Find Out What People Are *Really* Thinking

23:33And so there's a whole bunch of questions that I put in the bucket of crummy questions, but quality questions, I think I'm in the same way that I imagine a surgeon might think about their scalpel and all their other tools. So the definition of quality questions is very simple questions that help us learn something important from someone else. And in this part of the book, I lay out a taxonomy because I think most of us have a very narrow repertoire of good quality questions that we ask. We might have our favorite go-to question, help me understand this or that, which is fine, but it's too narrow of a repertoire.

24:05We can actually have a much broader set of questions. And I'll just give you one example of, I think, a very underutilized question strategy, which is what I call requesting reactions. And this simply means that we state our point of view, and then instead of stopping and waiting for the other person to react or not react, we just add the question, what's your reaction to that? How does that land with you? How does that sit with you? What does that make you think? What might I be missing? Any number of those questions are the kinds of questions that actually let the other person know we want their reactions, that we value, we need their reactions.

24:39And I think too often we assume, oh, if they disagree, they're going to tell me their reaction. Or if they don't want to do this, they're going to tell me their reaction. But they don't for all the reasons why we just talked about people don't feel safe often telling us those things. But if we pose that question in such an open way, what's your reaction to that? We're far more likely to elicit. I remember in one of my I feel like this is almost like my therapy and confessional of bad management moments. But in one of my other management moments, I was just learning this strategy. And I had just given feedback and direction to someone that I was managing as a new manager.

25:09And then I said to myself, let me just try out this thing I got trained on. And I said to him, so what's your reaction to what I just said? And he looked at me for a minute. He was quiet. And then he said, honestly, if you really want my reaction, I find that completely demotivating. And I was shocked. And had I not asked that, he never would have told me. So then we could unpack it. And what it turned out is that he and I had different information about what our client needed. And so he thought what I was asking him to do made no sense. Once we were able to exchange the assumptions and the information that we had, we were able to get back on the same page.

25:38And he was motivated and he did a great job. But had I not asked that question, we might have wasted days or weeks and our relationship would have frayed. And so it took almost no time to pose that question, but it very quickly course corrected us. So that's just one of a dozen different quality question strategies that I think we all need to know and master to help us learn different kinds of things. I see a couple of things in the chat. Yeah, and I appreciate the candidates from him as well. Yeah, the candidates was really great. And what else do you think that you did, if anything, to prompt that candidness?

26:12Because you could have said, what's your reaction to that? And he could have said, this guy Jeff's an idiot. And he's telling me something that doesn't make sense. And so I'm just, I'm checking out here. I'm just going to say my reaction to that is sure, even though I think that it's a terrible idea. I think we did have a prior relationship. So some of the things that under make it safe, like create connection with the other person. I think we were in a space where there was time and it was conducive to be having that kind of conversation. And I give him credit for his candidness as well. So I think all of that combined, and there's no guarantee that he would have said that to me or that anyone would say that to me.

26:45But I'm almost fully certain that had I not asked the question, I would not have gotten that from him. Yeah. Something I've noticed, there's a guy I do some work with on a project, and he's really good during group meetings of asking that question of anyone who just hasn't talked in a while. So if we're talking about something and I haven't said anything in a few minutes, then he'll just turn to me and be like, Jason, what's your reaction to that? Or like, how do you feel about that? And I really like it because it not only prompts good dialogue, but it also just ensures that everyone is engaged and that conversations aren't just taken over by the loudest voices or the ones who maybe think that they have the most to add to something.

27:31That's often the reason why I'm not speaking in some certain situation is I just think, I have less to add than Lisa does. So I'll just let her speak. And maybe I have something to say, or maybe if you force me to say something, I will start talking and maybe get to an interesting point. And I would have never done that unless I was asked. Perfect example. Yeah. And sometimes you may not, to your point, you may not have even worked out your own thinking until you have a chance to just verbalize it out loud a little bit as well. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. So should we go to number four? Yeah, let's go to number four.

