This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

At various points in our lives, all of us turn to coaches and trainers.

If you're a student athlete, you might need a coach to improve your tennis stroke or soccer footwork.

If you need to take up a musical instrument in your 30s, you'll need the help of a piano teacher or guitar instructor.

If you decide you want to learn a new language in your 50s,

you sign up for classes with an expert in that language.

But there are lots of domains in our lives

where many of us never dream of recruiting the help of a coach.

That's because we feel we are masters in those domains already.

We don't need a coach to help us breathe or walk or talk.

Or, do we?

Just because we've done something a long time doesn't mean we are doing it right.

Just because we feel we are skilled at something doesn't mean we don't have plenty of room for improvement.

Today on the show, we focus on a skill that seems so commonplace that many of us fail to see how difficult it is to do well.

We're going to look at how we engage in conversation and the things we can do to get better at it.

Learning to Talk this week on Hidden Brain. When discussing the children in our lives, we say they learn to talk at age one or two.

For the late bloomers, maybe it's three or four.

We make it sound as if learning to talk is something we master early, and then practice

without a problem as adults.

But it turns out that most of us have a lot to learn when it comes to having conversations

that are dynamic, engaging, and meaningful.

Alison Woodbrooks is a behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School. For many years now,

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