Jeff Wetzler, Author of ASK

  Welcome back, friends, to our podcast, Your World of Creativity, where we explore not only how to get inspired with new ideas, but how to organize the ideas and pitch the ideas and get the work out into the world. And that's what we're all about. And I'm so glad today our guest is going to talk about this idea that sounds so simple.

It's like asking for directions when you're on a road trip, but we don't take the time and we drive around. We waste a lot of time. We waste a lot of fuel. And finally we say, we've got to get some answers. And you know what we do ask. And that's the title of our guest new book. Ask Jeff Wetzler is my guest.

Jeff, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Mark. It's great to be with you. I love that metaphor, by the way.

We've all experienced it, right? Either the receiving, the giving, the chiding, the, it's some, somewhere along the way. Why don't you just ask? It could be at the department store. That's right. Many of our listeners know what a department store is.

Others are like, what are you talking about? But this idea that we have to stop and ask, it sounds so simple and yet it's maybe so hard for some people.

That's right. And when you ask someone for directions, maybe you're not just going to find out the fastest route, but also, Hey, by the way, there's this great coffee shop that you should stop by.

Or did you know this town was known for this or all kinds of other little gems that are hidden in people's minds that we would never find out if we didn't ask.

So true. And by the way, ask has been just published by the Hachette Group. And I love the subtitle Jeff, tap into the hidden wisdom of people around you for unexpected breakthroughs in leadership and life. It's a mouthful, but every one of those phrases, we're tapping into hidden wisdom. Why don't we just take advantage of other people's experience? What do you think the block is to asking?

There's a few different blocks. The first one is very often we don't even realize there's something to ask about because we're not curious. We, we have ways of kind of sizing up people and sizing up situations And very quickly concluding, I know what's going on here. I know what they know or they don't know.

And we feel certain. And we, when we feel certain, that's one of the fastest things that shuts down our curiosity. And so we just walk through the world, not even realizing, Hey, I could ask for directions. I could ask for help. I could ask for this person what they know, because I just I'm in my bubble of knowing what I know and being certain about that.

So there, there is that sometimes we don't ask because we think that, It's going to feel too sensitive to the other person for us to ask them that question. If we ask them, how come they did this? Or what, how did they get to this point? Or that we think that they're going to be burdened or offended by being asked.

And there's really a lot of interesting research that shows. It turns out people actually appreciate being asked by and large. And so we often over attribute. Sensitivity when in fact people are dying to be asked a question. So that, that's another reason, another reason is that we, some, we, asking is a skill.

And so we, most of us have not been trained in actually, how do you ask questions in effective ways? And so without that training, we don't do it. And then of course, I think, that the driving directions is a perfect metaphor for sometimes we ask, we don't ask. Because we, it's too prideful.

We think, it would expose my own ignorance and somehow exposing my ignorance is a bad thing. And so that we let that stop us from asking.

So true. In fact, as I was reading this model, making, asking, Yeah. I think about that pride part. It's you gotta know that, or, I'm going to be too embarrassed to ask somebody like Jeff, how did you get, the Harvard business school professor to write your, yeah.

So there's this idea that you ought to know this already maybe or there would be an embarrassment.

And I think we live in, our culture can condition us and send the message that somehow not knowing something is a sign of weakness. When I actually think not knowing something is a sign of being a learner and being willing to say that out loud.

And there's, most of us don't know most things. And so if we could just own that, how much better could we, could we learn from one another?

And I think about, we've been talking about these everyday analogies and they're good to frame it, but let's get down to there.

Sometimes when you're saying, how do I get a business loan, how do I start an LLC and what are the implications of that for my business, for my taxes, for my, legal run, but sometimes, how do I get a record on Spotify? Literally, you've got to ask these how to questions because you've got to take your business or your practice forward.

Yeah, and I think when, when we're stuck on those, how do I do any one of those things that you said one of the shifts that I like to encourage people to make is to shift it to who could I ask, who might know that even with my son who is very interested in science and has a ton of questions.

I remember there was a time when he was really stuck on how did electromagnets work, and damn, if I remember how they work, I couldn't answer his questions. But I did say, who could we ask? And then we realized that down the street from us is someone who's a physics teacher.

