake; make sure your hands are dry (discreetly wiping/patting them on your pants before you stand up), that the web between your first two fingers connects with the web of theirs, and that your fingers are flat rather than cupped so that your hands touch palm-to-palm.

In a social situation, shake hands or hug the other person as you say goodbye. 

In both professional and personal settings, if it feels natural, consider offering physical contact twice, offering a handshake/hug when you rise from the desk/table and at the door as well.

End with eye contact and a smile. As you make physical contact, look the other person in the eye and smile. Face them directly, rather than being at an angle, so you’re standing heart-to-heart. You’ll leave behind the impression of someone who’s open, straightforward, and warm.

Thank the person twice. As you stand up from a desk in an interview or other professional setting, say something like, “Thank you so much for the opportunity. I really appreciate it.” Then when you part at the door and shake hands, say, “Thank you again for the interview.”

In a social situation, accompany your first thank you with an appreciation for something specific you enjoyed about the event: “Thank you so much for having us over. That was the best pot roast I’ve ever had.” Then at the door, just say, “Thanks again for having us!”

Make sure you have all your belongings. If you make a great last impression, but then sheepishly have to come back through the door again, apologizing and saying you left your phone somewhere, that memory will supplant the other to become your new last impression, and not a great one at that.

Move with intent. Don’t stand there shifting your weight back and forth and saying, “Well . . . so . . .” When you’re hesitant, awkwardness results. Be friendly but firm with your goodbye; know exactly what you’re doing next, where you’re heading, and move confidently and deliberately in that direction.

Send a follow-up text/thank you note. Sending an appreciative text or thank you note (depending on whether the event was more casual or formal, respectively) is a really nice touch, and extends and solidifies the warm memory people have formed of you in their minds. So after a date is done, text the gal to let her know again what a great time you had. After a nice dinner party, send a thank you note to the host, sharing how much you enjoyed yourself and appreciate their hospitality. After a job interview, send a note to the interviewer thanking them for the opportunity. It’s such a simple thing to do, but will really set you apart from the pack.

Oftentimes, if we feel like an interaction isn’t going well, we just sort of turn off and shut down. But you shouldn’t give up — you can still improve the impression you’ve made! Even when things seem to be going downhill, try to finish strong; the person you’re with will remember the positive end of your interaction more than the muddling middle.

With our archives 4,000 articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in March 2018.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

The awkward silence at work when everyone knows a project is going off the rails.

The simmering resentment in a marriage over an issue neither spouse will confront.

The dysfunction in a church where certain topics are understood to be off-limits.

My guest, Joseph Grenny, says that some of the biggest problems in every organization, from businesses to families, aren’t the issues themselves, but people’s inability to talk about them. Joseph is a business social scientist and consultant, and the co-author of the bestselling book Crucial Conversations. For decades, he’s studied why people shut down or blow up when the stakes are high, emotions are strong, and opinions differ.

Today on the show, we talk about what makes a conversation “crucial,” why our brains betray us in conflict, and how to escape the false choice between maintaining a relationship and speaking honestly. From figuring out what kind of conversation you need to have, to creating the right conditions for connection, to dealing with criticism, we unpack how to have the conversations you’ve been avoiding — at work, at home, and everywhere else.

Connect With Joseph Grenny

• Crucial Learning website
• Joseph on LinkedIn

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page

Download this episode

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice

Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. The awkward silence at work when everyone knows a project is going off the rails, the simmering resentment in a marriage over an issue neither spouse will confront, the dysfunction in a church where certain topics are understood to be off limits. My guest, Joseph Grenny, says that some of the biggest problems in every organization from businesses to families aren’t the issues themselves, but people’s inability to talk about them. Joseph is a business social scientist and consultant and the co-author of the bestselling book, Crucial Conversations. For decades he studied why people shut down or blow up when stakes are high, emotions are strong and opinions differ from figuring out what kind of conversation you need to have to creating the right conditions for connection to dealing with criticism. We unpack how to have the conversations you’ve been avoiding at work, at home, and everywhere else. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/CrucialConversations.

All right, Joseph Grenny, welcome to the show.

Joseph Grenny:

Happy to be here with you, Brett.

Brett McKay:

So you are a business social scientist and researcher. You’re a speaker and a corporate consultant who specializes in organizational performance and human behavior. And something you observed decades ago in companies really shaped your career, and that was that some of the biggest problems in companies are the result of people not feeling able to speak up about problems. And you wrote a book over 20 years ago, it’s called Crucial Conversations about how to fix that. So you train corporations and companies in this skill of crucial conversations, but this problem of not being able to talk about hard things, this happens in personal relationships too, like in families. It’s not just business. 

Joseph Grenny:

Yeah, in fact, the general way we’ve come to describe our findings is that you can pretty much tell the health of any relationship, any team or any organization by looking at one simple thing. And that is the lag time between when people see it and when they say it, between when they feel it and when they discuss it, between when it’s a concern and when it’s a conversation. And so you look at a marriage and if there are undiscussable things that both of us are bothered about, but neither is talking about, it comes out in passive aggressive ways. If you don’t talk it out, you act it out and it shows up in your behavior. And that always makes matters worse and tends to make the problems persevere and even worsen. And so the general finding that any social system, it could be a church congregation, it could be a community organization, a nonprofit or what have you, even entire nations suffer from this. Our inability to have emotionally and politically risky conversations is at the heart of most all of our persistent problems.

Brett McKay:

So what makes a conversation a crucial conversation?

Joseph Grenny:

So there are three characteristics of a crucial conversation. One is that it is high stakes. There’s something on the table that matters a lot to me. Now, it doesn’t necessarily have to be that the entire economy is going to crash. It could just be that my ego feels threatened, there’s something important to me. High stakes. Second, I come into these moments expecting the other person to disagree with me. I expect you to have an opposing opinion. And the third is there’s an emotional piece to this or it’s emotionally salient to us. And so the combination of high stakes, opposing opinions and strong emotions causes us to show up differently in these moments than we would most any other time. There are a lot of us that are quite princely or regal and effective diplomatic and so forth, and how we show up in a lot of communication, great at small talk, but in these moments, these moments of emotional stress and threat, we behave differently and that has enormous consequences for our outcomes.

Brett McKay:

Why do we behave differently? Because you take a step back and say, well, it’s just a conversation. It’s not like someone’s got a gun drawn on you.

Joseph Grenny:

Well, it is kind of like someone’s got a gun drawn on you, unfortunately. So I’ll give you a brief anecdote. One of my business partners, Kerry Patterson, and I had a long, long history of writing together. We did a lot of the writing on these books together and worked in very close collaboration. And as you’d expect, there were crucial conversations along the way. What happened on a particular Saturday where our pattern was one or the other of us would write the first draft of a chapter, send it to the other, the other would do critiques, and then we’d get together on the phone to talk about it. So I sent it over on Thursday. Kerry got the chapter and then he rewrote it. I sent it back and with some rewrites. So here we are, Saturday, seven o’clock. And I said, so Kerry, did you get it? And he said, yes, yes I did. I said, what’d you think? He said, you ruined it. I said, I didn’t ruin it, I fixed it. He said, you didn’t fix it. It’s all disjointed now. I said, it’s not disjointed. It has a soul. I mean, here we are. And this was a chapter of Crucial Conversations.

As I tell that story, and I recall that moment, I think I knew better than this. I knew how to respond in this moment, but it wasn’t coming out of my mouth. It wasn’t even accessible to me. Our problem in these crucial conversations is first and foremost, physiological, literal changes. Physiological changes happen in our bodies when we’re under stress or threat. Cortisol starts to increase and adrenaline starts to occur in our veins in higher concentration. Literally parts of our brain shut down and we behave like idiots. We behave like raw animals that only know how to fight, flight or freeze. And so there’s a physiology you’ve got to overcome. And much of what we learned about how to deal with crucial conversations are skills for addressing that physiological problem. We’ve got the fact that I feel stressed and tight and angry or aroused, that’s the first thing we have to contend with.

Brett McKay:

So whenever we find ourselves in these high stakes moments, so crucial conversations, the stakes are high, there’s differing opinions, and there’s a lot of emotional salience going on. A typical response is that people just don’t say anything. And it’s because I think oftentimes people feel like we have these two choices. It’s like, okay, I can speak up, be honest and ruin the relationship, or I can stay silent and just keep the peace and don’t rock the boat. And you call this the fool’s choice. Why are we so conditioned to believe those are only two options in a tough conversation?

Joseph Grenny:

Well, yeah. You think about it and what I just described, when the prefrontal cortex of our brain starts to shut down because in moments of stress and threat, our body doesn’t think we need complex problem solving. What we need is to be able to run very fast or hit really hard or hide or something like that. Very simple tasks. And so portions of our body get starved for blood and the oxygen associated with it. So we don’t think particularly clearly. And so this fool’s choice is evidence of this simplistic view of the world that I’ve got. I either have to kill my enemy here or I have to run from my enemy. That’s what I’ve got to do. So it’s expressed in that same way, silence or violence. And so the real challenge is juicing your brain back up and starting to recognize those aren’t your only options.

One of the consequences of how we feel during crucial conversations is we start to adopt this false belief and we don’t even realize we have it, but I’d urge all of your listeners to write this down and to commit it to memory so you recognize the next time you’re framing your reality in this way. We often believe we have to choose between telling the truth and keeping a friend. And when you’re thinking those are your only two options, that thought is the problem because the real challenge is to figure out how to do both. And most of us in rational moments realize you really can’t keep a friend without telling the truth. The only way forward in a relationship to high trust and real collaboration or connection is for us to be able to work through the problems. In fact, crucial conversations are intimacy accelerants.

We’ve all had the experience with somebody of dreading a crucial conversation, but getting to the other side of it. And there’s almost this euphoric sense of connection of intimacy if it was a loved one at home, a feeling of trust and relating again. And that doesn’t come without going through this difficult process together. So reminding ourselves, there usually are ways to both tell the truth and keep a friend. In fact, doing one is the way to do both. And so the fool’s choice has to be transcended before we’ll even entertain the possibility that there’s something better on the other side.

Brett McKay:

And I imagine there’s a lot of social conditioning going on there too because I mean, you grow up, you watch Bambi, you hear Thumper say, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” And if you go to church, there’s emphasis on being nice. Don’t rock the boat. You got to keep the connection. And I’ve seen that in family life, friends and church congregations and trying to be nice often isn’t the nice thing. It just makes the problem worse.

Joseph Grenny:

Yeah, yeah. We had a reprise Thumper to say, “If you can’t say something nice, grow a tumor,” because that’s the outcome. We’ll just suppress all of these concerns that we’ve got and it doesn’t show up in great ways. And interestingly, you mentioned the church or the religious context too. So many will misunderstand their own religious texts and assume that what their religion is calling them to do is just put up with stuff. And there is not a more robust example of a community that dealt with hard conversations than some of the Christian texts. And you could say the same about Muslim and Hindu and others and their great examples there, but if many of your listeners are familiar with that, Jesus wasn’t somebody that pushed it under the rug and it was a pretty fractious thing at times. The people that he gathered around him, they dealt with stuff, but for some reason we misunderstand, we misread that and we start thinking, turning the other cheek means not dealing with stuff that is not anywhere in Christian text.

