The One You Feed - Hal Gregersen on Asking Better Questions

Episode Date: July 24, 2019

Hal Gregersen is the Executive Director of the Leadership Center at MIT. He is a prolific author and motivational speaker recognized by Thinkers 500 as one of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Minds. In this episode, Eric and Hal discuss his book, Questions are the Answer: A Breakthrough Approach to Your Most Vexing Problems at Work and in Life. Need help with completing your goals in 2019? The One You Feed Transformation Program can help you accomplish your goals this year.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Hal Gregersen and I Discuss…His book, Questions are the Answer: A Breakthrough Approach to Your Most Vexing Problems at Work and in LifeThat whether we know it or not, we’re all living questionsKeystone questionsShadow questionsHow he discovered his questionsThe heart attack that changed his lifeHis shadow questionsAsking better questionsCompeting CommitmentsUnderlying assumptionsAlexander PapaderosHow if you want better answers, you’ve got to ask better questionsThat if you feel stuck you’re probably asking the wrong questionBrainstorming questions without answering themWhy we don’t ask good questionsCatalytic questions that challenge false assumptionsHow wanting to be right and smart stops us from getting to better questionsWhat if you woke up and asked, what am I dead wrong about today?That if you’re not making big enough mistakes, you’re not trying hard enoughThe danger of moving into smaller and smaller tribes that are founded on being rightActively seeking passive data – observing and listeningThe power of the pauseListening to understand vs listening to defendHow can I find and reflect the light in you?Hal Gregersen Links:halgregersen.comTwitterDaily Harvest – they deliver absolutely delicious organic, carefully sourced, chef-created fruit and veggie smoothies, soups, overnight oats, bowls and more to get 3 cups free in your first box. Visit www.dailyharvest.com and enter promo code: FEEDTalkSpace – the online therapy company that lets you message a licensed therapist from anywhere at any time. Therapy on demand. Non-judgemental, practical help when you need it at a fraction of the cost of traditional therapy. Visit www.talkspace.com and enter Promo Code: WOLF to get 65% off your first month.The Upper Room – a global ministry where you can join a worldwide community of Christian believers in daily prayer and devotional practice. Go to www.upperroom.org/welcome to get a free 30-day trialIf you enjoyed this conversation with Hal Gregersen, you might also enjoy these other episodes!John ZertaskySkip PrichardSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We put ourselves in situations, we push ourselves to the edge, and we do that in order to uncover better questions and insights. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.

Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor.

What's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Hal Gregerson, Executive Director of the Leadership Center at MIT. Hal is a prolific author and

motivational speaker, recognized by Thinkers 500 as one of the world's 50 most innovative minds. He has authored or co-authored 10 books. On this episode, Hal and Eric discuss his book, Questions Are the Answer, A Breakthrough Approach to Your Most Vexing Problems at Work and in Life. Hi, Hal. Welcome to the show. Hi, Eric. It is a pleasure to have you on. Your latest book is called Questions Are the Answer, A Breakthrough Appro your most vexing problems at work and in life. And we are going to dive into that here in a moment, but let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson, and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love.

And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks about it and looks up at his grandfather and says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Powerful parable. Whether we know it or not, I believe we're all living a question. I happen to call those questions keystone questions like an arch with bricks. There's a center keystone that holds it all together.

And the real issue, at least in my life and in the leaders that I've encountered in my life, is whether or not we know what those keystone questions are. And these are ones that are powerful, centering, orienting, productive, positive. And at the same time, I've discovered, Eric, that there are shadow questions, and it's the other side of the wolf that you're talking about. These emerge from fears and shame and other kinds of things that draw us into a completely different orbit. And so one of the things that I've wrestled with in my life and some of the leaders that I've encountered throughout my research and life is the tension, actually, between these keystone questions and shadow questions that drive who we are and what

we do. Can you give me a little bit of an example of that? Like what a keystone question might be versus what a shadow question might be? The shadow questions for me were the first ones I discovered actually. And for me individually, they came over the course of a lifetime. And so they started to surface and emerge most abundantly through some really crucible moments in my life. And I'm just going to dive in if that's okay, Eric, because they're the way in which these things became more real and apparent to me. So it was 2014, January. We'd been living in Boston for two years. I'd been working for a French-based university, traveling intercontinentally three to four times a month. French-based university, traveling intercontinentally three to four times a month. And January, I ended up giving a speech in Southern California. Early in the morning,

