How to Ask Better Questions: Stop Asking Why, Start Asking How

Vance Crowe [00:00:00] The Ag Tribes report is brought to you by Legacy Interviews, a video service that captures people as they really are, so the future knows who they really were. Here's Legacy Interviews guests, Darryl and Jill Stamp on the joy of filming their legacy interview. What do you think you'll tell your kids about the experience? Oh, I'm gonna thank 'em a lot. I realize this is more for them and their kids and their kids than it is us, the grandkids, right? Don't know these stories. I can't wait to, for us all to get together and see it. This went better than I thought it was gonna Time does go fast. So it's, what time is it? It's almost three o'clock. No way. Yes. God, you talked so much. I know. Welcome to the Ag Tribes report, a breakdown of the top stories affecting the culture of agriculture with your host Vance. The report begins in 3, 2, 1. Let's begin. Welcome to the Ag Tribes report. I'm your host, Vance Crowe. Each week I bring on a new co-host to represent one of the many Ag tribes that make up US and Canadian agriculture. This week, however, is going to be my Christmas special. I have been looking around at what's going on in the news, and I have to say, I don't know if your world is anything like mine, but I have been so focused on getting work done, trying to accomplish all the things that need to get done before the new year that I really haven't been paying attention to the news.

Vance Crowe [00:01:32] And I sat down to write this week's script and to start working on it. And I came to the conclusion that anything I put together was just gonna be skimming the surface. It wasn't gonna be bringing you something of value. So I actually sat down for a while and just thought, what is something that I could deliver to you that you would find valuable? And it brought me back to an idea that of something I've been working on for a long time. Many of you know that I put on a class called Interest-Based Communicating. But what you may not know is that for the last several months I've been working on converting that to a book. I've been trying to take all of the ideas that I've talked about here on this podcast on stages when I give speeches, and most importantly, what I've learned from interviewing hundreds of people to tell their life stories. So what I thought I would do is pull out one of the sections in that book and try and share with you something that I think you will find deeply valuable as we head into the holiday season. And that is, I wanna offer some thoughts on how to have deeper, more meaningful conversations. These could be conversations with your grandparents or your parents, maybe your kids, people that you know really well. But also what I'm about to share will help you with people that are new. Maybe your niece is bringing a boyfriend and you want to get to know him and have some kind of substantive experience with him. Or maybe, you know, I am not getting the most outta the conversations that I have with my employees or my vendors.

Vance Crowe [00:03:06] Now, a lot of times I've come on and I've talked about negotiations. How can you figure out a way to prompt other people to meet your interest, to be able to help you get done what you need to get done? But this particular section, what I wanna talk about is how to interact with other people. I wanna share some thoughts and some ways of being that could really help you. And I wanna start off by doing what I do in the book throughout, which is to tell stories about how I arrived at many of the conclusions I'm sharing here. Many years ago when I had just finished college, I was a deckhand on a ship. And deckhand is a pretty fun job. You get to tie up the ship, you get to use big equipment, but there's a lot of time that the deckhand work was terrible. In fact, if we were ever underway, we were moving from one place to another. Overnight, deckhand would get the job of sitting with one of the mates or the captain to on Bridge Watch, where you would look out on this inky black ocean. And all your job is, is to see, is there a tiny little mast light somewhere out there that represents a ship that we might run into? And so you have to do this job 'cause you can't just rely on computers and radar. And so you have two people sitting there. And in effect, it would be like going on a multi-hour road trip night after night after night. And so the first couple of times you sit down with one of the mates or the captain, you're kinda sharing your story, their story, and you just kind of swapping things.

Vance Crowe [00:04:41] But over time, you run out of a lot of stories. And a lot of times what would happen if you were a deckhand was you would just kind of be the re the receptacle for these people to tell you all about themselves. And it would become kind of boring. Now, it was kind of dangerous that it would become boring because if you fall asleep on bridge watch, you are immediately fired. The next port they come into, you are let go. So you know, you're trying to fight, you're tired, it's late. You've got all kinds of other responsibilities you're gonna have to do as soon as you get done with Bridge Watch. And slowly, even a guy like me, an extrovert would become really annoyed by Bridge Watch. And that was until I met this guy named Greg Gordon. At the time, he was just a second mate, but he was a fascinating guy. And I remember having these great conversations with him where he shared all kinds of things about himself that I really found really valuable. And I remember just bonding to him in a really deep way. And one morning after I had been working with the second mate Gordon, we finished up the shift and I went to bed. And then my later in the day, my job was to do something. I don't remember, I was like grinding metal or something like that. And I saw him and I was with a bunch of my other deckhands and I said, Hey everybody, look, it's the most interesting man in the world. And I thought this would be a compliment. But instead, Greg just actually kind of collapsed and he looked really embarrassed, and he quickly went on and I realized I'd done something wrong.