Brett McKay:

If you read the gospels closely, a lot of it’s just Jesus being annoyed at people. There’s the Pharisees or the scribes or his own apostles, and he would confront them very directly. So what is the goal of a crucial conversation? Is it agreement? Is it compromise? I think when people think about having a hard conversation, they think the purpose is to come to some kind of agreement.

Joseph Grenny:

It’s unwise to make agreement the goal because then you tend to force competition. What we tend to do in a crucial conversation in unhealthy moments is I’ll share my point of view and then you’ll try to pick holes in it and then I hear your point of view and I debate back, but we think of agreement as the natural outcome of a healthy conversation, not the objective. So the objective of a crucial conversation is just to fill a pool of common meaning where we get both of our perspectives and experiences and preferences and everything out there accessible between both and make ’em swim together, stir it all together and see if there’s better combinations or better points of view that come out of having both of those most synergy and most problem solving happens more naturally if we just create a climate where we’re just understanding and appreciating each other’s points of view and not trying to drive for agreement. The agreement tends to follow naturally as we develop more of a sympathy for others’ perspectives, more of an appreciation for where they’re coming from. And so filling the pool of meaning creates a common pool of meaning is our objective.

Brett McKay:

I thought that was really useful. I typically go into these kind of conversations with the idea like, okay, we got to figure this thing out, but you really don’t know what you’re trying to figure out and you can’t even conceptualize the potential outcome because you really don’t know the other person’s side of things and what they’re thinking until you create that shared pool of meaning. And once you do, that’s going to change what comes out of that conversation.

Joseph Grenny:

Yeah. Some people will hear that and say, well, that sounds like a pretty wimpy approach to conversation. You got to come in with a point of view, argue for it, prosecute it, and that’s how you come to be persuasive. Well, that might be good on a TV game show or a reality show where there’s no ongoing relationship or need for mutual commitment and executing on things, but the real point here is it doesn’t make you weak, it makes you effective. I once watched a conversation between a senior executive who believed that another executive was embezzling from the company, so really difficult thing to deal with. And the two of them get together to talk this through, and one obviously expected denial and obfuscation and redirection and all that kind of stuff, but he approached it as filling the pool of meaning and how do you do that?

He started very honestly with laying out what he believes was going on and then all the evidence to support that. And then says, you know what? I might be wrong. Maybe you’re not embezzling from the company, but here’s all the evidence I’ve got. Here’s where I’m coming from. And I watched the other guy kind of staring at this for a moment. He had expected hostility. He expected to be able to try to redirect by saying he was being abused and accused that this was any other sort of thing, but instead as it was just laid out factually and calmly and appropriately and confidently not apologetically, the other guy basically looked at it and said, I think I need to resign and basically confessed. And it was remarkable to watch. When you suck defensiveness out of a conversation, the likelihood of people coming to a common view increases dramatically. And the way to suck out the defensiveness is to make the objective to ensure that both sides are completely heard and to just inquire and explore and be curious about the other point of view to all the meanings in the pool, and then confidently and appropriately place your meaning in the pool as well. And better things tend to happen when we do.

Brett McKay:

So something you talk about is before you have a crucial conversation, you need to kind of prepare your mind for it. And a big reason a lot of crucial conversations fail is because the person is having the wrong conversation. They think they’re talking about the right topic or having the right conversation, but they’re not. You say there are three different kinds of conversations and you got to pick the right one for the issue.

Joseph Grenny:

We have this little acronym we call CPR that many people find incredibly useful because it helps you to tease out the different kinds of conversations we could be trying to have or should have. The C stands for content. So let’s say you and I rideshare together and we take turns driving, and whenever it’s your turn to drive, you tend to show up 15, 20, 30 minutes late and it really compromises my schedule. And we’ve been driving together for about a year, and this happens about 50% of the time. So now it’s Thursday, you show up and you’re about 30 minutes late. I get in the car and I say, “Doggone it, Brett, you’re late.” So there’s the first mistake. The first mistake just let’s take out of this that then I’m being too energetic or aggressive about this. The real problem here is the topic is wrong because I’m talking to you at the content level, the C level, the content level is the immediate problem, the immediate instance of whatever the concern is.

The reason I’m so angry and upset is because I haven’t been dealing with what is a longer pattern. That’s the P. I’ve never addressed it as a pattern. So I wait for one more instance and then I blow all of that upset and energy out through this particular instance. That’s a big mistake. Don’t talk about content when your issue is pattern. And I’ve set it up as a content issue as well, which also makes it less likely I’ll get satisfaction because you might very well say, gosh, I’m really sorry Joseph, I apologize. I got up this morning and there was only five pounds of pressure in my tire and my pump at home didn’t work. And so I had to find a gas station and I put coins in one and it didn’t work. And so I had to find two other gas stations. I’m really sorry.

It won’t happen again. I’ll leave a little bit earlier so I make sure I’m on time. Now, in that moment, what many people will do is feel like, oh, all right, well, he kind of apologized, kind of owned it. Let’s move on. No, he didn’t because your problem was a pattern and all you did was just solve the content problem. If you wait for a new content issue, a new instance of the problem to occur before you try to talk about pattern, you lose because it’s going to get mired down in all of the idiosyncratic things that are part of this particular instance when that isn’t your concern. It’s that 50% of the time over the last year we’ve had this issue. So one of the first pieces of advice on this is when you have a pattern conversation, don’t wait for a new instance of concern to raise it because then you’re going to lose the point, create a special opportunity just to talk about the pattern.

“Brett, we’ve been driving together for a year over the last year. Shame on me, haven’t brought it up, but I want to do it now so we can figure this out. You tend to show up late 15 to 30 minutes late about half the time.” Now we’re on the right topic, the final kind of conversation, the R in CPR, so content pattern, and then the R is a relationship conversation. This is a conversation where it isn’t that there’s a pattern of concern anymore, it’s that I don’t trust you anymore or I don’t respect you, or I don’t think you respect me. So trust, competence, and respect are the three things that tend to describe relationship concerns. So for example, if I keep giving you faulty work, you delegate assignments to me and I’m getting back to it poorly. And the real issue is that it looks like I’ve got bad grammar in some of my written communication, and you want to talk with me about this concern you not just say, “Hey, Joseph, the last two things you wrote had some mistakes.”

That would be content stuff or this tends to happen consistently. That would be a pattern conversation. If your real conclusion is “Joseph, you’re not good at written communication,” that’s a competence problem. And that isn’t solved by you just pointing out a couple of mistakes and me trying to be more attentive. You think I have bad grammar, you don’t think I know how to construct a paragraph, and that requires a much bigger solution. So before you open your mouth, identify, is this a content pattern or relationship conversation, tease that out and then hold yourself accountable to address the right thing.

Brett McKay:

I can see that happening, that confusion happening in marital disputes, like the husband doesn’t turn on the dishwasher at night or something, and for the wife, it’s like a relationship thing. It’s not the fact that he’s not turning on the dishwasher. It’s like what it represents about the relationship. Like, well, you don’t respect me, you’re not considerate. And the husband might say, okay, sorry, I’ll turn on the dishwasher. But for the wife, she’s not feeling like he’s competent. She feels like she can’t trust him to take care of things. So it’s like it’s not really about the dishwasher, it’s a relationship issue.

Joseph Grenny:

Yeah, I’ll give you an example of that. So I’ve traveled a lot in my career and I think I’ve been married for about 13 years or something at the time. And so our kids were getting a little older and were aware of different dynamics between us. And at one point the kids said, dad, we want to have a conversation with you. And I got that little tummy tickle and nervousness and sat down and they were pretty prepared for this. And basically they started out with saying, dad, we don’t like it when you come home. That was a big bomb to drop. Now, there could have been better ways for them to open this topic, but they had a relationship conversation to hold. And their grievance with me was that mom has a certain way of doing things and all of a sudden when dad comes home, the rules all change and it’s miserable to try to have to deal with two different regimes and we don’t like that. And so I’d come home and I realized as they said this, I did feel like I had to reset things to the truthful and proper way for things to operate because she wasn’t managing it. And so she had issues with me that she wanted to address. They were relationship things about respect and about care and compassion for other people. They were not just about patterns of behavior and much of the improvement that later came in our family came because we had that relationship conversation with each other.

Brett McKay:

So a conversation can happen on three levels. There’s content, which is an immediate instance of whatever the problem or the concern is. There’s pattern. That’s when a problem is occurring regularly. And then there’s relationship. That’s where the problem is causing an issue that’s making it hard for someone to trust or respect the other person or feel they’re competent. And you got to know which kind of conversation you’re having. 

So another thing you talk about is that each person is coming into the conversation with a story that they’re telling themselves about what’s going on and their feelings are flowing out of that story. So it’s important to get a handle on that story and make sure it’s true.

Joseph Grenny:

Oh boy. I mean this is, of all of the personal work I’ve done on crucial conversations over the last 35 years, this has been my central focus. It’s learning to master my story. If you can develop control over your emotions in your life, a mastery and an understanding of your own emotions, you can master your life. This is the key to intimacy, to connection, to being able to work well and build trust with other people. It’s recognizing that when emotions flare up, they can corrupt your capacity to have a crucial conversation. They are not a function of what happened. They’re not a function of what somebody just did. They’re a function of them doing something and then you telling yourself a story about it. So I share this example of, again, early in our marriage when I was traveling a lot, we would have kind of an adjustment.

When I came back home, I remember at one point I came home late at night, kids were in bed, and it had been a long week. It’s a Friday, and I walk in, and this was when we had wall phones, if any of your listeners were alive during that time. And I remember walking by this wall phone and I looked across the room and my wife is sitting there, she’s relaxed. It’s the end of her day. She’s got a book open. And I looked at her with this adoring kind of gaze, and all of a sudden the phone rang. And that was a moment of decision for me. It was a moment of decision of whether I’m going to pick it up or not, right? I’m looking at the love of my life. The two of us have an opportunity to have a little quiet moment and reconnect, but the phone is ringing, and I picked it up.

Now, a lot of people won’t believe what I’m about to say, but as I turned towards the wall and put the phone up to my ear and heard the voice of my administrative assistant saying, “Hey, I knew you were getting home right now. There were just three things I needed to address before tomorrow morning.” And then she launches in on this. I felt this burning sensation in my back. I mean, it was a physical, tangible kind of thing. And I looked around to find the source of it, and there was Sila across the room staring at me with just this absolutely deadly stare. And that was a moment too. I had an opportunity there. I experienced some emotion when I saw that look on her face. Now, it would’ve been easy for me in that moment to tell myself the reason I’m feeling how I’m feeling right now resentful and hurt and defensive is because she’s being insensitive, because she’s being uncaring, because she’s judging me, because she, so we tend to tell ourselves that our emotions are a function of what’s happening to us, of what others do.