went down to set it up. Ended up feeling pressure on my chest and discounted it as anxiety. Went down to the place where I was giving the speech, got everything ready, continued to feel the pressure, breathed deep, tried to relax, wondered why I'm being nervous about giving a speech that I'd given a hundred times, was able to get enough energy, peace, said a little prayer, and stood up and did a 90-minute speech. Then afterwards, the pressure came back. Then I started to get nauseous, and then I started to feel achy, and I'm like, I need to get of here. So I went up to my hotel room where my wife was. As soon as I walked through the door, she's like, what's wrong with you? And you don't look well. And I explained to her what I just explained to you. And she looked at me quizzically and she said, are you having a heart attack? I honestly, Eric said, I don't know, but let's find out. So I grabbed my computer, looked up heart attack symptoms, had a list from one of the medical web pages and everything was happening. And I said to my wife,

let's go to the hospital right now. And she said, I just exercised. Can I shower first? I'm like, no, Susie, let's go to the hospital right now. And she was generous enough to give up the shower. We raced to the hospital. And the moment that I had the words come out of my mouth, I'm having a heart attack. I completely shut down and couldn't say anything else. And I woke up the next day with three stents in my heart after two arteries had been blocked 90%. And first of all, my father had had three major heart attacks when I was, one was at four years old, one was at about 13 years old for me, and one when I was an adult, and that one killed him, the final third one. But when I was an early young adult, I had committed to never have a heart attack. So I learned everything there was to not have a heart attack. And I ended up exercising, eating right, doing all that sort

of stuff. But frankly, I never learned what heart attack symptoms were. So what I didn't know, I didn't know about heart attack symptoms almost killed me in that instance. And afterwards, about two weeks later, after this heart attack, I was classic male, pretty quiet, kept it all to myself, the churn and the turmoil inside. And ended up visiting with a marriage counselor. We're a blended family. We'd been married then about a dozen years and complex issues with children and marriage and all that kind of fun stuff and she knew me well the counselor did and she looked me in the eye how and she said if you don't stop being nice to people you were gonna gift yourself

another heart attack in very few years and I realized that it just like thumped and hit me right between the eyes and right in the chest. And I just realized she's spot on. And that's the point at which the shadow question that I'd been living surfaced in ways that I'd never quite grasped before, which was how can I make people happy? How can I professionally and even personally make people happy? So you wake up in the morning and that's the question that I was living. And that had its own deep and dark story that I'm happy to share. But that was the question that at one level had propelled me to some incredible professional success because I worked really hard in so many different ways to

make people happy. but it had literally worn me to the bone and almost killed me. Thank you for sharing all that. And the deeper, darker part of it for you was a childhood that was not great. And your original question was, how do I make my father happy? Which then morphed into, how do I make everybody happy? make my father happy, which then morphed into how do I make everybody happy? Yeah. And that's where I realized, started to sort out and sift and uncover and realize that in today's terms, my father would have absolutely been emotionally abusive and to some degree physically, but in the continuum of abuse, it was mild in comparison to what so many people deal with. But for a four-year-old, when you're dealing with being whacked over the head or hit with a belt for what you've done, you behave differently and

you learn how to make this adult big person in your life happy. So yeah, that was the realization that that internalized shadow question that grew as a young child when I did not have the ability or the capacity to respond differently besides just protect myself by making someone happy. That had lived on. Yeah. And it had lived on vibrantly in a powerful way throughout my life. And so once you realized that was the shadow question, how did you start to unwind that? I'm going to ask that in a slightly specific way. Can we tie that back to questions in general? Because, you know, that's where we're going to go with the rest of this conversation is all your research and work on questions.

Did asking better questions help you to unravel that shadow question? commitments where you work down to big, frightening assumptions you hold in your life, and then you realize they're closely linked to these questions. It also came with the harrowing experience on Mount Everest a year later in 2015 that that highest mountain on planet Earth forced me back into the same space of, you know, what's the point? What's the purpose? Why am I here? What am I doing? And, you know, it was a combination of really, it's a combination of experiences that leveled me, Eric. This experience at Everest leveled me emotionally, spiritually, physically, and otherwise in 2015, a year after the heart attack. And it was in that place of just being completely aware that I'm a piece of dust on planet earth caused me to realize there must be a better way a better question a better approach and

