Camille: Welcome to episode 21 of The Belief Shift.
Camille: We don't know what we're titling this, so you already know what it's titled, listener, because we titled it.
Camille: But as we're going into it, we don't know what we're titling it. It's something about the idea of thought partnering or group activity or just not doing stuff alone. I think we talked about this when we said, when we're gonna talk about creating a plan that you should shop it around.
Camille: You should share it. You should, it should be something that's done with others as opposed to, I'm just gonna sit in my little office and write my plan by. So the reason that I was focusing on this as a topic today is because I just literally did this yesterday and it was so fun. It was so great.
Camille: I did a annual business planning workshop with a handful of business owners yesterday. We spent five hours together building out their plans and it was super fun. And I had been doing this the past couple years on Zoom, just, you know, cuz the pandemic kind of took out the option of doing it in person.
Camille: And then this year I had enough energy around some of my clients that really wanted to do it in person and I had enough people locally to do it. So we did. So we got about 10 people and we just planned out our stuff and it was just delightful.
Camille: And so I just thought we really needed to talk about why is that so much better?
Camille: Welcome to The Belief Shift. The show that explores. What you really need to know about building a successful small business.
Camille: I'm your host, Camille Rapacz: small business coach and consultant who spent too much of her career working in corporate business performance.
George: And I'm George Drapeau: your co-host and her brother. I'm a leader in the tech world bringing my corporate perspective, but mostly my curiosity.
Camille: Together, we're exploring beliefs about success and how to achieve it. But mostly we're bringing practical solutions so you and your business can thrive.
George: I'm gonna break another secret for the audience here and saying that like you have a note at this point saying, Hey, George asked your George questions about this.
George: And coming into this, I had some questions in mind, but as you're talking, first of all, you answered most of the initial questions I had, but then it brought up a whole slew of other things. So can I just dump these on you? Yes. Okay. In no particular order.
George: So have we talked about on the podcast you as an introvert and me as an extrovert and how that expresses itself differently in how we deal with it, but mostly you as an introvert?
George: Have we talked about that?
Camille: We haven't explicitly talked about it. I think I've mentioned it by the bye, but I don't think we've actually talked about the fact that I am an introvert and you are an extrovert and how that shows up.
George: Well, I hope I'm not outing you here.
Camille: Oh, no, no, no, no.
George: But where I'm going with this was, so you do this all the time.
George: You're very good at this. You lead, you get, I mean, I, when I hear you talk about the workshops that you do or in-person events, I can easily visualize how you would run on those things. Cause I know you pretty well. And yet you're an introvert. So I wonder, well, how does introvert Camille get into a space where you go and kick butt at this thing?
George: Sure. Highly energetic. And then is there blowback for you afterward that you have to kind of absorb a process?
Camille: I do love doing it because, even as though I'm an introvert, I still love to connect with people and how I connect with them is what matters.
Camille: So extroverts tend to be able to feel energized through connecting with people and larger groups of people. You can handle a larger group easier than I could handle a larger group. And this particular group, I already knew most of the people that were showing up. So it was almost like doing it with friends.
Camille: But even if it was all a group of new people, it was a small enough group. Like I said, it was just a room of 10 people. And I can still make meaningful connection with people and that's what matters for an introvert. Can I have a meaningful connection and conversation.
Camille: I'm also in control because I'm leading the whole thing. So I can manage my energy in how I'm going to ask people to walk through the exercises. So that is really helpful for me. Mm-hmm.
Camille: But in terms of blow back, absolutely there's blow back. So whenever I do an event like this, I do get all jazzed up.
Camille: I'm super excited about doing it. And I go in there and energy, energy, energy. But all the energy's going out. It's all flowing out and I love it. And I do get some back just from the interactions, but it's mostly energy depleting. It's so I have to rejuvenate myself. I have to make sure I set aside time to just be alone.
Camille: Huh. And that's how I will re-energize myself. Yeah. And I need to much more than an extrovert needs to do. I have to do it more often. This is what I notice. Cuz I'm also married to an extrovert, so I'll need to do that. And it doesn't mean extroverts also don't need this, right? Yeah. You need your own downtime too.
George: I certainly do.
Camille: I need to be more thoughtful about it. I need to plan it out. I need to recognize the frequency and the level of quiet that I actually need in order to re-energize myself. For me, I just look at it, it's just part of my process.
Camille: It's just what I do. Yeah. It doesn't ever get in the way of what I do. And then I go re-energize myself and then I'm ready to do the next thing.
Camille: So when it's hard is when I'm doing a multi-day event. So I used to do, oh yeah. A week long leader training. That I didn't lead the whole thing the whole week.
Camille: Thankfully I had a team, so we all were taking turns, but I was responsible for the whole thing. So I was present the whole time and either back of the room or front of the room, depending on what was going on. There was one day where I pretty much owned the whole day. So we're doing that. So I'm on the whole time cuz I'm in the room.
Camille: So for me, whether I'm in the front of the room or not, I'm on. I'm with this group of people all day long, leading them through. . I loved seeing the transformations that leaders would have, but I would be wiped out. And so that weekend there could be zero plans in my schedule all week.
Camille: Yeah. Zero plans. Yeah.
George: Next question.
George: You mentioned you're able to be in a room with people and do this versus having to do it virtually. And I felt this in this last year too. It is highly satisfying being there with people. The energy is better. It feels like it's easier to be more productive.
George: What did you observe than being there in person that made it a better experience than doing it all virtually?
Camille: I think part of it is the type of activity. How do you decide when it's important to be in person versus not?
Camille: Yeah, right. Exactly. Like even here, it's when is it important for me to go meet with a client in person at their office for my local clients versus just be here? Yeah.
