Greg McKeown:
Welcome back, everybody. I’m Greg McKeown, your host, and I am here with you on this journey to learn and this is part two of my conversation. Jeff Wetzler, who is the author of Ask. I mean, isn’t that just a great title? A single word of all the things that you could write about, of all the things you could get interested in, ask. In part one of the conversation, we went, I think, reasonably deeply into the problem of why it matters, what it is that keeps us from understanding the people around us, particularly those things that they already have that they would like to share with us, or they think would at least be useful for us to have, but they don’t share. So these are things that would help you make better decisions, build better relationships, be able to get, therefore, better results, and, literally, this is there for the asking.
Jeff, welcome back to part two of this conversation.
Jeff Wetzler:
Thank you, Greg.
Greg McKeown:
Okay, so we’ve talked about what doesn’t work, we’ve talked about the problems, we’ve talked about why it matters, so take us through your ask approach.
Jeff Wetzler:
The ask approach is comprised of five research-backed practices that, when put together, are the very best chance that we have to overcome the problem we’ve just been talking about. To actually tap into what other people are thinking us been talking about. To actually tap into what other people are thinking, feeling, but not saying.
Greg McKeown:
And it’s not just a list. This is a five-step process. It’s an ongoing process.
Jeff Wetzler:
That’s right, exactly. We need to do this.
Greg McKeown:
Exactly. I got an exactly, you got an exactly from me.
Jeff Wetzler:
So we should have a bell that rings every time there’s an exactly.
Greg McKeown:
Yes, we should. I’m going to add that. I’m going to add that to the show. I need a gong right here. I need an exactly gong. I like that idea. Okay, so why don’t you just talk us through in the simplest possible terms what is this five-step process?
Jeff Wetzler:
Great. So the first step I call choose curiosity. And there’s a lot of ways of thinking about curiosity. You can look at curiosity as a trait that some people have and other people thinking about curiosity. You can look at curiosity as a trait that some people have and other people don’t have. You could look at curiosity as a state of mind that we’re in. Today, I’m curious. Yesterday, I was less curious.
I’m posing a different way of looking at curiosity, which is a choice that we make, which is a decision to awaken ourselves to the possibility that the person in front of us has something that they can teach us To be consciously asking ourselves what is it that I can learn from this person?
And I know from listening to some of your podcasts, Greg, you have studied Stephen Covey and you’ve talked about this relationship between stimulus and response, and I believe that choosing curiosity is essentially injecting a question mark in between the stimulus and the response.
It’s actually training ourselves to not just see something and jump to a conclusion and say, “Aha, that person’s a jerk.” Or “Aha, I know how it works.” But it’s to actually see something and say, “Huh, that’s interesting. Huh, what could I learn from that? Huh, what might I be missing? Huh, what impact might I have had on the other person that contributed to them?” Et cetera. And so those are a set of different kinds of what I call curiosity questions that we can inject into our otherwise very certain way of thinking and interrupt that stimulus, response, reaction.
Greg McKeown:
Let’s just double click on this first idea of choose curiosity. What’s the most behaviorally specific thing that I can do to make sure that I remember to choose curiosity?
Jeff Wetzler:
So you can actually turn what in the book I call curiosity killers into curiosity cues, meaning the number one curiosity killer is emotional triggering. So if I get frustrated, irritated, upset, why did that person not do what I thought they were supposed to do? Why aren’t they respecting me? Why all of that kind of thing? If I can actually teach myself? Just the same way, we can train ourselves to use a cue for a different kind of habit, that when I’m furious, that’s my cue to get curious. When I’m pissed off, it’s like, “Oh yes, right, that’s the moment I need to ask this question what can I learn from this person? What might I be missing?”
I think that’s the most concrete thing we can do, particularly at the height of our curiosity, to really separate the stimulus and response and inject the question mark in there.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, the idea of furious to curious is a nice phrasing of that. Give me one more, because that’s a very particular situation. That’s what makes it a helpful insight in the time we are least likely to be curious. Okay, that’s the trigger to be curious, but the idea of choosing curiosity isn’t only in those moments when we know about something that’s frustrating us, as we’ve talked about in the last episode. It’s about all of the information we don’t have. It’s everything you don’t know.
