1171: How to Get Better Results through Better Questions with Dr. Marilee Adams

Pete Mockaitis
Dr. Adams, welcome!

Marilee Adams
I am so pleased to be here. Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited, too. We’re talking questions and, boy, you have spent your whole career or a huge amount of time inquiring into inquiry, questioning questions.

Marilee Adams
That’s a really great way to put it. It’s true.

Pete Mockaitis
So I’d love to hear, what’s something you know about questions that most of us don’t?

Marilee Adams
Most people think about questions, they think about interpersonal questions – I ask you, you ask me, we hear other people ask each other. And, of course, that’s incredibly important. In fact, questions and statements are what make up language, frankly.

And there is another entirely different layer that goes on in our thinking that most people are not aware of. And that’s why I call the theory that I’ve come up with, question-thinking, because, in fact, we all think with questions all the time.

And what we typically think is a thought, is actually an answer to a preceding question, which means that if we can make visible or audible the questions we’re asking ourselves, and we know how to assess them and change them if we want different experiences and results, then we have a methodology that we can use in any role and any function, basically, for the rest of our lives.

And I can unfold that as we go on, but that’s why my work is really about the nature of thinking. So it’s a re-conceptualization of the nature of thinking which provides so many access points for different kinds of interventions.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Okay, so re-conceptualizing thought itself. Okay, that’s potent and that’s a really intriguing notion that there’s an extra layer there behind questions, not just, “Hey, this is how humans talk to each other. It’s kind of half of the things we say, you know, questions, responses, statements.”

So what we think of as a thought is actually an answer to a preceding question. As I consider my own lifetime of experience with thinking, I’m thinking that is often certainly clearly the case. I ask myself a question and then I come up with some answers, and so there’s that.

Marilee Adams
Oh, good.

Pete Mockaitis
But you’re suggesting that, is it most, all, many of our thoughts are, in fact, answers to preceding questions?

Marilee Adams
Yeah, I’m actually suggesting that it’s systematic and invisible. And when you can see it, and I’m going to demonstrate it in a minute, and then you can do something with it, then it’s remarkable how it changes everything in a very efficient and effective way. So, shall I illustrate this?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, maybe in just a second. I mean, how do we know that this is the case, and an illustration can help? But, I mean, like in the human experience, what is the best evidence to suggest that this is, in fact, how we operate?

Marilee Adams
I’m going to make it even more challenging than what you just said because the implication is also that our behavior is internal question-driven.

I want to give you an example because I really want to make this concrete, and I like ordinary examples because they’re very relatable. So let’s imagine that you just woke up and you’re getting dressed for the day.

So you go to your closet or your drawers or, if you’re traveling, your suitcase. And then you would ask yourself a series of questions, “Where am I going? What are other people wearing? What would be comfortable?” maybe even, “What will be clean?”

And then you do something really interesting. After the question, you engage in a behavior. You reach forward and you pick up whatever it is you’ve chosen and you put it on. And you could say that you are wearing your answer. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you can.

Marilee Adams
But what I’ve also done is given you an example of the question-driven nature of decision-making. Whether it’s something as simple as getting dressed in the morning or as complex as, “Should we do this initiative? Should I hire this person? How should I run this meeting? How should we create this project? And what questions do we want the project or the initiative or the product to answer?”

And you used the word direction earlier, which I thought was great, because the questions we ask kind of design the direction we go in.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. And they can shut off directions in terms of, “Should we do this or this?” It’s, like, “Are those the only two options?” And then sometimes we don’t even stop to ask that question.

Marilee Adams
But that is a really great question. Just what you said is a great question, “Are there other options? What assumptions am I making? What biases are making me a little blind? Am I missing something?” And those are powerful questions, particularly if we want to be creative or we want to make well-based decisions.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s very intriguing. And, certainly, I’ve witnessed that as well in terms of the new question really does open up things. And I guess I’m just sort of still fixated on this notion of the questions I’m not even aware of, that I have been asking. Like, I can reverse-engineer the implied question. So would asking a new question to override my prior implied question be just as transformational?

