Hal Gregersen on Asking Better Questions

have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf m

Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Hal Gregorson, executive director of the Leadership Center at m I. T. How is a prolific author and motivational speaker, recognized by Thinkers five hundred as one of the world's fifty most innovative minds. He has authored or co authored ten books. On this episode, Hall and Eric discussed his book Questions Are the Answer, a breakthrough approach to your most vexing problems at work and in life. Hi, how Welcome to

the show. Hi Eric, It is a pleasure to have you on. The latest book is called Questions Are the Answer, a breakthrough approach to your most vexing problems at work and in life. And we are going to dive into that here in a moment. But let's start like we always do, with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.

One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks about it and looks up at his grandfather and says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work

that you do. Powerful parable, Whether we know it or not, I believe we're all living a question I happened to call those questions keystone questions. Like an arch with bricks, there's a center, keystone that holds it all together. And the real issue, at least in my life and in the leaders that I've encountered in my life, is whether

or not we know what those keystone questions are. And these are ones that are powerful, centering, orienting, productive, positive and at the same time I've discovered Eric that there are shadow questions, and it's the other side of the wolf that you're talking about. These emerged from fears and shame and other kinds of things that draw us into

a completely different orbit. And so one of the things that I've wrestled with in my life and some of the leaders that I've encountered throughout my research and life is um the tension actually between these keystone questions and shadow questions the drive who we are and what we do. Can you give me a little bit of an example of that, like what a keystone question might be versus

sort of shadow question might be. The shadow questions for me were the first ones I discovered actually, and for me individually, they came over the course of a lifetime, and so they started to surface and emerge. Most abundantly through some really crucible moments in my life, and I'm just going to dive in, if that's okay, Eric, because they're the way in which these things became more real and apparent to me. So it was twenty fourteen January.

We've been living in Boston for two years. I've been working for a French based university, traveling intercontinentally three or four times a month, and January I ended up giving a speech in southern California early in the morning. Went down to set it up, ended up um feeling pressure

on my chest and discounted his anxiety. Went down to the place where I was giving the speech, got everything ready, continue to feel the pressure, breathe deep, tried to relax, wondered why I'm being nervous about giving us speech that I've given a hundred times. I was able to get enough energy, you know peace, said a little prayer, and stood up and did a ninety minute speech. Then afterwards the pressure came back, and then I started to get nauseous, and then I started to feel achy, and I'm not

I need to get out of here. So I went up to my hotel room where my wife was as soon as I walked through the door, She's like, what's wrong with you? And you don't look well? And I explained to her what I just explained to you, and she looked at me quizzically and she said, are you having a heart attack? I, honestly eric said I don't know,

but let's find out. So I grabbed my computer, looked up heart attack symptoms, had a list from one of the medical web pages, and everything was happening, and I said to my wife, my wife, let's go to the hospital right now, and she said, I just exercised. Can I shower first? I'm like, nos, cuz let's go to the hospital right now. And she was generous enough to

give up the shower. We raced to the hospital and the moment that I had the words come out of my mouth, I'm having a heart attack, I completely shut down and couldn't say anything else. And I woke up the next day with three stints in my heart after two arteries have been blocked. And first of all, my father had had three major heart attacks when I was one was at four years old, one was it about thirteen years old for me, and one when I was an adult um and that one killed him in the

final third one. But when I was an early young adult, I had committed to never have a heart attack, so I learned everything there was to not have a heart attack, and I ended up exercising, eating right, doing all that sort of stuff. But frankly, I never learned what heart attack symptoms were. So what I didn't know, I didn't know about heart attack simpstince almost killed me in that instance.

And afterwards, about two weeks later, after this heart attack, I um, I was classic male, pretty quiet, kept at all the myself, the churn and the turmoil. Ands iide and ended up visiting with a marriage counselor. We're a blended family, we've been married then about a dozen years, and complex issues with children and marriage and all that kind of fun stuff. And she knew me well, the

counselor did. And she looked me in the eye hole and she said, if you don't stop being nice to people, you were going to gift yourself another heart attack in very few years. And I realized that it just like thumped and hit me right between the eyes and right in the chest, and I just realized she's spot on. And that's the point in which the shadow question that I've been living surfaced in ways that I'd never quite grasped before, which was how can I make people happy?

