Jeff Wetzler: An Actionable Guide to Unlocking Learning and Personal Growth

Episode recap:

This week Marcel sits down with Dr. Jeff Wetzler, author of Ask: Tap Into the Hidden Wisdom of People Around You for Unexpected Breakthroughs In Leadership and Life. In this enlightening conversation, Marcel and Jeff discussed the importance of asking the right questions and being curious in leadership and life. Jeff introduces a powerful scientific method called The Ask Approach™, a practical framework for learning from others. They explored the challenges that prevent people from sharing insights and emphasized the need for creating psychological safety, posing quality questions, active listening, and reflection to unlock human potential. The conversation covered various aspects of effective communication and learning, highlighting the significance of curiosity, empathy, and gratitude in both personal and professional settings.

Bio:

Dr. Jeff Wetzler is an expert on adult learning and leadership development. He is co-founder and a board member of Transcend, a leader in education innovation. Transcend works with hundreds of schools and districts in over thirty U.S. states and has a vibrant network of 10,000+ innovators. Jeff is also former Chief Learning Officer of Teach For America, and is a two-time author. Jeff’s career is dedicated to unlocking human potential by helping people learn more deeply and transform their mindsets to realize bold new possibilities for themselves, their organizations, and their communities. Jeff holds a Doctorate in Adult Learning and Leadership from Columbia University.

Quotes:

• "If you are not embarrassed by who you were last year, you're not learning fast enough."
• "There is something important to learn from every single person—even people we disagree with, even people who are our enemies, even people we think are dangerous." 

Takeaways:

• Practice curiosity by asking "What might I be missing?" before jumping to conclusions about people or situations.
• Create psychological safety in conversations by meeting people where they're comfortable and showing you genuinely want to learn from them.
• Develop listening skills by paying attention to content, emotions, and actions during conversations, not just words.

Timestamps:

[00:08] Why We Struggle to Ask the Questions That Matter

[02:44] Meet the Mind Behind the Ask Approach to Learning

[05:01] What Drives Dr. Wetzler to Keep Learning

[06:11] Why People Hold Back What They Really Think

[11:51] Five Ways to Get Honest Insight from Others

[21:38] How to Make People Feel Safe Enough to Share

[25:17] Asking Better Questions That Actually Teach You

[28:42] Listening That Builds Trust Instead of Tension

[31:25] What to Do After Someone Opens Up to You

[35:00] How to Make Good Conversations Feel Natural

[37:42] Dr. Wetzler’s Biggest Hope for How We Grow Next

Conclusion:

The Ask approach shows that many communication problems come from fear, assumptions, and not taking time to understand others. When people feel safe to speak openly, real conversations can happen. Asking thoughtful questions and truly listening—not just to words, but to tone and body language—can lead to stronger trust and clarity. This kind of communication builds deeper connections and helps avoid misunderstandings. It's a simple but powerful shift in how we relate to one another.

Links/Resources:

Book website: https://www.askapproach.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-wetzler-9ba3824/ 

Transcript

Marcel Schwantes 00:08

Hey, gang, welcome back. So too often, we don't find out what's truly on other people's hearts and minds because we don't know how to ask the right questions in the right way? Well, I just gave you a little preview of today's show, and so with that thought in mind, why is it, why is it that we don't ask the right questions? Is it that we're not curious enough? Maybe we're afraid to ask the right questions, because for some of us, it's hard to have these the hard to share things sometimes that are so personal to us, right? And it's so it's hard for other people to even venture into asking us the right questions, because maybe they're afraid, right? And then sometimes, you know, we may not activate our listening skills, right, to truly listen, to understand and learn from someone maybe that has a different point of view than our own. 

So much about asking questions these days, which I feel is a huge necessity, is about learning, right? It's because we're in this age where we don't dialog anymore, so we're divided among so many lines that we're not coming to the table. So it comes down to the relational stuff. And the relational stuff is really the hard stuff these days. And so whatever the case may be, for you, where you're not really activating listening, you're not being curious enough to ask questions or the right questions. Well, a book released last year called Ask, tap into the hidden, the wisdom of people around you for unexpected breakthroughs in leadership and life. The author, Dr Jeff Wetzler, brings you this, this powerful method that he calls the well, what else? The Ask approach, which is based on a simple premise that tapping into what other people truly think and know and feel. 

Well, Jeff calls it a superpower, and because we're not doing that right? Well, some of us don't know how to do that right, so it's going to be a superpower for you when you when you do it the right way. But not only that, because a lot of you are listener or listeners are leaders, it's going to also do the same thing for your team or your whole organization, if you have the skills to do it right. And Dr. Jeff Wetzler is going to show us how by walking us through the Ask approach. And he is our guest today. A little bit about Jeff. Dr. Wetzler is an expert on Adult Learning and Leadership Development. He is co-founder and a board member of Transcend, a leader in education innovation. Transcend works with hundreds of schools and districts in over 30 US states and has a vibrant network of 10,000 plus innovators. 