Marilee Adams
Yeah, and I love that you’re “fixated” on that because it is a very novel concept. And what’s so interesting is not only is it novel but it’s practical. And so I’m going to give you an assignment, should you choose to accept it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Marilee Adams
And also, for all of your viewers or listeners, which is at any moment, at any time, stop, and ask yourself, “What questions am I asking right now?” and you get a readout. I ask people that all the time who don’t know anything about my theories. And because it’s just there, they go, “Huh? I’m asking myself dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.” And I can tell you a story about that, that I did with the coaching client, if you would like.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Marilee Adams
So this is a client who was afraid she was going to get fired. And so I asked her some more about her job, and she said, “Well, I really love my job. But I hate my boss. I’m afraid he’s going to fire me. Help.” Okay?

So I said to her, just casually, “Well, what questions are you asking yourself about your boss?” And she immediately came up with, “What is he going to do wrong today? And how is it to make me look bad?” And, of course, I understood immediately that it was her questions that were getting her in trouble.

So I said, “May I suggest some different questions for you to ask yourself?” And, of course, she said yes. And I gave her, “What is there to understand and appreciate about my boss?” And then I gave her, “What can I do to make my boss look good?”

And this woman, she looked like I had hit her with the two-by-four, which, in a way, I had, because the questions I gave her did not fit naturally into the way she was thinking before. And the next time I saw her was not in a session but at a community event.

And when she saw me, she got very excited, came running over with her husband trailing behind, and she said, “Would you like to hear a miracle?” I said, “Sure, I love miracles.” And she said, “Here’s what’s happened since that session. I got a promotion, I got a raise. And the best thing is my boss and I are now getting along very well.”

And I said, “That’s great. Congratulations.” Of course, I knew it wasn’t a miracle. It was a method and it was the method of giving her new questions to think with. So her husband is standing there. And I turned to him and I said, “That’s really great. Don’t you think it’s great?”

He goes, “Yeah, it’s pretty good.” And I said, “What could be better?” And then he breaks out into a big grin, and he said, “She doesn’t complain about that man for an hour every night anymore.” So four results from just changing her question.

Pete Mockaitis
And what I love most about this story is when you said “whacked over the head with a two-by-four,” and when you try on those new questions, there’s an internal state. I don’t know, it’s almost like being flabbergasted, maybe, is the English word. It might be the closest I could come up with.

You ask those questions and it’s just like, “Wait, what? Like, no, but he’s bad. Like, arrgh?” It’s like, “I’m having a short circuit.”

Marilee Adams
Now let me take that a little bit further because I just demonstrated something that I didn’t call out before, and that is that the theory of question-thinking is really pretty married to our mindsets. And so there are two basic mindsets that I work with, and I call them judger mindset and learner mindset.

And you can see just even by the names that the questions that she was originally asking were all judger mindset questions. And the questions I gave her were learner mindset questions. So she took up the new questions without even realizing that she was literally changing her mindset.

And it was that change in mindset, along with the new question, that changed the direction of her thinking and behavior that led her to those four results.

Pete Mockaitis
Very cool. All right. So is this the questions-thinking framework of yours or are there some key elements to be unpacked there?

Marilee Adams
Both. So when you understand, when one understands, this nature of thinking that I’m calling out, which is we’re always asking ourselves questions and they impact how we think, feel, relate, behave, and the results we get, and you start playing with that and experimenting with it, and you start noticing that it literally changes the way you see the world, how you move in the world, how you relate to people.

And you can easily extrapolate this to leadership, to working with teams, to running meetings, to making decisions, all of that, which is why so many organizations bring us in to teach this actual material, and then we watch the response to it.

So if you put together the mindset material and the self-questioning methodology, then it becomes, really, a strong thing. And what is imperative in it is the willingness and ability to self-observe non-judgmentally and to discover what’s literally going on under the surface that one can actually change once you can see it.

Now I could illustrate this on a graphic that I have the choice map.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. And this will also be in the show notes, listeners, for your visual reference. All right. Start. We can choose or we can react, which starts us down the path, choosing of the learner mindset, or reacting, the judger mindset. But then later on, we can do a switch. Okay.