And so we trundled on down the street and knocked on his door. And, one of the lessons I hoped to, to leave my son with was not so much about electromagnets, but that when you're stuck, ask yourself who might know and then you could start from there.

So good. And as we look at your five step approach to asking, it does tend to break it down.

I guess it's like cutting the meat up, you're really saying, gosh, now, if you look at it that way, I could do it.

Yes. When you take this practice of learning from other people, and you break it into the components so we can get into them each one is learnable.

And it's, it's not it's not mysterious. It's not something that some people are good at and other people are never going to be good at. We can all master this. We can all get better at it if we unpack it and understand what goes into it.

Take us through it. We've been talking about curiosity and that we just have to have this open mind.

And we also broach this idea of making it safe. Where do we go from there to get better at this?

Yeah, so what you're alluding to are the first two steps of the ask approach and maybe to back up for one second, the ask approach is a set of five practices that when we put them together, give us the greatest chance of really tapping into what the people around us need to know.

Think, feel, and know. And, too often people around us don't tell us those things for all kinds of reasons, which we can also get into. But that's why I call it hidden wisdom, because we're surrounded by people who know things and who have ideas and perspectives and feedback that they just don't tell us.

And so to go through the steps that you, as you mentioned, the number one is choosing curiosity. That's really awakening ourselves to want to know what we can learn from other people. That's really saying to ourselves, let me plant one question in the front of my mind, which is what can I learn from this person?

And when that's the question in the front of our mind, all kinds of other questions gets pushed to the side. Like how do I show that I'm smart? Or how do I prove that I'm right? Or how do I get out of here? That, all that stuff gets pushed away. Okay. When we say, what can I learn from this person?

And then all of a sudden inside, what can I learn from this person? Are all kinds of other questions like what experiences have they had? What do they know that I don't know? What might they see that I'm not seeing? How else might they be looking at this situation? What advice might they have? All kinds of things we can learn.

I believe we can learn something from anyone. But we have to choose curiosity to do that. And it is a choice. It's not, it's a choice that's always available to us. If we put that question in the center of our minds. So that's number one, choose curiosity. Number two, as we were starting to allude to is called make it safe.

Because just because I'm curious to learn from you doesn't guarantee you're going to share with me, especially if you don't feel safe. Telling me your truth, if you feel like telling Jeff, your truth might make me defensive or might hurt me or might burden me or might, make me punish you, there's, there are potential into our relationship.

So if I'm going to make it safe, I have got to create a level of connection with you. And I got to do it on your terms, where and when and how you feel comfortable, not how I feel comfortable. I've got to open up myself. Meaning I got to say to you here, here, I don't know the directions to this place.

Here's why I'm asking. I'm lost. When we can admit that to other people, that makes it much safer for them and also makes them not have to guess our agenda. And part of making it safe is also what I call radiating resilience, which is really demonstrating to the other person. I can handle your truth, no matter what.

I'm not going to crumble. I'm not going to, I'm not fragile. I'm not going to blame you for my reactions. If I have reactions, I'm resilient to it. And so if we can do those things, if we can create that kind of connection, open up, radiate resilience, that goes a long way to making it safer for the other person.

Then now that it's safe, we can now then get into the questions. And so number three is what I call pose quality questions. And I define a quality question simply as a question that helps us learn something important from someone else. And that's different than most of the questions that we ask, even though they have question marks at the end.

So many of the questions we ask are what I call crummy questions. Maybe they are questions like, Hey, this is what I think. Isn't that right? And when you say, isn't that right? The other, what's the other person supposed to do is that, no, you're, you're an idiot or no, I just that's a crummy question or another crummy question is don't you think it would be better if we went to this or, have you ever considered seeing a therapist or, all those kinds of questions are questions that are trying to maneuver somebody to an answer.

Those are not quality questions. And by the way, people feel manipulated. They can tell when you're doing that. Quality questions are questions that really allow the full, the full honesty of a response from someone and so in, in this part of the book, I give a whole taxonomy of different strategies of quality questions.

I think of them the same way that I think a surgeon might think of their scalpel and all the other tools, depending on what you're trying to do, we've got a different tool or different question strategy. One example of a commonly overlooked. Quality question strategy is what I call requesting reactions because so often we will say what we think and we assume if the other person has a reaction, especially if they disagree, they're going to tell me, but for all kinds of reasons, including the fact that people often don't feel safe, you're not going to find that out.