and that's where I started to explore what might that be and in fact I found my inspiration from a person who asked and answered some powerful questions in Crete, Alexander Papaderos. It's a whole different story there. Right. It's quite a story, though, about him. Maybe we should tell that one real quick because I think it's pretty powerful. It's incredibly powerful. So here's this young boy, Alexander Papaderos, grew up in Crete. or papaderos grew up in crete um a young little boy when world war ii was going on and the germans invaded crete in large part because the greek government as i understand it uh took away the

the took away literally the guns and the arms and the protective means for the cretians in the island of crete because they hoped that the germans would invade Crete and not invade Athens. And so the Germans did invade. The Cretans literally defended themselves against the invading Germans with farm implements, and they didn't have guns, if any, to really do much about it. And they ended up beating and pushing the Germans back to the point that a few days later, the Germans returned in much larger numbers and ended up massacring a few villages. It was just horrific in terms of the consequences. And so this little boy, Alexander Papaderos, in the midst of all this, discovered one day a little piece of mirror broken off from a German motorcycle that had been broken on the island. And as a little boy, he ended up sharpening the edges of that to where it was round

like a quarter. And he ended up playing with it as a little boy and absolutely loved doing it, shining light onto things. But here's this little boy growing up in the context where the island he lived on hated the Germans, and that was his context. But he was always as a little boy in love with shining this mirror into dark places. And then when he became an adult, he actually found his keystone question to some degree, which was, how can I build a bridge of peace between the Cretans and the Germans? And he set up a peace institute to do so. And at one point, he was in the midst of a presentation, and one of the people in the audience asked the question, what is the meaning of life? At the end of this two-week conference and everybody kind of laughed

and shuffled their feet and was ready to leave. And Alexander Papadaros looked at the person very intently, realized the person really wanted the answer to the question and told everybody to sit down, settle down. and then he explained that he's not going to share with them what the meaning of life is but he's going to share with them what the meaning of his life is and that's where he pulled out this literal little piece of mirror and he explained what happened when he was a little kid in Germany and why he founded this peace Institute and he explained also that as a kid he had shined this little light into places just out of pure fun and joy. As an adult, he actually enjoyed using the same mirror, but it was a metaphor for his life. And his life was essentially wound up in,

how can I shine light, truth, or whatever you want to call it, into the darkest places, want to call it, into the darkest places, the darkest hearts, in order for peace and good to come from that. And I just deeply admire Papaderos and that story and that metaphor and that image, because that was the keystone question he ended up living day in and day out. How can I shine light and truth into the darkest hearts in order for things like peace to come out of that? I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor.

We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by.

Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really

No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's change directions and kind of go backwards a little bit, because I want to start to talk about questions. You say that if you want better answers at work and life, you have to ask better questions. You quote Peter Drucker, who says, The most important and difficult job is never to find the right answers, he wrote. It is to find the right question, for there are few

things as useless, if not dangerous, as the right answer to the wrong question. So let's talk about your statement that it's the questions that are important. Share a little bit more with us about that. Whenever we're stuck in our personal lives or our work lives, that stuckness always emerges from asking the wrong question. And earlier we talked about me having a heart attack, and I was asking the wrong question. How can I avoid having a heart attack when I should have also been asking, what are heart attack symptoms and it you know it could have been incredibly dangerous but in a work setting it's the exact same scenario

again or at home with our family or partners or spouses that we're around that we care deeply about whenever we have that stuck moment we're almost always asking the wrong question. And so a good friend of mine who's a senior leader at a not-for-profit organization that's global around the world, we were talking first about professional things, and then it sort of merged into personal issues. And then it came up that he really had valued and treasured his relationship with his oldest daughter who was now turning into a teenager she was starting to be with friends and she was starting to pull away and he felt

like the relationship was changing and he asked a very legitimate question which was how can I keep this relationship strong going forward? And yet he was stuck. He felt like it wasn't going where he wanted it to go, Eric. And I cared about him and we had a good friendship. And I said, basically, let's just here at this restaurant where we're having dinner, let's take four or five minutes, get out some napkins, pull out a pen, and write down as many questions as we possibly can about this issue in your life. And we're not going to answer any of the questions. We're not going to explain why we're asking the questions. We're just going to

ask as many questions as we can for four or five minutes. Essentially brainstorming questions. You actually have a methodology around this. Yeah. And it's called a question burst, but it's essentially brainstorming nothing but questions as a means to create the conditions where new questions can emerge. And so in this very informal way with my friend, we did this with napkins and a pen. very informal way with my friend, we did this with napkins and a pen. And we ended up with about 20 questions. And by the end of those 20 questions, these were questions like, where are you spending your time? And what does your daughter really value? And when do her eyes light up? And are you helicoptering too much? And when is she independent from you, and how could she be more independent from you, and what do you see in her eyes when she shares her fears or when she's

