How Asking Questions Transforms Relationships And Leadership With Jeff Wetzler

In both personal and professional settings, the act of asking thoughtful questions can be a powerful tool. This seemingly simple act can foster deeper connections and transform the way we lead and interact with others. In this episode, Tony Martignetti engages with Jeff Wetzler, the co-CEO of Transcend and author of Ask, exploring the transformative power of asking questions. Jeff recounts his journey from a childhood steeped in magic, where understanding the audience’s perspective was paramount, to his career in management consulting and nonprofit leadership. His insights underscore how embracing curiosity and asking thoughtful questions can lead to profound insights, growth, and meaningful impact in both professional and personal contexts.

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Listen to the podcast here

Introduction

It is my honor to introduce you to my guest, Jeff Wetzler. Jeff has been on a quarter-century quest to transform learning opportunities, blending a unique set of leadership experiences in the fields of business and education. He has pursued this quest as a management consultant to the world’s top corporations, as a learning facilitator for leaders around the world, as a Chief Learning Officer at Teach for America, and as co-CEO of Transcend, a nationally recognized innovation organization.

He’s also the author of the published Ask: Tap Into the Hidden Wisdom of People Around You, which is a brilliant book. Please go pick it up. You won’t regret it. Jeff earned his doctorate in Adult Learning and Leadership from Columbia University and a bachelor’s in Psychology from Brown University. He’s a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network and is an Edmund Hillary fellow. He lives in New York with his wife, two children, and their puppy.

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It is truly an honor to welcome you to the show, Jeff.

It’s great to be with you. Thank you so much for having me.

We’re going to have so much fun. I’m so thrilled that you took the chance to come by the fire and to have this conversation because we have some really intimate conversations. I’m really intrigued by what you do and how you do it, but I want to know the story that led you to this work. We’re going to have fun.

That expression of curiosity alone brings out my desire to share and engage with you.

As we do on the show, we explore people’s journeys through what’s called flashpoints. Flashpoints are the points in your journey that have ignited your gifts into the world. As you’re sharing these flashpoints, which I’ll turn over to you in a moment and you can share them, we’ll pause along the way and see what themes are showing up along this path. Feel free to start wherever you’d like and share whatever you’d like to share. Go ahead. Take it away.

Thank you. First of all, I love the concept of flashpoints, and I love the definition of flashpoints as moments that bring your gifts into the world. Is that what you said?

Yeah.

Family Of Magicians

I don’t know how far back to start, but maybe I’ll go way back. One of the things that is part of my family lineage is that we have been magicians for many generations in my family. I grew up as a childhood magician doing birthday parties, festivals, bar mitzvahs, and different things like that. Also, my dad was an amateur magician as well as his dad and their uncle. It goes pretty far back. There are some fun family stories.

I loved being a magician growing up. It was a form of self-expression. It was a way to delight and entertain people. It was a way to make money. I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to do that. One of the things that being a magician teaches you is that you have to put yourself in the other person’s shoes. You have to be obsessing over what’s the experience of the person in front of you. What are they thinking? What are they understanding? What are they wondering about?

As a magician, you’re doing it to deceive them because you want to understand where they’re coming from so that you can misdirect them and put their attention in the wrong place. It trains your brain in a certain way to be constantly thinking about the other person and constantly trying to design experiences for them that are learning experiences. They may not be learning about accurate reality, but they’re learning. I have always been obsessed with learning. Doing this for decades-plus years, especially early on as my own brain was forming, was an incredibly formative thing for me to be somebody who thinks about and cares a lot about learning. Maybe I’ll pause with that. That’s one flashpoint.

I’m blown away by that. First of all, I’m sure there are times when you’re like, “Enough with the jokes and the tricks. I want it straightforward. Serve me dinner. Do not try to serve some kind of joke or something that is meant to fool me.” What’s brilliant about what you shared is this sense of putting yourself in other people’s shoes. It’s this empathy that you start to form because you see behind the curtain and they do not. You want to make sure you understand, “What is it that people are seeing? How do I put myself in their shoes?” That starts to put you at that early age of really understanding empathy.

