Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Oh, yeah. I'm glad you brought that up, because inquiry is a fundamental component of strong interpersonal relationships for a couple of reasons. And first of all, let's stop and note, inquiry comes the root of the word inquiry is quest. Quest means to be in search of and not knowing what you're going to find, not the way most people think about questions and inquiries. Most of the time people ask a question to confirm a hypothesis. "Don't you think you're just trying to discredit John by doing that?" That's not inquiry. "Don't you think you'd just be better off letting that go?" That's not inquiry. And by the way, another thing to note in artful inquiry, first of all, you have to suspend judgment. You cannot be curious if you've already decided you know what's going on someone else. You can always go back to being judgmental, but you got to suspend it long enough to see if there's something for you to learn. And then the way you ask the question matters, questions that can be answered with yes or no are typically limiting questions and aren't going to be very productive. Questions that start with why, why did you do that? Are going to make me defensive? Or worse, why are you crying? Well, is that going to make me want to tell you more about why I am upset or why are you upset? Right away I'm going to go into, "Oh no, I'm not upset. It's not a big deal." Or I'm going to go into a place that's not necessarily very productive because this reminds me of how my mother always scolded me. Neither one is going to be very productive. So questions that start with what? What's this about? What's going on? Where is this manifesting? When did you see this happen last? How might we go about unpacking what's going on? Where is this happening most? When, where, how, stay away from why. And it's a whole art. Something else you teach people and you're big on is that people can actually change themselves. I think a lot of people might feel like, I'm just not good at this. I'm not good at giving feedback. I'm not good at maybe asking questions. I'm just like, I don't know. Talk about what you found about the change people see and why it's actually possible and how. Well, for starters, to any of your listeners, one of my very favorite authors is Carol Dweck who wrote a book called Mindset and you put a word yet at the end of any of those, I don't know how yet, I'm not like that yet, changes the meaning of the whole thing. And by the way, talk about updating a mental model, instant update of a mental model. And the other thing that I'll say is we are all capable of changing our behavior. We cannot change our personality. We are born wired with personalities. I am very outgoing and extroverted as might come as a shock to all of you. And you know what? When I overdo it, I suck all the oxygen out of the room and one of the behaviors I had to learn, and it takes discipline to engage in was zipping it a little more so that others could speak up more. And my incentive was that I actually really wanted to learn more about what was going on for them and I wasn't going to learn anything unless I shut up long enough for them to tell me. So behavior is something we all have control over. Now when I give somebody feedback and they tell me, well, I can't do that. If I've asked them to change a behavior, then I'll say, I'm sorry, I don't think I can accept I can't. I will accept I don't want to or I don't have it, but I don't have to accept I can't. So I'd just like you to own the fact that it's a choice that you're making.…

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