How can I, you know, professionally and even personally make people happy? So you wake up in the morning. And that's the question that I was living um and had its own deep and dark story that I'm happy to share. But but that was the question that at one level had propelled me to some incredible professional success because I worked really hard in so many different ways to make people happy, but it had literally warned me the bone

and almost killed me. Thank you for sharing all that, And and the deeper, darker part of it for you was UM, a childhood that was not great. And your original question was how do I make my father happy? Which then morphed into how do I make everybody happy?

And that's where I realized started to sort out and sift and uncover and and realize that, Uh, in today's terms, my father would have absolutely been emotionally abusive and to some degree physically, but in the continuum of abuse, it was mild in comparison to what so many people deal with. But for a four year old, when you're dealing with being whacked over the head or you know, hit with a belt for what you've done. You just you behaved a friently and you learn how to make this adult,

big person in your life happy. Right? So, yeah, that was the That was the realization that that internalized shadow questions that grew as a young child when I did not have the ability or the capacity to respond differently besides just protect myself by making someone happy. That had lived on, and it had lived on vibrantly in a powerful way throughout my life. And so once you realize that was the shadow question, how did you start to unwind that? I'm going to ask that in a slightly

specific way. Can we tie that back to questions in general? Because you know that's where we're going to go with the rest of this conversation is all your research and work on questions. Did asking better questions help you to unravel that shadow question? I think it was a series of questions Eric around and where did this desire to

make people happy come from? Um? It was doing some powerful work with Keegan's framework around competing commitments, where you worked down to big, frightening assumptions you hold in your life and then you realize they're closely linked to these questions. It also came with the harrowing experience on Mount Everest a year later, in that that highest mountain on planet Earth forced me back into the same space of you know, what's the point, what's the purpose? Why am I here?

What am I doing? And you know, it was a combination of really its combination experiences that leveled me eric. This experience that Everest leveled the emotionally, spiritually, physically, and otherwise in after year after the heart attack, and it was in that place of just being completely aware that I'm a piece of dust on planet Earth caused me to realize there must be a better way, a better question, a better approach. And and that's where I started to

explore what might that be? And in fact I found my inspiration from a person who asked and answered some powerful questions and crete Alexander Popaderos. It's a whole different story there, right, It's quite a story though about him. Maybe we should tell that one real quick, because I

think it's pretty powerful. It's incredibly powerful. So here's this, here's this young boy, Alexander Papadero screw up and create um a young little boy when World War two was going on in The Germans invaded Create in large part because the Greek government, as I understand that, took away the took away literally the guns and the arms and the protective means for the creations in the island of Crete, because they hope that the Germans would invade Create, not

invade Athens. And so the Germans did invade. The Creations literally defended themselves against the vaiting Germans with farm implements, and they didn't have guns, if any, to really do much about it. And he ended up beating and pushing the Germans back, to the point that a few days later the Germans returned in much larger numbers and ended up massacring a few villages. It was just horrific in

terms of the consequences. And so this little boy I was then to Papa Darius, and midst of all this, discovered one day a little piece of mirror broken off from a German motorcycle had been broken on the island, and as a little boy, he ended up sharpening the edges of that to where it was around like a quarter.

And he ended up playing with it as a little boy and absolutely loved doing it, shining light onto things but here's this little boy growing up, growing up in the context where the island he lived on hated the Germans, and that was his context. But he was always a little boy in love with shining this mirror into dark places. And then when he became an adult, he actually found his keystone question question to some degree, which is how can I build a bridge of peace between the creations

and the Germans? And he set up a piece institute to do so. And at one point he was in the midst of a presentation and one of the people in the audience asked the question what is the meaning of life at the end of this two weeks conference?