There’s another dimension of being a magician, which also plays into who I am. As a magician, you keep your cards close to the vest. You withhold things. You don’t tell people what’s really going on. That gave me an appreciation for the fact that there are so many times in life when people are holding their cards close to the vest when they’re not telling us what’s going on. I have that as a part of my own personality where I can sometimes be conflict-averse, be afraid to say what I think, or wonder, “Does anyone care what I think?”

Also, growing up over time, I started to realize there are all these things that I am thinking, feeling, and know. There are experiences and ideas that I have that I’m not sharing with other people. I bet you I’m not alone in doing that. I bet you that there are other people. It got me thinking, “How many other people around me and around each other in the world know things, think things, believe things and have experienced things that are not coming across to those around them?” That was a seed for the book as well that got planted early on.

No doubt. That’s such a great way to look at this to see that questions are the gateway to uncovering that hidden world that those people have and for yourself too. Oftentimes, people don’t think about those things. They say, okay, “They’re being shy,” or, “They’re expressing themselves as they are,” but the reality is there’s always something going on behind the surface.

Often, what’s going behind the surface is what we need to know. The thing that we’re not finding out, if only we could find it out, we would be closer to the other person. We’d help them better. We would make better decisions together, save time together, and come up with better ideas together. That’s the hidden wisdom that I became obsessed with early on.

I love that you say it in a way that it’s about bringing people closer together and not about gaming them.

It’s not about extracting information. It’s not about gaming them. It really is a mutually valuable thing. If it’s not mutually valuable, it doesn’t work.

The Hidden Wisdom

I’d love to hear what happens next. Here you are, this child growing up in this particular environment. What happens along your journey that starts to shape who you become?

I’ll quickly mention the college years but then land on another flashpoint after college. Both growing up and over the course of my college years, I was obsessed with issues of learning, development, and human growth. I studied psychology in college. I spent a lot of time in education. I spent some time redesigning courses in college as well to make them more engaging, deeper learning, And more powerful. I thought I was going to go into teaching, and then I allowed my dad to talk me into trying business first.

I found a management consulting company that came closest to my values. The recruiting slogan at the time was, “A place for optimists to change the world.” It’s called the Monitor Group. I was like, “That sounds like me. I’m an optimist. I want to change the world.” I also chose Monitor because they had a professor named Chris Argyris who was a professor at Harvard Business School and Harvard School of Education. He has retired and was working full-time at Monitor.

He is known as one of the pioneers of the field of organizational behavior. He obsessed over this question of how it is that smart, successful people often fail to learn from each other. They often fail to communicate in ways that truly generate deep learning that enables teams to be successful. Sometimes, it was often the most “successful and educated” people who were the worst at this because part of learning from each other means asking for help, admitting failure, and confronting wrong assumptions. “Smart and successful” people don’t have a lot of practice doing that.

I became very fascinated by what Chris was researching. He had this methodology that I will never forget and has become truly foundational to me. He would say to people in a workshop, “I want to hear about a challenging interaction that you had. I don’t want you to tell me about it. I want you to recreate it for me. Take out a sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle.

On the right-hand side of the paper, I want you to recraft some of the key moments in that dialogue as if you were writing the script of a play, like, “I said this and she said this.” We get a window into the dialogue. He was then like, “On the left-hand side, I want you to write down all the things you were thinking and feeling and did not say during that conversation. Give me all of your unspoken thoughts and feelings.” It was almost like an X-ray into your heart and into your brain.

I had the opportunity to start working with these cases and began to teach this methodology around the world. I would see hundreds of these cases. It was almost like getting this X-ray into hundreds of people’s left-hand columns. Sometimes, you would see all kinds of frustration, pain, hurt, some crap, and a bunch of things, but so often, what I would also see in the left-hand columns was information they weren’t sharing with the other person but that would’ve made a big difference.

It was information like, “Don’t you see why your plan’s going to fail? Here’s the reason I know why your plan’s going to fail,” or, “Don’t you see why you’re demotivating the team around you?” or, “No one can understand what you’re saying.” It was different things like that that if the other person got that information, they would be so much better off, but they never got that information.