Jeff Wetzler:
Yes, exactly.
Greg McKeown:
So how do we do it on a multiple times a day? What are the cues I can use to pause to be curious?
Jeff Wetzler:
Yeah, I mean, I think one is that there’s just a simple question that we can inject into our minds in every interaction we have, whether that is with our Uber driver, or whether that’s at the store, or whether that’s with our coworker or our spouse and that question is just simply what can I learn from this person? If I just put that question right at the front of my mind, all of a sudden, I shift myself out of the mode of what am I gonna tell this person? What is right, but what? And it reminds me of the premise that there is something I can be learning from this person, and so one of my favorite things to do is just to simply center that question in my mind, and all of a sudden, new questions come up, “Huh, what was their experience? How did they get that? What’s the story behind that.” Etc. So I would say that’s the second one.
Greg McKeown:
The Uber driver is something I directly relate to. I have traveled a lot over the last few years all over the world, and I have had the most amazing conversations. And I don’t mean every single conversation with a taxi driver or an Uber driver. Sometimes I’m just too tired. Sometimes, it just isn’t going to gel. But I have had so many high-quality conversations. I have learned so much about a country I’m in or an area I’m in. They can educate me about the political sensitivities of the place. I mean, there’s so much that this person knows.
Jeff Wetzler:
Think about all that richness that you wouldn’t have gotten had you not been curious enough to ask. I mean just that vast education. I had myself an example a year or two ago with an Uber driver who picked me up. And this Uber driver had a flag on the front of his car and on the cap that he was wearing. That was a symbol that I felt like I was completely violated my values. I actually thought this person was dangerous, wrong. I even felt a bit unsafe being in this person’s car, and all of a sudden, I said to myself you know what? Let me just ask, “Tell me about the story behind the, you know this was the thin blue line flag. Tell me the story about the flag that you have on your hat.”
I learned an incredible story about this person who had been a police officer, whose fiancé was a police officer, whose cousin was murdered by gangs, and who went through as a police corrections officer. Just the amount of personal sacrifice that he actually made to protect the country, the ways in which he actually believes in preserving the dignity of people. I walked away with so much respect for him and for the people who serve in the police, et cetera. I’m not going to necessarily go around wearing the same hat that he wore. But, man, did I completely shift my views about the judgmentalness I was carrying just by asking what could I learn from this person?
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, I mean, look, that directly speaks to the most emotionally intense part one conversation, which is, hey, I got another, exactly Gong. Where’s the gong when you need it?
I love it.
Okay, and look, I think that as much as anything that’s going on is technology. It has educated thoughtful people with a slight political bias. Will tend to be radicalized over time on YouTube, on almost any social platform, because the algorithms are built to radicalize. The goal was to keep you watching, keep you engaging, and have utilized deliberately and intentionally, the hooked research we have what hooks people, and the technologists have been able to do that more precisely than anything before them. I think anything, including, you know, let’s say, including the serious drug addictions, because in this case, everything becomes more and more precisely personalized to that individual. So it’s more and more engaging. So, right, it makes for a great business model in one sense, but it’s really, really bad for our ability to understand each other.
Jeff Wetzler:
And I would add our ability to be curious because in the book, I list three curiosity killers. We talked about number one, which is emotional triggers. You’re speaking to what number three is, which is the conformity that we feel based on being surrounded by people whose views reinforce ours and put pressure on ours to actually conform to them. It literally diminishes our curiosity to the point where I get in an Uber with someone who seems so different from me. I have to work hard to be curious.
Greg McKeown:
Well, because that mental model, that stuck in their heads phenomenon, is so amped up right now. So my wife and I, we went through a website that takes something like the 250 sources of news, and they rank whether the news is left of center or right of center, and then everybody that goes to the website can also vote. So you get two data points on every single thing. So, everyone who goes to the website can also vote. So you get two data points on every single thing. So you’re also getting what the public believes about these new sites. So, it’s not just whoever created the website. And of all of these news channels, there was one that they thought was actually centrist, and the people on the website were talking like 20,000 votes per news channel that thought were centrist. One. And so we started watching the news from that outlet, and the thing that we learned immediately was how boring the news was. And that really stuck with me as a lesson because if you strip away the emotion and the hyperbole and the radicalization and this idea, you know, back to what you’re saying about the curiosity killers. If you remove that, you got no interest. What’s the point? Okay, that’s a nice update. Okay, fine, move on with our life, just like the news, in a sense, is supposed to be to play a minor role to keep us just basically informed about what’s going on.