And the beginning of all capacity to manage my emotional life begins with me accepting the fact that it does not, that it comes from the story I’m telling myself about what that other person is doing. I was telling myself a story that she was being judgmental, that she was being rude, that she was being inappropriate. I had these stories. I was telling myself about how insensitive and how impatient and how selfish she is. And so I looked back at her and rolled my eyes, not my best shining moment, but completely dismissed the frustration and concern she was experiencing and continued my conversation. I heard her book slam shut. She stomped upstairs, and we didn’t talk the rest of the night. Now, this is a long time ago, and I think I’ve grown a little bit since then, but as you break all of that down, none of that had to do with me answering a phone or with her staring at me in a deadly looking way.

It had to do with the stories we were both telling ourselves about that. The three kinds of stories we tend to tell in these crucial moments are, number one, a victim story. When something is happening that we don’t like, we tend to make ourselves out to be innocent sufferers. And that’s what I did in that moment. I’ve been working all week. I’ve been on the road, I come home and this is the kind of treatment I get. I look at all my virtues and absolutely none of my vices. And then with the other person, we tell a villain story. If I want to be rude to the love of my life and feel good about it, if I want to be able to justify myself in doing bad things to good people who don’t deserve it, I need three kinds of stories. First, a victim story, second, a villain story.

I need to think about her and think of only her vices and none of her virtues. Think of all of the worst weaknesses I can paint on her, and then I feel justified and mistreating her. And finally, I need a helpless story. I need a story that makes me helpless to do anything other than the petty little thing, the hiding or the sneering or whatever it is that’s coming out for me right now that I’m doing so victim, villain, and helpless. That’s what we mean by master my stories. It’s learning to take responsibility for and be aware of our tendency to tell those three kinds of stories during these crucial moments, and then to set them right?

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I know I do the villain thing whenever someone does something that I don’t like, the tendency is to jump to the worst conclusion. Like, oh, this guy, he’s out to get me. And then when you actually talk to him, it’s like, oh, man, I’m really sorry. I’ve had a lot going on and I didn’t really address that. I think there’s that story I think Steven Covey talks about in his book where he’s on the subway and there’s these kids just going crazy and the dad’s not doing anything, and Steven’s like, look at this deadbeat dad. He’s not taking care of his kids. And he says, sir, can you do something about your kids? And the dad was like, oh, I’m really sorry. We’re just coming back from my wife’s funeral. And I imagine they’re feeling bad. It’s just like a gut punch, like, oh man, I made this guy a villain, and he’s going through a hard time.

Joseph Grenny:

And we get there so naturally, so quickly. Now, some people will listen to this conversation we’re having and say, but there are villains out there, and that’s true. There are times where somebody lied to you, they stole from you, they embezzled from your company as we talked about before. But oftentimes the story is more complicated than just that too. Does that mean we let ’em off the hook? No, but it would change our emotional response to them. We had a guy that worked for our company many years ago who we were in a building with another firm and we owned the building, so they were subletting from us. And we found out from this tenant of ours that somebody from our company had stolen from them, had broken into their office and stolen things. And I had to sit down with this particular employee and address that.

And I remember first of all being incensed and embarrassed and all of that. And of course he was let go. But it turned out that he was struggling with drug addiction and his marriage was falling apart. He had seven children at home and there was a lot more to the story. And I ended up after letting him go, taking him to lunch a few times and checking in, and just because I cared about whether he was going to get through this awful time in his life as well. So there is no necessary opposition between holding people accountable, dealing with things truthfully, and also making sure you get to the right story, that you get more meaning in the pool so that we have a proper appreciation for even villains aren’t just villains, and you’re not always a completely innocent victim, and you’re not helpless to show up in a more mature and appropriate way too. There are better ways through this. We can tell the truth and keep a friend.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so that’s what you do before the conversation. Prepare yourself for this crucial conversation. Figure out what is the topic of the conversation actually? Is it content, pattern, relationship, get my story straight, master my stories. Am I painting this person as a villain? Am I painting myself as just a victim who’s as pure as the newly driven snow? Or am I painting myself as helpless? And then I think the important thing, you talked about it earlier is once you decide you need to have the conversation, don’t delay, because I thought that was really key, that if you have too much lag between the event and the conversation, it’s just going to get worse than that idea. If you don’t talk about it, you act it out. I think that was because I’ve seen that in my own life. I think if you’re in a marriage or even in a business or a church, you see that where you don’t talk about the thing and then you just start acting resentful towards the person.

You kind of just give them a sideways look. You ignore them, you dismiss them, and nothing’s ever solved. So you got to rip off the bandaid basically. So you mentioned the typical response people often have to crucial conversations is silence or violence. So they either just clam up and just ignore it and try to not rock the boat or violence, which is just lashing out, arguing, being combative. And a big reason why people do that is because they don’t feel safety. They don’t feel psychological safety. And I think often people misinterpret this idea of safety as comfort or being nice, but you argue that safety actually allows you to be more candid and unapologetic with the truth, not less. Tell us about that.

Joseph Grenny:

And so here’s the thing, we’ve done a lot of consulting in healthcare, and it’s fascinating to me that I think I’ve got a friend right now who’s in the hospital that there are people on this planet that you’re willing to walk into a room with, lay down at a table and let them cut you open with a knife. You’re willing to do that. And the reason you’re willing to do that is because you feel safe with them. You believe that they care about your problem. You believe that they’re competent to help you solve it. We call them surgeons obviously, and we ought to limit it to just people with that classification. But we are willing to go through uncomfortable things with people if there’s a reason to do it, and if we feel safe with them. What we know about crucial conversations is that you and I tend to believe that the best predictor of the outcome of a conversation is how risky the topic is, and that isn’t true at all.

We think I couldn’t approach somebody and tell ’em I think they stole from the company or that they’re incompetent or that they’re racist or whatever it is. We couldn’t do that without them getting defensive. Well, that just isn’t true. We’ve seen over the years that there is no correlation between the outcome of a conversation and how risky the topic is. The only correlation is with how safe the people feel discussing the topic. I mentioned Kerry Patterson, my writing partner early on, and one of the first conversations I had with him about writing, I had written a white paper on some topic. I handed it over to him, he gave it back, and I said, what’d you think? And he said, it’s boring. He said, it’s turgid, it’s vapid. And it was interesting to me because normally I would’ve felt really tight and offended inside, but for some reason that information got through to me perfectly fine.

Why? Because I knew he invested a lot of time reading that paper, and he wanted me to be a good writer, and that was his sole motivation in sharing that. When you believe that, when you believe two things, you feel safe with people, and this is your first task in a crucial conversation in the first 30 seconds, you’ve got to generate evidence for them of two things. The first is that you care about their problems, interests, and concerns almost as much as they do. Just like the doctor, that doctor cares about the fact that I’ve got racking back pain and he wants to help me fix it. You care about their problems, interests, and concerns. As soon as they believe that they do this, they go. So I needed to have a crucial conversations with an employee many years ago who I had concluded was incompetent at some really fundamental parts of his job.

He was terrible at managing projects and terrible at managing people. He was a great designer, a great graphic designer, but we tried to grow a department underneath him, and he was terrible at projects and managing people. And so that was the message I needed to get across. It was a big relationship conversation, and I started that conversation not giving myself all the credit. A lot of it goes to him that he cared about these things, but I said, Hey, I’ll call him Paul. I said, Hey, Paul, I need to have a pretty heavy conversation with him. And he knew, of course there was stress and disappointment. He knew that things weren’t working well, but I said, I want you to know that my sole motivation in this conversation is to help you win here. I want you to have a wonderful work experience here. I want you to be here for a very long time.

You’ve made a great contribution in the past and things just aren’t working right now, and I want to talk about that and figure it out. And I watched him take a really deep breath, and you could almost watch his soul open. He just sat back and it was kind of like somebody saying to the doctor, go ahead and do surgery here. I know something needs to be done. I felt such permission from him, such vulnerability from him. Why? Because he trusted my motive. He trusted that I really did care about his problems, interests, and concerns. So that’s point 1. In the first 30 seconds of a crucial conversation, you need to make it clear that you have mutual purpose, that you care about those problems, interests and concerns. And second, you need to make sure the other person knows you care about and respect them. So mutual purpose and mutual respect are what we call the conditions for psychological safety.

They believe that not only do I care about your problems, but I also just care about you as a human being and I respect you. So Paul, this person that I’m talking to here, he got it that I love him and that I like working with him and that I respect him, and he’s then able to take a deep breath and open himself up and be vulnerable. And we had a great conversation where at the end, he agreed to take a salary reduction. Eventually we grandfathered him and kind of moved him gradually there to move out of a management position more into a technical position, and that this was best for him. It worked. It went there. Why? Because he felt safe. You and I tend to believe that when others get defensive and combative, it’s because they’re arrogant or mean or rude or manipulative or whatever. It’s generally about a lack of psychological safety, and that’s an empowering thing for us to learn.

Brett McKay:

So how do you do that? I imagine in longstanding relationships, what helps is you’ve already established a track record over time that shows that you care and can be trusted. But you’re also saying that you can establish that psychological safety in the first 30 seconds of a conversation. So how do you convey that? How do you convey, Hey, I respect you, I care about you, right In that moment.

Joseph Grenny:

I’m going to differentiate here between some gimmick or technique and just what really needs to happen. Your job is to generate evidence, and that can happen in a lot of different ways. If it’s with a loved one, sometimes it’s putting your hand on their knee. Sometimes it’s leaning forward and offering a warm smile. Sometimes it’s breaking tension with a joke because sometimes a joke shows that it’s a relaxed situation and that you feel safe, and therefore they can too. There are lots of nonverbal ways of doing it. One of the best ways to do it verbally is what we call a contrasting statement. It’s telling people what you do and don’t want. That’s what I did with Paul. I told him, look, I don’t want to come in here and just criticize and tear you down and point out everything that’s wrong. I want to get to a place where you are joyful and happy and feel successful in your work.

You describe what you don’t want and what you do want. The most important part of that message is the don’t want part because their brain, the threatened part of them is going to tell them that that is what you want, that you want to hurt them, that you want to insult them, that you’re just trying to downsize. You just want to get rid of an employee, or they’ve disagreed with you in the past, and this is revenge. They’re going to make all that stuff up, and that’s their story. So letting them know what it isn’t is a critical part of constructing that first sentence. But if that sentence doesn’t work, you’ve got to keep generating evidence. Sometimes it’s apologizing. Paul, I’ve let this go for a long time. I’ve let this build and accumulate. That’s my fault. I’m sorry. And I apologize that this conversation is now bigger than it should be, and I’m willing to take my responsibility for that in it. Any of those things that you do that demonstrate I care about you and respect you, and I care about your problems, interests, and concerns, can possibly help the other person get the signal that they’re safe and then be able to engage in the conversation. This does not mean the conversation will be pleasant. It might be really hard, might be really difficult, but you’ll feel safe. You’ll be able to hear.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, and then you can add to that shared pool of meaning. Exactly. One of the hardest conversations to have is whenever you disagree with someone on a value level. So maybe it’s a political disagreement with your loud uncle at Thanksgiving, or maybe a strategic disagreement at work or maybe a disagreement with your spouse about how to raise your kids. How do you find a shared goal when your immediate objectives are completely opposite?