Chris developed a set of tools and ideas for how to overcome this. I had the chance to start to teach these around the world. For me, it was a flashpoint in a couple of ways. One is this insight about what’s not being shared, this hidden wisdom, but also, there are tools for how to overcome this. I didn’t invent these tools. I had that chance to teach them. Yet, people would say things like, “This was the most powerful professional learning I’ve ever had. Most of the time, training sucks. I don’t like them. This has changed my life, and not just my work life but my home life as well.” I’m learning how to communicate in ways that produce learnings. I knew I was onto something. Maybe I’ll pause for a second and say that’s another flash point.

My jaw dropped. I listen to that, and how great is the world when you have people who are brilliant and are able to work together and understand each other instead of holding back and creating this sense of like, “I’m smart but I’m not open to hearing the other person through fully.” There’s such brilliance behind that. Most of the time, that’s not what’s happening. There’s a lot of value or creation that is left on the table because we don’t do what you described.

Every person is brilliant. Everyone we meet has something to teach us. When that brilliance is left on the table, we all suffer.

There is brilliance in every person. Every single person that we meet has something that they can teach us. When that brilliance is left on the table, we all suffer. Conversely, if we can unlock that brilliance, to your point, it’s not just a value for us, but it’s a gift to the other person. It’s a chance to help the other person be more self-expressed too, to contribute, and to be more powerful. That’s another flashpoint.

I’ll share a third one. After spending almost a decade at Monitor doing this kind of work with leaders both inside of Monitor and with our clients around the world, I decided to join one of my clients. I had been working part of my time at Monitor with a nonprofit organization called Teach for America. Since it was a nonprofit organization, we charged a lower rate.

I wasn’t supposed to spend as much time working with them compared to more high-paying clients, but I found myself always working more for Teach for America. It was both because I cared so much about their mission, but also because I found them to be more hard-charging, better-run, and more ambitious than most of my corporate clients as well.

One of our projects for Teach for America was to diagnose their readiness to grow over the next five years and then redesign the organization to be ready for that. Once we redesigned the organization and we had all the boxes and lines, the CEO and founder, Wendy Kopp, said to me, “What if you took that box yourself?”

I wasn’t looking to leave at the time, but I was so passionate about what they were doing that I asked Monitor if I could have a leave of absence to go to Teach for America and try this. It’s not unheard of for a consultant to try something rather than working with a client. They said, “You can take a year and do it.” Wendy said to me, “A year’s not going to be enough. You need to get a 2-year leave of absence because, at the end of the 1st year, it’s going to be so hard. You’re going to be in so much pain. You’re not going to be ready to go. I need you to give me two years to do it.” Monitor said, “Okay, two years.”

Wendy was brilliant because she knew that by the end of two years, once you’re in it for that long, you will have fallen in love with it. I did fall in love, so I ended up staying at Teach for America for ten years. I was the chief learning officer there. My responsibilities included the training and support of thousands of teachers across the country who are working in some of the most challenging classrooms and challenging high-need communities that exist in the country. It was very challenging but rewarding.

I remember one moment early in my tenure there, we were developing training institutes for these teachers who had an intense summer to get ready for their teaching assignments. We would run training institutes all across the country. Each institute would train 500 teachers. It’s a pretty big enterprise with probably 100 staff in each of these many institutes.

We were getting ready to launch the institutes. We were probably about a month out and I discovered at the very last minute that one of our institutes was about to implode. All the things that they had spent a year getting ready to do were falling apart. We didn’t have the classrooms for student teaching. We didn’t have the food service ready. We didn’t have the curriculum right. It was all falling apart.

It turned out, I discovered later, that the team was struggling the entire year but never told me that despite the fact that I was trying to use all the things I learned at Monitor, all the tools, the curiosity, the questions, and all that kind of thing. I was asking and was genuinely interested, but they didn’t tell me the problems.