Jeff is also former chief learning officer of Teach for America, and is a two-time author. Jeff's career is dedicated to unlocking human potential by helping people learn more deeply and transform their mindsets to realize bold, new possibilities for themselves, their organizations and their communities. Jeff holds a doctorate in Adult Learning and Leadership from Columbia University, and he lives in New York with his wife, Dr. Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler, whom, by the way, I have also featured on the podcast some years back. He also has two teenage teenagers at home, as well as a dog named breeze. Can't wait to ask him about that. So, Dr. Jeff Wetzler, now joins us. Welcome to the love and action podcast.

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 04:08

Oh, thank you for that very kind introduction. Marcel, it is wonderful to be with you.

Marcel Schwantes 04:12

What kind of breed is Breeze? 

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 04:17

Breeze is a Toy Goldendoodle, and so she is super cute. She has been with us for almost four years now and has transformed our family through her presence.

Marcel Schwantes 04:30

That's awesome, as most pets do, of course, family members, right?

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 04:34

Exactly. We're better for her off for getting to live with her. 

Marcel Schwantes 04:38

That's good. Looking forward to this discussion. So we start like this. For those of those of you that are not familiar with Jeff, here's the question, Jeff, you ready? I'm ready. What's your story?

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 04:51

I love that question. I would say probably the theme at the center of my story is my i. Deep passion for learning, for human growth, for whatever reason, and I don't exactly know how to explain it, I am just so learning matters to me so much. I mean, I love to learn myself, but even more importantly, when I get opportunities to create learning experiences for other people, deep, powerful, transformative learning experiences. When I see people grow to be their best selves, the best versions of themselves and stretch to things they never thought was possible, that is what lights me up. Yeah. And so I have spent my, you know, my life in various different settings, you know, often toggling back and forth between education settings and business settings, pursuing this quest of learning and so that's what lights me up.

Marcel Schwantes 05:50

Yeah, that's great, and that's so evident by everything you do. I mean, even as I read your bio, everything's about learning, right? Your doctorate, and the book that you just wrote, that we're going to talk about. There's so much learning involved in the in your ask approach. Well, anyway, before we dug in, dig in there. So here's what I'd like to ask you, is kind of just do the 30,000-foot level view of the book right before we dive in. In your own words. I mean, how would you describe it? Yeah. So,

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 06:20

I mean, for I mean, I think the first thing to say is, what is the problem that the book is solving? Because a lot of people said to me, you have to write a whole book about asking questions. I mean, don't we all ask questions like, what's the big deal? And so I think it's worth dwelling on the problem and the possibility. And basically the idea is that every single one of us, you and me and our colleagues and our friends, we are surrounded by people in our lives, those might be our customers. Those might be our clients, our coworkers, our bosses, our investors, the people we manage, whoever it is, we are surrounded by people in our lives who have insights and they have feedback and they have perspectives and they have life experiences. And if we could actually really find out some of the most important things that they knew and that they thought and that they felt, we would be way better off together. We would make better decisions together. We would innovate better together. We would save time. Our relationships would be deeper and more fulfilling. 

And the problem is far too often we don't actually find out some of the most important things going on in their hearts and minds, because they don't tell us, and so we miss out on all those opportunities, and we pay a lot of costs for it. Yeah, on the flip side, I think it's possible to overcome that, and I have been very fortunate in my career to be exposed to ideas and tools and deep mentors who have gifted me a set of very, very powerful concepts and approaches for how to do, how to overcome just that very problem. And so in the book, I have put those together, backed them up with scientific research, tested them out in various different contexts to try to create this approach called the Ask approach, that gives people the very best chance of really tapping into the most important insights and ideas and feedback and perspectives of the people around us.

Marcel Schwantes 08:12

Yeah, yeah, okay, I want to still set the table by outlining, sort of like the problem. And you kind of start out, you mentioned it already, but you labeled it the invisible problem, right? It's defense that are unspoken. I mean, why don't people tell you just what you need to know, what's going on there? 

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 08:30

I wish that they did. I also wish that we could read their minds, that we wouldn't even have to, you know, have them tell us. Unfortunately, neither of those things typically happens. And you know, as I'll say, as a leader, I've been an operating leader in a variety of different roles. I have so often thought to myself, why didn't they just tell me? Why didn't they tell me they were struggling with this? I would have rolled up my sleeves. I would have helped them. Why didn't they tell me there was a way I could have done it better. Why didn't they tell me that this plan was not going to work? And so I've obsessed over that very question, and you know, turns out that there's a number of reasons why people don't actually tell us. Number one is fear. And you know, I when I'm working with groups, I literally did this, you know, multiple times this week with groups. I say to people, why don't you say things to other people? Why do you keep things unspoken? 