Joseph Grenny:

Yeah. Now you’ve used a few different words there that I want to parse out because they’re very important. I think it’s very, very rare when we have value disagreements. It’s very, very common for us to have strategy disagreements. It’s all about the way something is being executed. So you think about the massive political divide we’ve got in the United States. Now, I defy you to find two people with polar opposite views that can’t sit in a room long enough to understand that a lot of their strong advocacy of polar opposite opinions is trying to achieve values that both of them value. And so sometimes digging down deeper and understanding, no. So let’s say we disagree on immigration. Most people at the end of the conversation will agree that we have a primary responsibility to the citizens of our country, and we also ought to care about citizens of other countries too.

But we have a primary responsibility there that we need to make sure our economy works and that it can sustain support for the people that it has primary responsibility for. When you start getting down to the values level, you’ll find there’s usually more ready agreement. I’ll give you an example of that. So I once had a late night flight to London, had a speech the next morning, the flight was delayed, got in at like one o’clock in the morning, got into my black taxi at the Heathrow Airport, and I just wanted to rest on the way to hotel to sleep as much as I could before the next day. And I noticed the taxi driver kept turning around and looking at me, and finally he said, in a really aggressive voice, he said, are you American? And I said, yes, I am. And he said, your president is a murderer.

And I thought, oh, great. Here we go. Here goes my rest. And at first I was going to try to just ignore it, but then I thought, you know what? I’m going to talk about crucial conversations tomorrow morning, and how lame is this that I can’t even engage in one right now? And so I thought, all right, I’m going to do this. And so I said to the guy, I said, look, we’ve got 40 minutes before we’re going to get to my hotel. I said, I’m willing to talk with you about this, but I want some ground rules. I said, first of all, you’ve got 10 minutes and I want you to say anything you want to say to me as an American, and I’m going to listen to absolutely everything and just try to understand it. And then afterwards, you’re going to have to listen to me for 10 minutes.

And I wasn’t saying I disagreed with him necessarily. I just wanted to make sure we had ground rules in place. It would keep us both safe. And he got this silly grin on his face. He said, you’re really strange, aren’t you? And I said, do you want to do this or don’t you? And he said, yeah, let’s do this. And we had a wonderful conversation. And I can’t say that I agreed with all of his beliefs or perspective on US foreign policy, but I was way more sympathetic to it when I got there. And I don’t know that he necessarily agreed with me on everything, but he was probably far more sympathetic to my point of view than he was when we first started. We started realizing we had some common values that both of us cared about decency and honesty and human life. And we didn’t think that economics should come above human life. And so we realized there were common values. So often our disagreements are at the strategy level, not at the values level, but the problem is we never discover it because we don’t spend enough time listening and asking and filling the pool of meaning so that we can appreciate where the other person’s coming from.

Brett McKay:

So to help people guide a crucial conversation, you’ve got an acronym state, S-T-A-T-E. What does that mean?

Joseph Grenny:

Yeah, we tend when we want to make our points, so let’s say for example, we were talking about immigration or something like that. What we tend to do is we start at the wrong end of the conversation. We just say, I think we need to build a wall and we shouldn’t have any illegal immigration in our country at all, and we got to kick out everybody. That’s illegal right now. That’s my point of view. So I tend to start there and people then react to that. I’m starting with my conclusion. I’m starting at the end of the story, not the beginning of the story. When I came to whatever conclusion I’ve got on immigration or any other topic, it started with me having some experiences, concrete experiences. It starts with my belief about what’s factual and true. And then I tend to tell myself stories about that and then I have feelings about it, and then that results in how I’m going to act.

So we call this the path to action starts with facts. Stories come next, emotions come next. And then the actions, the proposals, the opinions that I form, follow from the end of that. If you want people to be able to understand your point of view, you’ve got to take ’em by the hand and walk ’em down that whole path, start with the factual basis. What do you think is going on in our country today and how is immigration affecting that? What facts do you have to put on the table? What stories do you then tell yourself about it? What feelings does that create for you? And then what policy positions do you advocate as a result? Walk them through that. And even if they don’t agree, at least there’s more meaning in the pool. So they can see how a reasonable, rational, decent person might come to the point of view that I’ve got.

And then help them do the same. We call this state because the acronym S-T-A-T-E describes the five things you need to do in order to be heard non defensively. First, share your facts. S second, tell your story. That’s the T. A ask for others facts and ask for others’ point of view and then talk tentatively and encourage testing. Encourage testing means you encourage the other person to challenge, to question, to interrogate your point of view. Invite that when you do that defensiveness decline. So those are kind of the five ways of showing up when you start to share your opinion in a way that reduces defensiveness.

Brett McKay:

Let’s talk about that talk tentatively part because I think a lot of guys listening might think, well, that’s just being weak or in unconfident, what does talk tentatively actually look like?

Joseph Grenny:

Yeah, it just means to tell the truth. Most of us overstate our point of view. We think that banging the table and overstating the fact of the matter is, and as all thinking people know, and the only reasonable conclusion is when we overstate our point of view, when we act as though we’re absolutely certain that I’ll use immigration again, that this one immigration policy is the only right way for us to do this. When you do that, what tends to happen is number one, you lie because you probably don’t really believe that that’s the only point of view that has any reason or factual support for it. And secondly, you provoke defensiveness. So the other people who tend to feel like your goal is to try to convince compelling control, you’re trying to convince them of your point of view. They tend to start poking holes in it.

People naturally look at what’s wrong with your argument when the argument is overstated. If you want them to be able to listen, then state an opinion is an opinion. That’s what tentative means. So in my point of view, this is what I believe, or in my long experience, this is my point of view or after long consideration, I’m quite confident that all of those are perfectly appropriate things to say because they’re honest. They aren’t overstating your level of confidence or your level of omniscience about the topic. We find that people are more persuaded when you’re less aggressive, when you state your opinion as an opinion and allow room for testing.

Brett McKay:

So as part of a crucial conversation with a loved one or at work with a boss or colleague, you might receive feedback and criticism, and that’s always hard because it sets off for flight or fight response to feel criticized. But you say feedback can stop being threatening once you treat it as information rather than indictment. Even when it’s given emotionally or clumsily, you can still separate what’s being said from how it’s being said, and instead of reflexively defending your ego, you can start getting curious and ask, what does this person see that I might not even poorly delivered? Feedback often contains a fragment of truth worth examining, and one thing people can do to get value from criticism without being crushed by it, is to take your time with it. You can say, alright, thank you. I’m going to take that and sit on it for a bit, and then you go through it by yourself and think, okay, this doesn’t mean anything. That’s not true, but like, oh, that comment, he’s got a point here.

Joseph Grenny:

Yes, that’s a powerful, if you can recognize that in a crucial conversation, you can control the parameters of it. You’re not powerless. You’re not a victim of it. One of the best ways to take control is to control the pacing. So if somebody’s coming at you with some really hard feedback, it’s okay for you to set the table like I did with the guy in the taxi cab and to say, I want to hear you out. I’m going to ask a lot of questions, and if it gets a little overwhelming to me, I may ask for a break, but I want to get to the other side of this and understand it, and then I don’t know that I’ll respond right now. I’m going to need some time to reflect on this. So there it is. That’s how I’m okay with engaging in this conversation. So if you’re sitting down with your boss in a performance review and she gives you some feedback that’s surprising to you, don’t respond right? Then let her know that you want a chance to sort through it and absorb it, and then you want to respond in a way that’s respectful of the feedback that you’ve been given, and then go and deal with whatever emotions you need to work through to get to a good place, sort through it and come back and then deal with part two of it.

Brett McKay:

All right, so we’ve had the conversation. We have a shared pool of meaning. Everyone feels heard, but I’ve seen this happen a million times in groups where these hard conversations happen, but people get on the same page, the meeting ends, everyone feels good, but nothing actually happens.

Joseph Grenny:

You’ve been there too.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So why do people mess up the transition from meaning to action?

Joseph Grenny:

Yeah, because I think we let ourselves sell out at the end, and we all know that we should always end a conversation by clarifying who does what by when, and how we’re going to follow up. We need to make sure that we confirm our agreement, and if it’s a politically sensitive one or there’s a low trust history, writing it down so that everybody can confirm, yeah, that’s what we agreed to, that’s what we understood, and then how are we going to follow up? What changes are we going to make as a result of this? That’s the work at the end of the conversation. And if you don’t do that work, you will have deja vu dialogues. You will have to have Groundhog Day, and it’s not fun to do it, so why go through all the trouble of having a good crucial conversation if you’re going to just waste it at the end? Always end with who’s going to do what by when, and how do we follow up? 

Brett McKay:

Well Joseph, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Joseph Grenny:

Cruciallearning.com is our website and lots of great resources there to get the training virtually or in person or online with public classes. The book is called Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, and I’m happy to have a chance to share it. Thank you, Brett.

Brett McKay:

Thanks, Joseph. It’s been a pleasure. 

My guest here is Joseph Grenny. He’s the co-author of the book Crucial Conversations that’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, cruciallearning.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/crucialconversations where you can find links to resources to delve deeper into this topic. 

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Valentine’s Day has a way of pressuring couples into impersonal, default choices: an overpriced (and crowded) dinner, a last-minute card from Walgreens, a box of chocolates grabbed on the way home. There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of that, but if you want the day to actually mean something, it helps to be a little more intentional.

Over the years, we’ve published a wide range of posts on dating, gift-giving, and building strong relationships. Below, we’ve rounded up some of our best Valentine’s-related and adjacent guides, from creative date ideas and thoughtful gifts to deeper relationship check-ins. With a little bit of forethought, you can break through the shallow, commercial nature of the holiday and plan a day (or even just a conversation) that feels personal, memorable, and genuinely worthwhile.

Date Ideas

Going out to a nice restaurant is standard protocol for a Valentine’s Day date, but it isn’t very original and dining out on such a busy night isn’t always that enjoyable, anyway. Why not mix it up by planning an out-of-the-box date — a novel activity out on the town or in the intimate atmosphere of your own home? Whatever you end up doing, make sure you dress nicer than usual to make the occasion feel special!

• Cheap Date Ideas She’ll Actually Love
• 15 Creative Date Ideas
• At-Home Date Night Ideas
• How to Create the Ultimate At-Home Fondue Date
• Take Her Around the World for Valentine’s Day . . . Without Leaving the Kitchen
• The Perfect Valentine’s Day Menu 
• A Man’s Guide to Smart Casual Dress

Gifts & Gestures

While a woman will often say she doesn’t want anything for Valentine’s Day, what she often means is that she doesn’t need anything expensive and elaborate. But, she’s probably still hoping for a love note and/or flowers at the least. You can’t go wrong with giving her both, and we’ve got some tips for making these gestures more meaningful below. If you want to also give a gift, that will likely be appreciated, too. Extra points if it’s homemade.

• How to Write a Love Letter
• How to Give Flowers Like a Victorian Gentleman
• 7 Romantic, Non-Lame DIY Valentine’s Day Gift Ideas
• How to Give a Gift to a Woman
• Huckberry’s “Gifts for Her” shop 

Relationship Check-In

The approach of Valentine’s Day is a good time to assess the status of your relationship. Are there things you can do to improve it? Should you even still be dating this person?

