6 Secrets to Powerful Answers with Dr. Brian Glibkowski

I'd like to ship you a free copy of my book Habits of High Performers. If you come and join the 2026 goal setting workshop, I will ship you one of these today. The link is in the notes. Please come and join me to set up the very best 2026 you could imagine. If you've set up goals in the past or New Year's resolutions and they haven't substantiated, I'm here to help you across all the key pillars of your life, nail your goals. I'll see you there.

There's two sides of the equation. There's a question side and the answer side. You need to understand both to be an effective community. Leadership is like two ropes and the ropes are separate. They're strong. When the ropes are braided together, they're stronger. That's how I'm going to lead each meeting. I'm going to try to inspire and hold you accountable. There's blind spots that we don't realize we're not providing certain answer types.

Welcome to Lead On Purpose. I'm James Laughlin, former seven time world champion musician and now executive coach to global leaders and high performers. In every episode, I bring you an inspiring leader or expert to help you lead your life and business on purpose. Thanks for taking the time to connect today and investing in yourself. Enjoy the show.

Thank you for taking the time to tune in to Lead On Purpose. We recently made the decision to remove all ads on the show for the foreseeable future. Your listening experience is my number one priority. If you gain insights or value from the show and you would like to show your support, please consider making a small recurring donation to cover the significant back end admin and production costs. Even a few dollars per month will make a hu difference. So thank you. The link is in the show description. Now let's get straight back to this week's incredible guest AQ. Yeah, you heard me right. AQ, not IQ. Today I'm so excited to welcome in Brian Glibkowski. Dr. Brian is an author, researcher and futurist passionate about the role of questions and answers in business and society. During his research on questions, one simple observation stopped him in his tracks. We know a lot about questions, but we know very little about answers. In grade school we teach kids about questions, not answers. Our children learn about the six WH questions why, what, when, where, who, how and they learn about open and closed questions. There is no topology of answers that we teach our children. Journalists, physicians, sales reps, executive coaches, and almost all professionals have been trained in questions not Answers in Brian's new book, Answer Intelligence, Raise youe aq, he goes deep on his research and the six different answer types. So you're gonna find out what those six answer types are, are. So sit back and enjoy the show.

Brian, a huge welcome to the Lead On Purpose podcast.

James, thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Oh, I'm so excited about this. So for a long time, and I'm sure the listener is going to probably side with me here, we've thought about questions. Questions are so important. It's all about the questions. When we look at books, a large proportion of books, the title of them are questions. But actually you have rethought things. You've flip, reversed it, you've researched it, you've done this study. And actually we're going to talk about Answer Intelligence AQ today. So, Brian, just to get started, what is answer Intelligence?

So I define Answer Intelligence AQ as the ability to provide elevated answers to important questions. So it's a framework that incorporates questions, but I call it answer Intelligence because the new component is really the focus on answers. And that's where the majority of my intellectual contributions are focused.

Brilliant. And let's take, you know, so the listener that's listening right now going, okay, I focus lots on questions, but now I'm going to be open to shifting over to this answer intelligence. Where might they start to apply it in their life?

Well, I think answer intelligence is applied to any important conversation. That's a good starting point. So if you're in sales, you know, you're going to field important questions, you know, on a daily basis, you know, why should I buy from you? What is your product? How do we work with you? And is your ability to provide answers to those questions will determine if you close the deal or not. In leadership, you can ask yourself basic questions of leadership. You know, why am I a leader? What is leadership? How do I lead? And you provide these answers, which, you know, we're going to talk about, but it's any, any area where you want to influence others and you want more effective answers is a. Is a good area to start.

I love it. And it's interesting because a lot of leaders talk about how to win friends and influence people and that, that as a framework. But what I see what you've done is so much more in depth in terms of the research. And you've been rolling this out, you've been rolling this out around the world. In fact, we just spoke before we hit record. You've got A partner here in New Zealand, which is incredibly exciting. So I know that the listeners want to dive in and get the meaty stuff here. But who, what, when, why, how? That's kind of what. When I grew up in the British school system in Northern Ireland, that's kind of what we focused on. Right. Like ask those questions, but tell me why we should be thinking a little bit deeper and longer than that.