They're not going to necessarily tell you. And so requesting reactions is simply saying to the other person, Hey, this is what I think. 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 overlooking? Any one of those kinds of questions can be requesting reactions and you learn so much more from the other person than if you just say your piece and don't ask that kind of question.

Exactly. So good.

That's number three. Once we ask the question, then it comes down to how well we listened. And so number four is called listen to learn and listening to learn is very different than listening to prove a point, listening to look smart, listening to show you're right, listening to, whatever it's a true intention.

We are all much worse at listening than we think we are. That's been documented in research. There's a huge difference between thinking we're listening and actually hearing what someone is trying to tell us. I, for the book, I interviewed all kinds of professional listeners.

including psychotherapists, including journalists. Journalists are basically professional listeners. I remember interviewing one award winning journalist named Jenny Anderson, who would say to me that after she would interview someone she was reporting on, she would go back and replay the recording because she would always record the interviews and she would replay it two, three, four, sometimes five times.

And every time she would re listen to it, She would hear something really important that she just hadn't heard the first, the previous times and I thought to myself, if she is a professional listener and it's missing so much, imagine the rest of us mere mortals who are not professional listeners who don't record our conversations, how much just goes right by us that we don't hear.

And so listening to learn is really list is listening to pick up on all that's essential. And I talk about, we can triple the amount of information that we hear. listen for if we listen through multiple channels. One channel is what's the content of someone, what someone's saying, that's the information, the facts, the claims, the arguments, all that.

But we can also listen for the emotion. Are they feeling frustrated? Are they feeling demoralized? Are they feeling exasperated? People express emotion, display emotion. Sometimes that's the most important channel to listen through. And then the third channel is the actions that someone's taking.

Are they pushing back on us? Are they asking questions? Are they repeating themselves? Are, are they making a, making a proposal to us? Those are, so content, emotion actions. I know you have a lot of musicians that are part of the listening. I think that listening through these three channels is a little bit like what a music aficionado might do if they're listening for the percussion and then listening for the vocals and then listening for the harmony and you can isolate each one, but then when you put it together.

How much richer, an experience you have listening to a piece of music, the same is true with people.

So true. And I think about even, I may not be a professional listener, but a a podcast or an interview where I've done market research. And you're absolutely right that even the act of writing down what the other person is saying to go back and look at it later this idea of active listening that you really show the other person that you are listening yeah, it does help a lot.

I totally agree. One of the I think best strategies for active listening that I've come across that I write about in the book is a strategy that simply paraphrasing and testing. So let me just paraphrase what I heard you say. And then let me test. To what extent did I get it right? And what would you modify?

And what I took away that strategy is so underutilized, but it's, I think it's one of the most powerful things we can do when we're listening to someone, partly because it gives us a chance to correct our misunderstandings. And I will say when I do it at least 50 percent of the time, people will say.

He didn't get it quite right, or yes, that was right. But there's not, that makes me realize there's more I wanted to say, there's something else that I did. And yeah, it, so it does that. It also slows down the conversation and especially in a tense, heated conversation. If we make that move and we just say, look, before, Before I give you my counter argument and I push back on you, let me just check if I understood what you said.

It just, it just slows everything down, but it also sends a message to other people. I care enough about your, understanding you that I'm going to take the time to try to restate it and then literally check that I get it right. And I think it just changes the chemistry or the relational dynamic.

in a conversation when one person says, I really want to check that I understand you right before I, before we go on. So

these are much better responses. And you talked about crummy questions and weak, leading questions. I think some of the responses you're talking about too are much better than, Oh yeah, that's what I thought.

Or, yeah, I already knew that or tell me something I didn't know.

Exactly. Yeah. Those kinds of responses are not likely to lead the other person to keep sharing with you. It shuts it down. It shuts it right down. Yeah. And then just to complete the ask approach, the number five, the number is my favorite.

It's called reflect and reconnect. It's my favorite because my own, personal and professional passion in life is learning. And reflection is the key to learning. Reflection is what makes the difference between having an experience versus having experience and actually getting some insight out of it.