Camille: So part of it for me is what type of work are we going to do? If it's gonna be highly collaborative and creative, that tends to go better when you're in person. And if you're gonna be using tools that work better in person.
Camille: One of the things that's been happening with one of my clients is we're doing a lot of strategic planning and we just can't do them all in person. There's too many sessions and people are scattered all over the country.
Camille: So we're doing it online and we're using Miro for the online to sort of mimic what we would do if we were in person using Post-it notes and on the wall and trying to be creatively moving things around. That's working pretty well, but it's still, as soon as we get in a room with people, there's a different dynamic that shifts just because you're human to human.
Camille: And I don't really know how to put a word to that or a description to that. I'm not an expert in the psychology of what happens there, but something does happen. So somebody yeah, called out in the group yesterday said they loved just being able to feel the synergy of everybody doing the same thing together in the same room.
Camille: I don't know how else to describe that, except that there's real value to that.
Camille: As humans, we do need a sense of community and connectedness. And I think that connection that you do not get that same connection virtually, you can only get that from just being with an actual human in the room.
Camille: And it does make a difference. It helps creativity, it helps bring different energy to the work that you're doing. All sorts of stuff.
George: I completely agree. And it's something I like thinking about and seeing if I can get more crisp. I wanna relate that to a different, but I think related concept for me, a long time ago I joined this advanced development group where there are a few of us are developers.
George: There's a psychologist and an anthropologist in a group as well. Very smart people. And it's because we were studying how we could use com computer tools to aid human interaction. They built some early conferencing tools a long time ago before all this stuff was common.
George: And I remember psychologist, my friend, teaching me what they had learned about how information is shared or transferred to people. The basic rule of thumb was when you're physically co-located with your teammates, you know, if you're all sitting in the same hallway, in the same building, you're all there together.
George: There's two types of information. There's formal information and informal information. Formal information you could do through an all hands, emails, announcements, things like that. And that could just passed down generally, and you don't have to be in person to receive most of that stuff.
George: But when you're together, there's a lot of informal information that happens. You're at the water cooler and you meet up and you talk about something and you exchange some idea and a decision gets made, or an important concept gets transferred. The value of being in person is the enablement of all that informal information that we don't really easily account for, but is definitely a thing that helps teams feel more cohesive.
George: So we were trying to build tools that replicated that. We had a tool where it was a conferencing tool where everybody's camera was on all the time. And we were trying to simulate you going by somebody's office. You know, you walk down to somebody's office and you look at the window, you kind of maybe wave or just make eye contact, and if they're on the phone they'll wave you off or they won't paying attention, and it just takes a couple of seconds before you know if it's okay to walk in or not.
George: We replicated that and so like if I wanted to talk to you, I would press a button on my list of people for you. It would turn on both of our cameras, but no sound for just a few like five seconds. And so I was, you would see the camera, you'd say, oh, it's George. And you would use that same kind of behavior of you would either pay attention to me or wave me off or whatever.
George: And if you didn't confirm the connection, Then after five seconds, the cameras were shut down and go away like I walked by. It's a really interesting way to address that kind of problem. But where I'm going with all this is the concept about meeting virtually versus in-person reminds me of formal versus informal information transfer.
George: And I wonder if there's a relationship there.
Camille: It feels like that's gotta be a huge piece of it, right? As you were saying that, I was thinking about examples yesterday of when just informal conversations were happening across business owners who didn't know each other and, hadn't met until they got in the room even.
Camille: And they started having conversations and they were helping each other. I had not assigned people to talk to each other. I just said there was a point where I was going around the room and just what we're gonna talk about today, sort of thought, partnering with each one of the business owners about their brainstorms and how they were turning those into goals for their business.
Camille: And as I was doing that, I was like, and everyone else talked to each other. Either work on your own plan, if your head's down writing your plan great. Or talk to each other. And some of them were doing that and it was this, their ability to just sort of decide randomly whether they were gonna do that or not Yeah.
Camille: Was so much easier than, imagine if I was trying to be on Zoom and either, you know, do you want a breakout room or it's so much more formal.
Camille: The informality of the decision to connect, what you connect on, all of that, as you said, the information they choose to share, I think that we underestimate the value of doing that and creating space for that and what comes out of it.
Camille: And so I think that's part of the value in doing that work together is there are things that will happen that you could never plan enough to make happen without just creating the environment for it.
Camille: I like that.
George: I was also curious about how long it was this, the group size and stuff, which I think is interesting too, because if you had said, yeah, it was 50 people, I would wonder, wow, how did you get stuff done in just, just five hours with that many people? But 10 seems like to me maybe about the maximum size where you can really go in intensively. Maybe you can do bigger groups.
Camille: That was about the max size for what I was trying to do. To make sure that ad could be highly interactive with them. More than that. And it would've had to been much more even though I was walking through them through the steps, it's still highly variable cuz they were business owners of all different sizes and types and they're all small business owners.
Camille: But even at that, some were just getting started. Some had been in business for seven or 10 years. But the process was the same. The bigger the group gets, the more just instructional it is than interactive.
Camille: That's cool. We got to make it highly interactive and it just made me think about just this value of doing it all as a group and doing it in person and what we just talked about, that value of doing it in person. I think we're all sort of recognizing, even though we're like, oh, it turns out we could all do our jobs from home and on Zoom.
Camille: You can, but depending on the work that you're doing, again, it gets back to when you're making the decision to travel or to come together physically for a meeting, I think you start with what is the objectives and what are my methods for meeting those objectives?
Camille: Then once I know what that is, is that better served by doing it in person or can we get good enough by doing it virtually? Yeah, that's what you're trying to draw the line for. And this particular effort that I was doing with these business owners, there were several reasons for them coming together in person.