27:59Number four is basically what happens after you ask the question, which is how well do you listen? And so number four is called listen to learn. And I talk about how it's important to listen for more than just the content of what someone is saying. And so I personally gravitate towards the content, the information, the numbers, the facts, the figures, the claims, the logic, all those kinds of things. But I've discovered over time, that's only one third of what's going on in a conversation. There's not just the content, but there's also the emotion. What is someone feeling upset? Are they feeling frustrated, resentful, excited, motivated?

28:27And people can both express their emotions and display their emotions. And so we've got to be listening for that. And then the third is also listening for the action that someone is taking. So are they repeating themselves? Are they clarifying things? Are they offering support? Are they pushing back? Those are all things that we can be listening for as well. And so content, emotion, actions, I talk about as three channels to be listening through. The same way that I think a music aficionado or musician would be able to listen for the harmony and the vocals and the percussion and be able to isolate each one.

28:58But then when able to put it back together, to be able to just have so much a richer sense of the piece of what's going on. And so that's a big piece of listening to learn. And then there's a lot of different strategies for how to do that. One of my favorite strategies is just what I call pull the thread, which is a recognition that usually the first thing that someone has to say to us may not be the most important thing to be learning from them, or it may not be their most important answer to the question. I also interviewed a number of professional listeners for this book as well. One category of those was psychotherapists.

29:29And psychotherapists have this thing that they call the doorknob moment, which is that if it's a 50-minute session, like at minute 49 or minute 50, as their patient is about to walk out of the room, has the hand on the doorknob to leave, that's when they drop the biggest and most important thing. I'm about to leave my spouse or I'm getting investigated or any number of different kinds of things. And it's like, why didn't they say that in the first 49 minutes of the session when we could have actually talked about it? And there's all kinds of interesting theories, including the fact that maybe they were working up the courage or maybe they didn't know if it was gonna be safe or maybe they didn't have the words to do it, but it's a known phenomenon, this doorknob moment thing.

30:03And I think that the same can be true in conversations. There's lots of, we just ask a question to someone and then we get the answer and then we say, okay, great, I got it. And then we move on. And I think this is actually part of what I, what's wrong with me and my Teach for America situation as well. I got an answer. I thought, okay, that must be it. But that's often not the most important thing. And so simply just saying, what else? What more? Can you say more about that? And sometimes even with my own team, I'll say to them, I'm just going to keep asking you what else until you tell me that's it.

30:29Because every time I ask you that question, you give me something even better. And so I'll respect it when you tell me that's it. But I'm just, just so you know, that's why I'm going to keep asking you that question. And so that, I just call that pulling the thread. And there's so much richness I think we can get from that. And then the other, yeah, please go ahead. I'm sorry. I just want to say that the pulling thread reminds me and psychotherapists remind me of this line that I got from a friend of mine who's a psychotherapist, which is just say more about that. Yeah, exactly. It uses that a lot in therapy sessions.

30:58And I found that when I use it in conversation with people, it is incredible. When somebody says something interesting, but you know that there's more behind it, then saying, say more about that instantly opens them up. This is like the magic language. And I thought a lot about why that is. And I think the answer, you tell me the answer is that it, it's the same reason why people talk to a reporter. Why does anybody talk to a reporter? It doesn't make any sense. Why would you talk to a reporter who's going to take all the information that you say and then rewrite it in ways that are going to be hopefully mostly correct, but not entirely correct, and then share it with everyone.

31:41Why would you do that? Especially on very personal things. People share personal things all the time. And the answer is because there is just simply nothing better than finding someone who is interested in what you have to say. And this is my thesis, at least, Jeff, I want to hear what you have to say. But when you find someone who is genuinely interested in a thing that you have to say and say more about that is basically, I am interested in what you have to say, such that I want you to go deeper into this thing that you just said. It's like that feeling, that message in the smallest number of words, that it instantly opens people up because that is what they want.