And you know, the biggest reason people say is, well, I'm afraid of how they're gonna react. Yeah, I'm afraid they're gonna get defensive. I'm afraid it's gonna hurt their feelings. I'm afraid it's gonna piss them off. I'm afraid they're gonna punish me for it, or I'm afraid I'm gonna look stupid, or I'm afraid it's gonna put tension in our relationship. All of that is fear, and that fear is very real and it's understandable, and it stops people from, you know, from saying what they really think. That's not the only reason there are, you know, another reason is that people say I'm just busy, you know, I'm working hard, I'm stressed. If I say it, then they might want to have a conversation about it, then they might want to ask me to do something about it that, you know, it's going to take me so much time just to say it, and so it's just faster to keep my mouth shut. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes people don't have the word. Words to say it. They might have it as a gut feeling in their body, an intuition, or maybe the words that occur to them, they know these are not going to be helpful words, these are not going to be kind words. So if I can't think of anything kind of see, I'm going to keep my mouth shut. 

Sometimes it's actually a math problem I learned in doing the research for the book that the human brain can think at 900 words a minute. But the human mouth can generally say 125 words a minute. So if you think about it, any given minute that you're talking to someone, you're hearing less than 15% of what they're really thinking, not because they're holding back from you. It's just the math doesn't work. The straw that comes out our mouth is too narrow relative to all the things going on in our heads. But there's one last reason why people hold back, which I think is the most actionable, which is often people don't tell you things because they don't know you want to know. They don't realize you care. They don't think that they that their views are valued by you or by the team or by the organization. And so in the face of that, why bother? So you put all those reasons together, I think it's kind of over determined. It's like more likely than not for anyone or more than one of those reasons, that people are gonna hold back or hold back certain important parts of what they have to say.

Marcel Schwantes 11:13

Yeah. And I'm sensing that that happens on both sides of the table. Definitely some of these blind spots or a lack of awareness, is going.

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 11:21

Yeah, every, I mean, every single one of us has, you know, our speech bubble and our thought bubble, and so in any conversation, both people are saying things to each other, and both people got things that are going on in the unspoken. And quite often, the things that are going on in the unspoken are the most important things going on in a conversation, but they don't get put out on the table so they can't get dealt with.

Marcel Schwantes 11:42

Yeah, okay, besides all those things, are there any other quote problems that keep us from, you know, coming to the table, asking good questions, showing curiosity, etc.

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 11:55

Well, I mean, I'll just say that everything I just described is exacerbated across lines of difference. So if we're talking about power differences, if we're talking about cultural differences, age differences, gender differences, racial it makes it even more complex. And so the dynamics of difference are very real in all of this too, right?

Marcel Schwantes 12:16

Yeah, people in power usually have they Well, because they hold that power over somebody else that's inferior, the person that's lower. It in the ranks, may not feel like they are important enough, or have the skills to know how to ask or what works to choose and all that. Right? They may they're intimidated. There's the fear aspect again.

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 12:38

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Marcel Schwantes 12:41

Okay, all right, should we go into, all right, we established a problem. I love the show. Is really now is coming up with solutions, right? We establish the problems. Should we dive into your framework? Would this be a good transition? Perfect, perfect.

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 12:54

Yeah. I mean, this is, you know, I was motivated to write the book, not just to expose the problem, but really to say, what can we do about it? How do we overcome it? And so that's where the Ask approach comes in. 

Marcel Schwantes 13:05

All right, so listeners, here's how we here's how we're going to do this. Okay? Jeff's going to sort of paint a broad stroke, or brush stroke, of the five steps of the Ask approach. And then we're just going to drill down Jeff into each one. So paint a picture what? What is the Ask approach?

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 13:25

The Ask approach is five practices, each one backed, each one based in research, each one tested in action across many different contexts, that, when put together, give you the greatest chance to learn from other people. So I'll just say them quickly, then we can go deeper. Number one is called choose curiosity. It's all about really making sure that we are in a place of authentically wanting to learn from someone else. Number two, make it safe. This is actually about lowering the fear, lowering the barriers that other people feel to tell us their truth, especially if it's a hard truth to say, yeah. Number three is called pose quality questions. This is the heart of the Ask approach, and this is really about designing and choosing questions that are most likely to get us the learning, the information, the insights that we're hoping to get. 

Not all questions do that, but quality questions can then, once you ask the question, it all comes down to how well you listen to the answer. Do you actually hear the important things that there are to find out? And so step four is called listen to learn. And then finally, Step five is called reflect and reconnect. This is about processing what you heard. How do you actually take it in? How do you get the right meaning? How do you get the right takeaways from it? And then how do you close the loop with the other person and say, This is what I heard from you, this is what I learned from you, and thank you. And here's what I mean. Here's what I'm going to go do with it as well. So at the highest level, those are the five practices of the Ask approach. 

Marcel Schwantes 14:54

Okay, let's dive into the first practice. Why did you start with curiosity?