Yeah, so think of this way, like if you're exercising and you go to the gym, you know, you want to exercise your upper body, you want to exercise your lower body also. Yes. It's sort of like this idea that balance is important. So if we're focusing on questions, it's great to understand the six WH questions and formulating great questions, but we should try to understand the type of answers that are appropriate for each question. So, for example, let's say we have leaders listening. It's important to think about leadership and define it for yourself. So the question what is leadership? Can be answered with a concept and, or a metaphor. So briefly as a concept, I'll just keep it really brief. The concept leadership to me is inspiring others and holding them accountable. And leadership is like two ropes. When the ropes are separate, they're strong. When the ropes are braided together, they're stronger. That's how I'm going to lead each meeting. I'm going to try to inspire and hold you accountable. What I've demonstrated there is, yes, we need to know the questions to ask. In this case, what is leadership to reflect upon as a leader? But it's our ability to understand the particular answers that map to that question. Help us gain knowledge, understanding and self awareness. And then, you know, when we understand those answers for ourselves, we can use those and share those with others. But it's simply saying there's two sides of the equation. There's the question side and the answer side. You need to understand both to be an effective communicator.

It's funny because as soon as you mentioned the two strands of the rope and then instantly it just clicked for me. I was like, yeah, I can see, I can feel it just makes sense. So what actually led you down this track? What was the moment in your life like? I want to study that. I want to go deep on that.

Yeah, I think it was sort of a unfolding process over time. And I didn't realize I wanted to study it at first. But someone said once that in research you tend to research things you're not good at. And I always felt like I wasn't as an effective communicator as I wanted to be. I think a lot of us experience this. We have something to say. We feel like we can share information, but we're not quite influencing the way we want to. And that's how I felt. For example, as a professor, I thought I really understood the material. I had all this knowledge and I wanted to share it with others and communicate with others. And it just, it wasn't resonating the way I wanted to. So that was sort of the impetus was really self healing and correction of how can I become a better communicator. And, you know, that led me to the research which we can talk about, you know, if you'd like, with the top golf instructors in the world, let's do it.

Let's learn what you learned from those instructors.

It was pretty fascinating. I did some research with the top golf instructors in the world is rated by Golf Digest and Golf Magazine. And the basic idea was to understand what made them effective at providing answers. We studied them for two reasons, and I'll pause. One, they were experts. They're in the top 50 top 100 Golf Digest, Golf Magazine list. That put them in the upper half of the 99th percentile in the world. There's 25,000 golf instructors in the US alone, and way more than that in the world. And this is a global list.

That's one. But two, we studied them because they taught a wide range of students, from touring pros you see on TV to weekend warriors, to your young son or daughter picking up the sticks for the first time. And that meant there was no restriction of range. So if they could communicate to all these different individuals, those that were less knowledgeable, less motivated, all these asymmetries, then that would work in other environments. When you're selling, the buyer is less knowledgeable than you are. When you're leading, someone's less motivated. And so it represented a very unique sample that we've since found generalizes to almost any kind of important conversation in business or outside of business.

Incredible. And so what were the different parameters that you guys were measuring specific specifically with these instructors?

Yeah, it was, you know, we didn't know if the nature of the design is grounded theory design. And we, you sort of come to the research with no real preconceived notions of what you'll find. And the way the research works is you sort of gather this evidence, you start to do sense making and sort of the. The model or frameworks and the ideas that are going to sort of emerge from the research. And that's what we found. What we found are these people that were just unbelievable communicators and able to sort of organize how they did it. We came up with these high IQ practices or techniques they used. But let me give you an example of something that, like, was amazing. One of the individuals I interviewed was on, was on the Golf Digest 50 list, and he had taught half the people on the list. This is like the guru's guru, and he's in the confirmatory portion of a research, and I'm talking to him. And he was unbelievable at metaphors. I asked him, do you always get the metaphors right? He said, yes. And he wasn't bragging. I think this is. This is. This is how good he was. And then he said, if I don't, I'll have another one at the ready. And that's sort of a lesson for the ability to communicate that you have all the right answers. You're a student of these answers and connecting your experiences to answers, and you can just have that command of the material. It's like, give you another example for your listeners. If someone here thinks they're a great leader, you know you're a great leader. When you can communicate your leadership in all the six answer modes, you understand all the different concepts of leadership, servant leadership, and.