excited? And at the end of these questions, I could sense him getting more and more serious about the situation, and then it was quiet, and I know tears coming to his eyes and my eyes when he said I thought all along this was all about me keeping a relationship strong but I realized this is all about letting my daughter find her and the question really became Eric how can I let her find her and how can I help her find her and so the starting point Eric, how can I let her find her? And how can I help her find her? And so the starting point question of how can I keep this relationship strong wasn't necessarily bad, but it only could go so far. And in fact, it was keeping him from deepening the relationship.

And when he changed the question to how can I help her find her, it wasn't about him, it was about her, and it actually ended up deepening the relationship, which is what he really wanted in the first place. And part of the awakening there is, I think, a realization that some of the things he was doing weren't in line with living that new question. Why don't we ask good questions? You know, Eric, we were all three or four years old, and barring severe, abusive, horrific situations,

four-year-olds everywhere on planet Earth, they ask a lot of questions day in and day out. And then they move from family settings, where those questions might be supported into educational settings where, at least in the United States, between first grade and twelfth grade, the average child asks one question per hour in the entire month for an hour-long class. So if they're sitting in class for six hours a day, they ask six questions a month about the issues of the class, the subject matter. So essentially, they learn really fast where teachers are asking 50 to 100 questions per hour. They learn really fast that answers matter a lot more than questions. And so those teachers are giving these students a second to answer every question. If they don't answer, they follow up with a question.

If they don't answer that, they give them a half second to answer. And so we grow up. By the time we're adults going into college, knowing that fast, quick answers are going to move us far forward, more forward than questions. And unfortunately, the data aren't much better in college. And unfortunately, when we graduate from college and go to most first jobs in life, most organizations crush questions just as well as those school systems did. And so that's a long trajectory of our life story, which is for most of us, questions get crushed at every stage, often at home, mostly at school, then our first jobs. And then, you know, we often get promoted for being the smartest person in the room with all the right questions

until we hit the top, which is a whole different story. And so bottom line is the world is against us being able to formulate and ask powerful, what I call catalytic questions that challenge false assumptions and give us energy to do something about it. And can I contrast that with the arc of others' lives where they're good at asking questions? So you take someone like Arik Gadish, who's the chairwoman of Bain Consulting Group, or you take someone like Jeff Bezos at Amazon, or you take someone like Diane Green, who founded VMware, you take someone like Debbie Sterling, who founded GoldieBlox, Toys for Girls.

All of them grew up either with schools or families or both, where it was project-centered life. You showed up at school, maybe it was a Montessori school or an international baccalaureate school, and the kids, they showed up at school with interests and projects they were working on, and anything they were learning was trying to figure something out. Or you're Jeff Bezos going to your grandparent's house in Texas, and your grandfather buys a broken-down tractor at the beginning of the summer, and you're there for three months. And the whole point of the broken down tractor is to teach Jeff Bezos that here's a big project. You might think you're smart, but the tractor is smarter and you're going to have

to try something a hundred thousand times for it to work. And so these folks grew up and learned how to be relentless problem finders and solvers. And to do that, they asked a thousand questions. So Arit Ganesh had teachers in her school system growing up that would write in her little yearbooks in junior high school. Arit always asked those two or three questions because she would always raise her hand when the teacher said questions and she'd ask them. And so these were people who, for whatever reasons, had the world in their favor that said questions matter instead of that they don't. You quote a statistic that in some research has shown that the ratio of teacher questions to people questions is as high as 95 to one. You know, you sort of touched on this. Right. But I think all of that experience teaches us to want to have answers, not questions, right? And so we want to be right. We want to be smart. And you say that, nothing shuts down questioning activity more than the determination to be and be seen to be

unquestionably right. It reminds me of the famous teacher Suzuki who talks about beginner's mind. In the beginner's mind, there are tons of possibilities. In the experts, there's only one. I'm not getting that quite right, but that's the basic idea. No, it is. A beginner's mindset is one of the conditions that exceptionally inquisitive good questioners engage in every day. So these folks who are good at asking questions, they are seeking out conditions where they themselves are wrong and uncomfortable and reflectively quiet. And that's what that Zen saying is describing. It's like, instead of waking up in the morning dead set on, what am I right about? It's waking up in the morning like Stuart Brand does. And he actually is like, what am I dead wrong about today?