Marilee Adams
So the switch is what I was just referring to. Once you can ask yourself non-judgmentally, “Am I in judger?” that liberates you to ask a switching question which will take you up to learner. And if you’ll know, I want to read what’s in the two signs there, because people probably can’t see them.

But judger says, “Automatic reactions, blame-focused, win-lose relating.” And then, of course, at the bottom, we have the famous judger pit. And I would claim easily that every one of us has gotten very muddy in that pit. I know I have. I mean, it’s impossible not to, actually, because the judger is also related to the amygdala, so there’s a fear based component to it.

Learner is it goes uphill, it’s a little bit more difficult, but it’s also very much rewarding. And so the sign says learner, “Thoughtful choices, solution-focused, win-win relating.” And you notice that the learner path goes off the page intentionally because it’s from learner mindset that we can create new futures, that we can literally be creative.

Whereas, if we’re in judger, we kind of recycle the same things over and over again. Now it’s very important to realize that we all have both mindsets and they’re both entirely normal. What’s really exciting about being able to see them is that once you can see that you’re in judger, you have the ability to switch.

So that’s why the switching lane is here. And there are some switching questions that are my favorites.

Pete Mockaitis
Lay them on us.

Marilee Adams
So, “Am I in judger?” is always the first one. And then, “Is this what I want to be thinking or doing? How else can I think about this?” And my favorite one is “Regardless of the circumstances, who do I choose to be in this moment?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, what I love about that sequence, specifically, and I imagine you’ve given it a lot of thought, Marilee. What I love about that is, it’s like these questions really do feel like a bit of an exit ramp, you know, bit by bit.

Marilee Adams
That’s a great way to say it. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, not like, “I’m warming up to the really hard questions that I can’t even really wrap my brain around just yet.”

Marilee Adams
That’s right. And I’ll take it a little bit further. So you mentioned neuroscience, so judger is more the sympathetic nervous system. Learner is more the parasympathetic nervous system. So every time we switch, we’re really, I believe, making a little dent in our neuroplasticity so that learner becomes more and more normal and more resident for us.

And while I’m here, let me add also that this also illustrates emotional intelligence, in a way. And this I’ve tested and spoken with experts and authors in emotional intelligence. So emotional intelligence is four pillars: self-awareness, self-regulation, self-management, social awareness, social skills, basically, right?

So I think being able to see that, “I’m in judger” and name it nonjudgmentally is very advanced self-awareness. It really is. And then switching is self-regulation and self-management. So every time somebody recognizes they’re in judger, and switches to learner, they are strengthening the first two pillars of emotional intelligence.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s super handy. And there’s so many directions we can go with this. You talk about Q-Storming as a useful approach. What is that and how do we do it?

Marilee Adams
Well, Q-Storming is one of the favorite things I ever made up.

Pete Mockaitis
Glad I asked.

Marilee Adams
And I’ve done hundreds of them. And, basically, if we want to alter a behavior and a result, in terms of my theory, we have to alter the questions we’re asking ourselves. And we need to come up with new questions that can take us in different directions.

So there are three stages to it. The first stage is something that you would do, basically, at the beginning of any project, which is, “What are we going for? What’s our goal?”

Because you know well, if you don’t establish that robustly, then there’s no place for anything else to stand. So, “What is it? What’s our goal?” And, first, I get people to say a lot of goals, and then we bring it, we really work on the goal. And this is a format.

So then the next thing is, “What assumptions are we making?” And that is a critical, critical stage, because every assumption we’re making is going to block our creativity and possibilities. And so I push on that quite a lot. And it’s assumptions I make about myself, about you, about others, and I pull those from the group.

And then once you’ve got out a healthy amount of assumptions, good, bad, and ugly, then now that you can see what you or we all are assuming, then you ask, “Okay, now what are the actual facts?”

And, oftentimes, people confuse assumptions and facts which really get you off on a wrong direction. So that part is always up front. So that’s phase one. Phase two is we start generating and capturing questions. And the kind of questions that I was describing earlier, questions we’re asking ourselves.