32:17I totally agree. There's a phrase I learned from one of my mentors, Diana Smith, who said, the desire to know cultivates the willingness to tell. And so say more basically is an indication of our desire to know. And to your point, another category of professional listeners I interviewed for the book is journalists. And I interviewed one investigative journalist who literally did this entire investigative report that ultimately led several CEOs to lose their job for business malfeasance after she had interviewed them in this. And she said to me like, why would they tell me all these things that ultimately they know I'm a reporter that I could use against them, which I did.

32:54She won major prizes for doing this. And she said, I think the reason is I just expressed interest in them and nobody in their life around them seemed to have cared about them that much to be asking them more questions. And they had some need to be listened to and to be heard. And so I met that need and it all came out. And I think that's a lot of what Say More does. The other magic question, just while we're on things that work like magic as it relates to listening, is a strategy that I also talk about in the book called paraphrase and test, which is just simply saying back, saying to the other person, here's what I think I heard you say.

33:25Did I get that right? It's just that simple. It's just basically playing back to the other person. Sometimes people call it a tellback. And then checking, how well did I hear you? What did I miss? And I will tell you, at least 50 % of the time when I do this, people will say, actually, that's not what I meant. Or yeah, that's what I said, but actually there's more to it than that that I didn't tell you. And so I learned so much more, but it also has two other incredible benefits. One of which is it slows down the conversation. So if there's any kind of tension or argument or heatedness in the conversation, it just gives both people a chance to catch their breath.

33:57Instead of coming back with my next counterpoint, I'm just slowing us down by saying, did I understand you? But the other thing is, I think it also sends a message to the other person. I care enough about what you have to say and where you're coming from that I'm going to take up my time to try to actually put into words what I think you're saying and then ask you. And so it also has a relational benefit as well that I think can work wonders. Yeah. One other thing I'll say on the things that you shared, by the way, if anyone has any questions, throw them out, was the insight that people are often at the beginning sharing the things that are maybe least deep and that you have to let them let some of that stuff out.

34:34You would, what was your language for it? You had a term for it. I don't remember now. Pull the thread or? Pull the thread. Yeah, I have always thought of it in interviewing as let out the balloon. Because when I sit down with someone, they have a preconceived idea of what it is that we're going to talk about and what it is that I'm going to be interested in. And I know that before I get to the things that I'm actually interested in, I am going to have to let them say all of those things to me. So I think of this letting the air out of the balloon because I just feel like it's like, it's just, it all has to come out.

35:08And then once it does and they've deflated, now we can have an actual conversation. And so if I've done this for years and years interviewing celebrities, which is like a really, is a really time intensive process because you don't get that much time with someone and you need them to say something that's going to be interesting and new and fresh. and you have to develop a rapport and you got to do it all in an hour and a half. It's just, it's really hard. And so I will usually let, even though this is one third of my time with them, if it's an hour and a half, I will let them just say the boring things that they've said to everybody to me for a half hour straight.

35:45I've heard it all before. None of it's going to go into the story, but I basically just want to show them that I'm hearing the things that they're usually saying. They are performing in the way that they think I want. And then once I hear all that, I can pick up some little thing that they had said and dig into it in a different way and show them that I was really listening and hearing and that I'm not asking them the things that everyone else asked. And that's usually the moment in which they start saying interesting things. Wow. Love that. And I love that metaphor. I had not, I've not heard of that before, thought about it that way, but it makes a lot of sense.

36:19So I appreciate you sharing that. Yeah. All right. So there's a, there's one last, there's one last hit us. Yes. It's called reflect and reconnect. And this to me is, this is my favorite. I am a kind of learning nerd, learning junkie. And reflection is really where we squeeze the learning out of experiences. And I think a lot of people think about reflection as something mysterious, or I don't have time to reflect, or I have to go on some meditation retreat if I really want to reflect. But I talk about reflection as a very concrete and practical process. I call it sift it and turn it. So sift it is simply taking everything that we heard from someone, maybe just thinking back on the conversation, maybe looking at our notes, maybe listening to the recording if we want, whatever way we do it and saying of all that, what were the two or three most important, most interesting, most valuable nuggets that I heard from the person?

