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By Jeff Wetzler
Early in my career, I encountered an idea from my mentor, Chris Argyris, that forever changed the way I looked at myself and those around me: More often than not, highly educated, successful people are actually the least likely to learn what they most need to know.
Why? The people around us are walking around with valuable insights and information that could help us personally and professionally. But in order to access it, we have to cultivate a tolerance for not knowing.
Over the past 30 years, I’ve consulted to top executives at Fortune 500 companies around the world, overseen the training of thousands of teachers, managed teams of people with diverse backgrounds and skill sets, even built a thriving organization from the ground up. Time and again, I’ve seen just how often people fail to learn from those around them, and how costly this problem is to relationships, teams, and organizations.
But I’ve also seen that when people do manage to overcome this problem, it opens up whole new levels of learning, growth, and connection. Leaders I worked with described the immense relief of finally breaking out of long-standing patterns, the lightbulb moment of discovering the key insight that had kept them in the dark without even realizing it. I watched relationships shift from sources of conflict and anxiety to mutual understanding and collaboration.
What’s more, I discovered that learning what others really think, feel, and know is a concrete skill set — one that anyone can learn and apply to their life — at work, at home, and in their communities. Here are five steps that can increase your self-awareness, help you make smarter decisions, and bring new levels of depth and meaning to your relationships.
Choose curiosity
Without the ability to get truly curious about what you don’t know, you’ll never ask the questions you need to find out.
Each of us is constantly telling ourselves stories about our own lives and the people in them. Our friend isn’t returning our calls because they’re secretly mad at us. Our coworker keeps missing deadlines because they just assume we will pick up the slack. We loop and loop, working ourselves into a tizzy of judgment and resentment and anxiety, so certain about our own perspective that we don’t get curious about what we might not be seeing.
Choosing curiosity is all about breaking out of these certainty loops. We tend to default to certainty instead of curiosity due to a combination of psychological biases and cultural conditioning that make it feel more comfortable to stick to what we (think) we already know. The problem is that we forget that the story we are telling ourselves is only one of many possibilities, and our story may be very different from someone else’s. Curiosity interrupts this default mode and slows our thinking enough to consider what we don’t yet know.
The next time you catch yourself feeling certain, try injecting more curiosity into your thinking. What information about this person or situation might you be overlooking? How might you be inadvertently contributing to the very problem you’re concerned about? What challenges might the other person be up against that you can’t see? Deliberately asking yourself these questions fires up your genuine curiosity and motivates you to discover what others have to teach you.
Make it safe
Decades of research by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson and others have demonstrated that in order for people to speak up, they need to believe that you will not judge, shame, or punish them for sharing openly with you. This is all the more important if you are interacting across lines of difference, such as age, race, or gender, all of which can intensify the risks (real or perceived) of speaking candidly.
The key here is that it’s up to you to make it as safe, easy, and appealing as possible for the people in your life to speak honestly. If in past interactions you have reacted negatively or judgmentally, you have to work extra hard to make it safe going forward. But even if you haven’t, it’s very likely that the other person has experienced shame or punishment from others for speaking honestly and still feels unsafe at some level. While it’s easy to feel like they “should” feel safe with you, it’s far more effective to take extra steps to ensure they actually are.
To make it safe, communicate that you can handle whatever they have to say and — this part is essential — won’t hold them responsible for any emotional reactions you have. The fear of hurting, upsetting, or angering you is the number-one reason people don’t tell you what they really think or feel. Identifying and assuaging this fear up front is often the permission slip people need to start sharing. But remember—once you make this promise, you have to keep it.
I once experienced the power of this step during a progress meeting with an investor. Before I shared my update, she opened by explicitly stating that she didn’t expect things to be perfect and actually wanted to hear about what wasn’t going as planned with the project. This simple move dissolved any assumptions I had about what she wanted to hear and allowed me to feel safe sharing less-than-shiny information with her, information that was critical for her ability to get a full picture of the state of the project. The result? We both left the conversation with a more realistic sense of the status of the project as well as deeper trust in our relationship.