Whatever the different frameworks are. You know those. You understand the theory. You have stories of leadership, you have metaphors for what you think leadership is. You know, you have procedures and actions of how you lead a meeting. You think about all these answers. But, you know, so you're a student of the answers. And that's what these golf instructors were. They were a student of answers. And to punctuate this, one of the golf instructors had a library of 3,500 books. I'm not suggesting everyone needs 3,500 books, but they studied everything about golf and anything related to golf. So they knew the physics of golf, psychology of golf, sports nutrition of golf. That is the type of command that the experts have that those that want to be communicating about a particular topic at the highest level is to have that level of commitment. So, you know, that offers sort of one extreme for where you can go, but I'll stop there. I'm starting to digress.

No, it's brilliant. Thank you, Brian. And so it sounds like for those for to have a high aq, you've got to go deep on a subject matter. It's not about going a mile wide and an inch deep. It's about going like an inch wide. And a mile deep. So they develop this AQ through really deep understanding of a subject matter. Would that be right?

Yeah, it is. But it's also more complicated than that in that it is about depth. But when you're an expert, you often start to approach breadth as well. For example.

One of the golf instructors shared an example or a story of a metaphor. This particular golf instructor taught Cy Young award winning pitchers in the United States, baseball, so elite pitchers. And he was trying to compare balance in golf with balance in baseball. And he used a metaphor and basically said that the balance in golf and baseball are the same and that the throw in baseball is similar to.

The swing in golf. And so you make this because of dynamic balance and how balance shifts. The point is, this may not be the best example, but you're sort of able to understand other sports sort of horizontally. Or if you're talking to an executive, as a golf instructor, you know how to have metaphors that relate to the business world. So you wouldn't think at first like knowledge of business. That's important for teaching golf. Imagine if you're a golf instructor and you're talking to a top CEO and you're talking about. You make some metaphors, you have references to procedures that relate to mergers and acquisitions. I mean, that seems totally far afield. But that's how you can connect to someone and really get to them. And that's what these people could do. I got the sense talking to them, these golf instructors, that these are like the perfect dinner guests. You could talk to them almost about anything horizontally. So it is sort of paradoxical. Yes, they're very deep into what they know, but they also are sort of willing to make connections to a lot of different areas in life, to.

That kind of inspires me to think a little bit about self awareness. In your study and research, did you find that these individuals that had a high iq, they had a high degree of self awareness?

Hey, James here. I wanted to take a quick moment to let you know about something. Look, I get asked to deliver keynotes and workshops for teams and companies all over the world, from London to Antarctica, from America to Australasia, from armies to small businesses to large corporates to sports teams. But I go in and deliver keynotes around the mindset of high performers, around the habits of high performers, about how we navigate change. If you would like me to come and speak to your team or speak at your conference or deliver a bespoke workshop, please get in touch with my team. Carolinejlochlund.com will be able to help, I. I'll also make sure that we put that in the show notes.

You know, it's a good question. I think to some extent that might be a little bit outside of our scope. But I will say this. I think they thought in terms of the questions and answer types intuitively.

Bottom up. We studied how they did it. So they did it naturally. It's sort of like an athlete in baseball, like Ted Williams, he was just a natural hitter in baseball, but he wasn't really a great coach because he wasn't really aware of how he did it. He just did it. So to some extent they could have been just intuitive. We didn't really ask them. That wasn't part of the scope. But I will say for the average person or the average communicator or anyone who's trying to improve, not at that level, myself included, there's blind spots that we don't realize we're not providing certain answer types. So for example, like say sales reps very focused on stories but they might not realize other answers are important. Like metaphors can really unlock a client or speak of our colleagues that use AQ in the aviation industry. Aviation industry, for example, heavily index on procedures. So if you're a German military pilot, let's say roughly, you know, you got a. This is, I don't remember the exact, but it's something like a 500 page manual to be a German military fighter pilot. The German aviation industry has like 5x that. It's like a 2500 page manual, something crazy. So. But the point is every time something happens in airplanes, everything is can we put a procedure around it? But procedures don't always save the day. Like, you know, when Sully Sullivan landed the plane in the Hudson river in New York. It wasn't the procedures, it was other answer types in AQ terms and frankly even very subtle things like mental models for ideas like calm and referencing stories during their life that kept them calm in the moment, that allowed them to save lives. But it wasn't the procedure. So the point is for each of us we might over index on something and not focus on something else. And that was sort of a learning.