Vance Crowe [00:06:15] So I sought him out and I said, you know, second mate, Gordon, I'm, I'm really sorry about that. I didn't mean to embarrass you. Don't worry. I didn't share with them anything that you shared with me. And he said, oh, no, no, no, Vance, that's not at all what I, why I left so quickly. Actually, the reason I left so quickly is because I've always thought it's way better to be interested than interesting. And I'd never heard that before. I'd never really thought of this idea. And it started to like really, you know, make me reevaluate the conversations that we had had and why it had been so valuable. And what I came to realize was that Greg had actually not talked that much about himself. He had been incredibly interested in me. He had asked me all kinds of questions, he was very patient. He would laugh along with me, and every once in a while he would offer a little bit of information about himself, and we would talk about that. And then the conversation would come to me. And I realized in this experience that he was right. It is very, very powerful to be interested in other people way more powerful than it is to try and be a person that has interesting things to say, different quips, or coming up with clever questions. And so I started my pursuit of trying to be interested in other people. And I think that this has made a radical change in my life. It has shifted a lot of the pressure that we feel in life to have something interesting to say, to to be the guy that knows exactly where to take the conversation.

Vance Crowe [00:07:57] And instead, it has allowed me to let go. And in fact, this has led me to the conclusion that conversations when done well are a meditation. And by meditation, I mean when you are meditating, the purpose of it is to try and be completely present. You are not thinking about all the challenging problems that you are facing in the future, and you're not ruminating or reflecting on all the things that happened in the past. That's our natural state. We're always remembering what happened and we're imagining what's going on. And it keeps us from being in the present moment. But a truly great conversation, one that fills us with the sort of connection where we discover new ideas, where we bond with one another, where we get that spark that can happen between human beings, the one that we all crave. It happens when you're able to shut out all those other things. And in fact, when I'm doing a legacy interview, I often will try and actually sit down with the person that's gonna tell me their life story. And I take in a couple of breaths and I am empowered to just let everything go. My phone's in the other room, I am, I have nothing else going on that's more important and I can just let myself sit and have a conversation with this other person. And so I think the first thing that I would suggest, if you are going to try and have more meaningful conversations, particularly if you're a business owner, particularly if you have a hundred things going on, even if you're not a business owner, you're a person that's productive, you're trying to get the most out of your days.

Vance Crowe [00:09:35] If you want to have deeply impactful, meaningful conversations, you have to set that down. You have to put your phone in a place where it's not going to signal notifications that you should, you know, oh, I, I should stop paying attention to this person that's right in front of me and I should pay attention to whatever the telepathy box tells me. And then when you are sitting with a person, just the very act of attempting to make eye contact with them, attempting to breathe and, and be right there with them, that alone will signal far more to them than any kinds of questions that you could ask any, any sort of cleverness that you're trying to bring it. Because most of us go most of our lives without anybody really listening to us, most of the experiences that we have, whether you are, you know, trying to make a, trying to make a sale or you're buying something, right? That's a transactional thing. People are just trying to get through the work of, of what you're talking, what you're doing in front of you. Also, another big thing is, even with our loved ones, right? We are trying to manage schedules. We're trying to absorb our own emotions as we're thinking about how what they have going on is impacting us, or is their mood going to change things. And so even with the people that we care about the most that we spend the most time with, we often are not present with them at all. So if you can find a way to set down all of the things that are gonna distract you, this is going to put you in a totally different tier than what most people have.