And everybody kind of laughed and shuffled their feet and was ready to leave, and Alexander Papa Darius looked at the person very intently, realized the person really wanted the answer to the question, and told everybody to sit down, settle down, and then he explained that he's not going to share with him what the meaning of life is, but he's going to share with him what the meaning

of his life is. And that's where he pulled out this literal, little piece of mirror and he explained what happened when he was a little kid in Germany and why he founded this piece institute. And he explained also that as a kid he had shined this little light into places just out of pure fun and joy. As an adult he actually enjoyed using in the same mirror.

But it was a metaphor for his life, and his life was essentially wound up in how can I shine light, truth or whatever you want to call it, into the darkest places, the darkest hearts, in order for peace and good to come from that? And I just deeply admire Papa Darrow's and that story and that metaphor and that image, because that was the keystone question he ended up living day in and day out. How can I shine light and truth into the darkest hearts in order for things

like peace to come out of that? O, let's change directions and kind of go backwards a little bit, because I want to I want to start to talk about questions. You say that if you want better answers at work in life, you have to ask better questions. You quote Peter Drucker who says the most important and difficult job is never defined the right answers, he wrote, it is defined the right question for there are a few things is useless, if not dangerous, as the right answer to

the wrong question. So let's talk about you know, your statement that it's the questions that are important. Share a little bit more with us about that. Whenever we're stuck in our personal lives or our work lives, that's stuck. Goodness always emerges from asking the wrong question. And earlier we talked about me having a heart attack, and I was asking their own question, how can I avoid having a heart attack? When I should have also been asking

what are heart attack symptoms? And it you know, it could have been incredibly dangerous. But in a work setting, it's the exact same scenario again, or at home with our family or partners or spouses that were around that we cared deeply about. Whenever we have that stuck moment,

we're almost always asking the wrong question. And so a good friend of mine who is a senior leader at a not for profit organization that's global around the world, we were talking first about professional things, and then then it sort of merged into personal issues, and then it came up that he really had valued and treasured his relationship with this oldest daughter who was now turning into a teenager. She was starting to be with friends, and she was starting to pull away in the out, like

the relationship was changing. And he asked a very legitimate question, which was how can I keep this relationship strong going forward? And and yet he was stuck. He felt like it wasn't going where he wanted it to go. Eric and I cared about him and we had a good friendship, and I said, I said, basically, let's just here at this restaurant where we're having dinner. Let's take four or five minutes, get out some napkins, pull out a pen, and right down as many questions as we possibly can

about this issue in your life. And we're not going to answer any of the questions. We're not going to explain why we're asking the questions. We're just going to ask as many questions as we can for four or five minutes, essentially brainstorming questions. You actually have a methodology around this, yeah, you know, and it's called a question first, but it's essentially brainstorming nothing but questions as a means

to create the conditions where new questions can emerge. And so, in this very informal way with my friend, we did this with Natkins in a pen, and we ended up with about twenty questions. And by the end of those twenty questions, these were questions like where are you spending your time? And what does your daughter really value? And when do her eyes light up? And are you helicoptering too much? And when is she independent from you? And

and how could she be more independent from you? And what do you see in her eyes when she shares her fears or when she's excited. And at the end of these questions, I could sense him getting more and more serious about the situation. And then it was quiet, and I remember tears coming to his eyes and my eyes when he said, I thought all along this was all about me keeping a relationships strong. But I've really lies.

This is all about letting my daughter find her. And the question really became Eric, how can I let her find her? And how can I help her find her? And so the starting point question of how can I keep this relationship strong wasn't necessarily bad, but it only could go so far, and in fact, it was keeping him from deepening the relationship. And when he changed the question to how can I help her find her? It

wasn't about him. It was about her, and it actually ended up deepening the relationship, which is what he really wanted in the first place. And part of the awakening there is, I think, a realization that some of the things he was doing weren't in line with leving that

new question. Why don't we ask good questions? You know, Eric, we were all three or four years old, and barring severe abusive, horrific situations, four year olds everywhere on planet Earth, they ask a lot of questions day in and day out. And then they moved from family settings where those questions might be supported in the educational settings, where, at least in the United States, between first grade and twelfth grade, the average child asks one question per hour in the