I suddenly, in that moment, was like, “Oh, I’m so done with being used. I’m so done with being used by the news, by the inverted commas news.” Because I think so much of what pretends to be news is something close to hyped-up gossip.
“Well, this person said this thing on X. Well, this person said that thing on this social media, and this person responded this way.”
It’s like, are you kidding me? This isn’t news. I used to have to pick up a gossip magazine to read these things. Anyway, I think there’s some serious forces at play that are different than in previous generations, where educated, thoughtful people who are reading and watching and so on will get completely different stories over time.
Jeff Wetzler:
I totally agree, and it means that we are swimming upstream. We have to work extra hard because so many forces around us are essentially reinforcing our certainty.
Greg McKeown:
And what you said stimulus, response, it narrows the space. All that motive content narrows the space. The second, somebody says something that indicates which side they’re on. Boom.
I was speaking at a very interesting organization that, and we had at the table a whole very diverse group of people, the, the meal that the night before we’re in Chicago it’s we’re in in the museum of art, there. It’s one of the most beautiful locations I’ve ever been in and certainly ever eaten a meal in. So, the whole environment is completely given to having the kind of open conversation you’re talking about. And we did have a rich conversation.
But somebody in that conversation said to me I said, “Oh, I’m politically independent.”
And they responded, “Oh, yes, a couple of years ago, I realized I had to give up independence.”
So you can’t be independent anymore; you have to pick a side. And actually that was quite a scary moment for me in a sense, not the actual moment, not the interaction with them, but the idea that you could get to a place where people believe you can’t be independent. They’re saying in different words there’s no space between stimulus and response.
Jeff Wetzler:
I can’t be curious.
Greg McKeown:
I can’t be curious. I’m not allowed to step away from agreeing or disagreeing vehemently, emotionally, in a fighting posture. I can’t step away from that. To be curious, to understand, to see, well, what’s going on here, what might I not be seeing? How might this person be different than that radicalized version that’s being offered to me in media constantly?
Number two.
Jeff Wetzler:
Number two is called Make it Safe. And this essentially builds off of Amy Edmundson’s research and recognizes that even if I’m curious to learn from you if you don’t actually feel like it’s safe to tell me what you think, it doesn’t matter how curious I am because you’re not going to say it. And while I think there are some powerful implications of the psychological research at the organizational level. What this is really focusing on is how do you make it safe at the interpersonal level.
Part of that is actually very intentional about the context of the conversation, so I was referencing in part one of our conversation how I studied some of the iconic CEOs people like Bill George of Medtronic or Irene Rosenfeld, CEO of Kraft, and how did they overcome the problem of being at the top of the trees and really not knowing what was going on in the organization, and they both talked a lot about how choiceful they were about where they situated the interactions. Bill George said I would never have someone sitting across the CEO’s desk from me and assume that they’re going to feel safe telling me what’s going on. We’re going to sit next to each other. Irene Rosenfeld talked about how she made it a very important point to do ride-along with people so that she could actually be in their car on their turf, doing it on their terms, and I think it applies personally as well.
I have a teenage daughter and when she comes home from school, I want to know what happened during her day, how did it go, Et cetera. And if I ask her. Of course you can guess, invariably, what I get is absolutely nothing. But if I go on to her turf, which means I have to stay up till 11 o’clock, 11:30 at night, when she’s done talking to her friends, when she’s done with her homework or whatever else, she wants to tell me everything. At that point, I’m exhausted.
But if I want to find out what’s true for her. That’s part of making it safe for her is being on her turf and her terms. Of course, making it safe is also about opening up ourselves. So if we want someone to tell us what’s true for them, we also have to say here’s why I’m asking; here’s why I need to know something from you. Here’s what’s something that might be hard for me to say to introduce the reciprocity of sharing.