37:03That's just sift it. And also, by the way, let me sift out some things that I don't need to take in because not every piece of feedback we get from people, we need to take in and not everything is meant for us as well. And so sifting it is basically letting go of the stuff we don't need and really keeping the gold, the good stuff. And sometimes to sift it well, we need to sift it with a friend or a partner or a coach or therapist or anybody who can really help us get out of our own stuff in some ways so that we can make sure we're getting the gold. And then once we've sifted it, we go to turn it.

37:30And that just means turning it over in our minds three times. The first turn is what I call story level reflection, which is just to say, how does what I heard change my story about this person, about myself, about the situation, about what I'm trying to do here? The second level is what I call steps level reflection. And so once my now, given what given how my story has evolved, what steps can I take? Do I need to apologize? Do I need to make a decision? Do I need to double down? Do I need to get out of here? Do I need to take action? Whatever it is, the steps. And then the third is the deepest one that I think is often the hardest, but the most interesting, which is what I call stuff, reflecting on my stuff.

38:02So is there anything I heard here that might illuminate for me a bias that I have or an assumption that I'm holding deeply or a way of being or some worldview or something about my life experience? And that's where some of the richest learning can happen. And so it's story, steps, and stuff are the three reflective turns to really squeeze the insight out. And then I call this reflect and reconnect because it's not just about taking the insight for ourselves. It's not, this is not like an extractive process where I'm just taking everything I can learn from you to make myself better. The reconnect is closing the loop, is going back to the other person and saying, thank you for what you shared and thank you for the risk that you took and the time that you took to do it.

38:38And here's how I grew from it. And here's how it changed me and here's what I'm gonna do about it. And by the way, is there anything else you would have hoped that I would have taken from what you said? or is there any way you would want to modify my takeaways from what you would have said? And I think that reconnecting, that closing the loop is very rare. People don't often get that coming back to them. And it does a few things. It lets them know they were valued. It shows them they didn't waste their time. It shows them how powerful they are because they actually affected you. And I think it also radically increases the chances they're going to want to share again because they know how much it means to you as well.

39:08So that's the last step, reflect and reconnect. Yeah, I really appreciate that. How long would you say as you teach this to people? It takes for people to get it. This is a lot to program into yourself, into what are both casual and then also structured conversations. And it may not come natural to people. So a lot of what I have tried to bring together in the book comes from teachers, ideas, mentors that I've been very fortunate to have over the years. One of them is someone named Chris Argyris, who's no longer alive, but he was a professor both at Harvard Education School and Harvard Business School.

39:47He studied how can we help people in organizations do better at learning from each other, especially smart people who he said were some of the worst at learning. And so he developed a set of these ideas. And I had the chance to work with him. And I said to him, basically your exact question. I said, Chris, how long does it take to get good at this stuff or halfway good? And he basically said, he looked at me and he said, about as long as it takes to learn how to play a mediocre game of tennis. which kind of means you're not going to get it in one sitting. You're not going to get it just by taking a quick training on it.

40:14But it also doesn't take a lifetime to get it. You could take 10 tennis lessons or 12 tennis lessons to get out there and be somewhat mediocre if you practice a little bit. And so there's a whole chapter in the book called Make It Your Superpower, which is all about how to actually learn this. And a lot of this is about breaking it down to certain pieces. You don't have to do it all at once. You might say, I'm going to just going to practice asking people to say more. And that's going to be the thing that I'm going to start with. or I'm going to practice just centering in my mind this question of what can I learn from this person?

40:41And I encourage people to start in low stakes situations. So you don't have to be doing this on your highest stakes client meeting or investor meeting or most tense argument with your partner, but start in low stakes situations and let people know that you're trying something new and then ask them how it went. And it's just basically learning anything, a process of practice feedback, practice feedback, practice feedback, and then try the next thing. And you start to build it into your repertoire. Yeah. Something else that I found really useful, I'll just share, is related to something you had described in terms of reflecting back the things that you had heard to people, even if what you're saying is not exactly a proper understanding of what they're saying, which is theories.