entire month for an hour long class. So if they're sitting in class for six hours a day, they ask six questions a month about the issues of the class, the subject matter. So essentially they learned really fast. Where teachers are asking fifty to a questions per hour, they learned really fast that answers matter a lot more than questions. And so those teachers are giving these students a second to answer every question. If they don't answer, they follow

up with a question. If they don't answer that they give him a half second to answer. And so we grow up by the time we're adults going into college knowing that fast, quick answers are going to move us far forward, more forward than questions, And unfortunately the data aren't much better in college. And unfortunately, when we graduate from college and go to most first jobs in life, most organizations crush questions just as well as those school

systems didn't. So that's a that's a long trajectory of our life story, which is for most of us, questions get crushed at every stage, often at home, mostly at school, then our first jobs, and then you know, we often get promoted for being the smartest person in the room with all the right questions until we hit the top,

which is a whole different story. And so bottom line is the the world is against us being able to formulate and ask powerful what I call cattleted questions that challenge false assumption to give us energy to do something about it. And can I contrast that with the the arc of others lives where they're good at asking questions. So you take someone like Ri Gardish, who's the chairwoman of Vein of Bank consulting group, where you take someone like Jeff Bezos at Amazon, or you take someone like

Diane Green who found the vm ware. You take someone like Debbie Sterling who founded um Goldie Blocks toys for girls. All of them grew up either with schools or families or both where it was project centered life. You showed up at school, maybe it was a monastery school and a National Backglaurette school, and the kids they showed up at school with interests and projects they were working on, and anything they were learning was trying to figure something out.

Or are your Jeff Bezos going to your grandfriend parents house in Texas and your grandparents your grandfather buys a broken down tractor at the beginning of the summer and you're there for three months. And the whole point of the broken down tractor is the chief teach Jeff Bezos that here's a big project. You might think you're smart, but the tractor smarter, and you have to try something

a hundred thousand times for it to work. And so these folks grew up and learned how to be relentless problem finders and solvers, and to do that, they asked a thousand questions. So Aric Gadish had teachers in her school system growing up that would write in her her little yearbooks in junior high school or always asked those two or three questions because she would always raise her hand when the teacher said questions, and she'd ask them.

And so these were people who, for whatever reasons, had the world in their favor that said questions matter instead of that they don't. You quote a statistic that in some research has shown that the ratio of teacher questions to pupil questions is as high as nine to one. You know, you sort of touched on this, right, But I think all of that experience teaches us to want to have answers, not questions right. And so we want

to be right. We want to be smart. And and you say that, you know, nothing shuts down questioning activity more than the determination to be and be seen to be unquestionably right. It reminds me of the famous teachers

Suzuki who talks about beginner's mind. You know, in the beginner's mind there are tons of possibilities and the experts there's only one or I'm not getting that quite right, but that's the basic idea now it is, and a beginner's mindset is one of the conditions that exceptionally inquisitive good questioners engage in every day. So these folks who are good at asking questions, they are seeking out conditions where they themselves are wrong and uncomfortable and reflectively quiet.

And and that's what that Zen saying is describing. It's like instead of waking up in the morning, dad said, on what am I right about? It's waking up in the morning like sture Brand does, and he actually is like, what am I dead wrong about? Today? And frankly a little bit disappointed at the end of the day if some part of his mental map of the world doesn't get disrupted turned upside down. It's like, that's a bad day.

Where Sarah Blakely at founder of Spanks, who had a father who regularly asked her at the end of the school day or the end of the any day of a week, you know, what mistake have you made today? Sarah? And if she wasn't making big enough mistakes, he would be like, you're not trying hard enough. And and the whole point of that is we put ourselves in situations, we push ourselves to the edge, and we do that

in order to uncover better questions and insights. That's what these folks are doing, and that's that beginner's mindset is crucial. That um, what I may be thinking is right could be dead wrong. And that goes against the grain of some of our most prevalent ways of thinking right, the confirmation bias. We are looking to be proved right at every turn. We ignore things that don't confirm what we already know to be true. It is so true, and it's so exacerbated in the world we live in. We