Thankfully, somebody stepped in at the very last minute. We were able to get it all resolved. The teachers were well-trained. It was a smooth experience, but I continued to sit with this question of, “How come I didn’t find out? How come I remained blind to the most important information?” If I had known what was going on, I could’ve helped. I would’ve rolled up my sleeves and helped to clear some of the barriers and all that kind of stuff, but I was not aware of it.

In the end, what I concluded is that this was my fault as a leader. I did not create an environment of safety for people to tell me. I didn’t appreciate the power of my position. I wasn’t asking the right questions in all the right ways. What I realized is that all the things that I had learned at Monitor were necessary but not sufficient. There was more that was needed, particularly in the domain of psychological safety.

I learned a lot from the work of Amy Edmondson who’s a pioneering researcher in psychological safety. I also thought a lot about, “How does this work across lines of difference?” Teach for America was a much more diverse organization than I had come from in the corporate sector. There was diversity across lines of power, race, gender, class, and other identity markers, all of which I was insufficiently attending to. For me, this was a crucible, painful moment that maybe didn’t bring out my gifts but exposed the need to develop some gifts that I set about working on for all of that time as well. I’ll pause again.

I love that you say it’s a crucible moment because it really is. It was exactly what you needed to be able to see that there were some gaps that needed to be filled. I love the coupling of psychological safety with this. The best tools in the world without the right container and the context make it hard to be able to apply them over and over again. You’ve got to make sure that you are thinking, “Am I using this in the right environment? Have I created the right container for this to be able to work?”

Exactly. As leaders, we create the container whether we realize it or not. If we can be aware of what is the container we’re creating and how we can create a container where it feels safe, comfortable, easy, and appealing to have open, authentic, and honest conversations, we’re far more likely to produce the learning that we need to produce.

What I also think is interesting about this is that here you are somebody who’s charged with being a chief learning officer who, in essence, people would think, “This person’s got it all figured out. They should have it all figured out.” Even you stumble, and I’m not saying this as an affront to you. Everyone has stuff to learn. Everyone should be open to continuing to learn on the journey. No CEO can say, “I’ve got it all figured out,” and be done with it. There’s the journey that continues to evolve.

One of my favorite quotes is from a philosopher, Alain de Botton, who says, “If you’re not embarrassed by who you were last year, you’re not learning fast enough.” I love that because it flips the whole thing on its head. It’s like you have to have these moments where you stumble and recognize that you stumble. If you’re not, you’re probably not learning. You’re probably not trying. You’re probably not stretching yourself and taking enough risks as well. I have had all kinds of embarrassing moments, and I hope I continue to have them. I hope that they’re different from the previous ones that I’ve had as well.

Transcend

If you’re making the same mistakes over and over again, you’re not learning. That’s the crux of it all. I love this. Tell me what you’d like to share next. Is there another flashpoint moment? As you left Teach for America eventually, what happened next?

After about a decade at Teach for America, and this was in 2015, I left and launched a new organization called Transcend. I co-founded it together with someone named Alan Samoa. He and I had spent some time co-leading teams at Teach for America, so we knew we enjoyed working together and leading together. One of the things that we recognized in our work at Teach for America is that we were placing teachers into very outdated roles of what it means to be a teacher.

It’d be almost as if we were working with doctors and we said to doctors, “You need to be the general practitioner and the nurse and invent the drugs, sweep the floors at the end of the day, see 30 patients at once, and somehow think that will be an effective model of delivery.” Yet, that is the education delivery model that we have. It’s the education delivery model we’ve had for 100 years, and it hasn’t changed in 100 years. We call it the factory model or the industrial model of schooling.

We said, “We don't want to continue to place teachers in that outdated, broken model. We want to redesign the model. It was designed at one point. It can be redesigned again.” We started this organization called Transcend whose mission is to reinvent education and reimagine what schooling can be from the ground up in a very community-based way.

There is no answer that’s imposed on school communities. School communities can go through a journey that is educational itself where they are bringing students together, families, teachers, administrators, and employers to say, “What do we want from our graduates? Therefore, what kind of learning experiences do they need to have? Therefore, what does a school need to be and look like? It is putting everything on the table from the schedule, space, roles, the curriculum, assessments, budget, all of it.