Vance Crowe [00:11:12] Now, this is like kind of a paradox, right? Because I'm suggesting that if you wanna really listen, you have to be focused on what another person is saying. But people end up having these sort of barriers or these things that keep them from being able to really interact and engage with another person. And if you've ever heard me give a talk on this subject, I, I generally ask the crowd, all right? Most people fall into one of two categories as they're talking to another person. The first one is what I call fast matching. So fast matching is that thing that happens, you know, when you're talking with a new person and they're telling you about something that's going on in your life, and you try and find a way to relate to them so you hear what they're saying and you immediately try and grab on to something that they've said and, and make it relatable to what you're doing. And the problem with fast matching is as soon as you fast match, as soon as you take what they're saying and you map it to something that you are know about it or interested in, now the conversation has been moved away from them and back on you. And now they're thinking about how what you're saying relates to them, or if it does or if it doesn't. And this trips people up. Another thing that people do, and if you don't fall into the fast matchers, a lot of extroverts do, people like me. Another thing that can be a big obstacle in conversation is what I call internal tripping.

Vance Crowe [00:12:44] My wife, my beautiful, intelligent, incredibly detailed, detail-oriented wife falls under internal tripping. And, and what happens with her is she meets a new person, they tell them her name, they, they tell her, you know, what they do for a living, and then she's trying to remember their name and what they've just said, and this person keeps talking, but she's trying to remember and capture every single detail about what they're saying. And so instead of really listening, she starts tripping on the fact that she can't keep these details straight. And so by the time they get to a point where they are expecting you to jump in, the internal tripper is blindsided, right? They, they're like, oh, man, I'm just trying to catch up. I'm trying to get my balance. And they haven't been listening when the person is talking. And so that's why of these two tech things that can, can trip you up in a conversation, whether that's fast matching or internal tripping, it takes you out of the moment. And so by focusing your energy not on trying to connect with them and not trying to remember all the details and allowing yourself, trusting yourself to actually listen to what it is that they're saying to something almost magical happens. And I've taught this technique to hundreds, maybe thousands of people, and many, many people have told me that I'm right. But it's really hard to understand that if you let go of trying to connect with the other person and you can just walk past that internal tripping, not trying to grab onto all of those details, and you're really listening to a person when there's finally a break in the conversation and there's that little pause, maybe it's a half a second long, maybe it's a second, second and a half a question will appear in your mind.

Vance Crowe [00:14:36] And that question that appears in your mind is the right question to ask you. You may think like, no, no, this won't work for me. Like I'm, I'm, I'm, I need to be thinking of something. Or maybe as they're talking, you think of an idea and you grab onto it, and you're just waiting for them to finish what they're saying so that you can then give them a thing that you can ask them. Don't do that. Let go of all of that. And when you do, a question will appear because when you're listening to them, they're going to say things that conjure up a new way for you to approach them. This is something that it takes a little bit of time, and more than anything, it takes trusting in yourself to be able to find that, that that faith that a question will appear. But I assure you that it will. A big problem that we have when we're talking to other people is that our emotions about what they are saying start to crowd in. Not that long ago I was talking to somebody and they had a business pitch for me, and I noticed that as they were talking, I could kind of divine what it was that they were saying. And I was starting to think, do I want this? Do I not want this? How am I going to position myself? I don't wanna really tell this person no. And I realized I was doing that what it is that he needs to share with me.

Vance Crowe [00:16:07] And when we get to the end, then we will deal with what, what, whether, how I should respond. And so this is something that I, I think is the foundational skill when learning how to be a good listener. Now, when you think about listening, we can kind of be lulled into this idea of like, what is a good listener? You know, it's very easy to suggest that a good listener is somebody that just shuts up. They, they just don't talk. They let you talk. But if you think about the people that are the best listeners in our lives, the ones that have had the biggest impact, the ones we've connected with the most, they're not silent. Greg Gordon wasn't silent in the conversation. And instead of thinking that the best listeners are those that don't talk, it's better to think of it as the golden mean. So the golden mean is this idea in philosophy that the right spot to be between two polls, we'll say, is not directly in the middle. Like, let, let me say for example, if you're thinking about the concept of bravery, bravery is in between two poles. You have somebody that is a coward on one pole and somebody that is reckless on the other pole. Well, the middle ground is not exactly where bravery is. Bravery is actually closer to recklessness, but it's not reckless, right? The, you become brave, you become courageous when you're somewhere close to recklessness, but you still recognize that there's danger there.