Camille: And that's sort of even how it played out. Even when I just brought it up to them, they all really just jumped on it. And I think part of that is just the fact that we haven't been doing it for a couple years. Almost any opportunity for people to meet in person now, most of the people I talk to, they're like, yes, please, because they miss it.
Camille: Yeah. It's convenient, but, and I had people who were driving like two hours. So it was a long day for them, but it was worth it because they got to be with people when they otherwise wouldn't get to do this work. Yeah. So the first level of this value, which could be virtual or in person, this one isn't so specific to it being in person.
Camille: But it's just the idea of the accountability that we actually just booked this time together to do a thing. So one of the participants in the workshop said, you know what? I would like to think that I'm the kind of person that would go do this work on my own. But if I'm really honest with myself, I'm not.
Camille: I need this dedicated time that you have scheduled for us to come together and do it. So just accountability of having a group. Which also we'll talk about in terms of even just having a thought partner. Accountability becomes just one of the number one things, right? Yeah.
Camille: We already talked about synergy in the room. So just that other level of energy that's buzzing around when you're all doing the same thing and focused on the same type of work. Uhhuh is really, you know, energizing. Yeah, absolutely. I always think about how when you were in college if you really wanted to focus and study, you'd go to the library.
Camille: Well, why is that? I mean, I wasn't necessarily checking out books, but I would go to the library. I didn't need all the books that were there. Yeah. I just needed the environment. I needed that energy. This is why you'd have a study group. We're all just gonna sit down and do this work together.
Camille: It's helpful to create that common sense of purpose, and you have that energy or the synergy that's created from that. So that was definitely a thing that everybody was feeling.
Camille: We've been alone in our Zoom worlds, and just that idea of connection. But also for these business owners, it was that they're not alone in their business challenges. So even as they're talking about what they're working on and this is kind of related to another one I was gonna talk about, which was this validation that I am not alone in the struggles of my business.
Camille: Business owners tend to look at another business owner. People do this to me all the time. Oh, you just seem like you just really have it all together and you just know what you're doing. I'm like, my business is also not perfect.
Camille: I hate to admit that as a business coach I don't have a perfect business, but there's really no such thing. Having your business be perfect would be incredibly difficult.
Camille: Yeah. And everybody recognizing that and seeing like the business owner across the table from them who's been at it for seven years has aspects of their business that are not performing well, is really just relieving. Cuz you realize, oh, it's okay. I might be really good at one part of my business.
Camille: Like I might be really good at managing my finances, but I'm not really good at understanding how the marketing works or vice versa. And that's really what we were starting to see across the board. Everybody was an expert in what their business does, which is why their business does well. Yeah.
Camille: But certain functions of business itself, everybody had highly varied levels of competence mastery. Yes. Competence in any one of those areas. And it was very relieving for everybody to just see that.
Camille: The last couple things in terms of , why I even do the workshop one is the idea that I'm giving them the process.
Camille: If you're left to your own devices to plan, some people just don't even know where to start. So me walking in through the steps was obviously a big bonus for them cuz then they could focus on their actual content of the plan and not on what should I do next? I told them, now do this next.
Camille: But the last one, and the one I really wanna emphasize today is the idea of having thought partners.
Camille: What's the definition of a thought partner? Let's talk more about that. So thought partner is as somebody that you're sharing ideas or experiences. It's typically a conversation between either just two people or a very small group of people. I usually just thought partner with one other person. And it's usually mutually beneficial, like we're thought partnering together, I'm helping you and you're helping me in this process. And it's a way for us to really talk through, you know, how we sometimes do better thinking out loud.
Camille: A lot of it is just that we're just thinking out loud. We're processing these complex problems out loud and I'm doing it with a sounding board. Now you can kind of reflect back to me some of my thoughts and how that's working. It's kind of the idea that we would come together and in this specific instance of what we did yesterday.
Camille: It's, you're gonna build a business plan and then you're gonna share that plan with me and I'm gonna echo back some thoughts or some questions or some ideas to help you refine your plan, refine your thinking. Cuz on our own, our brains really need something to react to, to get that refinement to happen.
Camille: And that's what thought partnering does.
George: Yeah. It's funny, I mean, and I don't think I've ever really thought about a concrete definition of thought partnership, and then I hear how you describe it and think, yeah, it's really nice. It's really crisp.
George: If you were to ask me, so George, how would you define thought partnership?
George: Go . Yeah, go. I would, I guess my off the cuff reaction would be, Thought partner as, as you said, having somebody else to compare ideas with, to to discuss your ideas with and why? I have a thought partner is for a couple reasons. For me, one is it helps me get outside of my own head.
George: Cuz I can easily get wrapped around my own thought process and it can become more rigid. And so I have get more dug into a point of view and I lose the ability to brainstorm and have perspective, but I share with one other person. I get another brain gets me outta my own head.
George: And that's useful I think. But you've already said that, but that's the, the big thing for me. The other is I'm really big, big fan of the idea of sharing context with people. Whether it's people on my team report to me, giving them as much context as I can to help them make better decisions. There's a Star Trek discovery episode that talks about context, by the way.
George: Lorca? Yeah. The whole episode title is Context is for Kings.
George: It's a great episode.
George: But I also think that the thought partnership, you're getting somebody else's context to react to your thoughts on. I think that's helpful.
George: Often, I talk about models of behavior, you know, just have somebody you look up to in a certain way. And I have this thing where I have certain people in my life who are the model that I use for a particular kind of thing.
George: There's somebody in my life who, when I want to think strategically, when I'm not sure I'm doing it on my own, or clearly this guy is the guy, think like, what would Ashu do in this situation? He's the most strategic thinker I know. How would he think about this? And if I can get myself to think like him, it helps in that way. He's a virtual thought partner.