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 14:59

Okay. Right? If you are not genuinely curious, then everything else in the Ask approach will be inauthentic. It will come off as a tactic or a gimmick, because people will think, Well, he says he's asking me a question, but I can tell he doesn't really care. I can tell he's not interested. I can tell he just wants me to do what he wants to do. So you got to be authentically curious. And if you can get yourself to a place of being genuinely curious, you will radiate an energy that leads people to want to share with you. They will know that you're curious. And I look at curiosity not as a trait that some people have and other people lack, not as a state of mind that we're stuck in, but truly as a choice, as a decision that is always available to us, a decision to truly want to learn from the other person.

Marcel Schwantes 15:50

So if it's a choice, then anybody can activate their curiosity.

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 15:55

Yes, anyone can activate their curiosity. And I will say we all have it in us because we were all kids once, and kids are the most naturally curious of all the people. I mean by age four, kids are asking like, 400 questions a day. You know, the research shows it. You know, it's in us over time, sometimes that curiosity fades or gets suppressed, but we can all access the natural curiosity that we have. And one of the there's many different, what I'm calling gateways to curiosity, or different, different doors you can walk through to choose curiosity, but one of the most important things you want to get to is essentially centering one question in your mind. And that question is, what can I learn from this person? If you can center this question, what can I learn from this person? 

It starts to push away other questions like, why are they so stupid? Or, how do I get them to do what I want them to do? Or, how do I get out of here? It really it starts to open up space for many more questions to come to your mind. Questions like, Well, what do they see then I don't see. What's their life experience been like, how do they look at this situation? What do they need? What do they struggle with? How can I help them? How might I be impacting them? All different kinds of things start to come to your mind when you begin to center on, what can I learn? And I would say there is something vital interesting that we can learn from every single person, even people we disagree with, even people who are our enemies, even people we think are dangerous, there's something important to learn from every single person. And so that's at the heart of this first step.

Marcel Schwantes 17:29

Yeah, here's my takeaway from that, is that it also it, it, it breaks the pattern of jumping into the false conclusions or false assumptions. And because of this world that where we follow narratives, we have confirmation bias, and we don't know it. And so in being more curious and asking cure and asking curious questions to learn from somebody else that it thinks differently or acts differently than our than ourselves, I think we break that the we break the cycle of confirmation bias that kind of keeps us a one-track mind.

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 18:05

Totally and, you know, in the book, I call it the certainty loop, where basically our prior assumptions shape what information we focus on and how we interpret that information, and then we draw conclusions, and those conclusions reinforce our original assumptions. And so we're just stuck, I mean, and that's where we get the kind of mental phenomenon of like, there she goes again. This is how it always is, because it's literally what we've brought to the situation in terms of our own assumptions, and then our conclusions have just gone ahead and sealed that cycle again. And so knowing that we that we can get stuck in the certainty loop is the first step of actually getting more curious, because we can say, oh, what might, what might I be missing? Right? What else is? Another way to look at this situation, not to say that my story or conclusion is necessarily wrong, but to say maybe there's more going on here than I'm realizing. Maybe there's other stories here, and how can I hold my story just a little more loosely to make room to learn something else,

Marcel Schwantes 19:01

Right, right. You don't have, you're not you're not forsaking your belief system. You're just broadening your perspective a little more. Yeah, you know, outside the lines. So, yes, yes, exactly, all right, so are there good curiosity questions that we want to ask to, you know, increase our awareness, or.

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 19:21

Yeah, I mean that. So the there's a set of questions that I call curiosity sparks. And these are questions like, what might I have overlooked? What I'd be missing? What else is going on here? So that's one category. Second category is, how else might someone interpret the situation? How else might someone look at the situation? Another is, how might I be impacting the other person? Because typically we can see how they impact us, but we don't necessarily think about, how are we contributing to the challenge? So if you even just hold just those three and apply them in any situation, you will start to get a little more you. Curious a little more looseness in your story. Sometimes you need to ask a friend or mentor or coach to help you consider these questions. Sometimes we're so stuck inside our certainty loop we can't even see it. 

So if you've posed some of these questions to a friend or mentor or coach, they can help you get more curious. One of my mentors, Phil McArthur, used to say, Curiosity is a team sport. We can help each other get more curious. And I discovered in writing the book that one of those sources of friendship can also be AI. You can take your story, you can rant anything you want about your least favorite politician, least favorite coworker, least favorite whatever. Throw it into AI and then just put one of those sparks in. What might I be missing? What's a different way to look at this situation? How might I be contributing? And what you get back is so fascinating. It's all kinds of different perspectives, probably that you have never thought about before, that can help you get a little more curious.

Marcel Schwantes 20:55

Yeah, I'm giggling the background, because there are so many things about AI yet that we have yet to explore of its potential and it just blows me away.

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 21:05

I know. And AI, you know, AI will can do better a lot of things that humans can do, but it can't connect with other people, but it can help us. It can help us get better at connecting and learning from each other. 

