Make Them Answer - HumbleDollar (2024)

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Warren Berger|Apr 17, 2024

MANY HUMBLEDOLLAR readers are the financial experts that friends and family members rely on. But how can you best help those around you? Below is an edited excerpt from the 10th anniversary edition of “A More Beautiful Question.”

We all like to give advice—it feels good. “When you’re giving advice, you’re in control of the conversation,” notes the author and executive coach Michael Bungay Stanier. “You’re the one with the answers.”

But people who are experts at using questions to build rapport will tell you: resist the urge to dole out advice. You may be trying to be helpful. But the truth is, people’s advice often isn’t as good as they think it is.

The advice giver may not know enough about what’s going on in a situation—the history, the context—and may be trying to solve a problem that isn’t the real problem. And advice givers have their own biases, experiences and beliefs about how to deal with a given situation—which means the advice might make sense for them, but not necessarily for the recipients.

What’s the alternative? Rather than handing people what you think is “the answer,” it’s preferable to help them find their own answer—and one way to do that is through a combination of listening and asking questions that gently probe and guide. The model for this type of interaction is used by many therapists, life coaches, consultants and more thoughtful financial planners. Good therapists, in particular, don’t tell you what to do. Instead, they lead you on a path to figuring it out for yourself.

If you can help folks to think about a problem more clearly and gently guide them in the direction of possible solutions, you’re leaving room for them to arrive at their own insights and make their own decisions, so that they have more “ownership” of potential solutions. Think about it: Which portfolio are investors more likely to stick with during a bear market, the one they picked themselves—or the one they were told they ought to buy?

What follows is an example of how to gently guide others, as shared by Hal Mayer, executive pastor and leadership trainer at the Springs Church in Ocala, Florida. Mayer was coaching a woman who needed to attract more volunteers to help in her parish. He started by asking her what she hoped to achieve. Her goal: attracting 10 new volunteers.

Mayer next asked, “What have you tried?” She mentioned past efforts to recruit volunteers that hadn’t worked. He then asked this question: “If you could try anything and money was not an object, what would you do to find new volunteers?”

The woman came up with the idea of offering people $100 to volunteer. Mayer made note of that and asked, “And what else?” With each subsequent idea she shared, he followed up by asking for another idea, and then another.

By the way, “and what else”—the AWE question, as Bungay Stanier calls it—is one of the simplest and most effective follow-up questions you can ask. It nudges people to go beyond top-of-mind answers and elicits more, and usually better, ideas and insights. It encourages the process of “thinking out loud” about a challenging subject.

After drawing out a few ideas and jotting them down, Mayer then showed the list to the woman and asked: “Which one of these most interests you—which one would you like to discuss further?” She chose an idea about setting up a lemonade stand at which kids could hand out applications to volunteer.

Mayer then asked several practical questions about that idea: “How would you set it up? What would you need to get started? What problems might get in the way of this idea? What are the first steps you can take, right away?” By the time he was finished with the conversation—which took less than 20 minutes—the woman had a plan of action and was ready to begin in a few days.

As Mayer points out, he didn’t pass judgment on any of her ideas or try to tell her how to proceed. “All I did,” he says, “was ask her questions to help her draw focus.”

While Mayer’s conversation was about finding volunteers, it’s easy to imagine a similar line of questioning if you were talking to a friend about getting out of debt, finding more money to save each month or getting his or her financial affairs organized.

One of the important things Mayer did midway through the conversation was to solicit multiple ideas using the AWE question. The favorite idea, about the lemonade stand, wasn’t the first or even the second idea mentioned by the woman. It had to be drawn out with follow-up questioning.

The approach Mayer took here is similar to an established technique used by psychologists called “motivational interviewing.” It was initially used to help people struggling with alcohol abuse. Today, psychologists use variations of it to help patients deal with all kinds of issues. The technique is based around asking open-ended questions to identify why and how someone might wish to make a difficult change in his or her life.

Then, the questioner uses “reflective listening” (similar to paraphrasing) to move the conversation forward, clarify the person’s thoughts, and provide affirmation. It ends with summarizing the conversation and asking about possible next steps the person could take to begin to make actual changes.

You don’t have to be a psychologist to use motivational interviewing. William R. Miller, one of the pioneers of the practice and co-author of the book Motivational Interviewing, offers a simplified version you can try with a friend, family member or co-worker. If folks you know are considering making a change in their life—perhaps buying a larger home, purchasing a vacation property or changing jobs—try asking the questions below and “just listen carefully to their answers,” Miller says.

• Why do you want to make this change?
• If you did decide to do this, how could you go about it so you succeed?
• What would you say are the three best reasons for you to do it?
• On a scale from zero to 10, where zero means “not at all important” and 10 means “extremely important,” how important is it for you to make this change? What number would you say? And why that number?

“Listen well without interrupting or giving any opinion or advice,” Miller says. “Then give the person a summary of what they said. Finally, ask, ‘So what do you think you’ll do?’ And again, just listen.”

Motivational interviewing has proven very successful over the years—and the key to its success may come down to one basic concept, an idea expressed several centuries ago by the French philosopher Blaise Pascal: “People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.”

Warren Berger is the author of a handful of books, including the bestseller “A More Beautiful Question.” His wife Laura E. Kelly also writes occasionally for HumbleDollar. They live in Mount Kisco, New York.

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