Pose quality questions
Foundation set, it’s time to start asking questions. Unfortunately, most adults ask far fewer questions than we should, and the ones we do are often motivated by a desire other than learning and understanding, such as convincing, proving, blaming, or even attacking the other person— even if we don’t realize it. Yes-or-no questions (“don’t you agree?”) or those that put people on the defensive (“what were you thinking?”) do not produce any valuable information, and can actually shut down conversations.
By contrast, quality questions help you learn something from the other person. They signal true curiosity, reflecting a genuine intent to learn from and understand the other person—not to prove a point or influence or fix them. They invite honesty by being clear and direct, with no alternate agenda. Quality questions tap into the other person’s story to surface the underlying meanings, reasons, emotions, and experiences.
Questions can be used for a variety of purposes. They can help you identify what someone really cares about (what matters most to you in this situation?) or surface the logic beneath their beliefs or actions (can you walk me through your thought process?). You can use questions to enlist someone’s help in solving a problem (I’m stuck. Can you help me think this through?) or to find holes in your own reasoning (what do you think I might be missing?). Understanding your own goal for asking the question is essential to choosing the right one for the job.
Listen to learn
How we listen determines how much we learn and how deeply we connect. But while 96% of people think of themselves as good listeners, research finds that we hear (and retain) only a sliver of what people are really telling us. It’s easy to feel like you’re listening, when what you’re really doing is waiting quietly until it’s your turn to respond, or scanning the other person’s words for holes and ammunition you can use to defend yourself or rebuff their argument.
Whenever you catch yourself doing this, remind yourself that your only goal is to understand what the other person is trying to share with you. Everything else — yes, even your very best counterpoints — must take a seat in order to free up the attentional resources you need to listen for multiple levels of meaning simultaneously.
Most people only listen through a single channel: the content of what others say. But to really listen to learn, you have to pay attention to two other channels. The second is emotion—the feelings, needs, and desires beneath the words. And third is action—what are they trying to do by telling you this? And what are they trying to get you to do? Only by listening to all three at once can you fully understand what someone is trying to express.
A friend of mine, Anna, recently had a challenging conversation with a colleague that left her feeling upset and a little indignant. Luckily, she had recorded the conversation (with permission, of course), so I recommended she go back and listen for emotion and action. Anna was stunned — she had been so focused on the content of her colleague’s critiques that she hadn’t noticed the edge of fear in her voice or that what she was really trying to do wasn’t to criticize Anna, but to seek reassurance that she was still committed to the project. Once Anna understood what her colleague had really been saying, they were able to have a much more productive conversation and move forward with the project from a stronger foundation.
Reflect and reconnect
Lastly, you have to process what you heard in a way that really allows you to learn and grow from it. You might be tempted to immediately begin fixing or solving or even apologizing. But this is when it pays to pause and take a beat so you can reflect on what you heard and what it means.
To do this, ask yourself these three questions:
How might what I heard revise my story about the situation?
Based on what I heard, what action steps can I take?
How might what I heard challenge my deeper worldviews, assumptions, or ways of being?
Once you’ve reflected, share what you’ve learned and what you plan to do next with the person. This final step profoundly shapes the future of your relationship with them. When someone has taken the risk of sharing their honest thoughts or feelings with you, they want to know that it was worthwhile. If you don’t reconnect, it can leave the other person feeling unappreciated or, worse, used. But when you take the time to share what you’ve learned, you open the door to deeper connection and ongoing learning that benefits you both.
When Anna came back to share what she learned from their conversation and how it had impacted her, her colleague was moved and shared even more about her hopes for the project and her desire to continue partnering with Anna. From there, they were able to have a much more productive (and honest) conversation about key aspects they had previously struggled to get aligned on. They both left feeling heard and motivated to keep working and learning together.
In combination, these steps are nothing short of a superpower — one that anyone can use to transform their relationships and unlock unprecedented learning and growth in every area of their life.
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