And I’ll pause a little and give you a quote. I think I told you this, it’s, actually, I dreamt this. And the quote is, “A question not asked is the door not opened.” So if we want new solutions, new thinking, new possibilities, we need to be asking new questions.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely.

Marilee Adams
And so it’s a long process of generating new questions. And I also want to contrast this with brainstorming, because brainstorming, it is the iconic creativity exercise, and the research is, actually, that it’s not quite as useful as people think. And I believe the reason for that is, in brainstorming, you’re coming up with ideas, solutions, answers, which is all well and good. Well, what if you’re answering the wrong questions?

So if I were doing like a big organizational effort, I’d be doing Q-Storming before brainstorming because that opens up your thinking and it also opens up your collaborative movements. So once we’ve got a really long list of new questions, that’s the end of phase two.

And phase three is, “Well, what do you do with all those questions?” Now in the third phase, we have to analyze the questions.

So the first thing to do is start putting them in buckets. And you don’t want to proclaim the buckets before you do this because the coolest thing would be is, if you come up with questions that don’t fit in a bucket, because that means there’s a place where thinking wasn’t occurring before, which is really great.

So when I was doing this in person, and I remember doing this, and I won’t say the agency, but it was there were 200 engineers in a particular agency, and I spent, literally, an entire day doing a Q-Storm with them around some really mission-critical issues.

And so after we generated, we had hundreds of questions, and I had them on flip charts, and then I had people go around and pick. They had to read all the questions, and every time you do that, of course, it’s opening up your thinking and they had to pick their five favorites. So they had a marker or Post-it or something.

So, then, we could narrow it to, “These are the top five questions,” and then they could choose. And you could see that that would be the beginning of a different strategy because they’ve opened up their thinking collaboratively. So it really is so practical and so creative. And we have companies and agencies who do this all the time now because they realize how effective and efficient it is and creative.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Marilee, I’m loving this. Might we be able to do an accelerated demo of some Q-Storming?

Marilee Adams
Well, we’d have to have a topic or a challenge, and it would have to be yours.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’ll give you one. Sure thing. Let’s go for it.

Marilee Adams
This is great. Nobody has ever asked me this before.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, shucks. Well, I love, well, you know what, talk about questions, I love it when someone says that to me about my questions. So let’s go with this.

Let’s say, Marilee, I lose several hours a month of productive time because I get into little pockets of, “Ugh, I’m kind of tired and kind of bored and kind of don’t feel like doing what I probably should be doing on my to-do list. And so maybe I’ll just fiddle around on the news, or YouTube, or just sort of, like, time-wasting stuff.” It’s not really like life giving, right?

Marilee Adams
So the first question I would ask is, given that you said, the situation you said is maybe it’s procrastinating, which is normal, maybe it’s not feeling energized. But what would your goals be? What would you like to think and feel and do differently?

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. I suppose my goal, it would be that each, well, I mean, I’m tempted to put numbers on them, but I don’t know exactly what the numbers would be. But I would just say the vast majority of hours in the vast majority of work days are spent on activities that are enjoyable and/or meaningful.

Marilee Adams
So a goal would be something like, “To use my time well so that I am productive and energized.” Would that work?

Pete Mockaitis
That is a clear, more succinct way to say that. Yeah, that works for me. Uh-huh.

Marilee Adams
Okay, so let’s go to assumptions. What assumptions are you making that hold up the state you want to leave? And, also, let’s do that first.

Pete Mockaitis
I suppose the assumption in the moments could be that, “Oh, these tasks are not enjoyable.”

Marilee Adams
Okay.

Pete Mockaitis
“I am not in the optimal state of mind to do this at my best. It would be more fun to do this other activity.” Those seem like the biggies.

Marilee Adams
Okay, may I offer some assumptions that I think I heard, and you’ll tell me if they’re right or not?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Marilee Adams
So one is, “To do something, it has to be fun,” that you have to be in the right state of mind. Then there’s a deeper assumption that, “I don’t know how to get myself into the right state of mind.” Would that be accurate? As assumptions?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I think that those assumptions feel true at certain times. It’s, like, they flicker. They’re intermittent assumptions. Sometimes they exist and other times they seem like that’s nonsense. Of course, I do things I don’t like all the time, you know? Yeah.

