Help To Grow Talk: Effective Communication Skills

9. Get Better at Effective Communication - A Talk With Scott H Young (Wall Street Journal Bestselling Author, Programmer & Entrepreneur)

• Desiree Timmermans • Episode 9

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Listen and learn how to get better at Effective Communication in this talk with our guest, Scott H Young. He is the author of 2 books on Learning: Get Better at Anything - 12 Maxims for Mastery, and Ultralearning - Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career. 

Scott is a Wall Street Journal Bestselling Author, Programmer, and Entrepreneur. His work has been featured in the New York Times, BBC, TEDx, Business Insider, and more.

In this episode, Scott H Young and host Desiree Timmermans talk about Scott's latest book 'Get Better at Anything: 12 Maxims for Mastery', and how to apply it to effective communication.

"So I think these three aspects - seeing, doing, feedback - are important for all skills. And certainly they're important for learning communication skills." - Scott H Young

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[00:00:00] Intro: Welcome to the podcast, Help to Grow Talk, where we talk about growing your communication skills. How can you better communicate and change the way you live, work, interact with others and help make the world a better place? 

[00:00:21] Scott: "So I think these three aspects - seeing, doing, feedback - are important for all skills. And certainly they're important for learning communication skills."

[00:00:29] Desiree: You just listened to our guest Scott H. Young. Scott is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author and also a programmer and entrepreneur. His work has been featured in the New York Times, BBC, TEDx, Business Insider and more. 

In this episode, we talk about how to get better at effective communication. It is based on Scott latest book 'Get Better at Anything' in which he reveals 3 key factors and 12 maxims that help us learn and improve skills.

My name is Désirée Timmans, your podcast host. 

Let's go!

Scott, welcome. I'm really happy to have the opportunity to talk with you about how to get better at effective communication. You wrote a book 'Get Better at Anything'. And I was wondering what inspired you to write this book? 

[00:01:20] Scott: Well, it's a long story, but I had written a book in 2019, Ultra Learning, which was based on some of my personal projects, learning things like languages, computer science, art, various things like that, as well as projects that I documented other people had undertook. So people who, you know, built video games all by themselves or became world champions in Jeopardy and various things like that.

And that book was sort of my introduction to the science of learning because prior to that I had mostly studied specific subjects. And it was one of those things where your appetite gets wetted and you don't feel totally satisfied. So after I'd written that book I did this sort of deep dive research project into a lot of the underlying science of how people learn things.

And then it just sort of like snowballed and snowballed and accumulated until I felt like I have another book here, like I'd like to write something about this stuff, which is a little bit less personal, a little bit more grounded in the research. But I thought this is stuff that I didn't know, and I've been obsessed about learning for decades.

So this was something I thought other people could benefit from. And so that was sort of, as you can say, the origin of the book 'Get Better At Anything'. 

[00:02:24] Desiree: Okay, well, interesting. 

And I was wondering, in this book, you have three key factors. How did you come up with these key factors? It's see, do, and feedback.

[00:02:33] Scott: I spent a lot of time trying to struggle over this, like, immense volume of: hmm, what's the common pattern in all of this? But the basic idea of see, do, feedback comes from this notion that a lot of what we can look at - of, like, quite specific ideas about learning, and obviously in the chapters in the book, I go into a lot of these details -, comes from these observations that first of all, people largely learn through observing others. That's sort of our cultural strength. 

In some cases, you know, small children actually underperform some animals in tests of problem solving. But the thing that kids do extremely well is that they're very good at observing what someone else does and copying that strategy.

And so this idea of copying - learning from the experience of others - this is embedded in our entire education system. This is how people create great art, entrepreneurship. So, this was a very important factor. This ability to see how someone solved a problem and emulate it yourself. Very important. 

The next thing obviously is 'Do' because you need practice to get good at things. This is the part that I think most people understand. But I think it's also something that we miss a lot of the details. So for instance, if you spend a lot of time just doing something, the assumption is: well, you just kind of get better and better and better. But it's often not the case. You often plateau at a level that's far below your potential and doing something a lot often makes it easier for you to do, but doesn't necessarily make you better at it.

So, for things like communication skills, this can be very valuable because if you have some confidence issues or you feel a little disfluent, you know, if it's another language. Speaking a lot is going to make you more fluent, more effortless, more confident. But, I'm not necessarily going to become the most charismatic person just by talking a lot. You need more than that often. So that was another interesting finding from that aspect of the research. 

And then feedback is I think what ties all of it together because it's interacting with the environment. Not simply just a teacher telling you what you got right and what you got wrong, but interacting with the environment is automatically giving you this sort of source of information about: oh, that went well, that didn't go well.

