Ask and Ye Shall Succeed: 5 Tips for Mastering the Art of Good Questions

Jeff Wetzler shares key insights from Ask: Tap Into the Hidden Wisdom of People Around You for Unexpected Breakthroughs In Leadership and Life.

There’s a vast amount of useful information all around you, but much of it is sealed away inside the heads of other people. To access it, the only real tool available to you is language, and in particular, questions. Many of us are either too timid or too proud to ask the right questions in the right ways, or simply don’t know how to do it. But learning the art of asking could supercharge our careers and our personal lives, according to

Jeff Wetzler

, author of the new book Ask: Tap Into the Hidden Wisdom of People Around You for Unexpected Breakthroughs In Leadership and Life. Jeff is an international management consultant and co-CEO of Transcend, an education innovation organization. Here he is to share 5 of his big ideas.

1. Choose curiosity.

What if I told you that some of the most important people in your life aren’t telling you what they really think, feel, and know? That’s right: your friends, family members, colleagues, and even your customers and clients are walking around with insights, ideas, feedback, and experiences that would be incredibly valuable for you to know. But if you’re like most people, too much of this treasure trove of information will forever stay hidden.

For example, one of the most common things people hold back from sharing is their feedback or advice for you. The people around you can see things about you that you just can’t. They can point out a blind spot in your strategic plan or gently observe an unhelpful pattern in your behavior. Most importantly, they are the only person who can tell you how you impact them. If something you were doing were inadvertently hurting someone or making things harder for them, you’d want to know. But most people don’t offer up that kind of feedback or ideas for what you could do better. It’s up to you to draw it out of them.

This is what led me to develop the Ask Approach. The Ask Approach consists of five highly effective, actionable steps that will deepen your self-awareness, help you make smarter decisions, and bring new levels of depth and meaning to your relationships.