Greg McKeown:
That’s marvelous. Give me number three.
Jeff Wetzler:
Number three is the heart of the ask approach, which is posing quality questions. Many of us have a go-to question that we like to use, like help me understand or this or that? Many of us say a number of things that have question marks at the end of those statements that we actually make, but really, those are not quality questions. Those are what I call crummy questions. They are questions designed to actually manipulate someone or maneuver them into a certain answer or potentially sometimes even attack them, etc. Quality questions have a very simple definition, which is they help you learn something important from the other person. And so, in the book, we go through a taxonomy of questions, and I like to think of it almost like the way that a surgeon would have a very precise set of tools: I want the scalpel for this, I want this tool for this, et cetera. We actually can treat questions the same way.
We can say if I really want to learn X, here are three great questions, and I’ll give you just a couple of examples of what I think are very often overlooked questions. I would say the most single overlooked question is the question that actually requests reactions from the other person to my own viewpoint, so if I say to them, “Here’s what I really think about this issue.” And maybe even, “Here’s why I think that.”
The question to request reactions is what are your reactions to that? How does that land with you? What might I be missing? What am I overlooking? What’s the downside of what I’m saying, et cetera?
We are so unlikely to actually get those reactions, especially if there’s any kind of power dynamic at play unless we actually ask that kind of reaction. So that’s one category we can talk about other categories of quality questions.
Greg McKeown:
No, I really liked this. Let me just ask one question I’m curious about, which is how you’ve defined what a quality question is. Can you just define what a question is?
Jeff Wetzler:
A question is just simply you could say a string of words that is inquiring into what someone else thinks, and now that question could be used in a whole bunch of different ways, in quality ways or in weaponized ways, etc. But I think that’s as simple as a question.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, I mean, that’s the definition of a question to someone else, but of course, you could ask a question to yourself, too, but a string of words inquiring. Yeah, it’s a solid definition for my purposes.
Number four.
Jeff Wetzler:
Number four is all about what happens after you ask the question because it’s not enough just to pose a question; you actually have to take in the answer. And so number four is called listen to learn, and we all think we’re good listeners, but there’s a difference between listening and hearing. Just because we’re sitting there with our ears open doesn’t actually mean we’re gonna hear what’s most essential from someone else.
In the chapter on listening to learn, I talk about listening through three channels. Most of us typically listen through one channel, which is the content of what someone is saying, but there are two other channels that are equally important. The second one is the emotion, and I think this gets back to what you were talking about about Carl Rogers as well, and emotional empathy. But the third channel is the action that someone is taking, and so if we can actually train ourselves to not just hear the content but also hear the emotion and also hear the action, just the same way we might train ourselves to listen for percussion and harmony and vocals in a piece of music and have a much richer understanding of what’s going on. When we put all three of those together, we’re going to hear so much more about what actually matters to somebody.
Greg McKeown:
Well, there’s a couple of things here. One is when you say you put those three together, you have a more rich sound. Is what you’re trying to do when you’re listening to those three? Things like connect the dots between them, create a story between those three data points. Are you trying to find where they’re aligned, where they’re different? How do you think about putting those three types of information together?
Jeff Wetzler:
What you’re trying to do is see how they relate to one another. Sometimes, they’re completely congruent, where the content and, the emotion, and the action just completely line up. Sometimes, however, you might be hearing someone say one thing, but the tone of their voice and the emotion that they’re conveying suggests something completely different, and that’s a great point to ask a question about and say to what you said earlier. “I’m noticing that you look sad or you’re frowning. What’s going on here?”
So you’re basically trying to look at the interrelation between those three things? I will say that ways to do that include what you referred to earlier around playing something back to someone and seeing if you can get it exactly, or what else are you missing? I call that paraphrase and test my understanding, but I’ll just name one other one that I think is particularly important, which is simply the question of say more about that, tell me more. Because often, we assume that the first thing that comes out of someone’s mouth is what they really think, or is the most important thing that they really think, and if we take that and we say, okay, I heard them, now time to move on, we are quite likely to actually miss what’s truly the most important thing.