Vance Crowe [00:17:42] The same thing is true of listening. You, you, between the poll of being silent or speaking too much, it's some kind of middle ground that, that, that is the right place between listening and, and giving them space to explore an idea. And on the other hand, talking too much and jumping in. And so I, I bring that up because I think a lot of times people are like, how, how can I get better at listening? What, what is it that I can do? And the first thing is just to, just to recognize that it's not some middle ground, right? And in the book, I go into things that can help you when you're listening, things like how you can signal understanding without over signaling, how you can make sure that when you do interject, you're not fast matching and you're not, or undercutting people by saying, oh yeah, I get that. I did that all the time, right? And taking something that was really valuable to them and undercutting it. But now let's move into, well, what should you be doing? How can you give the person feedback that will be really valuable? In my negotiations class, I talk about a concept called mirroring. And mirroring is where when you hear somebody say something, you repeat it back for them in as high fidelity as you can. And this way they know, ah, this person heard what I have to say. When you're having just a general conversation, mirroring isn't exactly appropriate all the time, but it is valuable if somebody has told you a whole bunch of information that you do say, oh, man, what I just heard you say was all of these things about the, the challenges that you faced in your work and that the business had to close down and you were not expecting this, and now you were expected to step in.

Vance Crowe [00:19:34] This is a way for you both to be able to signal that you're listening and it will also give your mind a chance to review what they're saying. And then when you get to the end of that mirroring, again, if you're patient and you trust yourself, a question will appear. But now if you're wondering like, all right, well what, what can I do? What can I be doing to ask better questions? The very first thing, the very first repertoire, and if you get a legacy interview, you will hear me say this throughout the interview, and it is a very simple phrase. It's one that I call a sleeve phrase like a seed, a sleeve technique where you always have this ace up your, your sleeve. And when you don't know what to say next, or you don't know what to do next, you can always have this three word phrase that will enable you to signal I'm listening and I want you to tell, and, and I, and I want you to keep speaking. That three word phrase is, tell me more, tell me more, is one that doesn't judge anything that they've said. It doesn't make the conversation about you, but it very clearly indicates to another person, I'm here and I wanna know more. This very simple phrase. Sometimes I say, tell me more. Sometimes I say, say more about, and I'm more specific, but the, this three word phrase is something that we almost never hear, right? In most conversations, what happens is one person is talking, and when they're done, the other person responds with maybe a little note about what they said, and then they start talking about their own thing. When you invite a person to keep talking by saying, tell me more, tell me more about this thing, you will notice that they completely relax and they get into a phase where they say, ah, this is interesting enough that he wants to allow me to continue with the baton.

Vance Crowe [00:21:19] I get to keep talking. So other things that I think are really valuable to ask people and, and coming back and getting good questions is, is, is body language, right? We are, are, I think, a problem that many of the most detail oriented, oftentimes the most serious people, is that when they're listening to somebody, they have almost a cold face, right? They are, are trying to absorb it. And so a body language does not come natural to them, and so they don't give any feedback. But if you've ever been in a conversation where you're talking to another person and they've got that cold face, you have no signal about whether, whether what you're saying is interesting, which, which part of what you're saying is interesting. And now doing Legacy Interviews, one thing I know is people don't want to hear my voice on the, on the conversation. Sure, they don't mind it when I'm asking questions, but they don't want my interruptions, they don't want my interjections. And so one thing that I've discovered is that I'm sitting off camera as I'm engaging with people asking them about their life stories. I sit there and give them lots of body language, I raise my eyebrows, I smile, I shake my head, no, I put my hands on my face. I do these things that are as good or maybe even better than words. And this is giving people the signal that they need to feel confident that they can keep going.

Vance Crowe [00:22:54] And so if you are sitting with another person, your loved one, a total stranger, and you don't really have something to say, you don't even have a question to ask, just responding to what they're saying will elongate with what, if you're res responding to it using body language, it will elongate. It will give them a way to say, ah, I can keep going. And oftentimes, if you have let go of your need to be a, a big part of the conversation in terms of what you are suggesting or what you're putting out there, what you'll find is people will just keep talking and talking and talking and what you, what's shocking, I think it's, it has been shocking to me. I've kind of internalized it now, is how much people will tell you. It's how much they will share when they feel like, Hey, this person is really, really listening to me. Okay? Now I wanna talk a little bit about questions that you can ask people. And you know, what is a better question as opposed to a not so good question? Well, I, I've been playing around with this idea of, of how to describe the types of questions that draw people in or push them away. We could think of this as kind of the concept of valence, right? If you have a a magnet that's pulling you towards it, that's good. You want that in a conversation. And if you've got the magnet flipped around and you're repelling a person, that you wanna avoid that. So I wanna suggest to you some questions that will make somebody lean forward, lean in, and have high polarity.