So, you can think about some skills are just totally unlearnable without feedback. Like if you're skiing down a mountain and you can't feel the snow underneath you, you can't learn to ski. It's actually impossible. And similarly for a lot of communication skills, there is sometimes a mistake that you can kind of practice without actually interacting with people, seeing how they respond to stuff. And so for many communication skill adjacent domains, the feedback is really predominant. So, I think about people who like become good standup comedians, like you go to the open mic clubs and you give your jokes and some of them hit and some of them don't. And that's how all comedians get good. 

So, I think these three aspects - seeing, doing, feedback - are important for all skills and certainly they're important for learning communication skills. 

[00:05:12] Desiree: And what I really like about it is the power of three. And I agree with you, you can apply it to anything. But what I also understood is in your book you have 12 maxims. What does a maxim mean and how is it linked to this see do, feedback? 

[00:05:26] Scott: Well, a maxim is just a pithy saying that expresses some truth. So, the idea of having these 12 maxims for mastery was essentially that even though I've organized into see, do, feedback, and we just talked about this general idea, there's a lot of fascinating subtopics within each.

So, under seeing, there's this interesting idea that you can actually learn to solve problems better by watching someone solve a problem than by solving it yourself, which is very counterintuitive. I think most people have the intuition that: well, I learned by doing. And it's true that you do need practice to get good at things, so I don't want to deny that. But there are some important exceptions to this. And this explains why, you know, if you can get a good explanation for something or you can get shown how to do something, it's sometimes easier to learn it. And that's, I think, something very surprising and interesting. 

And then similarly with 'Do' we have like subtopics about variable practice, for instance, there's this whole body of research about how if you practice something repetitively, like you go to tennis and you just do your forehand shot over and over again, you will get better at that skill in that moment. But if you mixed it up with serves and backhands, you would learn it more durably. And you would be able to generalize it more to different kinds of tennis shots. So, this has a lot of implications, I think, for the kinds of practice we structure. 

And each maxim was an attempt to bring about some sort of important finding from the research under these 'See, Do, Feedback' header topics.

[00:06:46] Desiree: And can you give an example of a maxim that is linked to 'Do'? 

[00:06:51] Scott: Yeah. Difficulty has a sweet spot. Another one from the 'Do' section where the idea being that to learn at the best rate, it's not enough to just make something really easy or make something really hard, but you have to pick this right zone of difficulty. And that's a major theme in a lot of learning science: if you make something too hard, then learning is inefficient, and if you make something too easy, it's also inefficient. So, finding that sweet spot is a major component of not only structuring your learning experiences, but like ensuring that you're not frustrated, that you're actually able to make progress.

[00:07:24] Desiree: Well, that's a good one. Not being frustrated. And, does that also mean that you have to find a place outside your comfort zone, but not too far, because then maybe you get frustrated if you're learning something. 

[00:07:37] Scott: Well, so there's different aspects of it, but you can summarize the general idea that if something is too easy, then you're not getting a lot of growth, you're not learning new things. And if something is way outside of your current zone of ability, you're not going to do it very well. So, that's the kind of extreme version of it. But even in skills that you're learning there's this continuum from, let's say, seeing a demonstration, to doing it yourself with the solution next to you, to doing it without the solution, trying a variation on that problem. And so you can see this sort of fine grained continuum. 

And what we find is that based on where you are in your current skill level, there's this kind of zone where you're going to get more improvement. And so they study and they find that students who are a bit better they sort of do well with the harder problems. And the students who are a bit worse they do well with the easier more structured, the ones that have more support and guidance. 

And so this kind of tension exists in a lot of learning where it's not enough to say: okay well, I'm gonna use this strategy to learn this skill. It really matters where you're at, because different strategies are going to have different amounts of efficiency, depending on what your prior ability is. Like to just use a simple example, if you're learning another language, there's going to be probably some set of students where flashcards are really helpful for them to get that structured word translation, but there's probably going to be some level of student where flashcards aren't helpful anymore. They need to do some more complicated kind of practice. 

And so I think this is one of those things that when we're considering improving any skill, is to just think about this continuum of all the different kinds of practice you can do and try to zoom in on: okay, where am I getting the most growth? How am I going to optimize what I'm doing? Because again, at the extremes you have 'too easy, too hard', but even in the sort of zone where you would expect 'okay, this is useful' fine tuning that is very important. 

[00:09:25] Desiree: Let's talk about communication. Where is your sweet spot over there? 

[00:09:28] Scott: I think that's another area where there's a bit of a myth, that the idea that communication skills are this sort of monolithic entity.