That’s what we have been doing for almost a decade. Transcend has about 125 full-time employees. We’re working all over the United States and a little bit beyond and helping communities all over the place go through this community-based design journey to reimagine schools. It is probably the most challenging thing I’ve ever done but also one of the most fulfilling things I’ve ever done. I’ve learned a ton along the way.

What is so interesting about this, and it came to mind as you were sharing this, is this idea that here you are when you talked about your early journey to be a teacher. Here, you stumbled into Teach for America and it became something that you did. You’ve stepped into Transcend and you’re applying a lot of the things that you learned in the work that you did in other capacities of disrupting, redesigning, and changing the way things are done but applying it to an area that you thought you were going to be working in in the first place.

It’s true. Nothing is a coincidence. I feel like I’ve been able to toggle back and forth between the worlds of business and education, bringing together themes of learning, design, and innovation. A couple of years ago, I realized that the very tools I learned at Monitor starting with Chris Argyris and with these ways of helping people engage better have been the foundation of my own leadership throughout it all. That’s what’s enabled me to change industries, start an organization, raise money, and all these different things. It is my ability to learn from other people. I’m still a student of it, so I have plenty of moments when I don’t do it well, but it’s something that has served me so well.

It has also been the thing that has been my go-to in developing and mentoring the people around me as well. It’s the first set of tools, and people say how valuable it is. A few years ago, I said, “It’s time to pay it forward. I don’t want to benefit from this myself and the people around me. I want to pay forward what people like Chris Argyris, David Kantor, Diana Smith, and many other mentors have poured into me. I want to be able to share it.” That was what led me to put this book together. We can talk more about that as well.

The Book

100%. I’m so glad you brought us to the book. It’s so amazing when you think about all the pieces that come together. When you’re doing all the work that you’ve accumulated along your journey and they all align, that’s where fulfillment comes from. You feel fulfilled when you’re able to do things that complete all the aspects of who you are. That’s a beautiful thing when you recognize that. The book itself is a piece of completing the pie. Maybe I’m speaking out of class, but you can tell me if it isn’t. I feel like it is a way to honor all of the pieces of who you are and then also share them.

To me, the book was an act of self-expression to try to put into words all that I have benefited from other people and synthesize it in a way that I hope is practical and helpful for people. That has been a very fulfilling thing to do. I thought to myself, “I hope I have many more years to live, but God forbid if something happens, I feel like, at least at this point, I’ve said what I have to say, what I want to say, and what I want to offer to the world.” I’m working to bring it to life.

Tell the audience a little bit more about the book. I want to dive into some key concepts without giving the whole thing away. Tell the key concepts behind it.

The core problem that the book is trying to solve is a problem that we all face, even though many of us don’t realize that we’re paying the price of this problem. The problem is that the people around us, our friends, colleagues, coworkers, investors, and clients, have these ideas, insights, perspectives, and feedback for us that if we could find out what they were thinking and feeling, we would be better off together.

We would make better decisions. We would save time. We would innovate. We would be closer in our relationships. The problem is too often, they don’t tell us. In fact, more likely, they’re not telling us all of what we really need. I believe the answers to our most important challenges are right in front of our noses, but they lie trapped in the heads and hearts of people who know it and see it but aren’t telling us.

The book starts by exposing what are the most common things that the people around us are likely thinking, feeling, and knowing but not telling us and how prevalent that is, and then it digs into why. What are the barriers that stop people from telling us what we need to know, think, and feel? That’s the first part.

The heart of the book is what we do about this problem. It’s a solution. I call it the Ask approach. It’s 5 steps or 5 practices, all of which are grounded in research and all of which are tested in action that when we put them together, gives us the greatest chance of understanding what the people around us know, think, and feel. It includes things like, how do we choose curiosity? How do we lead with a true desire to learn from the other person? How do we make it safe? How do we lower the barrier so it’s more comfortable, easier, and more appealing for people to tell us? How do we know what the right questions are to ask? How do we pose quality questions?