Marcel Schwantes 21:16

Yeah, okay, let's jump into your uh, practice number two, which is, make it safe. And by the way, you have this essential question at each chapter of the practices, and I'm going to read the essential question for make it safe is, how do you make it easier for people to tell you hard things? Okay, break that down.

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 21:38

Yeah. So this is essentially about creating psychological safety at the interpersonal level or at the team level. And in the research for the book, there were three major strategies that surfaced around, how do you make it safer for other people? The first is around creating connection with them. May seem obvious. We gotta build connection. We gotta build trust. The best time to build that connection is not when you need it, but is well before you need it, because you never know when you're going to really need that level of trust. So it's a message to dig your well before you're thirsty, but also that the time and space and place of connection really matter. So in researching the book, I interviewed CEOs, because CEOs are notorious for not getting the truth from people. People often will lie to CEOs to tell them what they think the CEO wants to hear. Make them look good in the eyes of the CEO, get their agenda to move forward. And I said to CEOs of big companies like craft or Medtronic, what do you do to get the truth out of people? How do you actually get them to tell you the real thing, especially people more junior than you. And one of the common answers was about where and how they create connection. 

They said things like, if I want someone to feel safe telling me the truth, I'm not going to drag them into my office and make them sit across the big, intimidating CEO desk. I'm going to go to them. We're going to take a walk. We're going to do a ride along. We're going to have lunch in the cafeteria. Whatever it is, there was no single answer other than wherever the other person is going to be most comfortable. And so part of creating connection is really creating that connection for wherever the other person is going to feel most comfortable. This is true in our personal lives as well. You mentioned I have teenagers. When my teenage daughter comes home from school and I want to find out what happened in her day, and I say, what happened? How was your day? What did you learn? I get absolutely nothing. I completely get stonewalled. 

And the same thing usually happens at dinner. But if I want to really learn, I have to go where she's comfortable and safe, which means I gotta stay up till 11pm when she's done with her homework, and she's done talking to her friends, and then it all comes out, and again, pouring out. My body wishes that I was asleep at that hour. But if I want to actually learn from my daughter and find out things I gotta do, I gotta go to where she feels most safe uncomfortable. And so that's all around creating connection. A second strategy is opening up. So you know, when you ask a question to someone else, they're going to wonder, Why is he asking me that question? Why is she asking me that question, they're going to be suspicious of your motives. 

And so the more that you can open up and say, This is why I'm asking. Here's what I'm stuck on. Here's why I feel like I need your help. The more vulnerable you are in opening up, the safer they're going to be in telling you hard things as well. And then the final piece of making it safe, I call radiating resilience. And this is essentially giving people the message that you can handle their truth. Because people are constantly making judgments about how honest to be with you based on how they think you're going to react, and if they think that you're brittle, or if they think that you're defensive, or if they think you can't handle the truth, they're going to hold back. 

But if they think you're resilient, that you can actually can take it in, and you're going to be receptive to it, you'll get more and so that can even look like saying to them, Hey, look, if I were in your shoes, I might feel really confused right now, or frustrated, or whatever it is. But by naming that, you make it, you let them know you can handle it. That's what they're going to say. Yeah. I have a friend who used to. Day, Jeff, please send me your most critical feedback on this draft that I just sent you. And by just putting it that way, he was sending me a message of his resilience that he actually wanted critique. So those are a couple ways to radiate resilience, create connection, open up. Radiate resilience. Are different ways to make it safe.

Marcel Schwantes 25:17

Yeah, and that requires a lot of openness and feedback on your end to be absolutely, yeah, absolutely. All right. The next one is pose quality questions. Did you say this is sort of the crux of the whole this is the heart of the Ask approach.

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 25:29

Yes. This is really about the questions that you actually do ask. Okay, yeah, not everything that has a question mark is a quality question, right? There's a lot of things that that we all say in the, you know, in the name of asking questions that I would call crummy questions. These might be sneaky questions, like, you know, isn't that right? Or, you know, don't you think? Or things like that that we're trying to kind of maneuver people to. They could be clumsy questions. Like, we're asking three or four questions in a row and the person doesn't know which one to answer. They could be attack questions. How could you possibly think you know all kinds of stuff? If you if you look at all the questions you ask, I would say we all have a bunch of them that go in the crummy category, quality questions. My definition is very simple. It's a question that helps you learn something important, right? That's a quality question. 

And just like surgeons have their tools, they have scalpels and sutures and forceps, all different kinds of things. Those of us who talk for a living can also have a taxonomy of quality question strategies that we can use to learn different things from different people. Problem is we rarely get taught what those strategies are, and so in this part of the book, I offer about 10 or so quality question strategies that we can all use. It's not 50, it's not 100 you don't have to memorize 1000s of things. It's really about 10 things. And if you memorize these, if you, if you master these, you will have a much broader repertoire of what you can learn from other people. I'll give you just one example. One of the strategies is called Request reactions. And requesting reactions is just simply, you know, saying something to someone else. Maybe you're giving your opinion, or you're giving them some feedback, or offering direction. 