George: So when I'm seeking advice I guess I find I will go talk to different people depending on the kind of reaction I need or the kind of angle I think I need at the time.
Camille: Yeah, definitely.
Camille: If you're really gonna use thought partnership, well, you have different thought partners like you're describing. Cuz you're really looking for people who have some sort of either expertise or knowledge or something that really is gonna help you with the specific thing you wanna thought partner on.
Camille: So if you want a thought partner about your business plan, Go thought partner with somebody who knows what a good business plan looks like, right? Yeah. If you're gonna thought partner about coding, go partner with somebody who understands something about coding. It doesn't necessarily have to be that they're more expert than you, but you do want somebody who's got some kind of knowledge or expertise that fits what you're gonna talk.
Camille: Because even if they don't know more than you, they're gonna know different from you. And that's really the value of the thought partnership is it doesn't have to be that that person is above you in a level of expertise or something like that. It's not like a mentorship where it's like, oh, this person's way out ahead of me.
Camille: And so I'm meeting with them to get guidance in that way. This can be much more of an even playing field. I think what's more important is that you find somebody that's going to share different perspectives. They're not just going to be a yes. All of your stuff sounds great.
Camille: That's great. So , I would never thought partner with my mom because she thinks all my ideas are perfect and that I'm a perfect human. Whatever you say, it's fabulous. And then she won't help me think outside my own box if I'm fabulous. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not a good thought partner. Sorry, mom.
Camille: No, not good for that. Not for that. She's good in many other ways, but not for that. So when it comes to a thought partner, you want somebody who's gonna be like, huh, you're always a great thought partner. Cause you always will come up with a different perspective or angle or question to ask.
Camille: So you want fresh ideas, and you want somebody who's gonna really help you uncover maybe ideas that you just hadn't surfaced yet. So I always think about whenever you are creating something, whether you're creating a plan or a concept, flushing out an idea, whatever its that you're doing. We only get so far on our own, but there's more stuff.
Camille: We have more ideas in our brains, but, we run out of the energy or the capacity to pull them all out of our brains . And so I always think thought partner is somebody who's actually trying to like pull that little idea out of our head . You know, when Harry Potter, when you, it's awesome.
Camille: Yeah. The pensive. Yeah.
Camille: And they're pulling their, your memories out.
Camille: It's like that. But it's a new idea. That's lovely. So I always think of thought partners as that. How can I help find some of those ideas that are just buried in there somewhere?
Camille: I wanna help you have that little light bulb or aha moment of Oh yeah. Oh, and this, yes and that. And it's just, it's just been buried.
Camille: The other thing that thought partnership can do for you is it also can be a way to help create accountability for yourself. So I know people who have recurring thought partner conversations with people, and I've done this in the past where it's just, we're just gonna come together and thought partner about, you know, our businesses.
Camille: Like, we're just gonna share what's going on. That's it. There's no other real objective than that to just talk about what's going on, because I don't have anyone else to talk to about it, who understands what I'm doing, except, you know, this person over here. Accountability to, to actually work through problems.
George: Go ahead. I have a question for you, although I think this is really a question for our new friend, Shula . What do you think about the idea of using a therapist as a thought partner? Does that work?
Camille: Oh, that's interesting. We will have to ask her what she thinks about. Is that the role of a therapist?
Shula: Hi there, George and Camille. George, what a good question. Can I use my therapist as a thought partner? In fact, I would say that what therapists do. If you have something come up and you need to talk it over, you want to explore, usually we do it in a thinking because of course we think of therapists as mental health.
Shula: So we bring emotional or psychological issues or interpersonal issues, the kind of things we see as appropriate in therapy to a therapist. But what we do when we bring the issue to the table is to be curious about it and to talk it over and to understand what's going on and to gain insight and to connect with ourself around that thing.
Shula: And to me, that's what I understand thought partnership to be. So, I have, yes, definitely brought thought partnership issues to my own therapist. When I have an issue that I wanna talk over and I'm like, Hey, you know, I'm thinking about this thing. I wanna check it out. I wanna see how it sits with me, how I feel about it, what my inner wisdom is about this thing, as much as what I think about it.
Shula: I've done that lots of times and I think that that's a perfect way for folks to be able to use the skills of their therapists in a broader way. I think it's a great idea and I'm so glad you asked the question.
Shula: Thanks for giving me an opportunity to weigh in.
Camille: What I can tell you is I do think it's the role of a coach. As a consultant, not as much. But as a coach, yes.
George: Oh, okay. Please say more.
Camille: So these two methods, coaching and consulting often kind of get mushed together? Yeah, and I do both.
Camille: Even though I call myself a coach, I'm doing both. Okay. When I'm consulting, I'm really either, I'm either consulting as, and I'm filling in a specific gap in a company. So I go in as a consultant to do project management for you because you don't have good project management skills on site.
Camille: So I'm internally providing that expertise as a consultant. Or as a consultant, I'm actually providing specific advice or expertise on a topic. So I'm teaching your organization how to build out your project management expertise, for example, or as a consultant, I'm leading your company through a strategic planning session, right?
Camille: So yes, I was operating as a consultant yesterday by providing the actual steps to do their plans. Yes. I'm gonna tell you what they are. This is what you do and this is what your plan should look like.
Camille: I was more of a coach when I went into my thought partner mode, which was okay, now they've done the step, but now they need help actually refining the process that they went through into something meaningful for them.
Camille: And this becomes a very specific, now they have to pick their three goals. For example, what are my top three goals for the year? They brainstorm out all these ideas and instead of me going in and being like, yep, it's one, two, and three, sometimes the better way was for me to ask a bunch of questions. Like, wow, okay, what is actually the most important?
Camille: Like, if you could only do one of these, what would it be? Yeah. And why would that be? Yeah. And if you didn't do it, what would happen?
