TU Presidential Lecture Series: Jad Abumrad
Lorton Performance Center
Tulsa
October 8, 2024
I wasn’t the only one who was excited to see Jad Abumrad. The Lorton Performance Center’s 635 seats were all full as the former host of WNYC’s RadioLab took the stage as part of TU’s Presidential Lecture Series. Abumrad delivered a tight, strong, fascinating lecture about the nature of conversation — and as a radio host, he should know.
Titled “How to Talk to a Human,” the lecture incorporated sound and video in a way that I can only describe as “RadioLab-like”: seamless transitions between Abumrad’s speech and quotes from his sources made it all the more of a performance, not dissimilar from his trademark show. He was energetic and affable as he guided the crowd through four ideas about how to have conversations where people feel heard.
Abumrad guided the crowd through a round of “Resonance,” the first conversational idea. The crowd was grouped into pairs and, after one person talked for two minutes, the other person “resonated” back what landed for them: “It really hit me when you said.…” The topic was “How do you feel different from your fellow Tulsans?” My East Coast conversation partner’s complaints? Conservative mindsets and country music.
The second idea involved the “Choreography of Conversations,” which involved people’s spacing, distribution and angles in different types of dialogue. Abumrad used his interviews with Dolly Parton to make a point: in his first interview with her, they faced each other, and according to him, “She steamrolled me.” Sometimes, his argument ran, direct eye contact is too much. The next time he interviewed her, they sat side by side, with a laptop in front of them to view pictures. (Another idea: include an object, like the laptop, which can attract attention and energy.)
“The Listening Triangle” was fairly straightforward: Ask a question, listen to the answer and reflect the answer back to your partner. If you want to get really complicated, Abumrad argued, do a “Listening Square”: Ask, Listen, Reflect and then Verify that what you’re reflecting is correct. “Do you know how well we tend to know the people closest to us?” he asked us. “We typically get four out of 20 questions right about the people we love.” Verifying what we’ve heard, he argued, provides a way to make sure that we know the person we’re talking to.
Abumrad’s last point was about “Oneness and Separateness,” based on the ideas of Louise Kaplan and her 1978 book of the same name, which laid out the psychological progression of the infant becoming an individual. We can use these ideas, Abumrad said, to help us understand what people need when they’re in a crisis.
When first listening to someone experiencing difficulty, he advised us, use “oneness.” Infants believe that they are one with their mother, which creates safety; when we act “right there” with someone in a crisis — nodding, being empathetic and affirming, using affirming touch if appropriate — they’re likely to feel safe and heard. Only after that moment has passed (and Abumrad noted that this moment is tricky to detect) is it advisable to move into “separateness,” offering solutions and advice.
I left the lecture feeling stimulated and excited, thinking what a treat it was to be able to listen to one of the most influential figures in radio talk shop. It’s obvious that his talk was meticulously plotted, and the crowd seemed to get a lot from it: lots of people were engaged in conversation as they trickled out. I can only assume they were feeling heard.