Vance Crowe [00:24:31] Now, when you ask a question, there's some kind of a spectrum between a really general question, Hey, how's your day? And an incredibly specific question, tell me about this exact thing, right? And when you're meeting a new person, you're kind of left with the, the sense that you can really only ask general questions. Oh, tell me about your job. Tell me, oh, you're into sports. Tell me about, you know, what team you root for, right? We ask these very general questions, but actually, if you can make just a subtle, a very, very slight change to the way that you ask a question, you can actually get a lot more out of people. So I, I have come to this, this way of asking really specific questions, although it's still a general question when you're asking it. And what do I mean by that? Well, there are questions that you can ask a person that they're general, you could ask anyone very easily, but whatever answer they're going to give you is going to be incredibly specific. I call these beautiful questions and I call 'em that because one of my good friends, Rob Long realized that when he was meeting with his employees, the pe, the people that worked for him on his team, they were really intimidated by him. And he was not interested in hearing a lot about their personal lives. It's just not who he is. He didn't want to open up that door, but he still needed to find a question that would get people to open up to relax, to know that he is not just about, you know, outcomes and deliverables.

Vance Crowe [00:26:10] He's open to learning more about you and building a relationship. And so what he started asking people is, what have you observed that's beautiful lately? Ask yourself that question right now. What have you observed that's beautiful lately? This is a really amazing question because everyone sees beauty all around them all the time. And if you can focus their mind into talking about something that's beautiful that they've seen, they will tell you about observations that are meaningful to them, them things that really are, are beautiful, maybe only to them, but they are special to them. And when they, when you ask somebody to tell you about something beautiful out of this will emerge, all sorts of interesting threads that you can pull on if you want to. Other versions of beautiful questions might be, what's something unexpected that happened to you lately, or one that I've just been asking people more recently is, when was the last time you saw somebody do something brave? These questions are incredibly general, anybody can answer them, but when you focus somebody's mind, you move that question from being really general to being something really specific. And that specificity will offer you an enormous amount that you can then pick out and pull on. And if you're really listening and you're really paying attention to people, you won't have to fight to get to that question.

Vance Crowe [00:27:43] It will be very apparent. Now remember earlier when I was talking about you can ask somebody about their job, you know, what do you do for work? That's a perfectly fine small talk opening question as you're trying to find something to talk about or you know, what sports are you into? But what happens if you don't know anything at all about the field that they talked about? Or maybe you're not into sports at all. What can you do to be able to make this a richer conversation? Well, this is where the concept of what I call contrast questions comes in. So imagine for example, you've been talking to somebody about their career and they've told you that they are some, some position you can't imagine, you don't have any idea about what it is or anything about it. Of course you can just say that, Hey, tell me more about this. But one thing that you can do is ask a contrasting question. And by contrasting, well, I'll give you an example. So imagine instead of just asking somebody about their career, once you know what their job is, I like to ask, what's something about your job that the general public has no idea about? And the person will always go, oh, right, because most people don't know anything about anybody else's job. But now you've given their mind a way to say, ah, let me describe what the public knows, and now let me compare that to what is possible to be known, or what people should know right now that allows them to give you a much richer answer than they could come up with on their own.