Marilee Adams
Assumptions are just assumptions. And one of the really interesting things about questions, if you really think about it, particularly the ones we ask ourselves, is that entwined in our questions are our biases, our blind spots.

So when we ask questions, we’re actually bringing all of that history forward. So, can you think of a time when you actually got yourself into a different state? And then were able to do something?

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Certainly.

Marilee Adams
So tell me that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it happens nearly daily, perhaps, you know? I mean, I’m going to exercise or dunk my face in cold water or, you know, do some pump up music. Yeah, that’s very common practice for me.

Marilee Adams
Okay. So what you’ve just established as facts are two bunch of different things. One, there are times when you, I’m going to use my phrase here, that you enjoy being a couch potato and not doing what you said you were going to do.

Pete Mockaitis
There are those times, yes.

Marilee Adams
Me, too, by the way. I think everybody. And, also, there are times, when you bring some strategies to the fore that you know will work – put on energizing music, something that will help you alter your state. Correct?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Mm-hmm.

Marilee Adams
Okay, so let’s declare that the end of phase one, establishing everything. So now we have a goal, and a goal is not a question. Sometimes people think it is. A goal is a statement. It’s what we’re going for. So your goal is, “Use my time well,” which means productively and energetically or enjoyably, right?

So I’m going to start the Q-Storm part, the generating part, with throwing out a few questions. And then I’m going to ask you to start throwing out some questions as well, okay?

Pete Mockaitis
Alrighty.

Marilee Adams
“What have I done successfully in the past that has helped me become more productive and energetic? Which of those was easiest for me? Which were more fun? Which actually move me along?” So now it’s your time to put in one or two questions.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess, “What can I buy to make this better?” because that’s easy and fun. “How can I enroll other people to assist me in this endeavor? And whom should I enroll to assist me in this endeavor?
What changes in my physical environment, you know, what I’m actually seeing and sitting in, could provide helpful lift in this regard?” That’s what’s coming to mind so far.

Marilee Adams
Okay. Given that we have limited time right now, and we’re now going to move into phase three, if we stayed with it, we could come up with a lot more questions.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d like to ask you, do you have a guideline, amount of time or questions, ballpark that’s good to hang here?

Marilee Adams
It’s never a prescription, and that’s actually one of my pet peeves when people have a list of questions they’re supposed to ask when you do that, A, you’re not thinking, you’re not welcoming-thinking, and you’re also not present with the other person.

So the thing is curiosity is the booster, and caring also. And this is a case in which curiosity and caring would matter for you. You care about your state, you care about getting things done, you care about your output, you care about your timelines, you care about downstream effects, like, “If I don’t do this, how will that affect them or the project or something?”

So, at this point, I would just say to you, of the questions you said, if you remember them, what were the top three that felt good to you, felt right?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so I want to use something that you said as well. in terms of, “What have I done historically that was the most fun and easy?” What I love about that is because, in a way, you know, hey, after nearly 1200 episodes of How to be Awesome at Your Job, yeah, we’ve collected a couple of tools, maybe too many along the way.

So what I love about that is it shifts me out of an overwhelm in terms of, like, “Oh, there are so many things I might do.” But it was like, “Well, no way, in your own experience, what have you found was the easiest and most delightful?” I was like, “That was really good. Well, yeah, let’s go ahead and keep a shorter list. This feels more more manageable.”

Because, in some ways, when you’re feeling tired and overwhelmed and not in the mood, having too many tools to choose from is counterproductive.

Marilee Adams
And what you just said was really important that this new question actually focused you out of overwhelm and gave you something to look for that was useful. Oh, you know what? I just thought of… I would include questions like, “Can I give myself a break sometimes?”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. I work too hard. I care too much.

Marilee Adams
You know, “Am I willing to forgive myself? And how can I enjoy being a couch potato for a specific amount of time?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is good. Okay, so now we’ve identified some extra winning questions. And where do we go from here?