And I think a lot of people think that reflection is, some mysterious or esoteric thing. We, we have to go on a meditation retreat to do or whatever, but reflection can be very simple and practical. I talk about it as, a two step process. I call it SIFT IT and TURN IT. So SIFT IT is just simply to say, alright, let me look back at my notes, or let me just listen to what I heard, or think about what I heard.

Maybe they told me 20 things. What, what are the three most important things I heard? So let me just SIFT IT, and what else can I let go of and release? And then TURN IT is just asking myself a couple of questions what does this make me want to do? What steps should I take based on this?

What is, how does this change my story about the other person? And also, is there anything in here that's like pushing me to think about my deeper stuff, my, my own biases, my own assumptions, my ways of being, you just turn it each time by asking one of those questions and you've gotten some meaningful reflection.

And then I say it's reflect and reconnect because that reconnection is closing the loop with the other person. It's going back to the other person and saying. Thank you for sharing what you shared, especially thank you for taking a risk if it felt hard to do that and let me just tell you here's what I learned from you and here's what it makes me want to do and here's how I'm going to change as a person based on sharing that with you and I think that has such a profound impact on the other person on the relationship because it's so rare that people come back to us and say I learned something from you and here's what it is and here's what I'm going to do and thank you.

It lets the other person, first of all, correct. If there's anything you took away that was wrong, but also it, it makes them feel like they didn't waste their time and that you really value them. And I think over time increases their desire to give you better and better directions. The next time you ask a question of them.

Yeah. And I think sometimes people, I only want to ask people that might agree with them, or that have achieved that have won. I had a mentor once that says you can learn from everybody, even those that you don't like and you don't think are doing it right or may have failed. Yes. I don't know how many times people have asked me, I go let me tell you when it didn't work.

And that's just as valuable. Sometimes

you need to know what doesn't work. That's the answer. One step closer to know what worked and people who have failed have learned something yet that you haven't yet learned. Yeah. And so really tapping into that I think is especially important. I completely agree with your mentor.

I think there's something interesting and important from, from everyone because everyone has lived a different human life than we have. And that's fascinating.

What a fantastic model, and obviously it makes a terrific book, but I also wanted to turn the page a little bit and talk about the process, your creative process, of writing the book.

How was that experience for you, of capturing all this and then trying to publish it?

It's a thank you for that question. I I don't usually get that question. And so this gives me a chance to just reflect on it myself. I think it was it's been a really interesting process. I probably have had a version of this book in my head for 30 years.

I literally can still remember. I was working out of the gym, swimming underwater when the first seed of the idea came into my mind to say, let me write a book. And my original title for the book was. was called the unspoken, which was really focusing on what are people not telling us. And that was actually, I actually wrote the book proposal around the unspoken.

And then my agent gave me feedback and said that sounds too negative. People want to know what can I do? They don't just want to know what the problem is. And so I pivoted a little bit, but the first section of the book is still called the unspoken because it starts by talking about what, what's the problem that we're trying to solve.

And then, for me I have an incredible agent and he gave me Just an immense amount of critical feedback. He, I would send him, draft after draft that he would just basically pile criticism onto me. And it took a little bit of, I had to steal myself and I had to keep saying to myself.

He's only doing this because he believes in you. If he didn't, if he didn't give you that, he wouldn't waste his time, but I had to remind myself of that because I, sometimes I took it personally and it, it felt like, Oh man, do I have anything to say here? But my writing upgraded a lot throughout that process.

And then I also discovered about myself. I always work better in teams than by myself. And so I pulled together a writing team an incredible person, Emily Irving, who helped me with the research and a lot of the idea development and the writing and also a developmental editor, Sarah Grace.

And so we were a team and it was, I don't know that I would have had it in me. To write it. If I had to sit in a corner all by myself and write it I would, the ideas would not have been as good. The writing certainly would not have been as good. And so for me, the creative process is a lot of bouncing things around with other people.

What do you think of this? Trying it out, refining it. And that, that made it both much stronger, but for me also much more pleasurable to do that.

I think that's going to be useful for authors listening to the program. It's like, how do you build this team? I also think about, when you actually pick up these books, you have a great forward written by a Harvard business school professor, as I mentioned, Amy Edmondson, and you've received good reviews from notables like Adam Grant and.