Camille: So I'm just asking questions to, I'm now creating new thoughts in their head. Yeah. Like, oh, I didn't think about that. Oh, I don't know. Oh, let me process this. So they're having to process new ideas and come up with their own answers.
Camille: So I'm not telling them what the answers are. I'm guiding them to find their best answers. So that's when I think it's more thought partnership and that's what coaching is. Coaching is me helping you get your own good answers that are sitting in your brain and really pull them forward, help you get a new perspective to actually get rock solid on them.
George: Yeah, absolutely. That's awesome.
Camille: My example of this thought partnering as a coach. Yeah. Yesterday for me it was showing up in that way of standing in front of their post-its full of ideas and trying to help them refine them. How much thought partnering versus not really depended on where they were at and how clear that they seemed to be with their goals.
Camille: I could usually tell just by looking at it like, wow, I can see your priorities. It's really clear to me. And then I would just ask them, why? Why is this the priority to make sure it was right? And that they had a clear answer.
Camille: And other people, it was more guiding them into thinking about, I could see there was something else bubbling under there. Sometimes I would just ask them to think about what if it was this? Try that on.
Camille: So not tell them to do it, but just try it on and see if, like, if that was part of this goal that you were working on. , does that feel right or not? So trying to maybe fill in some gaps too. So thought partnership is not always just, I'm only asking questions.
Camille: It's definitely includes I'm going to, you know, share some ideas. I'm gonna give you some what ifs that I have in my own head. Thus the thoughts partner. I'm gonna give you one of my thoughts and you can try it on for size, right? Yep. So it does go both ways.
Camille: So the next thing I wanna talk about is how do you actually do thought partnership well? Yeah.
Camille: The first is finding the right person. Not everybody is good at this. And you all know who I'm talking about in your life who is not good at this because either they think everything you do is amazing, or they are too focused on just telling you what to do and not on listening to what you have to say.
Camille: So some people really wanna just give you answers, like that's their focus. They're trying to be helpful in that way, but they're just not really a great listener. So you're a thought partner, whoever you choose. They gotta be a good listener too.
Camille: Ultimately you want them to have some area of expertise or knowledge or something they've been through some experience that you value that that's why you wanna thought partner with them. That really ups the game.
Camille: It could just be a shared experience. Like I said I'm a small business owner and you're a small business owner. That's valuable right there, just for us to thought partner on business stuff, right? Yeah. So this what you wanna look for and then you wanna make an agreement with them about what this thought partnering thing actually means.
Camille: Like, what are we doing? Oh, we're sharing ideas, helping each other with our challenges, let's you just wanna have some actual agreement about that's what you're doing. So it just doesn't turn into either a bitch session or a, I don't know, devolve into something not useful. So be specific about that that's what we're doing now. Okay.
Camille: And then, it's a great place to, so we've talked about this in the past, and I thought this would be a great place to really dig deeper into the concept of humble inquiry. Oh yeah. Because humble inquiry is, man, that is such a valuable tool in so many different ways, but it, it actually could serve you to be a really great thought partner and to also, you can just learn this together with somebody who, that you wanna thought partner with to both get really good at this.
Camille: Yeah, absolutely. So humble inquiry is there is, I'll put this into the show notes so you can find, there is a book called Humble. There's a few books by this author. His name's Edgar Schein. And his books are pretty short and easy to read. You can also just Google this and see a lot of just basic information about humble inquiry.
Camille: It's basically described as the art of asking versus telling. So it's asking questions in an open-ended way, questions that you don't have the answers to, to genuinely create new thoughts for people and help them find their own answers.
Camille: I have a whole exercise that I have laid out for how to help leaders learn how to be better at humble inquiry. Because humble inquiry is an incredible way to build trust in your team and get them to be better at their own problem solving.
Camille: So it's an incredible coaching tool and all leaders should know how to do it. Yeah, I don't know. All humans should know how to do it. All parents should know how to do it.
Camille: Because it's shows a lot of respect for the other person in that they have their own abilities and thoughts and they can process stuff on their own. And the best way I can help them is by helping them be better at that and not by just giving them the answer.
Camille: So it's kind of the same thing as, you know, my little nephew, Avi, you don't wanna just tell him how to do everything in life. You want him to also learn his own way of doing it. You want him to discover things for himself and learn for himself.
Camille: If you just told him how to do everything, he wouldn't really be learning how to do things. He would just learn one way how to do things. So it's kind of that whole just development cycle of how do you help people learn how to learn?
Camille: I wanna talk about this humble inquiry in just a little bit more detail. Are you down for that? Yeah,
George: let's do it. Little bit.
Camille: So humble inquiry, does require deep listening while also coming up with thoughtful questions. I have this exercise and I do this with leaders.
Camille: And the hardest thing for leaders to do, and these are good leaders, they've been at it for a while. They're very experienced. And yet every leader I know struggles to ask an open-ended question. Absolutely.
Camille: An open-ended question is something you cannot answer with just yes or no or one word. I can't just say, yes, it's this
Camille: It has to require a narrative to answer the question. Yeah. Because if I just ask for yes or no answers, I'm not opening thought. I'm not opening that person up to really trying to generate new ideas and think about stuff.
Camille: I would highly recommend people try this out and see how hard it actually is and continue to do it.
Camille: What's my next open-ended question and my next open-ended question? I think you're sort of a natural at this, George, but Yeah. So many people really just struggle with doing it.
George: Yeah. Yeah. They're bad at it.
Camille: Do you ever coach people on this, on your team? Absolutely. Yeah. All the time.
Camille: Yeah. How do you do that? How do you help 'em do better?