41:23I picked up this idea from, or this strategy from Ira Glass, who I didn't, when I was in college, I went and I saw Ira Glass speak, Ira Glass from This American Life, groundbreaking radio show. And he said that one of his favorite interview techniques, which I have stolen and use all the time now, and probably use some version of even in this conversation, is theories, which is that you take something that somebody said, you have to be in the conversation a little bit already. So you're gathering some information, you're making some connections. And then you say, Jeff, that's so interesting that you say that.

41:56I wonder if the reason why that works is actually because of, and then you like say, some other piece of information that you might have gotten from that person or some insight that you have. And you put it to them. And even if you are incorrect, it doesn't matter. Because the point of opposing a theory is not to be correct about the theory. The point of the theory is to encourage them to think on their feet and to process information in front of you. Now, usually I'm doing that for the purposes of an interview. So I'm trying to get somebody to get to an interesting insight. But in any kind of business or any kind of relationship building, you basically want to do the same thing too, right?

42:33You want to signal to people that you're listening deeply, but then you also want to encourage them to go through the process of thinking and processing with you because that's what's fun. What's not fun is standing in front of someone and just reciting stuff over and over again. What's fun is finding someone who you can bounce ideas back and forth of, which means that if I'm posing a theory, I've spent some time processing something and now I'm going to share it with you and you're going to think in front of me and process it back. And now we're going somewhere together. And that, that I have found almost without fail, gets people in different places than we might've started.

43:12Yeah. I think you're modeling a version of that in this very moment as well. But the, I love that for multiple reasons. One is that I think that the ask approach does not require or even imply that all we do is ask questions. There's lots of room in it for us to say our own theories and for us to put out hypotheses and to get people react to. But also, I think what you're saying illustrates that when we're asking people questions, including asking them for what's your reaction to this theory that I just put out there. We're giving them a chance to develop their own thinking too. It's not, they may not know what they actually think until you've provoked or prompted them in some kind of way.

43:46And that's why I think it to the point that in the chat from Allie, this is a mutual thing. This is not just for the benefit of us to extract from them. A good question gives somebody else the chance both to be self-expressed, but to sometimes to find out what they really think in the first place, because they get to hear it come out of their own mouth. Yeah. So Lisa, your comment there just prompted me to think of a meta question that I'm going to ask Jeff. So Lisa just wrote, love how you break this down. So Jeff, a lot of people in this group are also communicators in some form or another. Every entrepreneur has to be.

44:16And you have done a great job of taking what can feel like an abstract concept, coming up with this very practical, organized system that can be taught and discussed. And I'm curious how you came to that because you had to learn this process of asking and you had to understand it. But then it's another thing to start to develop the theory of it and the list of the five and the way in which to pair it. And I'm just curious as someone who's in business and who is in many ways now the business of this, how you have created that structure of communication that you're now able to share this with. Yeah, I appreciate that question.

45:02And it's a good chance for me to actually, I don't know that anyone's posed me that question before. So I'm going to think out loud and develop my own thinking in all of this. So I think it's a few things. In my career over the last 25 plus years, I've often toggled back and forth between business and education, those two sectors. And the amount of time that I've spent in education has taught me that people need things in chunks to learn them. There's literally like a learning science strategy called chunking, which is basically breaking big things up into small pieces so that people can digest those small pieces and hold them in their working memory long enough to be able to practice and process and start to move them into their, hold them in their working memory to move them into their long-term memory.

45:42And so some of that is just what I have been trained and learn to do over time, which is to make things learnable for people and break it down. Some of it is that I have spent years and years just teaching this stuff personally to groups, sometimes in formal training settings, and sometimes in one-on-one coaching of people that I work with. And so I've just gotten a lot of experience seeing how much can people take in and how do you package it in a way that connects and resonates with people. And then also some of it is that I mentioned Chris Argyris as one of the people whose deep body of intellectual work this draws upon.