And then you stop and you say, hey, I want to just check what's your reaction to that? How does that sit with you? What does that make you think? How does that land with you? Any one of those things gives you a far greater chance of hearing their thinking about your thinking, so that if they disagree, if they're confused, if they see a gap in your thinking, you're much more likely to find that out. Many of us think they're just going to tell me if they disagree, but for all the reasons we just discussed, people have fear. They don't feel safe. Quite often, they're not going to tell you, but if you ask a question in that category, you open yourself up to what's called disconfirming data, data that disconfirms your own thinking, that helps you break out of that certainty loop that you might have otherwise been in. So that's one example of a quality question strategy.

Marcel Schwantes 27:52

My one takeaway from posing quality questions is for you to do so, I believe you have to first be in a healthy state of mind, so that if you are holding on to bitterness, anger, resentment, if you are suspicious of somebody, you're not going to be asking those quality questions. They're going to be laced with those things that you know, the those things that are keeping it from becoming quality questions. Do you track here? I mean, it's certified, so we have to come from a space of authenticity. We have to come maybe even humility, to be able curiosity. There we go again, to be able to ask those quality questions.

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 28:35

100% agree, and that is exactly why this is not step one of the Ask approach. This is why getting authentically curious, yeah, is because, to your point, if you're not authentically, really interested in learning, and all those kinds of things like bitter mitt resent, bitterness, resentment, all of that that's working through that as part of getting truly curious about the other person that's got to come first,

Marcel Schwantes 28:59

yeah, including empathy as well. I mean, to really step into someone else's reality to understand them all right. Fourth is listen to learn, and listening is one of my favorite things. I mean, I think I spend 80% of my time doing my coaching sessions and really teaching them how to listen. So break that down for us. 

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 29:24

Yeah, well, so listening to learn is very different than listening to be right or listening to prove your point, or listening to look smart, or listening then to get them to do something you want them to do, or listening to look like you're listening. Yeah, most of those are the intentions that I think a lot of us have when we're listening and so, so a lot of first of this is just recentering yourself on that intention of, how do I actually, truly want to learn from the other person? And to your point, it's not easy. Most of us think we're a lot better at it than we really are. You know, 96 Percent of people think that they are good listeners. And yet, when I work with groups, I say to people, what percent of people in your life are good listeners, you know? 

And it's usually somewhere around 10% or so like that. So there's, you know, there's a huge perception gap between how well we think we listen and how well other people think we are listening to them. And in the book, I talk about, what are we listening for? And many of us listen for what the other person has to say, the information, the assumptions, the arguments, the facts, but that's only one thing to listen for, that's the content of what they're having to say. But we can also be listening for the emotion. We can be listening for the feelings that are expressed and displayed in the conversation. And we can also be listening for action. What are the actual behaviors? Are they pausing? Are they pushing back? Are they asking for help? Are they expressing support? 

So content, emotion and actions are three channels that we can be listening through, and if we can actually learn to listen through all three of those channels, it kind of triples the amount of information that we can hear from the other person. And so part of it is getting aware of what do you tend to listen for, what do you tend to omit? And then how can you begin to train yourself to listen through those other channels as well? Almost the same way that, I think a music aficionado, you know, they can listen for the percussion and the vocals, and they can hear the strings, and they can hear the tempo, and they can hear all these different things. It's a much more sophisticated understanding of what they're listening to. We similarly can train ourselves to listen for different dimensions of what other people are saying and get a much richer pitch picture of the other person. 

Marcel Schwantes 31:31

Yeah. Okay. The fifth one is reflect and reconnect. Let me read the essential question that you pose at the top of the chapter, how do you turn talk into action? This is so key, because you can have all the data information, but then all they become is just words that you forget, and you don't actually implement something, an idea that somebody brought to the table. Right? So what are some approaches of for each start with maybe, you know, the reflect part.

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 32:03

Yeah, so this is my favorite step of the Ask approach, because I mentioned at the very beginning that I love learning, and I think this is how we learn. This is actually how we squeeze the insight out of what people have to say. You know, reflection is how we convert our experiences into insights and our insights into action. And I think many people think that reflection, they don't have time for it. It gets a bad rap. But reflection is very simple, and I offer a structured process that I call sift it and turn it so sift it is just to say, you know, if somebody says 30 things to you, sift through what are the three or four most important things that you heard from them? Not everything that they said is equally important. Not everything that they said is necessarily healthy for you to take in as well. So sift out the most important stuff. You might sometimes ask a friend or a colleague to help you sift it so that you're getting the right stuff and not leaving out some of the right stuff. 