Really, there's lots of different communication skills. So for instance, with my interviewing right now, like I'm doing this podcast interview, I've done enough of these that I'm probably at the stage that if I want to be a better guest, doing more interviews is not going to be that helpful for me. Because I already feel very comfortable and fluent. Whereas when I was doing my first few podcasts for my first book, you know, I had those sweaty palms, I was anxious, whereas now it feels very comfortable. And so if I wanted to get better, I would need to make it harder. I would need to be watching my performance, looking at what I'm doing. Like, you have a tendency to do this, Scott, so like, avoid doing that in the next interview. And that would be sort of a way that I could consciously keep some kind of constraint in mind to make the interview more effortful because I'm trying to deliberately practice it to improve it.

In contrast, for other very similar skills, I don't practice them enough. I do give speeches from time to time, but I have friends that are like regular speakers. I'm not a regular speaker. And so if I have to go up on stage and give a speech, I think I'm still at the zone where keeping it simple, just go up, just try to be not nervous and give a speech is going to be better for me than trying to obsess about my performance.

So, I think with communication skills, we can imagine just these millions of different scenarios, and some of them maybe you're really fluent with, you're very comfortable, it just comes easily, and to get better at those - to become not just okay at it, but like world class - you're going to need to have some constraints that force your practice in a certain direction.

[00:11:07] Desiree: What I really like is what you said is: keep it simple on stage. For instance, when you are presenting. But to keep it simple, you really have to understand what you are doing. That's my experience. 

[00:11:19] Scott: Well, people have a lot of anxiety and fear about public speaking. And so I know people that are public speaking coaches. And the big thing, cause they're dealing with beginners for the most part, is getting people over that anxiety. It's really just going up on stage and realizing you're not going to die if you do a bad job. That itself is like the major hurdle for people, but that isn't to say that: Oh, I don't feel terrified when I'm on stage, therefore I'm done, I'm the world's best speaker. That's obviously not true. And so there's a real skill to it. 

And so I think this is, again, going to this sweet spot, that if you're scared to death of going on stage and then I start layering on: okay, think about this, make sure you move around and hold for pauses for impact. That's a waste of time. Finding where you are on that scale, picking the right practice for you is very important. 

[00:12:06] Desiree: Okay. So it's also very personal. 

[00:12:08] Scott: Yes. Very personal. 

[00:12:09] Desiree: So you have to be willing to do the work and take your framework: see, do, feedback. 

And if you go back to feedback, seeking advice, if we look at communication skills, sometimes people are fearful to ask for advice, but what do you advise them?

[00:12:27] Scott: Well, fearful to ask for advice, but people are also fearful to give advice, too. 

[00:12:31] Desiree: Indeed, that's also true. 

[00:12:33] Scott: This is one area where I've had conversations with people where they say: well, I know I need feedback. But whenever I ask for feedback, people just say: no, you're doing great. So there's a few things.

First of all, when I talk about feedback in the book, I'm talking about the broadest sense of feedback. But in terms of feedback from other people, there's this interesting research that shows that it's not always positive. So, one of these meta- analysis has been done on it, found that I think a little over a third of the studies, feedback actually had a negative effect. So, people got worse after you gave them feedback, which sounds crazy because feedback is important for learning. How can it do worse? 

The authors of this paper made the comment that it seems to be that if you give feedback in the wrong place, it can have all these sort of pernicious motivational effects on learning. And so, they observe that when feedback tends to work poorly, it's when it's sort of aimed at the self. So it's aimed at like a judgment of you as a person, as opposed to your performance, the task, how you did things specifically. So, the more I take a comment from you as being about me, as opposed to about this specific thing that I did, and I see those intertwined, it's going to be hard for me to respond to that positively and vice versa.

If I'm giving you feedback and I'm worried that it's going to be sort of an attack on you personally, that's going to be a problem. And interestingly enough, this is also true for praise. So if you give praise to person: oh, you're so smart, or you're so good at this. That can actually have a bad effect on learning too. Because people are sort of like: oh, I'm great, okay, I don't have to do any work. 

So, the idea here is that you want to try to solicit feedback and give feedback in a way that it avoids this criticism of the self. My advice to people when they're asking for feedback from others is to frame the way you're asking for the question in a way that the person cannot be giving you a judgment of yourself.

Let's say I give a speech, and I want to know how the speech went. I don't say: well, how did you like the speech? Or do you think it was a good speech? Because then I'm inevitably asking you to give a judgment, which is sort of going to bounce back onto me like: ah, I thought it was kind of boring. Instead, I want to say something like: what would be the thing that you would do if you were in my shoes to make this speech better? Okay, well now I'm going to focus on some area of improvement, something you can focus on for next time. This way of framing the question dodges or sidesteps this particular issue. 

And similarly, if you are going to give someone feedback, always make sure that the person actually wants feedback. Many times people want reassurance, not feedback. But if someone is genuinely asking for feedback, try to frame it with, Hey, you know, have you thought about doing it this way? Or have you thought about adding that? Rather than: you're not doing this very well, fix that. Certainly it's a delicate issue when it comes to learning. 