Kim Scott and Jim Collins, you're on a book list of the next big ideas club. Again, where does asking yield these kinds of results?

I will say it all came from asking and, in this case, it's asking, in the context of requesting, as opposed to just asking a question to learn from the other person.

But, Amy Edmondson, who is just, a luminary in the field of organizational behavior and super well known for concepts like psychological safety. I have, I've had the opportunity To work with her and to know her for, almost two decades now and our, our work intersects and our networks intersect very much around an early place that I worked in a place called Monitor Group and some amazing people and mentors there.

And she, so I went back to her. And originally, we just talked about some of the ideas for the book, and she was incredibly helpful, especially in the section around making it safe, because that relates so much to her work and then ultimately, she just very generously said she would consider to write the forward and then read the manuscript to see if it was a good fit and then came through and thankfully did that.

But I'm very I'm really grateful to people and every single one of those people that you named and the other people who endorsed the book. There's a similar story of, some common time that we spent together or some, some people that we know together who, who put us back in touch.

Even how we were introduced to each other my former guest, Adam Alter reached out and said, Hey, what a great conversation. Would you like to talk to another friend of mine? Exactly. I think that's how it goes. I think about that as the hidden breakthroughs. And it's leadership in life. It's it's one thing.

It's I'm doing research. So I'm asking. It's another to say, I just want to open up my eyes to the rest of the world, maybe, and meet people I couldn't have met before. And what a great platform to do that.

And you just never know who knows what, who knows who, who can, who can help, who can contribute, who you're going to learn from.

It's, to me that's one of the most exciting parts of this whole journey.

I try not to call it advice and dispense advice on this show, but what great lessons learned. And as you think about others that might be listening to the show, it's interconnected world. We could really ask almost anybody, anything right now.

It seemed like it was so hard. Before, if I had to send a letter and wait for a reply, or if I had to make the dreaded phone call, and they never call me back, and all that kind of stuff. But what are some of the creative ways we can reach out to ask?

Do you mean like to people that we don't necessarily know?

Sure. It's I want to talk to some I don't know, how did you produce this album? And I want to meet new people and, ask somebody in Europe what they're thinking. It's not as hard as it sounds, is it? It's

not as hard as it sounds. You can, obviously you can just track them down on social media.

You can find out who you know in common and ask that person to, to see if they would connect you. One of the things that I'm noticing, even as I'm going more public with this book, is that there are people I've never met who are consistently commenting on my posts, who are consistently for, sharing things and forwarding things.

And all of a sudden, their name is now becoming more familiar to me. And if they were to reach out to me, it would be a, I'd be much more receptive than if I had never heard of that before. And so all of that, there's all kinds of interesting ways to follow and support people and start to become more visible to that person.

Yes. And I'm reminded of a quote from Jack Canfield, the great chicken soup for the soul writer.

Yeah.

In order to G E T you have to ask. That's right. If you're going to get anything. In life you're going to have to ask.

And you never know. You probably, the chances may be higher than not that you're going to get a no.

It's not zero. And the more you try, the more, the greater, the greater the number of yeses that you're going to get. And so I completely agree and there's no harm in asking.

I really take away from our conversation, Jeff, the asking quality questions, maybe spend a little bit more time thinking about what you want to ask, and how you ask it.

It's a good lesson.

Exactly. And it's a very learnable thing.

Folks, my guest has been Jeff Wetzler. He's the author of a terrific new book called ask, and we can learn a lot just from the subhead tap into the hidden wisdom of people around you for unexpected breakthroughs in leadership and life.

Jeff, thanks for being on the show.

I really enjoyed the conversation, especially the part around the creative process and I just love listening to your show for that reason.

Yeah we can learn a lot. That's for sure. Listeners, come back again next time. We've traveled to New York today to talk to Jeff Wetzler.

We're going to continue our Around the World journeys talking to authors, singer songwriters we talked to animators. We've talked to a celebrity dentist, all the people that can help us and I've asked some questions and if you ever have questions you want to ask just reach out to me and we'll share it with our guests.

So come back again next time. We'll continue our around the world journeys to unlock your world of creativity.