What we're trying to do in conversational intelligence is not only define that trust continuum for people, not only helping them notice, which is so important, what's happening in them and others when distrust lives, but also how to bring people in trust. When they do, what happens, this part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex is loaded with wisdom, integrity, strategy, insights, empathy, foresight. It's beautiful. It's so designed for that, and often it's turned off because people don't have trust with each other.

It's 100% important to have a dialog with yourself going all the time. That's an ego talking to you, beckoning you to do more, but it's not the voice that you need to have in order to solidify the trust relationship. You have to be really transparent with yourself and say, "What can I do now?" What can I really do and how do I bring that into the world. In other words, those self-talk, we have to constantly be auditing, is our voice inside our best friend? If it's not, you have to make it your best friend.

What we're trying to do in conversational intelligence is not only define that trust continuum for people, not only helping them notice, which is so important, what's happening in them and others when distrust lives, but also how to bring people in trust. When they do, what happens, this part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex is loaded with wisdom, integrity, strategy, insights, empathy, foresight. It's beautiful. It's so designed for that, and often it's turned off because people don't have trust with each other.

I've spent years studying words. Linguistics, language, the power of words, the power of phrases on human beings. All of that. It's part of my, almost obsessive, fascination. It turns out that there are some keys that we all need to know about how conversations impact us, because they do at a chemical level. There are certain things that if we learned this, it would totally change our interactions with others, and that's the following. There are certain words that have a feeling of, "I love you, I care for you, you're in my tribe."

Every human being needs to know to be a great parent, for a teacher to be a great teacher, and for a business partner to be a great business partner. We can't fall back on, "Oh, I only said it once and it didn't matter." That kind of phrase. That's a not-good thing for a leader to hold inside. If what that leader did is do that separation and this person now knew that they were not going to be on the popular team, doing it once and then not doing it again isn't enough to erase what just happened.

It turns out that human beings are hard-wired to have conversations impact them in such profound and significant ways that it can actually turn genes on and off. That's a core, fascinating challenge for all of us and insight.

Conversational intelligence is hard-wired into every single human-being's cells. It's the way the cells engage with each other. Believe it or not, cells talk to each other. The immune system talks to the cells.