George: I do this a lot when we're doing interviewing training, because in our, in our style, we tend to follow a behavior-based interview format. The premise is when you're interviewing somebody, their past behavior is a good indicator of how they will be in the future.
George: Think about a situation you wanna ask them about, that you're gonna elicit the behavior you're looking for. And then ask them, give the background here, like, star is the typical acronym I've heard. Tell me the situation you're in. Tell me what the task was you're trying to accomplish, what actions did you take and what was the result?
George: And so I'll tell them, look, you're telling me a story here about something you actually did. I'm gonna ask you questions about that. And when I train people how to do this interviewing style, we'll do a couple practice ones. And generally in interviewing it's very easy to switch from closed-ended to open-ended questions.
George: For example how many times did you have to talk to the group to get your point across? Close ended question. I talked to 'em five times. Open-ended question. What was your thinking when you decided to ask your colleagues about this? Open-ended question.
George: One of the easiest open-ended questions: what the hell were you thinking when you did that? That's a closed-ended way of asking an open-ended question.
Camille: I like that. When you're thinking about open-ended questions, just that example you gave of the open-ended question that also had a little bit of a chip to it.
Camille: The whole point of humble inquiry is respect it's respect for people. Yeah. So how you're phrasing the question, it's respecting that they do have depth of thought and it's respecting the problem that they're trying to solve. And there's just, that's the, the main crux of why you go at this humble inquiry in this way.
Camille: It's really about showing respect for people. Yeah. You can see how that, it's awesome. It's building trust and it's doing all sorts of stuff.
Camille: But it's hopeful in just this thought partnership. Even if your role in thought partnership, even if you have all the trust in the world already with that person, it's helping at this other layer of, now I'm helping you by having that trust.
Camille: I'm also now putting that trust into play. It's one thing to say, I trust you. It's another to then, now let's actually act that out. It's like, you know, when we get challenged with how do I actually put my values into my actions, into my behaviors? Yeah. Yeah. This is one way to do that. Like, I trust you and you trust me, and now we're gonna play that out by the way that we have this interaction, by the way, this conversation goes.
Camille: Very cool. Yeah. So I love thinking about it in that way because it really just changes the dynamic of the conversation that you're about to have. Right? It changes for me when I go up to work with a client in this way. I walk into it not as like, I'm the expert here to tell you what to do, but you have your own expertise and I'm just here to help enhance and add to that.
Camille: Mm-hmm. but I already trust that you do know what you're doing a lot. You probably underestimate. Yeah. But I'm here to both show you how much you already know and then amplify it.
George: Yeah, I believe that too. I don't know how, but you and I have the same philosophy on people that way.
George: We're gonna trust the expertise and the person we're asking about. There's plenty in there. We can help them pull it out. Yeah, sure. Absolutely. True.
Camille: And I think for the most part, yeah, I think for the most part that the reason that my job even exists is mostly because people just underestimate their own capabilities and knowledge and expertise.
Camille: Yeah, for sure. I see it all the time. Or they're like, well, it's just what I do.
Camille: It's what you do. It's not what everybody does. Mm-hmm. . And they really underestimate that. Especially small business owners tend to underestimate the complexity of running a small business, and so they're constantly kind of beating themselves up for the stuff that they don't do well.
Camille: I'm like, no business owner's doing all of this well. Because there's a lot of moving parts in here. That doesn't mean you don't have a good business and a successful business, but what you are thinking needs to happen for this to be done well, air quote is just a level above what most people are actually have the capacity to do because there's a lot to do.
Camille: Back to this humble inquiry and how to do it. Here's some guidelines to sort of think about this.
Camille: You wanna sort of recognize that when the problem owner, so think about it, you have a problem you're trying to solve or a gap you're trying to close, and I'm here to help you.
Camille: So one of the things as you're asking these open-ended question is as you're listening, and this is another thing we have to get really good at listening and not trying to just think about the next question we're gonna ask. But first, listen, that's one of the hardest things of humble inquiries. I just need to listen.
Camille: And as you do that, you're listening for, is the the person I'm trying to help, are they jumping ahead as they're problem solving? Or are they getting stuck?
Camille: So you know how sometimes you talk to somebody and they say Yes, and so then X, Y, and Z needs to happen. And you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I think we missed a whole bunch of steps of what's gonna happen next, though, not what's gonna show up at the end.
Camille: Sure. Or they're just stuck because they don't know what's gonna happen next. So you can ask questions to help flush that out. Right? Yeah. There's also asking questions that will help them to be more aware of what they're sort of assuming or not assuming.
Camille: Sometimes their answers, you can hear that there's a bunch of assumptions built in. Yeah. And you can just like, wow. Well tell me what, you know, what, what are the assumptions that go into that? And maybe they hadn't even thought about 'em as assumptions and they're like, oh yeah, I am sort of assuming this, this, and this is all gonna happen. And go, well, yes. And then you say, wow, what if those don't happen? And whoa!
Camille: So you know, anything that's like a what if question is great. Well what if blah, blah. And they have to run through a scenario. That's a great way to get people to think outside the box of what they were otherwise thinking.
George: May I tell you big enterprise version of this one? The most common time I run into this is when I'm reviewing a slide deck that somebody's created. Colleague or somebody reporting to me, they've written the slide deck with all these great ideas and they wanted to convince somebody something.
George: They wanna get something done. And they look at the slide deck and they say, George, what do you think? And I'll look at it and it's like this, I noticed clearly you're making a lot of assumptions you really need to tease out here. And my first question usually is, Whom did you imagine was the audience for this?
George: When when you picture somebody reading this, who's in your mind reading that and they're like, oh I don't know. Okay, well, I think this person is gonna see the document. How do you think they're gonna perceive this? Do they know all the stuff in here that you're talking about? And they'll be like, oh yeah.