Vance Crowe [00:29:20] The same thing with sports. You know, my brother-in-law, he loves sports, and if he happens to talk to somebody that they love sports, they have a common language, they can talk and talk and talk, they have lots to share. But I don't have that, so I don't really follow sports. So if somebody tells me, oh, the thing that I do with my free time is I watch lots of sports, then I can either, you know, ask them a really general question about it that might make me feel foolish, or I can ask them one of these contrasting questions like, how has the sport changed since you started watching it? Or, what's your team like now? And how was it in the past? By doing this, you again get the benefit of that contrast, and that contrast will allow people to really sharpen the focus on an answer that they give you. And whatever answer they're going to give you is going to be filled with all sorts of threads that you can pull on. Now, these threads, this is a good place for me to talk about a concept that I call tiny choices. So when people are talking, particularly if they start telling you a story, so let's say if over the holidays you are asking your grandparents about different experiences that they've had, one thing to recognize is how people retrieve these memories. And the metaphor that I often use is to retrieve a memory. One that's been locked away for let's say 60, 80 years. What a person does is they plunge their head into the equivalent of a bucket like they're bobbing for apples, and they open up their eyes and they see flashes of this experience.

Vance Crowe [00:30:57] There's just photographs in those photographs. They don't always know exactly why they need to describe it, but as they start to tell the story, they will include details from their stories that will give you all sorts of information. One of the examples I often use is I, one time was talking to a woman about falling in love. She had moved out to LA and had fallen madly in love with an artist. And she said, I loved him so much, I wanted to spend all of my time with him. And so what I would do is every time I got done with work, I would go over to his studio and I would watch him do his art. And I think he got sick of me. He used to push me and the dog out of, out of the, the studio and tell us to go watch movies. And it wasn't that long into the relationship before we broke up, and I was really heartbroken. Now, the fast matcher is gonna be like, oh, you were living in la What, what part of LA were you? Or somebody that is not really paying attention, they might just try and resonate. They might try and have an emotional connection. Oh, you had a heartbreak, I had one too. But again, like we talked about earlier, if you do that now, you, you have taken the conversational energy away from them and towards yourself. So instead, I would recommend searching for the tiny choice that she made in telling that story, right? There's a detail in it that I, I, I would, I would challenge you to try and spot that is something that's critically important to that story because of the images she was shown in her mind when she was bobbing for that story with her head in the bucket.

Vance Crowe [00:32:34] And the, the detail, of course you've probably figured out is the dog, right? The guy pushed her and the dog out. And so I asked her, oh, tell me about this dog. What, what, you know? And all of a sudden the woman lit up. She's like, oh my gosh, his name was Sky. He was this Alaskan malamute and he was living in la. And, and oh man, you know, we used to spend all of our time together. I bought him all kinds of special dog food. I did all these things for him. And you know, it was when my boyfriend told me one time we were out on a date that he, he would get rid of the dog, except for it's more effort for him to do that. So that's why he is just kept the dog. And I realized that that's how he felt about me. And so I decided I was gonna leave him, and I took the dog. Now, that woman, when she was telling the story, she did not know that this was an important component. In fact, this was a realization that she had in telling the story. And the way that we got to that realization was that she had that tiny detail in there. And all you have to do is pull on it just a little tiny bit. Now, when you are asking for stories from your loved ones, you don't wanna turn tiny choices into the internal tripping, right? It's one of those things that as you're listening to a person talk, and as they're telling you more and more about it, some of these details will just pick out in your mind. And now that you know that they're there, you're gonna start seeing 'em all the time. And so when you do eventually get that pause in the conversation, one of those tiny choices is going to present itself to you, and you can ask the person about it.

Vance Crowe [00:34:10] Alright, I'm gonna wrap up soon. I, I wanted to give you one more, I think really important and deep tip about having conversations as you're talking with people. One of the things that we've been led to believe in our society is that the, the real question, the way that you are getting all the way deep down with somebody is to ask them why questions. Simon Sinek is, is famous for having that book Start With Why. And the point of his book is to say, people's motivation is the core of really who they are. And so if you're trying to lead an organization, you should get at why. But in my experience in interviewing all these people, one of the things that I've come to realize is people don't know why they do what they do. In fact, most of what is going on around us is really our reaction to something else that has happened. And so if you ask somebody why, and this has been proven, people have been put in MRIs, and you ask them why questions? And what we found out is the part of your brain that is imaginary lights up and this why question that they are trying to answer, they're not actually answering it. They're giving you kind of an imagined answer. And this imagined answer is really designed to protect them. Most of the time, if you ask a person, why did you declare bankruptcy? Now they're starting to think, well, should I be defensive? Is this person judging me?