And how do we catch ourselves when we are over indexing? How do we become aware of that?

I think to start with, it's about realizing that there are six answer types. So if you don't know there's six answer types, then you're not going to know you're missing something. So that for me when I practice AQ was a starting point when I was a professor, been in and out of academia. I would teach classes like negotiations. And to be really succinct about this, I knew the theory. I had great stories, great metaphors, but I was falling short on the procedures and actions. I might talk about some technique for, you know, integrative negotiating and someone would say, ask, how do you do it? And I wasn't providing them the level of sophistication of answers on the procedure and action side that I did with the theory side, for example. So that was frustrating to people. Give you an example, like how you have to be aware and focus on the answers. Let's imagine you're someone in sales that loves to tell stories. And I've had this experience where they're so convinced it's only stories that matter. Here's an example, opposite of stories being important. Imagine you go to the convenience store and you want to buy a candy bar, a mars candy bar. You ask the clerk, you know, how do I find the mars candy bar? And the answer you're looking for in AQ terms is a procedure, which is steps. You want the clerk to say, go down aisle one, take a left bottom shelf. You do not want the clerk to give you the history or the story of mars candy bar. So it's about it's awareness. If we know there are questions that map to certain answers, we can catch ourselves because we'll know that certain answers have appropriate answer responses. And the opposite of this would be, again, people just sort of rambling. We've all been in meetings where everyone just tells stories all the time. That's the only answer we need. Let me just tell a story. It doesn't work that way.

And these answer types or these answer responses, I'm fascinated to find out what they are. So what are the six different answer types?

Yeah, so I'll go through them briefly. The.

The what question is answered by a concept in metaphor. So, for example, trust. You could define trust and break it into a metaphor. So I talked to a consulting firm one time that defined trust as a client that does more than one type of business with us. That means they trust us. They only do one line of business is transactional. So you can disagree with the definition, but that's a definition. And they had a metaphor. They said, we're the trusted advisor. We're the third card in the Rolodex behind the lawyer and the accountant, then us. So again, you can disagree, but wow, they have command. That's the what question? Concept and metaphor. The why question is answered by a Story or a theory. So I'm not going to give you an example of this, but we all know what stories are, right? And stories have a moral of the story, and that sort of relates to the theory. The theory is cause and effect logic. You know, for example, you know, if employees are engaged, they're going to perform at a higher level. That could be a theory, cause and effect. And then you can have a story that shares that. Let me tell you a story about when our employees are engaged and it leads to higher performance and you tell that story. So the story is, you know, emotional connecting to experiences. The theory is more objective. And you can even talk about, like, alternative hypotheses. You know, what, what else is going to cause performance besides engagement? Maybe it's something else.

And then you can also call a theory strategy. You know what, you know, the strategy we're doing. Then you have the how question, which is answered with the procedure and in action. So a, to give you an example, procedure could relate to the steps in a recipe. The 10 steps in baking a cake is a procedure. There's steps. Any given step really involves an action like cracking an egg. So really what a procedure does, it catalogs and organizes the sequence of actions, but they're distinct. So you can tell me the procedure about how you lead a meeting, and then you can tell me a key action you do within that procedure. And actions really are unique or best practice. So, you know, if I'm running a meeting, a best practice action could be an agenda slide. And I like to say an example of a unique action, if I have PowerPoint, can hold up my keyboard control B on the keyboard, if I am in full presentation mode in PowerPoint, will make the screen blank. Arguably, that's a unique action. Many people don't know about it. It's not absolutely unique, but I might do that if I want to give the floor to someone asking a question. Or maybe I've deviated from the content on the slide. That's like high quality action, arguably. So anyways, those are the six answer types and they map to different what, why and how questions.

Incredible. And we're in, say, the last year or so when we've been through quite uncertain and turbulent times. You know, personally, professionally, nationally, like it's been everywhere we've been dealing with uncertainty. Where have you seen this model? Really support an organization or support a community.

Yeah, I think there's a couple themes at a macro level. One is.