• How Do You Know When She’s the One?
• Podcast: How to Keep a Happy Relationship Happy
• The Yearly Marriage Checkup
• 10 Ways to Be a Better Husband Today
• Look Before You Leap: Questions to Ask to Avoid Falling in Love With the Wrong Person
• Podcast: How to Avoid Falling in Love With the Wrong Person
• 14 Red Flags to Look Out for in a Relationship

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

We’ve all had that feeling — you meet someone new, and the conversation just flows. You’re in sync. You click. But what’s really happening when that magic occurs?

My guest today is journalist Kate Murphy, author of Why We Click: The Emerging Science of Interpersonal Synchrony, and she says this experience isn’t just a vibe, it’s a measurable physiological phenomenon and the most consequential social dynamic most people have never heard of. In our conversation, we dig into what happens when people click, why syncing with others feels so good, and how it influences everything from friendships to teamwork to romantic relationships. We also talk about why some people have a knack for connection, how you can become more “clickable,” and why video calls are the worst.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Dying Breed article: Resonance as an Antidote to Social Acceleration
• Kate’s previous book: You’re Not Listening
• Sunday Firesides: Be Someone’s Atmospheric Getaway
• AoM Article: The Importance of Eye Contact

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page

Download this episode

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice

Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. We’ve all had that feeling: you meet someone new and the conversation just flows. You’re in sync, you click. But what’s really happening when that magic occurs? My guest today is journalist Kate Murphy, author of Why We Click: The Emerging Science of Interpersonal Synchrony. And she says, this experience isn’t just a vibe, it’s a physiological phenomenon and the most consequential social dynamic most people have never heard of. In our conversation, we dig into what happens when people click, why syncing with others feel so good and how it influences everything from friendships to teamwork to romantic relationships. We also talk about why some people have a knack for connection, how you can become more clickable, and why video calls are the worst. After the show is over, check out the notes and resources at aom.is/click.

All right, Kate Murphy, welcome to the show.

Kate Murphy:

Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure.

Brett McKay:

So you got a book out called Why We Click. It’s all about that feeling that we’ve all experienced where we’re clicking with someone socially. It could be the first time we meet them and we’re just like, man, I’m on the same page with this person. I’m vibing with them. And there’s actually a name for this in the scientific literature: interpersonal synchrony. And you call it the most important social dynamic. So why is interpersonal synchrony so important?

Kate Murphy:

Well, it is the way we connect, just like you said, it is the physiological mechanism, the under-the-hood mechanism for connection and interpersonal synchrony. The way I define it is, and I still think it’s magical, that moment of clicking, but it’s the magical but now scientifically documented tendency of human beings to fall into rhythm with one another. And what I mean by that is when you gather two or more people together in a room instantaneously, usually in less than 30 seconds, they will not only begin to match or mirror one another’s gestures, facial expressions and postures, they will also start to sync up their heart rate, their respiration, their hormonal activity, their pupil dilation, all these physiological signals that we cannot detect, but we sync up to them nevertheless. 

And why do we do this? We do this because when we internalize and embody one another, we are able to get a read on one another’s thoughts and feelings. And so when you smile, when someone else smiles, you get a read on their joy. When you flinch, like when you’re watching a football game and you see a quarterback get sacked and you flinch, you are actually intuiting their pain. And also when you sync up with somebody else’s racing heart, you start to feel their anxiety. So it’s really an evolutionary advantage of human beings of being able to tell very quickly, instantaneously friend or foe, what are they thinking? What are they feeling?

Brett McKay:

I think all of us have probably heard this idea that we mirror each other. So if someone puts their hand on their chin, we have a tendency to put our hand on our chin if we’re syncing up with them.

Kate Murphy:

Yeah.

Brett McKay:

But you go into the fact that there’s a lot more going on with our physiology than just that. Besides mirroring gestures, you mentioned your heart rate syncs up, your hormonal activity syncs up, and there’s also research that shows that when people are syncing socially, their brain activity, their brainwaves sync up.

Kate Murphy:

Yeah, that’s key. And that really shows that there’s been this transfer, particularly during meaningful conversations. It doesn’t happen, interestingly, during vacuous conversations, very superficial conversations — only during meaningful conversations, and I learned this when I was writing the listening book and it really got me started on this next book about synchrony. But when the listener and the speaker are really understanding one another, their neural patterns, their brainwaves start to sync up. And that is a measurable way of seeing, okay, there has been a transfer of thoughts, memories, and feelings. So that’s really critically important. 

But also when you are having these meaningful conversations, particularly when you’re in the presence of another person and eye contact, we’ve always been told, look people in the eye. It’s really true because we start to mimic other people’s pupil dilation and there are all these things happening like micro expressions on your face that you are mimicking totally subconsciously and that aren’t really visible, but we’re mimicking them just the same. And it helps us again, embody, internalize one another and really feel and get in the rhythm, in the groove vibe sounds very West coast, woo, but to really get a read on the other person’s vibe, people have energy, they have negative and positive energy, and that’s how we pick it up.

Brett McKay:

And as you were talking about how we all have this desire to connect and click with people and how we want to sync up and basically almost become the same person, it reminds me there’s that myth from Plato talking about where men and women came from, and the myth was that there was a time before in primordial time where there’s these creatures that were kind of like a donut shaped, like a circle looking thing that had four arms and four legs and two heads, and they were together and they kind of connected at the belly button. They kind of wheeled around like cartwheeled to get around and then they separated.

Kate Murphy:

I know exactly what you’re talking about.

Brett McKay:

And then they separated and that became men and women, and then we just had this desire, we want to become that one person again.

Kate Murphy:

Yeah, the idea Plato had was that we’re roaming the planet looking for our missing other half that we’ve been separated from, but interpersonal synchrony tells us that what we’re really looking for is we are looking for the person with whom we effortlessly sync the person who harmonize with us, the people that we are on their wavelength. I love how all these turns of phrase things that we have said for time immemorial, being in sync, in step, in tune on the same wavelength and on the other side, discordant, that kind of thing, that those are all actually true, these things that we were feeling. Now we have the technology to actually see that’s actually what’s happening. We’re syncing up in this way and that’s what feels so good.

Brett McKay:

So syncing feels good in the moment, and then when you consistently have those clicking moments with someone, that’s what makes for fulfilling long-term relationship. What contributes to our ability to sync with others? Is there a genetic factor? Does it have something to do with our early childhood development? Is it a mixture of both?

Kate Murphy:

Yeah, I think it’s all of that. And I love that you’re bringing up the genetics because I really want to say at the outset that this is an emerging science and we don’t understand it exactly why it happens when it happens. That’s why it’s still magical. I mean, why did John Lennon and Paul McCartney click on so many different levels and were able to produce and have the impact that they did? And the same thing with all of us. When we click with somebody, it’s still somewhat magical. 

But yes, I do think everything comes into play there. It’s genetics, it’s your history, it’s everything that has happened to you in life is embodied within you. And every neural twitch, everything that you do is a product of all of those pieces all the way back to when you were in utero. So I like to use the analogy that we’re all kind of like we’re made up of trillions of oscillating cells and what we’re all kind of like, are these massive symphony orchestras with all of these different instruments playing at different frequencies and and you meet another person and they’ve got their whole orchestra from all these different pieces that came together.

And it’s just a matter of whether or not you two are able to harmonize that you are able to, it’s not necessarily you’re going to start playing their song and get on their tempo entirely or they’re going to do the same to yours. What’s really remarkable is how we both somewhat accommodate to one another and play this even more beautiful tune together. And we also, the key point is we interpret it as pleasurable. So it’s not so much of putting each other in an exact common state of arousal. It’s more accommodating one another and playing this beautiful song together that we both are really in the groove, if that makes sense.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, it’s a dance.

Kate Murphy:

It is a dance. 

Brett McKay:

Well, what you talk about is stuff like genetics and upbringing influences someone’s general ability to sync with people. It’s like their overall capacity to connect with people, but those things, they also influence your personality, your disposition, which also influences whether we click with people. There has to be some kind of alignment there, not that you have to be perfectly parallel and the same. You can still sync if you compliment each other in some way, even if you’re different.

Kate Murphy:

Yeah. What’s sort of cool about this is if there are so many people that we can think of who are odd couples that come together and that we never would’ve like God, I never would’ve put those two together, whether it’s friends or a romantic couple, so you can sync with people that you never thought you would sync with.

Brett McKay:

Something else you talk about is that there are certain people who are just especially good at syncing with other people.

Kate Murphy:

There are people that have, and I talk about this in the book, we have something called effective presence, and we’re all familiar with this personality and that’s sort of the general state of how we feel, but effective presence is this consistent way that we make other people feel. There are some people that just, for lack of a better word, have a really good vibe that people just sync to very easily. And you can call it charisma, you can call it a vibe, you can call it just somebody who’s just really has a compelling personality. And it doesn’t mean they’re always upbeat. It’s not just that it’s just people are drawn to them, but we all carry around an effective presence. That is something that is I think, useful to think about is how do I leave people? Am I leaving people better or worse than I found them? Are they more uptight? Are they happier after they’re around me? And what does that mean and what can I do about it?

Brett McKay:

I think that’s worth remembering that we all have this personal atmosphere that can influence how people feel and that we should be mindful and thoughtful about how we want to leave people feeling after we leave their presence. As we’re talking about this, people might be thinking that these good syncers, these people who can click easily with people, people probably think, well, they’re probably all extroverts. They’re bubbly. They’re charismatic in that sort of stereotypical way we think of charisma. But you highlight examples of individuals who have that great effect of presence and they’re not super dynamic, but people are still drawn to them.

Kate Murphy:

And I think that’s because they’re able to put them in sort of a calming cadence, for lack of a better word. They calm you down, they make you feel more secure. There are also lots of people that can just make you feel more competent or there’s something about their presence that you find pleasurable. Again, it’s like tuning into them and you find it pleasant. I also, I think it’s worth noting that we’re not going to sync with everybody. And as much as we might like to, I think we like to, we’re really not meant to. And so part of maturity is realizing that there will be people that you can really hum along with and you’re really going to click with them. And other people, you’re just, no, that’s not going to work. And it instantly, and there’s no use really forcing the issue. And it’s also, people usually have two reactions to that failure to connect is to say, first of all, there’s something wrong with that person that I didn’t connect with them. There’s something wrong. There’s something wrong with that person, or there’s something wrong with me that I wasn’t compelling enough or that’s why we didn’t connect. And sometimes no harm, no foul. You’re just not a good fit and that’s okay.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, you’re not for everybody and everyone’s not for you.

Kate Murphy:

Exactly.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So there’s some individuals who just, they’ve got some sort of knack for clicking with a lot of people. They got that effective presence. What about individuals on the autism spectrum? Something that you hear about, it’s hard for them, people with autism to socialize because maybe they don’t pick up on cues as much. Are they still able to sync?

Kate Murphy:

That’s an interesting question. I actually found it really fascinating. There are two schools of thought about that, and one is that just having a really difficult time noticing syncing that they’re so internally directed that they have a hard time syncing with other people. There’s another school of thought is that they’re so overwhelmed by all the signals they’re receiving that they’re flooded and so they aren’t able to sync. 