Vance Crowe [00:35:42] Have I done something wrong? Have I, like, do I wanna make sure that I give reasons that will make me look good? Or conversely, if you ask somebody a why question and now they think, ah, now is my chance to, to brag and to, and to tell them about something I'm proud of, neither of those two answers are wrong per se. But if you wanna get deeper, and if you wanna have those kinds of discoveries that we're talking about, that that valence where people are drawn in more closely to you, don't ask why questions. Ask how questions, how questions are just a little different, but the outcome is completely different because when you ask somebody a how question, they go back in their mind and they start telling you about the things that happened, and then what happened as a result. And as they're describing these various things that have happened along the way to how they got to declaring bankruptcy, for example, what you'll find is that y has emerged from it. That's the exact thing that happened with the woman that was telling her story about the dog, right? She did not know what her motivation was for leaving him until we were able to explore it. And so if you ask people how questions you'll give them an opportunity to revisit, to walk down that path. And from there, the why will emerge, not just for you and for your own edification, but also for them. And this is the type of conversation that will fill somebody with a sense of joy and excitement when they have a discovery about something that they haven't thought about in maybe in the months since that thing happened, or the many 60, 70 years since they had that experience.

Vance Crowe [00:37:31] Okay? There is so much more in here. I, in the book, I've been writing in my classes, I teach about things like cashier questions, and I talk about all the different ways that you can shape questions so that you get more out of people. I also talk a little bit about how to share things so that other people lean in and they wanna know more about you. But as I close up, I also want to offer you, I don't know, it's a little bit of a word of caution, maybe it's a word of integrity. And that is that when people are sharing with you, and you will be truly and magnificently stunned, when you start asking people these tiny choices, when you ask them contrasting questions, when you use your body language, how much they will tell you eventually as somebody is answering questions and they're feeling really good about you, they will sort of wake up from this sort of hypnosis that we feel. 'cause we almost never get to talk about ourselves. We almost never get to share things that matter to us. They'll wake up and then all of a sudden they'll say things like, oh, I've, I've been talking too much. It's your turn. What, what about you? It's here that you are going to have to choose to share at the same level of vulnerability with them. And people can detect, and I call it the law of mutual self-disclosure. People can detect if what they have shared is beyond what you are willing to share. And in that case, they will recoil.

Vance Crowe [00:39:01] It will be very awkward. And so as you're using these techniques, one, you should just know, Hey, this is gonna happen and I have to be prepared to share. But as a matter of integrity, I always tell people, you should never ask a question that you yourself are not willing to answer. And I think that this is a great heuristic to be able to preserve the genuineness of your questions, because anytime you're using techniques to build relationships, to get other people to share with you, in some ways it can be a form of manipulation. And as you get better and better and better at this, what you have to do is put guardrails on because I'm, I'm telling you, is, is a hundred percent certainty. The people I've told the have taken my classes, they have all come back and been like, you were right. I had no idea how much people would tell me. So I would encourage you to really think about, am I willing to answer the question that they're answering? Of course, there's all kinds of other, you know, nuances to this and sometimes people overshare and all of those things. But really, as you're building a relationship, let's say with your niece's new boyfriend, just be sure that whatever question you're asking him, you would be willing to answer yourself. Alright, that is gonna do it. I have been working crazy hard. My team, I, I'm, I'm so deeply proud of my team. They have been editing Legacy Interviews and burning the discs, so that way we can send these interviews out.

Vance Crowe [00:40:34] And I can't even imagine how many people are gonna be watching their legacy interview over Christmas. But if you are thinking about giving a truly unique gift for Christmas, then I highly recommend a legacy interview. This is where I will sit down with your loved ones to record their life stories so that future generations can know their family history, where they came from, who they are, and they'll get a video recording of your parents, your grandparents, and it'll be captured so that people really can know where they came from and what matters most, the wisdom that's been earned along the way. That's gonna do it for this week. Thank you so much for tuning in and for jumping along with me on this special Christmas episode. Thanks so much, and we'll be back after the holidays.

IBC Course Testimonials — Heath Hunter, Broadview Group (ad segment, multiple voices) [00:41:45] My name is Heath Hunter. I'm a managing director at Broadview Group in our business, your success is dependent on how you're able to effectively tell your story to relate to your customer or your potential partners, and we needed a course that could train our staff on how to do that. I was looking for something much less than what Vance delivered. I literally just wanted him to come in and help us a little bit with storytelling. And he came back with this curriculum, which was awesome. How to craft a memorable introduction, build a story around our firm and how we personally weave into that story. How do we continue the conversation through asking good questions, how to negotiate in a collaborative way versus a competitive way so that we maintain that relationship that we've worked so hard to build?