And then once you have those nuggets, just turn it over in your mind three times. So the first turn, as I call the story level turn. So you ask yourself, how does what I heard affect my story, about them, or about the issue or about what's going on here? Maybe it confirms some things, maybe it challenges some things, maybe it nuances some things. But you ask yourself, How did my story change? The second turn is about my steps. What steps do I want to take based on that? Maybe I want to double down, maybe I want to apologize, maybe I want to make a right turn, whatever it is. But what steps do I take? And then the third is that is what I call the stuff. Is there anything that they have heard here that helps me get a little more insight on my own stuff, my own biases, my own assumptions, my own ways of being? Because ultimately, we carry that stuff with us everywhere. 

And so if we can get a little insight on our stuff that has huge leverage, because it'll help us in many, many situations. So that's the reflect piece of it. And then the reconnect piece of it is basically to say, this is not just for you, for me. It's not just this is not just a conversation where I'm extracting learning from the other person. This is a relationship. And so the re the reconnect is to go back to the other person, and just to say, thank you for taking the time to share all that with me, and if it felt risky, thank you for the risk that you took. And let me show you what I'm going to do, because I want to tell you what I learned from you. And here's how it's changing me, and here's how I'm going to take some actions. And by the way, is there anything different that you would have hoped I would take away from our conversation, or additional as well, that kind of full reconnection with the other person, I think is rare, but it's so powerful because it says to the other person, you didn't waste your time, and you are powerful. You have influence over me. You've changed me. And I think it brings us closer and significantly increases the chances that they will want to continue to share with us over time.

Marcel Schwantes 34:39

Yeah, I love the gratitude part of the equation in the reconnecting piece, yeah? So that reinforces someone else to continue to reflect, and then you have that cycle reflect and connect.

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 34:50

So often on teams and organizations, people say, well, I gave them the input. I never heard anything. So, you know, why bother in the future, but that reconnection, you know, avoids that risk. 

Marcel Schwantes 35:00

Yeah. Okay, so, so here that's the Ask approach, folks, and the point is to reach a level of mastery, I think, where we do this naturally. We've created neuropathways in the brain, and you can access what we learn and put the Ask approach into action. But so many of us are going to feel stuck. We're going to make mistakes where we're going to feel incompetent and we may not yet know how to sort of put these things into action. I use the term a lot in leadership, is that we have to unlearn what we have learned, and even through these steps and these practices, there are still things that we hang on to that don't serve us well, right? So what do we need to do to build capacity so that we get really good at this stuff, from Curiosity all the way through to reconnect and reflect?

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 35:55

Yeah, I think the good news is that this is very learnable. You know, it goes back to the fact that we all started curious, so it's part of it, like getting back to what's already in us. But just like any other skill, whether it's learning to drive swing a golf club, throw a baseball, the brain works the same way for different skills. So you take a skill, maybe you want to start by curiosity sparks, reminding yourself to say, what might I be missing here? Or those kinds of things. Maybe you want to take a skill like asking, what's your reactions, and you begin to start making yourself aware of here are moments when I haven't been doing that, that I can start to do that. And when you start to do it, at first it will feel a little awkward. And the fancy term for that is called conscious competence. You're you have to be really conscious that you're trying to build a new competency. 

But once you start to do that, and sometimes you can, by the way, say to other people, Hey, I'm trying something new. Let me know how it worked. And so you can make you can normalize a little bit. You start to do that enough times, and you see the benefits. It becomes more fluid, it becomes more natural, almost to the point where it's unconscious because it's in your repertoire. And then you take the next thing, and you say, All right, now I want to get better at radiating resilience. So here's what I'm going to try and you do that a few times. Get some feedback on that. You start to build that in, and you build that and over time, more and more stuff becomes natural. And then you say, Now, I'm going to take it to a higher challenge. I'm going to take this into a more complicated relationship, into a team, whatever it is, and go through that same thing, and that's how a skill starts to become a true superpower. 

Marcel Schwantes 37:29

Okay, so as we wind down here, is there anything that we have not covered that our listeners absolutely must know? 

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 37:37

Well, there's so much more that I want to share about all this. I think that, I think the main thing that I would say is that this is something that, if you can get right at a team and organizational level, unlocks an amazing amount of collective intelligence, collective genius in organizations that is typically suppressed. And so I think, especially in times where budgets are tight, or training gets cut, or different things like that. To me, the one thing to double down on is people's ability to learn from one another, because then they can just do that whenever they need it, on whatever issue they need it as well. And so I've been, I've had the good fortune of working in organizations that have truly invested in this, and the returns are quite exciting.

Marcel Schwantes 38:20

That's great. All right. Stripe on your seat belt. We have arrived at our speed round here we go. Speaking of learning. What are you learning right now?

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 38:31

Well, I am reading a book called ways of being, and it's a really exciting book, because it talks about the ways in which intelligence exists throughout our planet, beyond human beings, the ways that animals have intelligence, the ways that plants have intelligence, the ways that trees have intelligence. I mean, it's kind of totally stretching my mind about the concept of intelligence, and it's fascinating.

Marcel Schwantes 38:58

That's great, all right, greatest lesson you've learned in life. This is a tough one for a lot of our guests.

