Celeste Headlee
President & CEO, Headway DEI · 1 appearance on the record.
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Celeste Headlee is a veteran public media journalist and author of books including We Need to Talk and Do Nothing. Over her career, she co-hosted PRI/WNYC's The Takeaway and delivered the viral TEDx talk "10 Ways to Have a Better Conversation".
36statements → 8claims → 7claims resolved → 86%fully supported → 3.86/5average certainty → 1.81/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated →
6 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted 1 not checkable as stated how the 8 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
8 assertions · 3 opinions · 25 insights · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 8 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 7 are resolved, and 1 names no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Celeste argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Expressed certainty vs assessment result
weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Celeste Headlee on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Celeste Headlee said on the Knowledge Project that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Headlee: Cognitive Diversity Drives Innovation While Seeking Agreement Hinders It
“Agreement is, is not a great goal if what you're trying to do is be innovative or creative in your problem solving. Do cognitive diversity is extremely helpful. That's when you'll get your best ideas.”
Headlee: Evolutionary biology makes humans naturally poor listeners
“Listening is really hard. I'm not saying that to make you feel better, although I hope it does make you feel better. It's not hard because of our smartphones. It's not hard because we're distracted. It's hard because human beings, the species homo sapien does …”
Headlee: Saying 'I Know How You Feel' Is The Worst Response
“What I'm usually talking about in this is when someone comes to you with something which is a struggle or a source of pain for them, and we then tell them about a time when we went through what we say was the same thing. I know just how you feel, we say. Which…”
Headlee: Musicians Are Among the Only Professionals Trained to Listen
“Musicians are one of the only professions who are actually trained to listen. You cannot succeed as a musician unless you're a very careful listener.”
Headlee: Many People Learn Public Speaking, but Very Few Learn Listening
“Lots of people get training in public speaking. Very few people actually get training in listening.”
Celeste Headlee: America Has Not Produced a Better Orchestrator Than William Grant Still
“Holy cow, I don't know that there's, America has produced any better orchestrator than William Grant Still. Literally over the course of its entire history.”
Headlee: Vertical Listening Requires Focus That Has Been Disappearing Over Decades
“To listen vertically, you're, it's like all of the parts, the voices in the orchestra are sort of spanning out like a deck of cards... Vertical listening is where you're hearing all kinds of different voices joining together to make one overall sound. That's a…”
Headlee: Spoken Communication Requires One Thought Per Sentence
“You know, no subordinate clauses wet, no complicated sentence structures, et cetera. One thought per sentence. You're trying to create you're trying to sculpt information so that it can be easily understood and absorbed by the brain.”
Headlee: Almost Any News Report Fits the Fairy Tale Narrative Framework
“Like, there's almost no news report you can't put into that framework, that you can't put into the fairy tale framework.”
Headlee: News Stories Fail If Listeners Cannot Explain Them
“By the end of this, if that person listening can't turn to their spouse or whatever friend next to them and explain what the story is, then I failed.”
Headlee: Interviewers must lead with core questions rather than conversational windups
“When you start that interview, that first question needs to be a good one. It needs to get to the meat of it. It can be a provocative question. It can be a question that, that reveals how well you know the material But for the most part, that needs to be getti…”
Headlee: Interviews are one-sided spotlights, not mutual exchanges of information
“So it's not a mutual exchange of information in an interview. It's really way more one-sided than that because the interviewer, again, is supposed to shine the light on their guest and get the expertise from the guest.”
Headlee: Email Communication Reduces Cooperation And Escalates Conflict
“I mean, for example, email in email, you're less likely to negotiate. You're less likely to cooperate. You're more likely to escalate conflict.”
Headlee: fMRI Scans Show Defensiveness Triggers Brain's Physical Attack Response
“They've done fMRI scans in which they discovered that when you start to feel defensive, that, that word is quite literally descriptive. In other words, you start to feel challenged. You start to feel defensive and your brain begins actually instigating the sam…”
Headlee: Conversation Has Negative Emotional Impacts Only in Two Specific Scenarios
“They, they've studied the benefits, especially the neurological benefits and emotional benefits of conversation, and in every single circumstance, conversation is good for you. It doesn't matter if it's a simple chat with somebody, with your Uber driver. It do…”
Headlee: Unsolicited Advice Is Almost Always a Bad Idea
“We do not like to get unsolicited advice, which is pretty much always a bad idea. That's the time in which we're going to come away, even if we have learned something valuable, we'll come away not feeling great about it.”
Headlee: Sustaining true conversation is difficult beyond four people
“When I'm talking about conversation, I'm almost always referring to one person talking to another, and the reason for that is it, it's really hard to sustain that level of attention and focus once you get more people involved. I think you could do it with thre…”
Headlee: Listening well requires actively considering what someone says, not just hearing
“That's the bare minimum of listening is to at least learn something from them. To listen well is not just though to hear what they're saying, but to consider it.”
Headlee outlines three modes of listening: evaluative, interpretive, and transformative
“There's the evaluative listening, where you're just deciding whether that person's right or wrong, what they're saying is true or false. And then there's interpretive, where you're trying to understand, and there's transformative, where you could be changed by…”
Headlee: Vocal Cues Are Essential for Empathy and Human Recognition
“One of the best ways to create that understanding and that empathic bond is to hear someone's voice.
In other words, human beings are such sophisticated communicators.
There is so much information being transmitted just through the sound of somebody's voice.…”
Headlee: Improv training helps people overcome conversational narcissism
“So improv is a really great way to not only make you aware of your tendency to do that, to shift it, but it also is a way to train yourself out of it.”
Headlee: Brain Softens Memories of Pain to Prevent Psychological Dysfunction
“The fact of the matter is, is that when we experience in any kind of pain or travail, your brain immediately Gets to work on softening that memory. Literally right after it happened. And that's a really good reason, because if we actually remembered pain to it…”
Headlee: Popular Music Requires Less Focus Than Classical Music
“Popular music has always been intended to be, to require less focus and attention.
Than classical.”
Headlee: Radio mirrors poetry through strict artistic and time constraints
“I think that I think of radio I think of radio as poetry. Because those are two particular art forms that are quite limited. There's so many rules and so much going on that you, that in a way you're, it's quite limited in what you can and can't do. But if you …”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation | Feb 5, 2019 | 53m |