[00:15:15] Desiree: So when you give feedback, it's also important to understand what the person really wants, but also to give examples or to give a solution. And maybe when somebody takes it personal, first talk about that. 

[00:15:28] Scott: Yes.

And I think it's also important to know what kind of feedback to listen to, especially with skills that we don't feel like we've mastered yet. We're very wide ranging in who we solicit for feedback. We want some kind of information signal, but it's not going to be of universal quality.

So, I think that's another thing that if you're working on a skill, particularly something that you know, the average person maybe is not going to be able to give you really good advice on, like they don't have the skill themselves. And so I know when people are eager for feedback, finding good sources, that's an important consideration to keep in mind.

[00:16:02] Desiree: I understand.

Let's go to the next question and I hope you enjoy it. It's a lightning round. 

[00:16:08] Scott: Oh, okay. Lightning round. All right. 

[00:16:10] Desiree: So are you up to it? 

[00:16:11] Scott: I'm up for it. Yeah. 

[00:16:13] Desiree: Scott, what is your favorite mistake concerning ineffective communication and what did you learn from it? 

[00:16:19] Scott: I think my biggest mistake, which I continually learn, is that people think communication is mostly speaking, but it's mostly listening. That's one I continually make myself. 

[00:16:28] Desiree: That's also one that I recognize. It's also about learning to speak consciously, to become more conscious in your speaking. 

And then the next one is, what do you think is the most effective thing you can do to become better and better at communication? 

[00:16:44] Scott: Well, I think communicate a lot.

So, whatever type of communication you're trying to get better at, you should try to do it a lot. I mean, we've talked about these situations where you do something a lot and stop getting better at it, but certainly for people who have 'I want to improve my communication as a goal' the major impediment is that typically the kind of communication they're trying to get proficient at, they're not doing enough. So, they're not speaking enough of that foreign language. They're not having enough sales calls. They're not giving enough presentations. So, if you can get the volume of practice in, it's much easier to solve any remaining problems about like optimizing the practice or doing the right kind of thing.

[00:17:19] Desiree: So practice, practice, practice. 

And what is a specific tool or technique that you really like to use related to communication? 

[00:17:27] Scott: I think one thing that I find helpful if you're trying to improve your communication is active listening. So, whenever you're talking to someone and they're telling you something, begin by kind of reframing what they said so that you are sure that you understand it.

Because I think listening matters more than speaking. Certainly in communication situations there is often an issue where we get into an impasse because we think we're giving this sort of very persuasive job talking about something, but we're not really speaking to that person's concerns or issues.

And so, I would say that, that kind of: okay, so I hear what you asked me is this. And then that person can be like: yes, that's what I asked you. Or like: no, no, no, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about this other thing. You know, that's a very important check on that process. 

Not just parroting what the person said, so don't just like repeat it word for word. It should be: so what I'm hearing is that you're telling me this. And it should be in your words so that it shows that you actually were understanding it, not just playing back the recording. 

[00:18:23] Desiree: I understand. So active listening and understanding in the sense, use your own words to make sure that you understood the person you are talking with.

And then the last one is, if you want to improve your communication, what gives you a sense of accomplishment or joy? 

[00:18:41] Scott: I think there's always something exciting about when you're able to do something that scared you at first. So if you were nervous to give a speech and then you hear the applause at the end of it, or I was even just saying how those first few interviews I gave for my first book were nerve wracking, but when they were done, I felt really good after them, you know?

And so I think this is a principle that's often not fully appreciated by people that when you do things that seem like they're gonna be unpleasant or scary and you are able to do them, there is a much deeper sense of accomplishment. So, I would try to flip the script of like: oh, I'm terrified of public speaking. Because when you actually go out there and do it, you're gonna feel better not worse that you actually did it. So that's something to keep in mind, even though it's sometimes difficult to feel it through 

[00:19:26] Desiree: Okay.

And then the last question I have is: is there anything you want to share with the listeners that I didn't ask you yet? 

[00:19:32] Scott: Anyone who's interested in me or my writing, you can check out my two books, Ultra Learning and Get Better at Anything. You can also check out my blog, scotthyoung. com, and you can also check out my Scott H Young podcast.

[00:19:44] Desiree: Okay. Well, Scott, thank you very much for being on the Help to Grow Talk podcast. It was really nice to talk with you. 

[00:19:50] Scott: Thank you for having me. 

[00:19:52] Outro: Thanks for joining another episode of the Help to Grow Talk podcast. For more information and episodes, subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcast and visit helptogrowtalk.buzzsprout.com 

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