IBC Course Testimonials (montage) [00:42:14] Our relationships are everything. To me, Interest-Based Communication is really understanding the perspectives and the point of view of others, being able to meet them where they are. Interest-Based Communication to me is creating a dialogue with someone else sitting across the table from you. It allows each party to really describe what they care about and work together to accomplish that for each party. A lot of people, myself included, before I took Vance's class, really went in with higher weight on what was important to me. Everybody has a tendency to just focus in on the price, but there are hundreds of other components that come into something as complex as a transaction for a company. What are they actually interested in? What do they hope to achieve and what does success look like for them walking out of a negotiation? Those could differ widely from how they're showing up. If we can somehow get on the same page, you can create these collaborative solutions that are a win for everyone, we've definitely woven that into the process. We're trying to ask those deep probing questions on what are their motivations? What do they care about? Really understanding who they are, introducing yourself to better communicate who you are and your background. What makes a good introduction? This is something that I, I really appreciated and I've been in the workforce for, you know, 27 plus years and done lots of introductions. I've heard lots of introductions, making a good introduction. I think everyone just assumes that you should just kind of start talking about yourself and go into your title and what you do.

IBC Course Testimonials (montage) [00:43:50] And frankly, that's typically not very memorable or interesting. Going through this course and learning about storytelling and the arc of a story and how to embed that in your introduction was honestly like nothing I'd ever heard before. And it makes a lot of sense, right? Because if you're a good storyteller, you tend to sort of capture an audience and you want to be able to do that with your introduction, sort of that hook that you need in, in a story. For me, the big thing was having faith that sitting back and really paying attention to the conversation will help draw out a connection. Before I would spend my time trying to, okay, what do I have in common with this person? Oh yeah, this is a chance to interject and, and establish that link. Ironically, just kind of stepping back and saying, I'm just gonna really pay attention to what's in front of me. It really has impacted the conversation because you can get deeper faster. I used to think it was all about how interesting I could come across, but what I've learned, and honestly what Vance taught us, the most interesting folks that you run across, ask really good questions. That's been a game changer for me. Instead of trying to focus on myself, focusing fully on the other person and really just listening for like, what are the details that they're giving me? Because they's a reason that they mention that. We assume that folks can kind of see what we see in our heads. And what this course taught us about diagramming your ideas is to put it on paper, put it out there so the other parties can see it. We were meeting with a group that week and we were trying to communicate different ideas and outline a vision for this potential business.

IBC Course Testimonials (montage) [00:45:27] Instead of doing it in a PowerPoint format, we did it on a whiteboard. It was transformational. The CEO, he, he just lit up. We actually handed the pen over to him and we said, Hey, show us where we've got it wrong. Show us where you have additional ideas, the level of engagement, you know, went through the roof and he got up and you could see he was almost giddy. Having that limiter of the speed of your hand, you're bringing them along in, you know, your idea you're trying to convey. So the practicality of the course, the mirroring, the diagramming, the exercises. I think that's one of the things that I appreciated most about the course. Super candidly, I've been through a lot of these in my career, and you walk out of there and you're like, well, that was a waste of time. What I can tell you about what Vance brought to the table. I, at no point ever felt that way. I was able to walk out of every single session and put to work immediately what we had practiced that day. He has a great way of connecting concepts so that you have this, you know, holistic framework, so to speak, to connect with people, which is something that we do all the time, but deliberate practice of it really helped up my game. I would recommend that everyone take this course, and I would venture to say that this has been more impactful for me at home than at work. Pretty much everybody is having conversations and negotiations at home. I feel super lucky and blessed that we were able to have this course at work and that it sort of bleeds into home life. I think that's kind of the best of both worlds. Any corporation or any firm, no matter what the size I think would benefit from something like this, who I'd recommend this to, is a small group of professionals who are really dedicated to self-improvement.

IBC Course Testimonials (montage) [00:47:04] Interest-Based Communication, to me, is a holistic way to build relationships. Can benefit anyone.