46:18He founded a field called action science. And there's this very powerful, thick book called action science. It also draws on work from people like David Cantor, who was the founder of the family systems theory. But a lot of I found over and over that a lot of the way that they express that was too academic for most people to take in. And I could never recommend their books because no one would actually make it through the books. And but I knew how powerful their ideas were. And so I was just incredibly motivated to figure out how do we translate something that I know is so incredibly powerful into something that's learnable and then try to bring my own sort of learning skills and knowledge that I've developed over time into that.

46:55And out came this on the other side. It reminds me of a conversation that I had with a guy named Jonathan B. Smith, who is Chris Voss's business partner. If anybody knows Chris Voss, he's now famous within the world of famous negotiators. Don't split the difference. Yeah, for Never Split the Difference. And a former FBI hostage negotiator who wrote a bestselling book. And anyway, so Jonathan B. Smith is his business partner and is the guy who actually built like the business of Chris Voss, built the flywheel. That is that kind of content to business flywheel. And we were talking about my own work and where there are missed opportunities.

47:34And what he basically said is you have a lot of good ideas, but what you don't have is all those ideas organized into what could be a guidebook. There's no, even the book that I wrote, frankly, is not necessarily a guidebook. It's not a step one, step two, step three, step four, step five. And that is, if you can get your ideas to do that, so that there could be a, there could be like a series of worksheets that people could do and a process that people could move through, then it sticks. It like sticks much more than if it's just a bunch of ideas. And I found that to be a, I found that to be a, yeah, Julius's Framework and Organized Systems of Your Thought Process.

48:10That was a real breakthrough moment for me. And I would say I'm still not fully there, but it is now the framework through which I see how to successfully share big ideas in ways that are going to relate to people the most. Yeah, that deeply resonates. And for whatever reason, I have always been motivated by making learning stick, especially if it's learning that I deeply believe in. And in a variety of different contexts, I've just tried to say, like, how do we make this things, sticky, learnable, digestible. Yeah. Jeff, this has been awesome. What is your guidance for anyone who wants to get in touch with you or learn more about what you do?

48:50I love to connect with people. You can easily find me on LinkedIn, Jeff Wetzler. Please just connect with me. I'd love to be in touch. You can also learn more about all these ideas on the website www.askapproach.com. There is a little quiz to help you see which of the skills of the ask approach you're stronger in, which ones you might need to grow in, how good of an asker are you overall, but also lots of articles and resources and podcasts and different things that you can download. And then of course, you can get the book anywhere you find books. Yeah, awesome. And I'm going to edit down this and release it as a podcast as well to help you get the word out more about your work.

49:26So well, I'll give everyone a few more minutes back of their day and I'll find out what my five-year-old wanted. Part of it was apparently to pull a pillow out of the couch that stuck. So we'll take care of that. And anything else, I'll just say for folks, I'll send the video of this out to the full group tomorrow. And then starting next Monday, I'm going to start doing those posts on LinkedIn. So thanks for everyone for chiming in on that. And sorry, Sahara Rose for randomly asking you if you did a thing that you didn't do, because I forgot because I have four hours of sleep in me. And now I'm going to stop talking.

49:58Jeff, wonderful to see you. Thank you so much. I love this conversation. Great to meet you all. And that's our episode. I would love to hear what you think and maybe even about a problem that you solved. You can find me at my website, jasonfeifer.com. J-A-S-O-N-F-E-I-F-E-R.com. Also, I have some more useful stuff for you. I write a newsletter about how to future-proof yourself and become more adaptable and optimistic. I would love for you to sign up. It is at jasonfeifer.bulletin.com. Also, check out my other podcast. It's called Build for Tomorrow. In each episode, I take on some belief that we have that holds us back from progress and show you why it is not as bad as you think.

50:42Problem Solvers is a production of Entrepreneur Media and comes out every Monday morning. So make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss an episode. Thanks to Deepa Shah for production. My name is Jason Pfeiffer. See you next week.