know these words echo chambers, isolation, and so on. We it's just it's a world that is increasingly moving into smaller and smaller tribes. And those tribes, unfortunately for many of them, are based upon being quote unquote right. We're right and they're wrong. And it's a perfect way to get dead set on questions that become aged and outdated

and actually quite unproductive. And so it takes it takes active effort on all of our part to not get sucked into those isolated echo chambers, because in those spaces, answers are everything. Yeah, you know, asking questions is is the violation of the rules of the game. You have a have a little story in here about Walt bet injured and I pronounced that right. I think this is

so interesting. He says. The difference between successful executives and unsuccessful ones is not the quality of their decision making. Each one probably makes six or good decisions or something like that. The difference is the successful executive is faster to recognize which were the forty or forty five percent that we're wrong and adjust, whereas the failing executive often digs in and tries to convince people even when they're wrong, that they were right. Boy, does that ring true to me?

In the corporate world or the software startup world or all that was you know, that ability to you know, the people who just would dig in versus the people that would go, well, this isn't working. What are we gonna do well? Which you know? Here are two classic examples, positive and negative. And positive, You've got Travis Clinic, founder and CEO of Uber, hopping in the back of an Uber car a few years ago and being recorded at

the end of the ride. The driver basically is saying, here are some things in the system that you own. It's causing me as a driver to not be able to do my job well. And Clinics response is instant and aggressive and in his face about the driver's the problem and not him. And here was this perfect, perfect moment for the senior leader founder of a company to get some passive data, some passive information that's not just coming out and actively through his own direct report of

the system. But it's live, it's real, it's human, it's purposeful, it's meaningful. But he is not interested. Contrast that with someone I met when I lived in the Middle East, Fadi Gondor, who founded a logistics company called Aramex. He's the CEO of the founder, wealthy, top of the organization, has every reason, like Travis Clanic, do not listen to passive data that's uncomfortable and disc disc it's awkward for him. But funny lands in a foreign country, maybe it's Dubai.

For example, two o'clock in the morning, he's got an eight o'clock meeting. Instead of having a limo taken to the hotel. At two o'clock in the morning, he has an air Max delivery truck driver show up and he's actively seeking passive data from that driver, what's working, what's not why and fought he does this so much the

driver trust him he tells him the truth. At the end of the day fought, He's like, we've got problems here, and he has an all person meeting the next day to get to the bottom of the issue and to start trying to solve it. Those are just like polar opposites, kolanic versus funny. And what these great leaders do at work and frankly in life is they are actively seeking the data that's passive, that's just sitting out there. They're

going to the edge of their organization. They're talking to people that they wouldn't talk to that might cause them to be a little uncomfortable. And you know, it's the same thing even inside of our own families. It's what are we doing to just sit back, observe, watch, talk to the people in ways that information comes to is that otherwise wouldn't right. And one of the biggest pieces of this is um observing and listening, you know, moving

out of the mode particularly of being telling. You know, I'm always telling people what to do, how it should be, what it you know, kids, coworkers, employees, whatever it is, and moving into observing and listening. This is the logic of of asking the better question is putting myself in a condition where I am reflectively quiet, I am observing, and I am listening, and I'll never forget bumping into Mark benning Off at um Economic Form DA was meeting.

Unlike many of the other country and company leaders there, Mark did not have a ring of steel around him. He did not have a bunch of people protecting him from people like me coming up and asking the tough question. And I asked, Marcus, said, what do you do Mark that helps you ask the better question? Because he's done some He asked some great questions to build salesforce and to make a difference in his community. And he looked me right in the eye, Eric, and he said listen.

And then he waited about five seconds and looked at me, and I think he was trying to figure out how well I was gregorson listening and is he all here? Unfortunately, I think I passed the test. And we had a fifteen minute conversation about what does it mean to have a beginner's mindset and clear your mind and really listen and and and that's the power of what he does to get new insights. I also had the chance to

interview Duval Patrick. It used to be the governor of Massachuset citizen if all calls it the power of the pause. And he said, you know, is that last two to three seconds and you ask a question, you shut up, you'll listen, and if you can wait three, four or five seconds like I just did, he said, it's that last two seconds that signals to somebody else, whether it's the person you're working with or the person you're trying to serve as a politician, or your wife or husband,

or your kids. It's that last two seconds where they get it like you care, like it matters, and whatever you're going to say, you're going to pay attention to it's not going to be discounted. That's the power of the pause. It's it's profound. You quote Scott de Valerio. I think I said that right, Yeah, And he says he reminds himself constantly to listen to understand versus listen to defend, which is an approach he learned from his wife. And that is such a great little phrase. It is Eric.