George: And it usually hits 'em like that.
Camille: Yeah. I love that. I think for small businesses, the same example applies to I'm gonna create some kind of you know, marketing material. And the first question is, who's it for? Yeah. And really specifically in your audience, who is this for? And you're like, oh, yeah.
Camille: Well, what do they need to know? Who is this really for? Because usually, yeah, when we're just thinking about our audience, there's different customer you know, avatars as we call them. We like to say there's just one, but there's lots of variations on them. Yeah. And anything that we create can be something different depending on who it is that this is actually for.
Camille: And if we try to make it too generic, then nobody wants the thing that we made. Yeah. We have sort of a similar problem in just how we're creating for communicating ideas to our audience, to our potential customers. I like that example.
Camille: You're really focused on how am I helping them sort of identify their own assumptions that they might be making?
Camille: Really looking at also, are they looking at all angles of that problem? I have some examples of types of questions you can ask and Awesome. Some of these are almost like no fails.
Camille: And this is something that I've handed out to leaders in the past where I just give them the humble inquiry card. They have a little oh five card. So if they're really leading and they don't know what questions to ask, they're just like, oh, I can always ask these.
Camille: So here's the questions , and I wanna know if it makes you think of other questions, George, that you've asked.
Camille: Okay. So one of the questions is just so what's happening?
Camille: Hmm. I know that sounds like trite maybe, but imagine what kinds of things could open up if you're like, tell me what's happening. What's happening right now?
George: Not if you ask it like Bill Lumber, Hey, what's happening?
George: Yeah.
Camille: None of what we do on this podcast should be an example of Bill Lundberg.
Camille: Okay.
Camille: So just what's happening?
Camille: What problem are you trying to solve? That can be a really deep dive for a lot of people. Cause I, you would be surprised. I'd be surprised if how many times people are presenting an idea or you know, trying to solve a problem that they really haven't defined. So what problem are you trying to solve? Yeah.
Camille: Why is it important? Huh?
Camille: What concerns you the most? Oh, yeah.
Camille: What else do you need to know? Hmm. And how could you learn it?
Camille: Just please go on. Tell me more. I need, I just tell me more. A lot. Me too. People stop talking. Also just not saying anything. Just leave some airspace. Somebody stops talking and you just being silent, which is makes everybody uncomfortable. They'll start talking more. This is coaching 1 0 1. Just don't talk. And they'll say more stuff. Yeah.
George: The other thing I like about tell me more is you can spice it up and how you say it and so you're expressing to the other person jealous.
George: How excited you are to hear anything where they wanna say like, they're giving you dessert. You know?
Camille: You are great at this by the way. This is why people, like I tell people, well, when you meet my brother, you are gonna be so enamored with him because he's gonna make you feel like you're the most fascinating human on the planet. Because you're really good at doing that.
Camille: Like, wow, tell me more about that. Like, just how you would do it. You do it in this really energized way. This is why it's so important for leaders to know how to do, or any human with a human interaction, but leaders, especially in just really motivating people to keep thinking and keep talking.
Camille: And because you're genuinely interested in them, right? You wanna hear the, they have to say.
Camille: Also you could say, give me an example.
George: That's one of my favorites right there. Gimme an example is that's a go-to for me. That's a go-to. Yeah. I like that one. Yeah, it's great. I mean, it's almost foolproof as an open-ended question.
George: And the other thing about it is it's compact as a question, so you're not wasting most of your time with you asking the question, give me an examples, four words, and you're done.
Camille: Yeah. I mean that's the beauty of all of these is literally they don't need any more words. What concerns you the most? I don't need to say any more than that.
Camille: That's all I need to say. And then you go four words, I'm back on you. So I say four words and then you say 50. Yeah. , right? Yeah. I more these, one last example I have.
Camille: There's one more. That's it. I only have, I only have one more example. Okay.
Camille: What are your next steps? And these are really, as you can see, they're really framed around helping people solve a problem, which should essentially be the purpose of your thought partnering.
Camille: There is a problem here I'm trying to solve, cuz otherwise what are you doing? Right? Yeah.
Camille: But I think oftentimes we do thought partnering without being really clear about what problem we are trying to solve. So that question of what problem are you trying to solve could always be like, let's just kick it off with that.
Camille: And sometimes I've worked with people where that's all we talked about for like an hour. Because it's complicated the problem, you start to get more granular and more granular. Breaking down the actual problem you're trying to solve is so important and we often just skip past it. One, cuz it can be really hard to do.
Camille: But also cuz it's much more fun to talk about solutions. Oh yeah. Fast. It just is. Yeah.
Camille: So when you're doing this, the three don'ts are, do not use harsher judgmental tone. Like George's example of the open-ended, but snarky question, don't do that.
Camille: No run-on or multiple questions. So all of these questions and examples are great. Yeah. Because they're succinct and then you only ask one. So don't even try to feed them answers by saying, how could you learn it? Like, are you gonna talk to so-and-so? Or like, no. All you do is ask the question, how could you learn? That's it. Hmm. Don't feed 'em any answers. So no run-ons and no multiple questions.
Camille: Multiple questions would be like, well, what else do you need to know and how could you learn it? Nope. You gotta ask those questions separately. Yeah. Not together.
Camille: And then avoid just the inquisition of question after question. Like pause, like leave space. Allow the person to think, allow for them to go, huh. Let me think about that. That's a good question. Just let it happen.
Camille: You don't have to fill the dead airspace. Sometimes people just need quiet to process what they're thinking about and gather their thoughts and share them. So leave time for that.
Camille: So those are my questioning don'ts.
Camille: Do you have any examples of bad questions? Oh yeah. .
George: Well, my joking one is not serious, but like, do you really think that shirt goes with those pants? but I, there's a classic closed ended question that engineering people like to answer.