There’s also some absolutely fascinating literature that, and this is the case for also people who have some learning difficulties, also perhaps with ADD, but certainly autism is that their deficits in their ability to keep time, keep a beat essentially. They have a really hard time keeping a beat to music and also apparently keeping a beat with other people because we all have a rhythm. Neural patterns are rhythmic, inherently rhythmic. Everything in the universe is pretty much because atoms in and of themselves inherently rhythmic. And so the inability to keep time is an indicator and is also how they’re actually using that as a way to diagnose people who do have some of these neurological difficulties to find out whether or not that’s sort of a marker. And also it’s coming into play as a type of treatment to help people with their music awareness with rhythm, perhaps dance, to try and help with that timing deficit that translates into our ability to sync up with other people. Isn’t that fascinating?

Brett McKay:

It is. I thought that was really interesting that your ability to keep a beat with music translates over to your ability to keep a beat socially. I thought that was really interesting. But I mean, it makes sense because one of the things you see people do in groups, sometimes an organization will have people participate in a drum circle and then beating on the drums, it gets people in sync because they’re creating a rhythm together.

Kate Murphy:

Well, I think just in general, that’s the other side of this, is that when we are syncing with other people behaviorally, meaning we’re doing the same thing at the same time, particularly to a beat, to your point, it fosters feelings of rapport, of trust. People volunteer more information, they’re generally kinder and more helpful. Even babies strapped into face forward carriers and bounced in time to music are significantly more likely to favor an experimenter who is also bouncing in time to music versus an experimenter who’s bouncing out of sync or who is not bouncing at all. So there’s something about, I mean, I myself am in a line dancing class and a lot of this people in this class, I mean just really probably little else in common, but I mean, we are so cohesive and there’s such a sense of joy of doing the same thing at the same time.

You lose this sense of yourself, you become more of this larger organism moving together, and it does stimulate joy. 

And if you think just even back in history, synchronized behaviors, movements have been used as a kind of social glue. Think of religion, people singing together, praying together, kneeling together, standing at the same time together and in the military marching to a beat. And also all soldiers are really pretty much on the exact same schedule, doing the same thing at the same time. And it builds this incredible sense of cohesion. It brings this feeling of emergence. So when soldiers see something happening to one of their own, it’s like it’s happening to them.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I think we’ve all maybe experienced that. I know when I worked in a restaurant when I was in high school or I worked at Jamba Juice making smoothies and you get really busy and whenever the crew, they were just synced up and in the zone. We didn’t have to talk to each other, but we could look at each other and knew what they were going to do and what I needed to do. And it just felt awesome. This is amazing. We’re just cranking out smoothies. 

Kate Murphy:

Yeah, I love that. And the same with the greatest sports teams, the ones where everybody’s cohesive and really clicking. You can see that, and those are the ones that succeed.

Brett McKay:

Another factor that plays a role in our ability to sync socially is something called interoception. What is that and what role does it play in our ability to sync with others?

Kate Murphy:

Oh, I’m so glad you brought that up. It’s really, I found this, well, I found everything in the book really fascinating, but this was a revelation to me. We like to think of our feelings come from, okay, something happened. We process what happened in our mind and that results in our feelings. But the research is really coming to show that really feelings start in our body and our brain interprets feelings from these experiences, these feelings in our body, and then we translate that to emotions. So interoception is the ability to read what’s going on in your body. It’s essentially body awareness. It’s the flip side of perception. Perception is what you’re perceiving outside of your body, whereas interoception is being really in tune with what’s going on within your body. And that’s super important because if you don’t understand the sensations and what they mean in your body, you really can’t sync up to another person or embody another person and take on their feelings and be really in tune with them.

So for example, we all experience, if you think about what does fear feel like for you? Do you feel it in your stomach? Do you feel it in your chest? Do you feel it in your head? Do you feel it in your feet? Some people feel it in their genitals. I mean, all of us have a different physical signature for fear. And if you’re not in tune of, okay, what does that mean? What am I feeling right now is that anger? And where we get into trouble as human beings is when we start to misconstrue or get detached from those inner feelings within us and what they mean. 

A lot of people have a different sense of what hunger means. I mean, what the feeling is. Is it gnawing in your chest or do you get kind of irritable? People have different ways of perceiving hunger, but where we really get messed up is when we misconstrue things like you can feel a little bit irritable or lethargic and think that’s hunger when it’s really boredom and people get mixed up with that. And particularly in our culture where we’re so busy, and it’s almost a badge of pride to say you didn’t sleep when you were tired. You didn’t eat when you were hungry. You pushed yourself through when you were in a lot of pain. Exercising that detachment from your body, and you can see how this would be a problem is if you are trying to internalize, embody someone else’s feelings. And again, this is all subconscious, but if you’re not in tune with your own body, how can you be in tune with someone else’s body?

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I think that’s interesting. One of the first things you can do to help develop your own ability to click more with people is just get more in tune or more aware of your own emotions and what they feel like in your body.

Kate Murphy:

Yeah, just do an internal review because if we’re internalizing other people’s heart rate, their respiration, all of these things, and we’re not even aware of our own heart rate, you’re not going to pick up someone else’s anxiety if you’re not even aware of your own heart rate. They’ve done a lot of research with particularly heart rate, but there are lots of other things where people work on their interoception going through different parts of their body and what are you feeling? And there was one study I thought was just fascinating, where it had high frequency traders at a hedge fund, and the ones that had better interoception were better traders. They made more money and they stayed in the job longer because they had more of that sense of, okay, this is danger or what these other people are doing. I’m getting sucked into something that maybe I shouldn’t. Where they really had a sense of their own self. And again, this is all subconscious, but the fact that they had better awareness, higher awareness of their heart rate and whether it was up or down versus another person made them a better trader.

Brett McKay:

So personality can influence whether we click with someone, but there can be situations where the fit has potential, but you’re not syncing because you’re just not generally good at syncing with people. And we’ve talked about that some people are just better able to click with people and more people than others. I mean, some of that is genetic and upbringing, but there’s also things we can all do to improve our clickability. And we’ve talked about some of those things already. I mean, be aware of your own emotions, do things in a group, like some kind of physical activity together where you’re all in sync, but what else can we do to make ourselves more clickable? And you actually have a chapter on what the world of speed dating can teach us about this. So what can speed dating teach us about being open to interpersonal synchrony?

Kate Murphy:

Well, your listeners should know there’s a vast scientific literature on speed dating, which was news to me at not only speed dating, but speed networking. And they’ve done a lot of studies to find out that’s how they really figured out what is happening when people are clicking. And the people that reported a sense of attraction and they wanted to see this person, again, whether it was in a professional or a personal context, romantic context, it was that they were syncing on all these different levels. The thing that I think people can do that we discount, and of course that’s what my first book was about is to, you really want to be present, of course. And really, if you can be in person, in person, you’re going to pick up all these different signals that you don’t pick up online or in a two dimensional or even three dimensional.

If it’s virtual reality, you’re not going to pick up. Syncing is a multisensory dynamic, and so you’re losing a lot of information that helps you sync up with somebody if you’re not in person. So there’s that piece of it. But also learn to be a really good listener when you are really trying to inhabit somebody else’s narrative and really trying to understand them. And listening isn’t just being quiet. I mean, it is really trying to almost be with someone in the sense that you’re watching a movie where you’d get totally lost in the other person and to almost let yourself go in what the other person has to say, get rid of your own personal agendas and really be a good listener. That is something that helps with that neural syncing we were talking about with brainwaves. So that’s a piece of it too.

But I just think in general, what’s so powerful about this knowledge is to be aware that this is even something that happens. I mean, I don’t know if you knew this before, but I certainly didn’t know that on all these different levels we’re syncing up with other people and to try and be sensitive to that, and you kind of let yourself go with it if it’s something that’s working for you. But if you get that feeling, that discordant feeling or sort of like that needle across vinyl when you meet someone to also pay attention to that too, because you have intuited, you have felt something that’s pretty important to pay attention to.

Brett McKay:

Can you hack social syncing? Because some bit of advice you always see in magazines or blog posts is if you’re on a date or maybe even you’re on, you’re networking or a job interview, well, if you really want to sync up with someone, you should just do whatever they do. So if your date crosses their legs, you cross your legs and be intentional about that. Does that actually work?

Kate Murphy:

No. Short answer, because we are really fine tuned to authenticity. Human beings are. You talk about a superpower, we’re really, and even subconsciously, anything that’s a little bit off or that we don’t perceive as being authentic, we pick up on that. And then also when there’s a big disconnect between, that’s another thing about syncing, is to actually be authentic. Because if there’s a disconnect between what you’re feeling and what you’re doing or saying, people pick up on that, that’s sort of crossed wires. And so people, they pick up on that, whether they are aware of it or not, they’re aware of the end feeling, which is discomfort.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Another bit of advice I’ve seen people use to try to sync up is, but if you don’t do it right, it’s a total turnoff, is using people’s name.

Kate Murphy:

Oh yeah.

Brett McKay:

Dale Carnegie famously said something like “The sweetest sound a person can hear is their own name.” And I think a lot of people hear this advice and they feel like, okay, I got to drop someone’s name as much as possible in this conversation.

Kate Murphy:

It’s so aggravating.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. I mean, I’ve had salespeople do this to me and I’m just like, okay, I know what you’re doing, and it’s just really annoying, so you can just stop it. Please stop. But I’ve also had podcast guests who say my name throughout the conversation and it sounds natural, and I’m like, oh wow, that does feel really good. Even when I think someone is doing it intentionally to be charming, it still feels good if it’s natural, but when it’s really forced, it’s irritating. It’s a complete turnoff.

Kate Murphy:

No, absolutely. There is a natural way to do it. I have a friend who’s an airplane mechanic and he’s absolutely delightful. And he does that. He uses people’s names partially it’s to help him to remember, but it’s so natural. And I mean, Dale Carnegie’s, right? It is like music to your ears when he’s authentic, he wants to know me, he wants to be friends with me. And you feel that, and when someone just drops it every once in a while, Brett. That’s right. Lemme tell you, Brett.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Okay. So you can’t do the whole mirror somebody to sync up with them. That’s just going to happen naturally if you’re syncing up with them. What about looking people in the eye? You mentioned that eye contact is important.

Kate Murphy:

Yeah, that’s huge. Look people in the eye.

Brett McKay:

But how much is too much?

Kate Murphy:

Well, there’s creepy staring people in the eye, but I think when that happens, there isn’t a synchrony going on. The person is just in their mind thinking, I’m going to stare at this person. Do you know what I mean? There’s a difference between really looking with a sense of interest and a sense of exploration and really wanting to sync with somebody. And then there’s this, okay, I’m just going to look at you because that’s what I’m supposed to do. And also I think there are people who, everybody’s not as good at this. People have different tuners. And so some people really can try and look at somebody and it’s almost like a blank stare. And that’s where it’s creepy because you don’t, on a certain level, you know that your pupil dilation is not syncing up, they’re not syncing up with your heart rate. You feel that disconnect. So I would say when you’re looking at someone, if you’re really looking at someone with interest and curiosity, then that’s going to come across. But certainly I think people have different tolerances for intimacy and sometimes that all the signals that you’re getting from someone can be a little too much, and they need to look away every once in a while, and that’s okay too.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, that’s fine. So I mean, it sounds like if you want to be more clickable with people, it’s not so much about tactics or techniques, it’s more about an attitude or a stance you take to whatever social interaction you’re in. And that attitude is just one of presence and curiosity and wanting to know about this person. And if you have that attitude, the clickings going to happen naturally.