Marilee Adams
Well, the last piece I would say, based on what you’ve just discovered and based on your goal, which is really an important one, what’s your first action item?

Pete Mockaitis
My first action item is to schedule a time to get an upgraded office desk chair.

Marilee Adams
Now you could list out a few more, and then you could prioritize them. So what other actions could you take?

Pete Mockaitis
I could ask Justin, who’s in the office with me, if there are some handy ways we could provide some friendly, accountable influence to one another, in focusing. I could get my pump-up tunes playlist, dusted off and curated a little better. It’s been a while since I’ve really tended to that, yeah.

Marilee Adams
I do Tai Chi every day, and I have an accountability partner, my Tai Chi teacher, and I text him every night after I’ve done it, “Did I do it once, twice, three times?” And he does the same with me. So he is my teacher, but we’re also accountability partners. And I know that it makes, there are times when I do it that I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t have him to be accountable.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good.

Marilee Adams
So you have new action items you probably didn’t expect at the beginning of our conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and I appreciate it.

Marilee Adams
I also want to add one caution I would make is learn it and be careful about it.

I have had people read the chapter and then decide they ought to try it in some large high-stakes meeting and have it not work because they actually don’t understand it, they haven’t participated, they haven’t practiced facilitating it.

And so I put in that caution because I don’t want anybody to say, “Oh, I get this. I’ll just do it.” Experiment. Do it with yourself. Do it with a small team. Do not do it with the big, high-stakes mission-critical issue.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Marilee, before we hear about some of your favorite things, in general, I would like to ask if you could share with us three of your all-time favorite questions. It’s like, “Boy, it comes up so often, and it’s so transformational.” I know every situation is bespoke and unique and all that, but if there’s a few that just rock.

Marilee Adams
Okay, and some of these are going to sound very normal, “What do I actually want here? Like, what are my goals?” is always important. I love the question, “What am I missing?” And the one I said earlier, “Who do I choose to be in this moment?” And it’s always a centering question. It’s a question about presence, it’s a question about relationship, it’s a question about actually listening to people around.

And I think those are really important questions to have in your toolbox to ask over and over. And notice, I ask them in first person singular, but if you were a coach or you were a leader who’s using coaching methodology, you could ask them, you could change the pronoun, “What do you actually want here? What could you be missing? Who do you choose to be in this moment?”

So you change the pronoun and then it’s something you can invite other people to do as well. And using the word invite, I do want to say that questions should be experienced as an invitation to think, to collaborate, and that would be from a learner mindset. But when you ask questions that invite participation energy, it changes everything.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Beautiful. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Marilee Adams
This one is adapted from Oliver Wendell Holmes, “I would not give a fig for the simplicity, this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Marilee Adams
One is The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr, S-T-O-R-R. And the other one is How to Tell a Story, and that’s by the people who put on all the Moth events.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, great.

Marilee Adams
And, as you know, storytelling is a primary leadership skill. And, basically, if you want anybody to get anything, if you put it inside a story, it’s more likely to stick. They’re how we think. It’s why I wrote Change Your Questions as a story.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with people, they quote it back to you often?

Marilee Adams
Great results begin with great questions. And so keep asking and keep looking.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Marilee Adams
My website is InquiryInstitute.com. And if people want to email me, it would be marilee.adams@inquiryinstitute.com. And I really welcome queries and feedback, and it’s how I stay connected. We have a learning community of hundreds of people and it’s so much fun.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs.

Marilee Adams
No matter what is going on, stop, ask yourself – so pausing is really important – ask yourself, “What questions am I asking myself right now that I may not have been aware of?” Then you can ask, “Are they going to help me or hurt me?” And typically judger questions will impede progress, and learner questions will accelerate it.

And, of course, that stands on curiosity, real curiosity, because you have to be willing to discover a judger question. And then take action based on that. And that simple, it’s almost like a formula, will serve you professionally, personally, in every place in your life.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Marilee, thank you.

Marilee Adams
Thank you. It was fun.