If we aren’t having the same conversation, we aren’t going to be heard. That’s what Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit, covered in the following TED talk:

What we call conversations are actually aggregates of multiple conversations. In the course of those conversations, if we are not having the same type of conversation at the same time, we aren’t going to be heard. According to Duhigg, there are three types of conversations:

• Practical Conversations
• Emotional Conversations
• Social Conversations

Duhigg has written a book about these types of conversations, which I haven’t yet had time to digest, but the TED talk video lays out his understanding succinctly.