Kate Murphy:

Yes. If you’re compatible with the person, right? That’s important. And that’s so hard being a nonfiction writer, which I’m mainly a journalist, and now I’ve written my second book after my first, I said, I’d never do this again. But if you look at the landscape of nonfiction books, I think you’re probably more familiar with this than most people, that it is all about this hack. If you just do this and then this’ll happen, and interpersonal synchrony and the things that I write about, it isn’t something where if you do X, then Y will happen. And actually nothing about life is like that. And it’s as you said, and I think it’s really apt. It’s a dance. And so if you go in wanting to dance and you go in with that curiosity and that openness and just generosity of spirit, you will find people who are on your wavelength who will want to join in with your music, who you will play a beautiful song together or dance well together. And then there will always be people who will just sort of be on their own tempo and they’re maybe distracted. They may not even notice you or you’re just not compatible. But again, that’s okay. We’re not meant, we don’t have the cognitive or emotional resources to sync with everyone. And also what would make it special when you do.

Brett McKay:

So you mentioned one of the important things for interpersonal synchrony is you have to be with the person in person.

Kate Murphy:

Yes. 

Brett McKay:

And you have this whole section about the research on our ability to socially click with people via digital mediums. What does that research say?

Kate Murphy:

Well, as I touched on earlier, synchrony is a multisensory experience. And in fact, interpersonal synchrony suggests that we have more senses than the five we take for granted. How do you sense someone’s heart rate, their respiration, their hormonal level, even these subconscious smells? I mean, we have all these pheromones that we’re throwing out that they think is responsible for why women sync up their menstrual cycle. So they’re all these things, and you’re not going to get that online. You’re not going to get this full panoply of signals that someone is throwing out that you could potentially sync up to. And that doesn’t mean you can’t sync on certain levels. I mean, we certainly see things go on viral online, or people’s outrage gets stirred up online. So it’s not like you can’t have synchrony or feel like you have synchrony with people online. But oftentimes, and people who’ve done online dating know this better than most is you might think you have a connection with someone online and then you meeting them in person and you think, oh my God, no. All you can think about is how long do I have to sit here before I can break this off without seeming rude? It’s just you really do not get the full sense of another person online.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, that’s an interesting point about online dating because it also could happen, there might be people in your in-person social circle, maybe at work or at church, where your filters on the dating apps wouldn’t have brought you to that person.

Kate Murphy:

Absolutely. 

Brett McKay:

Because the filters on dating apps are very superficial, like how tall you are, money, income. But there might be people in your interpersonal social circle that you never would’ve thought you would’ve like, I want to date this person. But then you get to be around them and you interact with them and you’re like, oh, wow, I kind of like this person.

Kate Murphy:

Yeah, you swipe. You would’ve totally swiped left if you had read their profile, but then you see them in person and you totally click.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So yeah, in-person, important. Let’s talk about this. We’re on the podcast. I don’t do video podcasts and a lot of podcasts are going the video route. I’m talking to you, I cannot see you. You cannot see me. I do all my interviews remote without video. I don’t like video. I do video calls every now and then. I don’t like it. What is it? Help me justify myself here. Why do I have this aversion to video calls and why do I prefer voice only calls?

Kate Murphy:

Well, the science backs you up on that. I mean, I’m not just trying to make you feel better. I mean, the science totally backs you up on that, and I salute you for resisting it because that is the way of the world right now where everybody’s moving to video. But the problem is that because we have this instinct to sync, looking at video is very disruptive and makes us feel ill. I mean, zoom fatigue is a real malady. And that is because the way the technology is at this point, the way that video images are encoded and decoded and buffered and all these things that are manipulated about the image, and not to mention pixelation, it distorts all these tiny little cues, these facial expressions. And then back to eye contact, you are making eye contact with your, or maybe you aren’t with your camera, so nobody’s actually looking at you.

And so you in your brain, again, this is subconscious, you are just rapidly spinning your wheels trying to do this adaptive evolutionarily entrained thing with another person to sync up with them. You’re looking for all those microexpressions, you’re looking for that eye contact and you’re just spinning your wheels trying to do that. And it ends up making people feel uncomfortable, vaguely disturbed, a little bit off. And I have never met a single person who says, oh, goody a zoom meeting. And I don’t know why it’s become something where everybody thinks is to rigor, because I mean, I’ve had people that I’ve talked to that I’ve worked with who say, oh God, I loved reading that in your book, and I hate Zoom calls. And yet they’ll schedule a zoom call with me. And I feel like, why is this? But I totally agree with you that we are able to connect and sync on a much more authentic real level just by hearing each other than getting all that faulty information that we get from the video that throws us off. And at some part of our brain is really struggling, and it makes it really hard to connect in any way, shape, or form.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I love talking to people on the phone. I’ve been doing that a lot more lately. I’ve got a friend who’s moved and once a month I’ll take a walk for an hour and we just talk to each other on the phone and it’s like we’re together even though we don’t see each other.

Kate Murphy:

Yes, I agree. And there’s also you think there’s kind of an intimacy having someone right in your ear. There’s that piece of it too. 

Brett McKay:

No, I agree. Whenever someone does a zoom call, I always feel kind of like a heel. I’ll do the zoom call, but I’ll keep my video camera off. And then the other person’s like, Hey, is your video camera not working? And I say, no, it’s fine. I’m just going to do audio only. It’s a phone call.

Kate Murphy:

Well, but let’s be honest, Brett, people are mostly looking at themselves on these calls.

Brett McKay:

You’re checking yourself out. 

Kate Murphy:

They’re looking at a little image of themselves, they’re really not looking at you, or they’re getting distracted by looking at what’s that art in the background? Is that a cat crossing in the back? And then when people blur all around them and they look so peculiar with that blur stuff around them, I mean, you do kind of feel like a jerk. I have nothing to hide. It’s not that. It’s just I really want to pay attention to what you’re saying. I really want to connect with you in some way, and I want us to be productive and sync in a way that we can solve problems or get to an agreement. And the video just subverts that.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so let’s use this as a clarion call on Zoom video calls.

Kate Murphy:

Boy, if that came out of my book, I would feel like I had just accomplished something great in the world.

Brett McKay:

You have a chapter about the importance of interpersonal synchrony and romantic relationships. What happens whenever a romantic relationship is not synced up?

Kate Murphy:

Well, it’s not good. I mean, when we are not in sync with another person, we experience it as discomfort, romantic or otherwise. And I think it’s particularly painful when you have been in sync and then you move out of sync. And actually that’s not a bad thing because you do want to have periods of asynchrony in any relationship. It’s natural and healthy because that’s how you get back in touch with yourself and recalibrate and makes you better able to, when you do sync back up with the other person that you each can bring something to the dance. I like your analogy, so that’s okay. But I think a lot of times, particularly people who have anxious attachment styles, they get very upset when there is a sense of asynchrony. And so they really spin their wheels trying to what’s wrong,

Which only drives people apart. And they often will do things that provoke the person. If they’re really agitated, they will provoke the other person. So they’re agitated too, just so they’ll be in sync on that level, which is not good for a relationship. But if you really find that you’re really on different wavelengths and really feel like a real distance is coming between the two of you, go back to those things of make sure, are you spending enough time together? Are you with each other enough to establish those physiological, synchronous and also activities, those joint activities we talked about, go for a walk together. I mean, make time. So you’re doing things, having these shared experiences and these joint activities that help you sync up more readily.

Brett McKay:

Okay. That’s great advice. So make sure you’re syncing up regularly. People are busy as a couple. You can just sync up in the morning when you’re having a cup of coffee together, talk about what’s going on with your day, and then maybe at the end of the day, have another chat where you just hang out, talk about how the day went.

Kate Murphy:

Well, I mean that’s one of the greatest things about being in romantic relationships is they used to call it pillow talk, but just when you’re laying in bed at night and just talking and that quiet, and again, you’re not necessarily looking at each other, but you’re so synced up physically by proximity and just talking about your day and sharing things that really promotes that synchrony and that sense of intimacy.

Brett McKay:

So we’ve been talking about the benefits of interpersonal synchrony. It allows you to feel connected to people close. It feels good. It allows you to get stuff done efficiently and effectively. But are there downsides to being too in sync with somebody?

Kate Murphy:

Oh, yes. Because we have this instinct to sync, it makes us vulnerable to getting sucked into other people’s emotional vortex. I mean, I think we’ve all had the sense that when we are with somebody who’s just high drama, incredibly manic, that it’s exhausting. I don’t think everybody has a great emotional vocabulary, but we all can recognize someone who’s hard to be around versus easy to be around. And the people that are hard to be around are the ones that sort of sweep us up into this emotional cadence, resonance that we’re not comfortable with. And it is difficult, and it’s also difficult because when we embody and we internalize other people, it feels like it’s coming from ourselves. So I think we’ve all had the experience of why did I do that? Why did I say that? Or there was sort of a blow up and you’re like, how did that happen?

And that’s because you climb the ladder of emotion, arousal, agitation with another person because of this instinct to sync and you lost sight of yourself. You lost sight of where that person begins and you end. And so that’s why things like interoception are really important. And also just by reading this book, just to have an awareness that this is what’s happening. And when you start getting those feelings, you can kind of think within yourself, okay, what am I doing with this? I’ll give you a really good example. When I was first working on this book, or I had really gathered most of the data, I hadn’t really finished writing the book. I was invited to speak about my last book at a major university, and I won’t say which one, which will become clear in a minute. And I was invited to lunch with one of the deans, and we were at lunch and he was, let’s just say he was socially very anxious, and he was spinning and he was having a hard time looking me in the eye.

He was just kind of agitated. And as a result, I was pretty miserable. I was really uncomfortable and I was feeling really anxious, and I was feeling very socially awkward. And I realized, which is not me. I love meeting new people. And I realized, oh my God, this is what’s happening. I’ve totally internalized this guy. And once I was aware of that, I was able to pull back and do things like think about, okay, where am I putting? I realized, okay, my shoulders are hunched. Let me bring them down. Let me take some deep breaths. I even slowed the cadence of my speech, crossed my legs the other way, and I totally changed the rhythm of the encounter. And not only did I feel better and bring myself back to myself, but he started to relax. He started to sync to me. So there’s a real power in catching yourself. And it’s hard. It seems like an easy thing to do, but it’s really hard because it’s so instinctual and you become so wrapped up in the moment that you don’t realize it’s happening as it’s happening and you do the debrief kind of afterwards, you realize, oh, that would happen. But if you get good at reading yourself and reading other people, and the degree to which you are matching, mirroring that other person, it really can make a total difference in your social life.

Brett McKay:

So the Osmond’s famous saying, “one bad apple, don’t spoil the whole bunch, girl,” but you say the Osmonds were wrong. One bad apple does spoil the whole bunch.