Few of us have been taught a real repertoire of questions. We usually ask what I call crummy questions or a very narrow repertoire. There is a whole taxonomy of questions that we can ask to know what’s the right question to ask depending on what we’re trying to learn. That's about how to do that. Once we ask the questions, it’s about listening. How do we listen to learn? How do we listen to hear what are the most important and essential things people are telling us or not telling us but still that we need to understand?

Finally, how do we make meaning of it? How do we process what we’ve heard? It’s called reflect and reconnect, and we can squeeze the insight. Reflection is what allows us to convert experience into insight, insight into wisdom, and wisdom into action. It’s a practical process. How do we do that reflection? How do we close the loop with the other person, reconnect, and let them know, “This is what I learned from you. Thank you. Here’s what I’m going to do with that. Here’s how I grew. Is there anything else you want me to learn from what we talked about as well?” Those five steps comprise the Ask approach, and I believe that they are each very learnable.

Reflection is what allows us to convert experience into insight, insight into wisdom, and wisdom into action. It's a practical process.

The final section of the book is all about how we master this. How do we master this for ourselves? I talk about a very practical learning process for how we can build this competence, but also how we can build it into our teams and our organizations where we have teams that have rituals, structures, incentives, and practices that foster this constant learning and inquiry. How do we build it for the next generation or the young people in our lives? Whether they’re our own kids, our godchildren, the kids in our own lives, or whatever they may be, how do we raise a generation that’s far more curious and really knows how to ask and learn?

The book ends by applying this whole thing to the polarization in society that we’re facing where we are constantly being divided. We are often looking at someone on the other side of an issue as the enemy or the opponent. I offer the possibility to say, “What if we could say one question to ourselves, which is, “What can I learn from this person?

If I consider that no matter where you stand on an issue, there’s something I can learn from you, it doesn’t mean I’m going to agree with you. It doesn’t mean I’m going to do what you want me to do, but there’s something I can learn. Maybe I’m learning how you got your own views. Maybe I’m learning something we have in common.” If we approach people with that question, I have found it brings us closer. It has been very striking to me over the years to assume, “There’s something I can learn from every person.” That’s my closing wish in the book for society.

That’s wonderful. We are simpatico here because, in my book, I talk about this idea of divergent minds and convergent hearts.

I love that.

It’s the idea that we bring together different people who think differently, but at the end of the day, when we do share, we can converge being able to see each other and not agree but at least respect. That’s key. I love what you shared. I’ve read the book already. I love your book. What I love about it the most is that it’s for everyone. It’s not just for leaders in the business sense, but it’s for people who are in any capacity and for kids. If you can teach them in a way that they can understand, this model will help them to develop and create paths to be better people.

I agree. The problem that the book tackles is a problem that exists in every relationship. There has been lots of interesting research that shows we’re not very good at knowing what’s in the minds and hearts of the people around us. That’s especially true for the people who are in our lives in close personal relationships as well. Sometimes, we’re overconfident. We assume, “I’ve been in a relationship with this person for years. I must know what they are thinking and feeling.” I agree. One of the things that’s been gratifying for me since the book came out is how people have said to me, “This is not just helping me in my leadership, but this is helping me in my marriage or some other part of my life.” It means a lot to me.

Personal Insights And Learnings

I want to shift gears for a moment to ask, what are some things you’ve learned about yourself in this journey that you haven’t shared? It may be some insights about your own challenges or things that you’ve learned that you’d like to share with the audience.

First of all, I learned a lot about my own ability to share, write, and express. I’ve had to raise my game dramatically as a writer in this. My agent said to me at the beginning, “You sound like a management consultant. People don’t want to read books by management consultants. They want to hear stories.” I had to get over a story I had inside myself, which was, “Who wants to really hear my stories? It’s just me. Why would anyone care?” Ironically, that is one of the things that holds lots of people back from sharing with us.