I think, going back to the pandemic, both themes relate to the pandemic but the pandemic and also movements like Black Life Matters. I think there's a general.

Desire within society that yes, have questions, but people are interested in answers. They want the solutions to these big problems. And probably nothing is more powerful to emphasize that in terms of the COVID vaccines, there were questions asked of our scientists. The scientists provided answers. Arguably, of course, it's a tragedy, but let's say those are important answers for our time. You have similar need for other movements and desire for answers with movements like Black Life Matters. So I think there's this idea the answers are important. Related to that, Covid and virtualization has put more of a premium on communication. So like when we're doing zoom calls, like we're doing here, if you're doing a meeting with clients, the dynamics have changed. Whether it's sales or a meeting, what do we have? We have shorter meetings, people's attention span is less. There's more of a premium on high quality communication like in sales. You know, used to be back in the day, you could take someone out to dinner, wine and dine them for two hours and then you talk sales. Now, even if people moving back to the office, people don't want to meet you face to face all the time. Going out to dinner, it's about a quick zoom call and some sales calls. People report to me. The clients have their cameras off.

The focus on quality answers and conversations matter more than ever. And with aq, there's two things that it allows you to do. It allows for higher quality answers, but also more efficient answers. You respond to the question being asked, you respond in the right way, more efficiently, you move faster through things. That's the second thing I think is the biggest application for AQ is based on the virtualization of communication. A crisis of effectiveness. AQ is something that can help with organizations trying to be effective communicators in this environment.

Really powerful and say from a parental standpoint. So some of the listeners will have kids. I certainly have a little boy. What are the benefits of equipping our youngsters and young leaders with the AQ model?

Yeah, I think if we just.

Take a basic approach towards this, leaning into what we already value, we value questions. We want our children to ask important questions about the world around them. But I think we also should expect and want them to develop compelling answers for those questions. And it's sort of that simple. And there's ways we can help engage our students and move them along in different techniques. Like for example, this is true for sales. It's also True. For a child's understanding of something using aq, of course, might depend on their exact age per se. But, you know, one idea is to truly understand something, you need to be able to communicate it in six ways. You know, so if I'm like in a sales meeting or something, or leadership, I'm talking to my team, I give this story very compelling, and then someone leans in and says, well, how do I use this in my next meeting? And you have no answer for it. It's not equally as compelling. There's a gap. So hike, you know, so we should educate our students, I think, our children, to develop six answers for something that's really important and that is sort of a way to gauge the quality of our responses. So that's one thought.

And the other thought is, as parents, you can use this to communicate with your children, provide them with compelling answers, engage them in conversations. Because we get tough questions as parents. Like your young daughter or our young daughter might, might ask implicitly or explicitly, what is beauty? That's a tough question, right? So you want to define it as a concept and do you have that perfect metaphor to put that in relief? So we're not talking, of course, about any kind of objective external beauty, but the more inner beauty, how can you frame that so the child increases in self confidence and giving them the tools. Those are a couple of thoughts.

I love it. Could we try that? Could we try, um, ask a question and then you come at it with the six. Six answer types.

Yeah.

What's a topic you love? What's a topic that's dear to you?

Oh, geez.

I like sports and you know, you know, Premier league soccer. Like coffee.

Okay.

Maybe we could work on this together. You can ask a question, but you can, you can help me as we're going. Cause one thing about aq, I like to say is I'm a coach, not a player. You know, I, I try my best, but I'm making. No, no attempt to say I'm the best communicator. I mean, maybe someone else can use these tools much more fluently than I can. And that's fine. Go ahead.

I love it. Let's look at sports. So what, what makes sport important?

Yeah, I, I think, you know, so, so the question here, just to sort of what makes sport important? And one thing is with aq, sometimes if they use the word what, that might be a what question, a how question or why question. Like a young child may say, how, how, how. You have to sort of map it to which level is it at? And so, so what makes sports important? So I think I'll answer that still as a what question? I'll say.

You know, probably say something along the lines of.

Sports basically are a reflection of what we value in life. Okay, so that's a concept answer. And then I'll give you a quote. So quotes are related to concepts. They help us understand concepts. Okay, so I'll give you a quote of one of our AQ partners, Richard Hyam from London. And he told me this quote. He said.