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 39:04

Gosh, there have been a hard, lot of hard ones. I will I will offer a quote that is one of my favorite quotes that gives me a lot of solace, which is that if you're not embarrassed by who you were last year, you're not learning fast enough. It's a quote by Alan de button, who's a philosopher, and to me, it says, like, there's so many moments I'm just like, I can't believe I said that. I can't believe I did that. I can't believe I had that impact on that person. And of course, I try to clean it up, but at the same time, I'm like, You know what that means? I'm learning because at least I know and I can now do better next time.

Marcel Schwantes 39:37

Someone that inspires you?

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 39:41

I will name, I'm so fortunate to have some incredible mentors. I will name Diana Smith, who is what you know a lot of her, she's an author herself, and has put out some incredible books. And she, I was lucky enough to apprentice to her for three years, very intensively. And. And she really is able to look at any person in any situation and almost just like see deep into them in terms of who they are at their very best and also how they're getting in their own way, and help them to see what they could do doing better. And she certainly did that with me on many, many occasions. And I'm just deeply grateful to her.

Marcel Schwantes 40:18

She's still around right, 

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 40:20

Still around, yeah.

Marcel Schwantes 40:21

Okay, good. I'm gonna tag her on LinkedIn, if you, if you don't mind, just to bring her into the conversation.

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 40:25

She would absolutely love that. 

Marcel Schwantes 40:30

Okay, good, all right, something nobody knows about you, except now our 100,000 listeners?

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 40:35

Oh my gosh. Well, I would say I see a very young in life. Very few people know this. Actually, very young in life, I was an amateur magician, and so I used to go around to birthday parties and all kinds of other events and actually do magic shows. And I think that a lot of my love of learning and passion for learning comes from being a magician, where I was, on the one hand, kind of deceiving people, so I was kind of causing them to learn the wrong lessons. But also, in order to do that, I had to think a lot about how they were perceiving things, and how to actually help people learn certain things. And so it's, you know, that's been deep in me.

Marcel Schwantes 41:16

Your biggest hope for 2025?

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 41:18

My biggest hope for 2025 would be that we can get to a place in our communities and in our society where every single one of us looks at somebody who is on a different side of some issue than we're on and to say there's something I can learn from that person. There's something important, there's something interesting. I may not always agree with them. I may not fly their flag, but I can learn something from them. And I feel like if we could all get to that, just that, we would be in a very different place.

Marcel Schwantes 41:50

So good. You have survived at the speed round. Wow. Phew. All right. We bring it home with two questions, final questions, as we do with every guest, okay, the first one is the love question. So sticking with themes we've talked about in your book, how do I lead with more actionable, practical love, day in and day out? Yeah.

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 42:13

So the organization that I co founded called transcend, has six core values. Our number one core value is love, actually. And you know, for us, it just says, like nothing happens without connection, human relationship. But to tie it to this particular conversations that we've had, what in writing the book, I discovered that the word, the Latin root of the word curious, means to care, and so when you are truly being curious towards someone else. It's an act of care. And so I would say that if you want to lead with love, one of the greatest ways to express love is to lean into curiosity towards other people.

Marcel Schwantes 42:53

That is so good. I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do more research on the Curiosity piece to inform my own work as a coach, speaker, writer, so thank you for that. All right, bring us home. Jeff, what's that one thing you want people to take away from this conversation and your book?

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 43:11

Yeah, that there is something important to learn from every single person, that it's harder than we might realize, but it's totally doable if we ask them the right questions in the right ways.

Marcel Schwantes 43:22

Yes, okay, the book, again, is called, let me put that right in front of the screen, Ask: Tap Into the Hidden Wisdom of People Around You for Unexpected Breakthroughs In Leadership and Life. Jeff, if people want to connect with you, show them where they can go, including Transcend.

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 43:40

Absolutely. So to learn about the education work of Transcend, which we didn't talk as much about, you can go to transcendeducation.org to learn about ask and everything we covered in this podcast. Go to www.askapproach.com and then I love to connect with people on LinkedIn. So just feel free to connect with me. Jeff Wetzler, on LinkedIn.

Marcel Schwantes 44:02

I wish you had another hour. It just wasn't long enough. There's so much more I wanted to ask you.

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 44:08

We can turn the tables and ask you some questions as well, so we have to do a part two. 

Marcel Schwantes 44:11

Absolutely. It's been fun. It's been great. So thanks so much for hanging out with us.

Dr. Jeff Wetzler 44:15

Thank you. Marcel, really enjoyed it. 

Marcel Schwantes 44:19

Yeah, me too. All right, you can keep the conversation going on social media with #loveinactionpodcast, and look for my show notes on my website, marcelschwantes.com you can find all of Jeff's information there, as well as a YouTube to watch this very episode. All of that at marcelschwantes.com for Dr. Jeff Wetzler and yours truly. Remember, in the end, love wins. We'll see you next time, bye.