And frankly, a little bit disappointed at the end of the day if some part of his mental map of the world doesn't get disrupted turned upside down it's like that's a bad day where Sarah Blakely at founder of Spanx who had a father who regularly asked her at the end of the school day or the end of the any day of the week you know what mistake have you made today, Sarah? And if she wasn't making big enough mistakes, he would be like, you're not trying hard enough. And the whole point of that is we put ourselves in situations, we push ourselves to the edge, and we do that in order to uncover better questions and insights. That's what these folks are doing. And that beginner's mindset is crucial, that what I may be thinking is right could be dead wrong.

And that goes against the grain of some of our most prevalent ways of thinking, the confirmation bias. We are looking to be proved right at every turn. We ignore things that don't confirm what we already know to be true. Oh, it is so true, and it's so exacerbated. In the world we live in, we know these words, echo chambers, isolation, and so on. It's a world that is increasingly moving

into smaller and smaller tribes, and those tribes, unfortunately for many of them, are based upon being quote-unquote right. We're right and they're wrong. And it's a perfect way to get dead set on questions that become aged and outdated and actually quite unproductive. And so it takes active effort on all of our part to not get sucked into those isolated echo chambers, because in those spaces, answers are everything.

And asking questions is a violation of the rules of the game. You have a little story in here about Walt Bettinger. Did I pronounce that right? I think this is so interesting. He says, the difference between successful executives and unsuccessful ones is not the quality of their decision making. Each one probably makes 60% or 55% good decisions or something like that. The difference is the successful executive is faster to recognize which were the 40 or 45% that were wrong and adjust. Whereas the failing executive often

digs in and tries to convince people, even when they're wrong, that they were right. Boy, does that ring true to me in the corporate world or the software startup world or all that was, you know, that ability to, you know, the people who just would dig in versus the people that would go, well, this isn't working. What are we going to do? Well, which, you know, here are two classic examples, positive and negative, negative and positive. You've got Travis Klanick, founder and CEO of Uber, hopping into the back of an Uber car a few years ago and being recorded.

And at the end of the ride, the driver basically is saying, here's some things in the system that you own. It's causing me as a driver to not be able to do my job well. And Kalanick's response is instant and aggressive and in his face about the driver's the problem and not him. And here was this perfect, perfect moment for the senior leader, founder of a company, to get some passive data, some passive information that's not just coming out inactively through his own direct report to the system, but it's live, it's real, it's human, it's purposeful, it's meaningful, but he is not interested. Contrast that with someone I met when I lived in the Middle East, Fadi Gondor, who founded a logistics company called Airmex. He's the CEO, the founder, wealthy, top of the organization, has every reason like Travis Kalanick to not listen to passive data that's uncomfortable and it's awkward for him. But Fadi lands in a foreign country.

It's Dubai, for example. Two o'clock in the morning, he's got an eight o'clock meeting. Instead of having a limo taken to the hotel at two o'clock in the morning, he has an Air Max delivery truck driver show up. And he's actively seeking passive data from that driver. What's working? What's not? Why why and fadi does this so much the driver trusts him and tells him the truth at the end of the day fadi's like we've got problems here and he has an all-person meeting the next day to get to the bottom of the issue and to start trying to solve it those are just like polar opposites kalanick versus fadi. And what these great leaders do at work and frankly in life is they are actively seeking the data that's passive, that's just sitting out there. They're going to the edges of their organization.

They're talking to people they normally wouldn't talk to that might cause them to be a little uncomfortable. And, you know, it's the same thing, even inside of our own families. It's, what are we doing to just sit back, observe, watch, talk to the people in ways that information comes to us that otherwise wouldn't. Right. And one of the biggest pieces of this is observing and listening, you know, moving out of the mode, particularly of being telling, you know, I'm always telling people what to do, how it should be, what it, you know, kids, coworkers, employees, whatever it is, and moving into observing and listening. This is the logic of, of asking the better question is putting myself in a condition where I

am reflectively quiet. I am observing and I am listening. And I'll never forget bumping into Mark Benioff at a World Economic Forum Davos meeting. Unlike many of the other country and company leaders there, Mark did not have a ring of steel around him. He did not have a bunch of people protecting him from people like me coming up and asking the tough question. And I asked Mark, I said, what do you do, Mark, that helps you ask the better question? Because he's done some, he's asked some great questions to build Salesforce and to make a difference in his community. And he looked me right in the eye, Eric, and he said, listen. And then he waited about five seconds and looked at me.