Novices practice until they succeed once. Right. Experts practice until they never fail. You know, so now we think about that related to sports and micro, you know, sports is a, you know, reflection of life. You know, it's something on stage, it has the drama. And we watch these athletes because they are, they are aspiring towards, you know, not failing. You know, it's a different level of performance. And I think, you know, someone that enjoys human capital and, you know, achieving your best. You look at these athletes and everything about them at the highest level is about, you know, developing their skills. They have coaches, you know, around every corner and, you know, those in the coaching business or training business, these elite athletes have everything. Psychologists, all these teams. And it's sort of a microcosm for what high performance is or could be in the real world. We see this parallel. And so that's sort of where my mind goes with this. And I'll pause there. That answer was sort of long winded. Arguably, I could have had a shorter answer, but sometimes when you're doing that on the cuff, it's more difficult to come up with an answer. So I just provided, just there, a concept answer. I didn't go to a metaphor yet. Let me pause there and see, you know, what other question you have for me about sports.

And yeah, my natural question then is the, like, I get excited by what you just told me and then I go, okay, how can I embrace sport in my busy life?

Yeah, I think, you know, embrace sport meaning being a participant or watching sports.

Yeah, I think participant and engaging in sport and teamwork.

Yeah, that's a good question. You know, sort of related to the, this concept of reflection of life.

I think. So how can you make this part of your life?

I would say.

You know, I'd say is, you know, in terms of, you know, procedure or action.

You know, this may not be the best answer, but this is sort of my answer how I sort of view sports. You know, I like to think about sports the same time I'm thinking about other things. I want to do in life. And I don't really separate the two. I do that for a lot of topics. But one of the things about sports is about interval training and you do different intervals. Well, that's very consistent with high performance learning theory. And that's about doing things at different intervals and not always doing the same thing at one time. Like, for example, there's been studies of sports. So if you are sticking with baseball, you go to the park and you see children practicing baseball. Like a bad way to teach children about baseball is, is to. For the father, sons that keep, you know, the mothers, you know, throwing to the children to throw the ball at the same speed every time. We do that, the same speed every time. So little Johnny or Susan hits the ball, right? And we say, oh, good job. Right. But that's in a way, sort of the wrong way to teach. What you want to do in learning theory is something called interleaving, where you want to basically vary the pitches. Low pitch, fast pitch, curveball, and obviously lower, you know, younger kids, the variance would be a little bit less. Maybe, you know, high ball, low ball, slow, fast might be the way to go. But we learn through interleaving and we don't learn and improve by just doing the same thing over and over again. So, you know, as I'm reflecting on, like interval training, it makes total sense as it relates to interleaving. So this is a reason to do interval training is your training in your fitness. You're doing short sprints, longer jogs, etc. And you change it up. So for me, this may not be the best answer, but in getting involved in sports, when I try to think about other aspects of my life and try to connect them together and it gets me more excited about doing sports. So that's my answer. It may not be the best answer, but.

That'S my answer to that.

I love it. Thank you, Brandon. What I'm getting from this is that aq, there's no, you can't install aq and overnight, bang, away we go. It's a practice, it's a muscle that we develop. It's a model. I love that. And for the list of this listening, going, okay, AQ is very intriguing. I want to really, you know, go deeper on it. What are the whys behind that? What are the, you know, the benefits of having better AQ as a leader, as someone who wants to be a high performer, be world class at what they do, and as somebody who wants to connect with humans, like better relationships, better health. What's the benefits?