Kate Murphy:

Yes. And I think the best example of this was an incredibly interesting study that was done in the early two thousands by Will Phelps, who’s now in Australia. He’s at University of South Wales in Australia, but at the time he was at University of Washington. And what he did is he created all of these work groups out of University of Washington business students, and he created all these work groups, but he introduced a confederate or an accomplice who was to go in and either act like a jerk, a slacker or a depressing downer, and see what happened, what the effect was on group functioning. And actually, he didn’t know Will Phelps did not know about interpersonal synchrony at the time. He was just looking for the effects. But he said, now knowing what he knows now, he would’ve done the study totally differently because if you look at the video, it’s striking that during the slacker condition, he’s leaning back in his chair, he is eating, he’s acting like he couldn’t be bothered with the task at hand.

And sure as shooting, everybody else starts leaning back. They’re starting to say things like, let’s get this over with. And they performed really badly. And the really heartbreaking one was the depressive downer one. And the guy comes in and he’s acting real depressed and really lethargic, and it’s really sad. You start seeing everyone else slow down, putting their heads down on the table, and you get this sense, and they actually verbalize it. It’s not only the task at hand was meaningless, but life in general seem meaningless. And so you can see how this contagion happens in situations, and I think we’ve all experienced where somebody new comes into a group and it just totally upsets the dynamic and pulls people in one direction or another. And there can be good apples too. It can be positive or negative, but it’s true that one bad apple, the greatest predictor of the success of a team or organization is not how stellar the best person is or even the average abilities of the rest of the people, but how awful the worst person is that predicts the success or failure of a group.

Brett McKay:

So if you’re a leader of a group, what do you do when you’re dealing with a bad apple? Do you just have to get that person out of there, or do you try to rehabilitate them? What’s the strategy?

Kate Murphy:

Well, most CEOs that I’ve interviewed are just like, yeah, you got to get rid of it. It’s going to ruin everything. But I think what they try to do more on the front end is hire very carefully.

And again, don’t interview by Zoom. Don’t rely on an algorithm that’s going to pick the right resume. As you rightly said, sometimes with dating apps, the people that you swipe left on are the people that are the right person. So there’s that. There’s also, when I interviewed Danny Meyer, he allowed me to go and I watched, I mean, you talk about synchrony in his Michelin starred restaurants, the synchrony between the kitchen and the front of the house. And there’s just a tempo. It’s a ballet in there. And I was talking to one of the managers and he said, with hiring, they typically bring in somebody and have a trial run, which I think is probably a really good idea with a lot of organizations to the degree that you’re able, because it’s to the benefit of the potential hiree as well as the employer, because they all get a sense of, am I clicking here? Is this somewhere where I can flourish? Is this someone who’s going to fit in with the vibe, the rhythm of the team? So I think more to really try and head it off from the beginning.

Brett McKay:

So you got this one chapter. I want to end on this. I thought this was really interesting. You explore our sometimes uncanny ability to sync with people from afar. So for example, I’m sure some people have experienced this where they get a feeling that someone they know who lives far away is having a hard time, or maybe something bad happened to them and they think I better check on them and come to find out something bad did happen to that person. What’s going on there?

Kate Murphy:

Well, I’m not sure, but I do talk about this in the book. And again, this is very, people don’t agree, this is highly speculative, but in the physics world, they are coming to think that our brains operate much like a quantum computer. And again, I really want to preface this, that there is a lot of disagreement among physicists, but there is a camp that believes our brains work like a quantum computer. And quantum is subatomic particles, and their behavior is very unique. And one of the things that is a factor of quantum mechanics is something called quantum entanglement. And that is where these subatomic particles, they can become synced, but then when they are separated by time and space, they maintain that synchrony. And since they think that our brains are operating like quantum computers and obey the laws of quantum mechanics, including quantum synchrony, you can see this really trippy notion that if the quantum particles within your brain are synced up and can become entangled, you can imagine how the quantum particles in another person’s brain that would sync up to your brain would be operating in that same synchronized way. And that might, and I emphasize, might explain why we are able to intuit feel, predict telepathic types of things, and we’ve all had them happen and thought, whoa. I mean, how did that happen? And you could see how that might be an explanation of why that would happen.

Brett McKay:

That’s interesting. Yeah, I know people like that. My wife is able to do this. She’ll have those moments where she’ll just be lying in bed and she’s like, I got a friend who’s having a hard time. I need to call them. And then sure enough, she calls and they’re having a hard time. I’m like, what’s going on there? So yeah, it could be quantum entanglement or it could just be the romantic. We’re just so combined that we just are on the same wavelength no matter where we are. So who knows what’s going on there.

Kate Murphy:

But I do like that there’s still some magic to this that we don’t quite understand it all. For me, there’s something intellectually as well as kind of spiritually satisfying about the fact that synchrony binds us not only to one another, but also to the universe as a whole. Because synchrony has been observed throughout the natural and life sciences, everything from the tiniest quantum particle to supermassive quasars exhibit synchronistic properties. And so it really shouldn’t be a surprise that human beings do it too.

Brett McKay:

Well, and you have a section on this. I mean, we can get a little more, let’s go more woo-woo. I like this about syncing with nature. I’ve had that experience where I’ve been out backpacking in the Rocky Mountains and I’m just staring at a mountain by this lake, and I feel like the mountain is talking to me.

Kate Murphy:

Right?

Brett McKay:

And I know it’s not talking to me, but it feels like it.

Kate Murphy:

But on some level it is. I mean, the science is pretty clear on this because, I mean, think about it. We are ruled by nature. The sun coming up, the sun coming down. We have all these internal clocks that are based on the rhythms of nature. And the research is very clear that people feel better out in nature. And they think that is because we sync up with the regular rhythmic patterns of not only what you hear in nature, but also what you see in nature, which is not what happens in urban environments. So we probably need to have another conversation if you’re actually seeing lips moving on the mountain and talking to you. But the sense of communion and feeling in sync while you’re out in nature and with the mountain, I think that’s perfectly valid and accurate.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, humans are designed to click. We love to click. 

Kate Murphy:

Yes.

Brett McKay:

Well, Kate, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Kate Murphy:

Well, I think the best way is just to go to my website. It’s www.journalistkatemurphy.com, and you can read about the book and any journalism that I’ve done, and that’s probably the best place to go.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well, Kate Murphy, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Kate Murphy:

Thank you, Brett,

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Kate Murphy. She’s the author of the book Click. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere you find more information about our work at our website, journalistkatemurphy.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/click where you can find links to resources to delve deeper into this topic. 

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. If you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, it helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

You’re at a party and start chatting with another guest.

Twenty minutes later, you’re still talking with them one-on-one. You feel trapped, and you wish you knew how to break away from the conversation.

Maybe the person is annoying, and you’d like to escape their tedious orbit.

But you also might be talking with a friend and are very much enjoying the interaction. It’s just that you want to catch up with some of the other guests, too. He or she might feel the same way, actually, but neither of you wants to risk seeming rude in ending the exchange.

So how do you navigate this situation? You ideally don’t want to break things off abruptly and leave the person awkwardly standing there on their own.

Here are some options from social and etiquette experts for politely bowing out of a conversation:

Option #1: Introduce the person to someone else.

In my AoM podcast interview with etiquette expert William Hanson, he said that his go-to strategy is to try to pair your conversational partner off with someone else. He described how this would go:

‘Brett, it’s been so lovely talking to you. I’ve just seen someone over there I’ve got to go and get and speak to before they leave. Have you met Susan, however?’

And I’ve sort of seen Susan floating around and I grab her as she comes past and go: ‘Susan, may I introduce Brett? Brett has just flown in from Sydney. And Susan, I believe your mother is from Australia. I’ll leave you two talking.’

And off you go.

Basically, introduce the person to someone else, giving both people a bit of context — a conversation starter — to kick off the new interaction before you slip away.

If someone you can introduce the person to doesn’t happen to pass by, you can actively lead them over to a new conversation partner: “My friend Rob is also in the cyber security field. I want you to meet him; I think you’d enjoy talking shop.”

The strategy of introducing your current conversation partner to someone else is a good one if you think the former and the latter will actually get on. However, if you’ve found the person you’ve been talking to a bore, it would, of course, not be very generous to pawn them off on a friend. It is well that Jeanne Martinet, author of The Art of Mingling, calls this technique “the human sacrifice.” If it’s not a situation where you want to throw an unwitting victim to the gum-flapping wolves, try one of the other options on this list.

Option #2: Use the buffet bye-bye.

When I talked to Martinet on the podcast, she noted that one of the most common categories of conversational exit is what she calls “the buffet bye-bye and other excuses.” That’s where you say something like, “I’m going to go grab a drink/some food. It’s been nice talking to you.”

Martinet says that this option can be effective, but carries a risk: the person may follow you to the bar/buffet line. So the excuse she recommends instead is to step away by saying you have to make a phone call:

Even in today’s age of smartphones, everyone knows that if you’re at a party you can’t just whip out your phone right there, so they know you have to go off by yourself. Then you actually have to go off and look like you’re making a phone call for a second, then go to another group.

You can also excuse yourself to use the restroom, though this one tends to read more nakedly as a way to make an escape.

Option #3: Say there’s someone you’re supposed to meet.

Another strategy Martinet shared goes like this:

You find a pause hopefully to interrupt, and you say, ‘I’m so sorry, but someone just walked in the room that I’m supposed to talk to because my boss made me or my girlfriend said I had to,’ or some excuse like that. So it’s like you have a mission, and you’re so sorry but you have to go.

Martinet calls this technique the “counterfeit search,” as you may only be pretending that there’s someone else at the party you’re supposed to meet (though that may legitimately be the case as well). 

Your willingness to use strategies like the counterfeit search — or the phone call excuse from option 2 — will, of course, depend on how comfortable you are with telling a white lie in the name of social grace.

Option #4: Be self-deprecating.

Hanson says you shouldn’t leave someone on their own unless you truly do need to break away to do something like catch a plane. In that circumstance, he recommends making your exit on the back of some self-deprecating pretense:

You can make it sound like you are the bore. So I would say something like:

‘Well, Brett, look, I know I’ve monopolized so much of your time this evening, and I know there are lots of other people you want to go and talk to. But maybe we’ll see each other in a few weeks’ time at that fundraiser.’

Shake hands and off we go.

Acting a little apologetic for having taken up someone’s time is a graceful way to exit without causing offense.

Option #5: Travel together to a new group.

In a situation where you are enjoying talking with someone, and just want to be able to mingle with some other people as well, you can simply say something like, “I’m going to go sit down near Mike. Come with me.” Now you can talk to your current conversation partner and Mike as well. Or the person, who has also been waiting for an excuse to break away from you, will tell you that they’re going to go hit the buffet instead. This strategy works best when the person you’re talking with, and the person you’re going to go join, are mutual friends.

In addition to these options, a couple of other easy lines to use are, “You know, I’d better check in with the host before the night is through,” (a natural, legitimate reason), and “Well, I won’t keep you any longer — I’m sure you’ve got lots of folks to say hi to” (makes your exit seem complimentary to the other person).

Parties are for mingling. So rather than getting locked into talking to the same person for the whole night, use one of these strategies to set yourself free to enjoy both the full buffet of food, and of sociality.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.