And I think he was trying to figure out how well is Gregerson listening and is he all here? Unfortunately, I think I passed the test and we had a 15-minute conversation about what does it mean to have a beginner's mindset and clear your mind and really listen. And that's the power of what he does to get new insights. I also had the chance to interview Duval Patrick, who used to be the governor of Massachusetts. And Duval called it the power of the pause. And he said, it's that last two to three seconds. You ask a question, you shut up, you listen. And if you can wait three, four, five seconds, like I just did,

he said, it's that last two seconds that signals to somebody else, whether it's the person you're working with, or the person you're trying to serve as a politician, or your wife or husband, or your kids, it's that last two seconds where they get it. Like, you care. Like, it matters. And whatever you're going to say, you're going to pay attention to. It's not going to be discounted. That's the power of the pause.

It's profound. Thank you. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.

We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight

about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. God bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win

$500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called really know, really. And you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. You quote Scott D Valerio. I think I say that right. And he says he reminds himself constantly to listen to understand versus listen to defend, which is an approach he learned from his wife. And that is such a great little phrase. It is, Eric. And, you know, another person I interviewed said the same thing, Hal Barron, who is an incredible medical researcher.

And, you know, he said we're so often when we're in conversations like you and I are right now we're trying to figure out what we're going to say next and the point becomes I've got to clear out that space in my head and in my heart and we talked earlier about this question burst method where it's literally I don't care what the problem is if I'm alone or with some other people if I just sit down and force myself to ask nothing but questions, brainstorming questions, don't answer them, don't explain why I'm asking them, it's doing the same thing. It's creating quiet space. People are just like chomping at the bit in that exercise to fill the space between questions with explanations about why they're asking and answers about you

know that they've got to just get the solution out quick but what's fascinating is if we just provide either artificially that space in a question burst brainstorming question process or in our lives create that space that quiet where we can be reflective those are the points at which um these catalytic questions start to surface you tell uh a little story about a gentleman uh i think the last name is piazza who is a mediator which means he gets people who don't agree together and helps them to find to help them find an agreement. And he says, anytime you come in with assumptions about what is going to get someone from state A to state B, then you're setting in motion a cascade of bad things because, and now I'm sort of paraphrasing, you are sort of analyzing the behavior to a common

pattern, your typecasting. And then ultimately what he says is that you are creating separation. And he says his goal is to minimize the amount of separation because it's within that space, that separation, that the collisions occur that fuel the process of fighting. And I just thought that was so fascinating. Tony was fascinating. And what you just described that he had shared with me, it was stunning. And I had heard from someone who had used Tony in a high-stakes mediation between two companies.

And he basically said, you've got the two parties. Tony meets with the first one, listens intently to their perspective without the other party there, can literally mirror back not just the words, but the emotion and the affect associated with the words to the person he's just heard. And what it signals to that person is, Tony Piazza heard me.

He was really listening. He gets it. And then he does the same thing with the other party. And he's already now reduced the defenses on both of them walking into the same room because they believe he understands them. Because he's listened so carefully and almost unnervingly to be able to tell someone else, you know, here's what you just said and here's the feeling you have behind it. That's a unique ability. And yet, you know, people who create these questions that change their lives and change the world,

that listening ability is at the core of what they're doing. It is so crucial. It's interesting that you bring up that ability to mirror back so closely exactly what some person said, even using their exact words or inflections. My girlfriend was sharing this with me recently that there's someone in her life who does that and how powerful it is to hear your exact words and your actual inflections. It lands in a deeper way. And it's just not something I had thought about. I certainly have the idea of listening to understand and making sure that I can sort of say back like, well, what you're generally saying is blah, blah, blah, but the idea of being able to do it that specifically.