Yeah, Let me connect on that. Don't let me forget the connecting to other humans. I want to emphasize that. Just writing that down. Let me give you a couple benefits for leaders, but this, I'll say it frame in terms of leaders, a couple benefits. One is you can connect your experiences to answers. So you might be frustrated, you're not influencing people or you're not being heard. If you use aq, you can catalog the experiences you already have and put those into stories, into metaphors, into procedures. So that's a great starting point. Second, it gives you a vehicle to build upon your knowledge if you really, if being a leader is important to your brand, you know, maybe read a couple Harvard Business Review articles on leadership, start to understand the different concepts of leadership and choose, you know, the concepts of leadership that connect to you and be a student of leadership. The same goes for all six answer types. Second, you can learn a little bit more about AQ and things we haven't really covered, but there's high iq practices or techniques, ways, questions map to the answers and start to learn those and practice those and that that will those two things combine together. Understanding the framework, cataloging answers, being, being understanding techniques will increase your confidence. So then when you get into live situations that are difficult, even like the questions you're asking me, James, I, you know, I wasn't sure on all these, maybe not the best answers, but you're gonna, you're gonna be more confident and then it's gonna, the third thing that's going to happen is you're going to influence more, you're going to win the deals, you're going to have more gravitas in meetings and those are the benefits. So that's what AQ does is it gives you a framework to navigate important conversations, both questions and answers. And it'll make you by the way, a better question asker. So like I may, you know, ask you something, James, and say I want to understand why, you know, why do you want to move to this other company? Or why do you want to be a leader? And what I'm really looking for are story and theory answers and that can even help you. I can say, can you tell me a story why you want to lead the organization? So I can use my knowledge of AQ to ask for the type of answers you know, and that's, that's helpful, you know, and I'll just say in terms of connecting to humans.

We all want to be understood. And I give you a straw.

Person sort of idea for effective conversations. Imagine your next dinner conversation or your last one that was with a friend. What are those conversations? When they're good, Both sides speak about equally, both sides ask and answer questions about equally. Both sides care about each other. So you take that now and transport that idea to leadership or sales or any conversation. That's what you want to do. It's not about, you know, just providing all the answers or asking all the questions. Doing both. This gives you tools to navigate those conversations when you use aq. Last thing I'll say is, within those conversations, they can become upward spirals. You start with one little conversation and then you say a great metaphor, and then I ask a question. We're going up and up and up, and before you know it, that. That dinner just flies by, or that leadership meeting flies by, sales meeting flies by. And all we know is we just had a great conversation.

And I think, you know, certainly for me, I can reflect on some recent conversations like that where it was just an incredible experience. I felt we were equally contributing. There was a mutual trust and likability and respect. And also. Yeah, there was a mixture of stories, metaphors, ideas, tactics. Yeah, it was. Yeah, you ticked all those. That's very interesting. And I guess this is a very important question. I always like to ask this towards the end, but if we were to fast forward towards the end of your life and you knew it was your last day here on earth and someone very young, someone very near and dear in your life, it could be a grandchild or great grandchild. They were to say, brian, how do I lead my life on purpose? What advice would you have for them?

I think my advice to them would.

Be.

Follow your passion. And you have to fan that passion, figure out what it is, and just follow that path. I think that's what leads to joy and happiness. It sounds sort of simple, but it's too easy to get distracted from what you really value. I think many persons myself, I think, gosh, I wish I would have done some of these things earlier. The stuff I really love. So don't put it off and just follow your passion and do it well.

Amazing. Thank you for sharing that. And as we think about you following your passion and sharing your research, your wisdom, and of course your book, I'm going to put a link for the listener right now in the show. Notes for answer. Intelligence. Raising your iq. So, iq. I'll be sure to put that in there. So please share with us. What is your passion? Where are you headed? What's the next five, ten years look like for you?

That's a Good question. My near term goal is to spread AQ around the world. We have partners in 15 countries now and I'm very interested in working with others that, you know, want to push the boundaries for what AQ is and how it's used in different conversations. So let's say the next five years or so, at least they're going to be focused on that. And beyond that, I don't know. We'll see. Maybe it's more of this or could be something else, but I welcome whatever way the journey may go.

No, I love it. Well, Brian, I'll make sure to put all the details of how people can get in touch with you because there might be a listener listening right now that goes. You know what? I want to learn more. I want to learn how we can bring this into our organization, into our team, into our community. So I'll make sure that we do that. And you never know, there might be a very interesting collaboration or partnership that comes from that.

Definitely. Thank you so much for having me. You are a very generous host with excellent questions. So thank you so much.

Oh, it's an absolute pleasure to have you on, Brian. I'm sure it will not be the last time we speak, but thank you so much for taking the time to connect.

Thanks for tuning in today and investing in your own personal leadership. Please hit that subscribe button and I'd love if you'd leave me a rating and review you. I've got some amazing guests lined up for you in the coming weeks and leaders. It's that time to get out there and lead your life on purpose.