Psychologists have a term for this that they call the doorknob moment, which is that when someone’s finishing a therapy session, it’s often the very last minute, literally when their hand is on the doorknob, and they’re about to leave the room, that they drop the bomb. “I’m going to leave my wife, or I’m going to do whatever else.” And the first 49 minutes of that 50-minute session, the most important thing didn’t get said, and so we’ve got to remember that, just because it’s the first thing they say, that’s often not the most important thing that they say, and so we’ve got to say tell me more, what else is there? What else is there? I will often just ask the question to somebody on my team what else? Okay, got that, thank you, is that right? Okay, what else? That some of their best ideas come out, that some of their most important things happen, because they’re waiting to test, they’re waiting to see. How did he react for the first one and to the second one? Et cetera.
Greg McKeown:
Sure, that’s exactly what people are doing. And so if you react in any way that encumbers their psychological safety on their test one, two, three, four, and five, then they’re going to hold off on number six, the thing that really mattered. They’re like, “Oh, I see what happens when I share the thing that hardly matters to me. I’ll hold on to the pearl. That is the real thing that I would love to get to, but I’m just too scared to do that, especially now I’ve seen what you do.”
Jeff Wetzler:
Exactly, and it can relate to parenting. One of the people I interviewed for the book is a clinical psychologist named Fred Muench, and he talks about one of the biggest factors that determines whether an adolescent will actually share with their parents something that’s important to them is the emotional reactivity of the parents when something gets shared. So if the adolescent says something and the parent goes crazy and says, “Oh my God, that’s great!” Or “Oh my God, are you depressed?”
All those different things, you’re not going to get much more. But if you can take a receptive, somewhat neutral stance, you’re much more likely and say what else? You’re much more likely to get to the deeper thing.
Greg McKeown:
Well, that just makes such a nice contrast there. We’ve talked before about emotional responsiveness being the number one skill for creating securely attached relationships, so it follows, at least in a linguistic way, to say well, emotional reactivity is the thing that’s most likely to reduce that sense of secure attachment. I’m not sure it’s actually researched true, because I think ignoring and being just totally silent is worse than what we could call emotional reactivity.
Jeff Wetzler:
It’s a form of emotional reactivity. If you’re just stone-faced and someone’s telling you something important, I think that’s also problematic as well.
Greg McKeown:
If you literally ignore what they’re saying, right, absolutely. Somebody says, “Well, listen, I’ve had a terrible day,” and you say, “Well, did you take the rubbish out?” You like literally speak as if they didn’t speak.
Jeff Wetzler:
Yes, that would be a form of non-reactivity that’s also non-responsive at the same time.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s right. Emotional non-responsiveness versus emotional responsiveness versus emotional reactivity. Okay, there was something else that I wanted to get to here. When you suggest that we need to be listening to learn and that there are these three elements of it: content, emotion, and the action they’re taking, I mean, I have thoughts about that last one, about the action they’re taking, but I wanted to hear from you first. What do you mean when you say that?
Jeff Wetzler:
I mean, what are they actually doing in the interaction? So, for example, somebody might be trying to persuade me, somebody might be looking for sympathy, somebody might be insisting on something, somebody might be enlisting support, et cetera. There’s a way to look at the talk that someone is giving you in a conversation not just as a claim or the content that they’re saying, but they’re actually taking actions in the, in that very moment. At the same time, we have to be careful not to attribute their motives, but we can name what’s going on in the conversation.
Greg McKeown:
So, the word action might…another word for that is intent. You’re saying what is their intent in this conversation. Is that right?
Jeff Wetzler:
Yes. Well, I’m trying to be careful to not say let’s assume we know what their intent is because it could be we misattribute their intent. And oftentimes, we’re not very good at guessing what someone’s actual intent is. But I’m talking more about, what’s the nature of their behavior? So, for example, they might be repeating themselves five times. They might be re-asking me will I help them in three different ways in the conversation. And from that I could infer maybe they are trying to persuade me, maybe they are trying to lead me to a certain conclusion, but I can be observing their behavior. I would substitute the word intent for behavior if I’m looking for another way to define action.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, but I have to not exactly push back, but I think push to clarify, because both times that you’ve expressed it you’ve said behavior and then gone to intent. You’ve said, “From that behavior, I’m inferring this intent.” What am I missing?