And you know another persona dude, said the same thing, Hal Baron, who is an incredible medical researcher. And you know, he said, we're so often when we're in conversations like you and I are right now, we're trying to figure out what we're going to say next, and the point becomes, I've got to clear out that space in my head and in my heart. And we talked earlier about this question first method, where it's literally, I don't care what the problem is if I'm alone or with some other people.

If I just sit down and force myself to ask nothing but questions range from hythm questions, don't answer them, don't explain why I'm asking them. It's doing the same thing. It's creating quiet space. People are just like chomping in the bit in that exercise to fill the space between questions with explanations about why they're asking an answers about you know that they've got to just get the solution

out quick. But what's fascinating is if we just provide either artificially that space in the question versus brainstorming question process or in our lives, create that space, that quiet where we can be reflective, those are the points at which these cattlet of questions start to surface. You tell a little story about a gentleman. I think the last name is Piazza, who is a mediator, which means he gets people who don't agree together and helps them define

to help them find an agreement. And he says, any time you come in with assumptions about what is going to get someone from state A to state B, then you're setting in motion a cascade of bad things because and now I'm sort of paraphrasing, you are sort of analyzing the behavior to a common pattern, you're type casting. And then ultimately, what he says is that you are

creating separation. And he says his goal is to minimize the amount of separation because it's within that space, that separation, that the collisions occur that fuel the process of fighting. And I just thought that was so fascinating. Tony was fascinating, And what you just described that he had shared with me was it was stunning. And I had heard from someone who had used Tony in a high stakes mediation between two companies, and he basically said, you've got the

two parties. Tony meets with the first one listened intently to their perspective. Without the other party, there can literally mirror back not just the words, but the emotion and the affect associated with the words to the person he's just heard, and what it signals of that person is

Tony Piazza heard me, he was really listening. He gets it, and then he does the same thing with the other party, and he's already now reduced the defenses on both of them walking into the same room because they believe he understands them, because he's listened so carefully and almost unnervingly to be able to tell someone else, you know, here's what you just said, and here's the feeling you have

behind it. That's a unique ability. And yet you know, people who create these questions that change their lives and change the world, that listening ability is at the core of what they're doing. It is so crucial. It's interesting that you bring up that, that ability to mirror back so closely exactly what some person said, you know, even

using their exact words or inflections. My my girlfriend was sharing this with me recently, that there's someone in her life who does that, and how how powerful it is to hear your exact words and your actual inflections, like it lands in a deeper way, and it's just not something I had thought about. I certainly have the idea of listening to understand and making sure that I can sort of say back, like, well, what you're generally saying is blah blah blah, but the the idea of being

able to do it that specifically. When we do that again, we are creating a safe enough space, a psychologically and emotionally safe enough space for the people in that conversation to entertain a different way of living and working in the world. That's what it's coming down to. What happens in those moments is we start asking the different question um and it's provocative and compelling. Reminds me of the

prayer of St. Francis. You know, seek not to be under stood, but to understand, to give it a spiritual connotation, you know that the outside of just being you know, a good business practice or a good practice with your family, like, there's there's deeper roots to that idea. The deepest roots for me in some of our conversation ERK is so many people in the schools they've gone to, so many people in the places that they work, so many people in the homes they're living in for whatever reason, they

are isolated. They're fearful, and it's extremely difficult to do anything that we're talking about And you know, this is why I care so deeply about this creating these conditions where new questions can flourish, because at the end of the day, it's it's connecting with ourselves in a whole sort of way. W h o ELI, it's connecting with others in the same way, and it's it's acknowledging imperfections in both of us that we're just here to try

to build something better. And that's where you know, we started out with these shadow and keystone questions. To me, they're light and dark. It's night and day. I landed at one point at the end of the book questions or the answer. I landed with this part of AHA that instead of letting this question of how can I make people happy, it's how can I find and reflect

the light inside of you? And that might mean that I'm doing something that actually makes you very angry, but that might be a stepping stone to behaving and seeing and doing things in the world that actually could be far more productive. And so it may sound like the same question, but it started opening up a different engagement with my family, with friends, and with the world of work.