I’ve had to go through my own journey of recognizing that there is value in sharing some of the hardest, most vulnerable parts. In fact, what people have said to me is that that’s what they’ve most appreciated about the book. It’s when I’ve been able to talk about myself, my childhood, my family, my daughter, my son, and all of that. That has been a transformative process for me and a work in progress. I still continually need to remind myself, “Show up in this way. Bring your full self. Lead with the most personal and most vulnerable as well.” It’s a healing and transformative process because to see how powerfully that helps people connect to me means a ton.

You shared something really interesting. First of all, you humanize it because you want people to relate to you, not because you want to sell more books. It’s because you want them to learn the lesson through a human lens. When you write the book, it’s also about you, selfishly, in a way, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. I mean that you want to learn about yourself through this in the process.

Research and putting myself in the process has been a huge learning experience.

I can talk to you about this all day. I want to start to come to a close. I do have one last question, which I know is going to be interesting for you. What are 1 or 2 books that have had an impact on you, and why?

One of my deepest mentors throughout my career in my life is a woman named Diana Smith. I first met her at Monitor. She’s been in my life for 25-plus years. Monitor did an intense apprenticeship program, so I got to train with her for three years for half my time. She is one of the most talented thinkers and interventionists in systems of all kinds. That’s from family systems to organizational systems to political systems.

She wrote a book called Remaking the Space Between Us. It’s trying to apply many of the ideas that I talk about and learn from her, and also additional ideas to the question of our democracy. It’s saying our democracy is in a perilous place, but instead of blaming “the leadership” or “politicians,” we need to look at ourselves. We need to say, “What part am I playing in the divisions that we’re seeing in society? Also, what can I do in a very practical way to open up my own space inside my own mind and my own groups and close this space that is the distance between groups they’re dividing us as well?” Both the book and Diana herself have had a very powerful impact on me.

I’m going to go pick up this book. It sounds fascinating.

It’s truly a great book.

Is there anything else that you want to share?

I read a book called All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir. This is a young adult book. My daughter is in high school. One of my favorite things to do is to read the same books that she’s reading so that we can talk about those books. This is a book by a Pakistani-American woman. It’s a fictional book, but it draws from her own life experience and stories from other people as well. It’s such a poignant rendering of the American dream and the power and struggles that, in this case, Pakistani immigrants faced in trying to live out the American dream. It is both heart-wrenching but also very hope-filled as well. That would be a second one that I would recommend.

That’s wonderful. I love that idea. That’s something that I wish I could get my son to do. He’s into hip-hop and rap. Maybe I’ll have to find a book that really speaks to that.

Maybe there’s some bridge or something like that. Especially as my kids are teenagers, I get less time with them. I’m searching for the toeholds of something that we can talk about and something that we have in common. It turns out there are some great books that I also get a lot out of myself.

Thank you so much for sharing that. I have to start by saying this was wonderful. You shared so many great insights. I’m so grateful that you came to the show. I know the audience is going to walk away with so many great insights, so thank you so much.

Thank you for having me. I really appreciate the approach to the conversation. I will always think about flashpoints and your definition of flashpoints. It’s a very different kind of interview. It meant a lot to me to be able to have this reflective space with you too.

Reach Out To Jeff

That means so much to me. Thank you. Before I let you go, I’m going to need to know where people can find you. What’s the best place for people to reach out if they want to learn more about you, buy the book, and all that?

I love to connect with people on LinkedIn, so feel free to connect with me at Jeff Wetzler on LinkedIn. There’s also a website for the book, which is www.AskApproach.com. You can reach out to me there as well. On that website, you can see a bunch of articles and videos about the book. You can also take a diagnostic assessment to find out how good you are at asking questions and learning from the people around you, which parts of the Ask approach you are stronger in, and which approach you can learn more about as well. That’s all for free. Go to AskApproach.com.

Thanks again. Thanks, everyone, for coming on the journey. This has been a wonderful episode. I know you’re going to get out there and share this with others. Please do so.

Thanks so much.

Important Links

• Transcend

• Teach for America

• Ask: Tap Into the Hidden Wisdom of People Around You

• Remaking the Space Between Us

• All My Rage

• Jeff Wetzler - LinkedIn

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