Jeff Wetzler:
I think you’re making a good distinction and I should probably stop at the behavior. It’s very easy to jump to the intent, but it’s also an opportunity for me to test, is this what you’re trying to do or not?
Greg McKeown:
I think that’s very helpful because feedback is something generally we don’t love getting. I ask for a lot of feedback in my life and then I don’t like getting it. So it’s interesting. I mean, sometimes I like it, but it’s such an interesting combination, and it took me a long time to try and work through, well, what’s challenging for me about the feedback and the challenges that I’m genuinely curious for it. But then I’ve been insufficiently good at filtering it in saying, and I’ve been insufficiently good at filtering it in saying, “Well, that’s, you know, why might they have that thought that reveals.”
I didn’t do the what it reveals about you thing. I just took it in a sense like someone else can simply say what is true, and that then that, therefore, makes it true. And that’s a really emotionally dangerous way to receive feedback. So I’ve just been, I don’t know now I’m just riffing here, but it’s meant that I’ve been in an odd situation. I ask for feedback more than the average person, I think, but then I think I find it hard to then deal with it because I go, “Well, that’s true. They’re speaking the truth.” Instead of going, considering the source instead of considering well, what does that reveal about them?
So I thought that that’s. I think that this idea of what their behavior, and therefore their intent might be is very helpful thing to do in trying to filter and make sense of the interaction rather than just to absorb it completely.
Jeff Wetzler:
I love that, and actually, I’ll use that as a segue because I think that’s perfect.
Greg McKeown:
You almost said exactly. You stopped saying it because you didn’t want the gong to go.
Jeff Wetzler:
I can’t have the gong go too many times in one episode. But I think what you’re saying is a perfect segue to the final step, which is called reflect and reconnect because what you’re essentially doing is to say once I hear something from someone, how do I reflect on it? And what I talk about in Reflect and Reconnect is a process that I call sift and turn. So the first part of sift and turn is sift, which is to say what in what I heard from them has value and what can I discard? Maybe because it says more about them, maybe because it says more about the situation, maybe because it’s not pertinent to me anymore, et cetera. And that sifting is essential because, if we just take it all in of what we heard, we assume it’s true, we assume it’s all equally important, we could get overwhelmed, we could draw the wrong conclusions, it could harm our sense of self, et cetera. So, this first step of sift is essential. Sometimes, we can do the sifting by ourselves. It can be helpful simply to write down here’s everything I heard. Let me get a little distance from it and then come back and look at it.
It’s often quite helpful, however, to have someone who we trust help us sift it. So we could say to two or three people, “This is what I heard from this person in feedback. Can you help me sift through? What about it seems valid to you? What about it might not be valid?”
If we start to ask some people, particularly we triangulate with a couple of different people we can start to get a sense of what we can keep and what we can sift out.
Then is the turn part, and the turn part is essentially making what I call three reflective turns. The first one is reflecting on what did I hear that can enhance or enrich or provoke the story I have about the situation. Maybe it makes me actually complicate my narrative about the person who picked me up in the Uber driver, or what that flag actually symbolizes, or about myself and my own reaction, et cetera. So that’s the first thing. It’s reflecting on my story.
The second reflective turn is to reflect on the steps I should take based on that. So, based on what I’ve heard, what can I actually do about it? Is there something I need to repair? Is there a skill I need to get better at? Is there an action I need to take? Is there a move I should make, etc.?
That’s the second reflective turn, and the third reflective turn is what I call reflecting on our stuff; that’s the deeper stuff that we carry with us, our ways of being, our deeper worldviews, our biases, etc. And to say to ourselves, is there something that I heard that’s not just about my story, about this situation or the steps I should take now, but that can actually help complicate or deepen or enhance or expand who I am, and I think that’s where the deepest, richest growth happens. It can also be the most scary, but if we can get to that third reflective turn, that’s truly how we squeeze the growth out of what we hear from other people, out of what we hear from other people. Those are the turns. It’s not enough to do that privately, though. This is why I call this step reflect and reconnect.