But then I just recently realized Eric that I rejoiced at one point at locking that shadow question into a cage. There was a picture I took on the island of crete that represented that at the end of the book, that there's two big locks holding the darkness inside of these metal doors, and there's a little pinhole that shows

the darkness inside. And I'm kind of coming to learn and accept that that may not be the best metaphor that darkness, those difficulties, that childhood, it's going to be with me from now until the day I die, and there is light that actually emerges from that dark. There's good that comes out of that. But the dark does not have to dominate the light in my life. And so I'm now trying to explore, you know, that intersection.

And I'm reminded of Leonard Cohen's song Anthem, and there's this phrase in there where he says, ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering. There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. And what I realized was Cohen's talking about light getting into the dark place so that it can reflect more light

out of the dark. That to me is where I'm trying to to to position move experienced life where it's not an either or it's there are shadow questions that are powerful, and there are keystone ones that are powerful to their opposite. Is a tension there, but but that's where the best work comes from. That is a beautiful place for us to wrap up the conversation. Interestingly, I do many episodes I call him teaching song and a

poem that I give to supporters of the show. And the last the one I just did and released this weekend was anthem. Was the heart of it? That that that line and talking about you know how we you know, ring the bells we can how you know, forget our perfect offering? And I shared some poems that relate to that and some things from my own life. So it's so funny that you brought that up because I just

released that episode. Um, besides, how Lujah, that's probably his best known phrase, that that short little turn there, because it's so powerful. There's another person I really enjoy. It's Lindsay Sterling who's a violinist and a dancer, and she has a song called Shatter Me where the light actually comes out of her in her video to the rest of the world, and it's it's really breaking down. Some of her shadowy passed, but it's called shatter me and

letting the light come out of that darkness. Um. And I don't know if you saw recently, but on America's Got Talent, I forget his name, but he was a young man playing the guitar. Simon Colewell told him to stop, told him that he was too stiff, he was afraid of taking risks, and Simon did not know his story. But this young man's story was his parents divorced when he was young, and he had built walls to protect himself,

just like I did as a little kid. And I had so much empathy for this young man on the stage of America's Got Talent, because Simon had poked with a hot proud his shadow questions on stage in public, in front of so many people. And yet he the young man, was given the chance to go off, find a new song, come back, and he came back in a very different attitude, and his song was absolutely stunning.

But the reason I'm raising that is I think what we're talking about here, Eric, is exactly what happened on that stage, is this young man had been living a shadow question. He had been incredibly successful. He had a beautiful voice and great guitar skills. But you know, Simon poked and it was uncomfortable. It was awkward, and he realized some element of what he was doing is wrong for the singer, and he came back in a very

humbled way. But boy, his voice was authentic and deep and rich, and I have little doubt that over the course of this experience he's going to surface some questions that will give him more light than those shadowy ones that have grabbed him to richly in deep wonderful. That is a great example of exactly what you're describing, pushing

the questions, taking us to an uncomfortable space. And you and I are going to continue this conversation in the post show conversation where we're going to talk about exactly that, how our comfort zone prevents us from asking good questions.

And so we'll talk about that in the post show conversation. Listeners, if you're interested in that, or you're interested in hearing the mini episode I just described, you can go to one you feed dot net slash support, become a member of what we're doing, and you get access to lots of extra things. So Hal Thank you so much for coming on. I really enjoyed the book and this has really been a deep and rich conversation. Thank you, Eric, thank you. I feel the same and um, I'm walking

away with a little more light. Thank you me too. Okay, bye, good bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One you Feed podcast. Head over to one you feed dot net slash support. The One you Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.