When we do that, again, we are creating a safe enough space, a psychologically and emotionally safe enough space for the people in that conversation to entertain a different way of living and working in the world. That's what it's coming down to. What happens in those moments is we start asking the different question, and it's provocative and compelling. Reminds me of the prayer of St. Francis, you know, seek not to be understood, but to understand, to give it a spiritual connotation, you know, that outside of just

being, you know, a good business practice or a good practice with your family, like there's deeper roots to that idea. The deepest roots for me in some of our conversation, Eric, is so many people in the schools they've gone to, so many people in the places they work, so many people in the homes they're living in, for whatever reason they are isolated, they are fearful, and it's extremely difficult to do anything that we're talking about. And you know this is why I care so deeply about this creating these conditions where new questions can flourish because at the end of the day it's it's connecting with ourselves in a whole sort of way wh o le it's

connecting with others in the same way and it's acknowledging imperfections in both of us that we're just here to try to build something better and that's where you know we started out with these shadow and keystone questions to me they're light and dark it's night and day. I landed at one point at the end of the book, Questions or the Answer, I landed with this word of aha, that instead of living this question of how can I make people happy, it's how can I find and reflect the light inside of you? And that might mean that I'm doing something that actually makes you very angry, but that might be a stepping stone to behaving and seeing and doing things in the world that

actually could be far more productive. And so it may sound like the same question, but it started opening up a different engagement with my family, with friends, and with the world of work. But then I just recently realized, Eric, that I rejoiced at one point at locking that shadow question into a cage. There was a picture I took on the island of Crete that represented that at the end of the book, that there's two big locks holding the darkness inside of these metal doors. And there's a little pinhole that shows the darkness inside. And I'm kind of coming to learn and accept that that may not be the best metaphor. That darkness, those difficulties, that childhood, it's going to be with me from now until the day I

die. And there is light that actually emerges from that dark. There's good that comes out of that, but the dark does not have to dominate the light in my life. And so I'm now trying to explore that intersection, and I'm reminded of Leonard Cohen's song anthem, and there's this phrase in there where he says, ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. And what I realized was Cohen's talking about light getting into the dark place

so that it can reflect more light out of the dark. That, to me, is where I'm trying to position, move, experience life, where it's not an either-or. There are shadow questions that are powerful, and there are keystone ones that are powerful, too. They're opposites. There's a tension there,

but that's where the best work comes from. That is a beautiful place for us to wrap up the conversation. Interestingly, I do many episodes, I call them teaching song and a poem that I give to supporters of the show. And the last one I just did and released this weekend was Anthem was the heart of it. That line and talking about how we ring the bells we can, how forget our perfect offering. And I shared some poems that relate to that and some things from my own life. So it's so funny that you brought that up because I just released that episode. Besides Hallelujah, that's probably his best known phrase, that short little turn there, because it's so powerful. There's another person I really enjoy. It's Lindsay Sterling, who's a violinist and a dancer. And she has a song called Shatter Me, where the light actually

comes out of her in her video to the rest of the world. And it's really breaking down some of her shadowy past, but it's called Shatter me and letting the light come out of that darkness. Um, and I don't know if you saw recently, but on America's Got Talent, I forget his name, but he was a young man playing the guitar. Simon Colwell told him to stop, told him that he was too stiff. He was afraid of taking risks. And Simon did not know his story, but this young man's story was his parents divorced when he was young and he had built walls to protect himself, just like I did as a little kid. And I had so much empathy for this young man on the stage of America's Got Talent because Simon had poked with a hot prod his shadow questions on stage in public in front of so many people

and yet he the young man was given the chance to go off find a new song come back and he came back in a very different attitude and his song was absolutely stunning but the reason i'm raising that is i think what we're talking about here, Eric, is exactly what happened on that stage, is this young man had been living in shadow question. He'd been incredibly successful, had a beautiful voice and great guitar skills, but Simon poked and it was uncomfortable

and it was awkward and he realized some element of what he was doing is wrong for the singer. And he came back in a very humbled way, but boy, his voice was authentic and deep and rich. And I have little doubt that over the course of this experience, he's going to surface some questions that will give him more light than those shadowy ones that had grabbed him too richly and deeply. Wonderful. That is a great example of exactly what you're describing, pushing the questions, taking us to an uncomfortable space. And you and I are going to continue this conversation in the post-show conversation where we're going to talk about exactly that, how our comfort zone

prevents us from asking good questions. And so we'll talk about that in the post-show conversation. Listeners, if you're interested in that, or you're interested in hearing the mini episode I just described, you can go to oneufeed.net slash support, become a member of what we're doing, and you get access to lots of extra things. So Hal, thank you so much for coming on. I really enjoyed the book and this has really been a deep and rich conversation. Thank you. Eric, thank you. I feel the same and I'm walking away with a little more light. Thank you. Me too. Okay. Bye.

Goodbye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor? What's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you?

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