It’s essential that once we make these reflective turns, we actually reconnect to the other person for a couple of things. One is to just let them know thank you; you said something that actually I learned from, and that acknowledgment goes a long way to let them know they didn’t waste their time. But it’s also another opportunity for them to actually confirm or disconfirm our reflections If we say here’s what I actually took away, and they said, well, that’s what I meant. Or they might say, well, I meant that, but I also didn’t mean for you to take it to this extent or in this way or et cetera. We can nuance our reflections in doing that.
And thirdly, I think it radically increases the chance that they will be interested to share in the future. It keeps the door open because they know this person really takes me seriously, to the point that they actually thought so hard about it that they grew from it and that they took the time to come back and tell me. So it’s kind of a loop of reflecting and reconnecting.
Greg McKeown:
There’s a few places that are still in my mind, but let me just come back to you here. Let me just, maybe, let me just come back to you here. What have been the biggest challenges in getting people to engage in these ideas, to live them, to be interested in them in the first place, and to live them in the second place? Like what obstacles have you encountered?
Jeff Wetzler:
I think that probably the biggest obstacle comes back to what you said in part one, which is why bother in the first place?
If I don’t know that I’m missing out on something in the first place, what’s my motivation for doing it? And, of course, it’s almost self-sealing because we don’t know what we’re not finding out. And so the best way to overcome that is to help people see that their ways of operating are at odds with what they actually really want. It’s a philosophical distinction between an internal critique versus an external critique. The external critique would be to say you’re not using the ask approach. I, as an external person, think you should. That’s not very effective. But an internal critique can be to say if you’re not getting the results that you want, then this is a way to actually help you change those results.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, it seems to me that you have really thoughtful and deliberately, and over years and years, thought about this solution to a problem that is multifaceted, real, serious, and so on. But it’s almost like one has to overdo the expression of why all of that matters. Why did I do this work? Why did I spend all the years doing the research? Why did I spend all the years writing the book, at least thinking about the book, and then eventually writing it? Why was I so taken with this subject?
It’s like those things can sometimes become almost invisible to an individual in the passion, and then we have to awaken again and put into language again all of that why, and not assume that people know the problem we’re trying to solve, not assume that the other person knows why we are so passionate about it and have been so obsessed and so interested in it. And to all of us I mean. As an author myself, I have to constantly remind myself to do this. How do I make this subject so much more appealing to other people? Because if they don’t want it, it doesn’t matter. You know, people buy what they want, not what they need, in so many instances. So we have to do that connective tissue work. Why does this matter to you right now in your busy life?
Jeff Wetzler:
Yeah, this is why I spend the entire first section about the book exposing the costs of the problem, the costs that we pay if we don’t actually find out what other people are knowing, thinking, and feeling.
Greg McKeown:
What do you think the number one most appealing reason is for why somebody should buy, Ask, implement it and so on? You’ve talked about the downside, the costs involved. We talked about that in the last episode especially. But what would you say is the number one most appealing thing about not just buying the book and reading the book, but living in this?
Jeff Wetzler:
I’m going to put two things side by side. I cannot pick between the two of them results and relationships. On the results side, you’re going to put two things side by side. I cannot pick between the two of them Results and relationships.
On the results side, you’re going to get better decisions. You’re going to find out the fatal flaw in your plan before you execute that plan. You’re going to have so many better, innovative ideas because you’re actually harnessing the collective genius around you, not just what’s in your own head, so you’re going to save time. All of that is results.
And then relationships. You are going to be closer to people. You’re going to have far more “exactly” moments. You’re going to have people who actually feel like they can self-express with you. You’re going to understand the people around you better. So, depending on which one you value most, I would say results and relationships.
Greg McKeown:
That’s a terrific conclusion to a terrific conversation. Jeff, thank you for being with me and engaging in this rich and thoughtful conversation and thank you for being on the podcast.
Jeff Wetzler:
Thank you so much for having me Really really enjoyed it.