George: I've heard this many times, it is a question that's really proposing solution. If you were to do such and such a thing, do you think this would work for you? Or what would you think if you tried this approach? It's not really an open-ended question. It's my agenda built into my question trying to get you toward an answer.
George: It's not a specific question, but it's a form of a question, you know?
Camille: Oh, I love that example.
Camille: Because this is something that people can very sneakily do and make it look like they're being a good coach. But I'm just asking under the guise of an open-ended question, I'm also feeding you the direction or the answer.
Camille: Yeah. If you're gonna do that, be honest. Be more direct about I wanna present a new idea to you, have you thought about trying X?
Camille: That's when I'm going back and forth from coaching to consulting mode, right? Then I'm saying, have you thought about trying X or I recommend you try this thing. That's me consulting. Yes. And you can do that. And also thought partners can do that. Just don't pretend you're not doing it.
Camille: You know what I mean?
Camille: Like if I have a specific thing that I think like, Hey, you might try x, I have a thing that I think could actually help you. Here's the thing. It's still up to you whether you're gonna do it or not, but just be really clear, like now I'm just giving you direct advice. And I even say this in my membership group when we're having conversations and we're just sharing and people are asking for support.
Camille: I asked them to be clear about, are you asking us to just cheerlead you? Do you want direct feedback? Like what are you open to? Do you want people to just tell you what they do? Like, here's my solution. What do you actually want to hear? Yeah. And you have to be clear about what you're open to receive and how you wanna receive that.
Camille: So that's important in thought partnering too, is this is where it really helps to have somebody that you trust, because even however they might convey information, you're able to receive it in the appropriate way. It never makes you feel prickly or undermined or lesser than, or judged or any of those things.
George: You know, what makes me think? Sometimes I'll scale my questions differently for different people based on their self-esteem. Here's what I mean. So I will tell somebody sometimes I'm afraid, look, I'm gonna pick at you. If you don't mind that. I've got questions that's just gonna probe and probe and probe.
George: You tell me when it hurts and we'll stop it. Really, if you really need to get to a solid place on this, let me just pick at you. If you're maybe earlier in your career or you're not used to that kind of inquisition stuff, then I might take a different approach and might just be asking open-ended questions to help you build your self-esteem.
George: And I'm more in the, I'm just enthusiastic about everything. You have to tell me mode, which is not hard for me to be. It's interesting. I'll say, Hey, okay, tell me about this. Oh, it's interesting. Wow, I have not thought about that idea. What led you to come up with that idea?
George: Just ask more questions like that and the more they talk about their process, the more confidence they build up. And so they get used to kind of inquiry and not being afraid of it cuz they're not getting punished for it. But they're also getting more used to the introspection.
Camille: I think that makes a lot of sense. You definitely wanna gauge, who are you talking to and what level of trust do we have and how well do we know each other and what's our expertise like?
Camille: There's lots of different things that go into and we do this naturally just in life, right? As we're moving through it. Yeah. You definitely want that to enter into these types of conversations as well.
Camille: So you might find somebody that you thought partner with, that you, over time actually you guys get better and better at doing it because you have built this level of trust and that person becomes the person who you know is gonna give you that really good critical feedback and that you can take it and go, yeah, okay, that was really good.
Camille: I know what to do with that. Cuz they've learned how to deliver it to you with compassion without judgment as just like, I've got something that I know you're gonna love cuz it's gonna help you be better at this thing.
Camille: So this is ideally what everybody wants from their boss. And it's also why so many people it's true. Decide to quit their bosses and go be their own boss because they just don't get that right? Because not very many people do this very well. Yeah, that's true.
Camille: So learn how to get this for yourself. Business owners who are out there on your own, learn how to find this for yourself because you're not getting this support from working for a boss or in a company.
Camille: And if you're not your own boss and you're listening to this, still learn how to get this for yourself, if you don't get it from your boss. Find a way to have thought partnership, no matter what. It's the same thing of we should all have mentors. We should all have thought partners too. Yeah.
Camille: And I would urge people to make it a priority this year, like find out how to do this well with people.
Camille: Try it out with a few people. Create this way of connecting with others in order to improve. It will accelerate your own thought process and your own ability to plan and get work done if you can find good thought partners. It's also just so, I don't know, I guess just emotionally rewarding. Cuz you make this connection with a person and there's just back to why we even came together in person to do the work, of the workshop, just the connecting with other people is just really a valuable thing.
Camille: And remember that you're a professional thought partner is a coach like me. And that can be in anything, in any realm of whatever type of coaching that you're looking for. But definitely those are the people who really know how to do this well.
Camille: That's really our focus is how can I thought partner with this person among other things. But that's one of the things we're trying to do to help you really bring all of the best ideas that you have up to the surface. I'm trying to help you go faster by doing that with you.
George: Yeah, that's, that's awesome.
Camille: So that's it. That was my takeaway for the whole thing was go thought partner.
George: Really cool. Yeah, I like it.
Camille: And you and I are gonna keep thought partnering more on this podcast. Yes, we sure will.
Camille: That is all I have for this episode. So if you have questions about thought partnering, leave us a voicemail thebeliefshift.com.
Camille: Also, if you or like one of our consistent listeners, which I know you're out there people, and I know some of you that were in the workshop are also listening. Go to Apple Podcasts and leave us a review if you would kindly please.
Camille: That helps more people find us. So if you think we're a great podcast and other people should know about us, that's one way to do it. Or just share it. Just tell people, Hey, listen to this episode. I know some people have been doing that too, which I absolutely love.
Camille: So yeah, thank you for listening and for sharing and all that good stuff. And keep it up. Thank you.
Camille: We will be back in everybody's ears next week. See you, everybody.
