How to Make Better Choices - ft. Ryan Leveque

Welcome back, Kwik Brain. So your question for today, it's a big one. How do you make better choices? We all know that our life is a reflection of all the choices we made up to this point. What are we going to eat? Who are we going to spend time with? What are we going to think? Our routines, all of that. But have we ever given some thought on how we make these choices? So I'm really excited about this conversation we're about to have. I'm here with my friend Ryan Levesque.

Hi.

Many of you know him already. He's the bestselling author of Ask, and he has a brand new book called Choose. This is the topic we're talking about today. We're going to go deep. Thanks for being here, Ryan.

Excited to be here, Jim. Thanks so much for having me.

You're so amazing. You and I have geeked out over the power of asking powerful questions. Ask and you shall receive. People here, they're watching or they're listening at home, and they're thinking, yeah, my life is You know, reflection of all the questions I've asked, but I've never really thought about that meta-level of asking questions of myself.

Well, we talked about choices, right? So how to make better choices. And the reality is, when you think about how you make better choices, it begins by thinking about reflecting on the questions you ask yourself that lead to those choices. And I'll explain what I mean by that. If you think about the language you use to talk to yourself, The brain naturally thinks in the form of questions.

Mm-hmm.

Every single day, you are asking yourself a series of questions. Should I wear this or should I do that? Why did I say that? Was that stupid? Did I make a mistake? Why am I doing this? We're constantly asking ourselves questions like this. And so the implication of that is when you change the questions you ask, you can change your life. You can change the choices that you're making. So that kind of gives us a jumping-off point Or talking about how you make better choices in your life and in your business.

That's very powerful. And so where would you recommend somebody start now that they're super aware? And they're probably asking the question, is that true? But notice as they're thinking, they're asking a question.

Right.

So that's very meta.

It's very meta. And so my expertise is in serving entrepreneurs and people who are maybe thinking about starting a business and want to become their own boss. So that's kind of my realm of expertise. And so I'll give you an example of sort of this in action. One of the questions I see people ask a lot, and a lot of the conventional wisdom is around this, is the question of what. What type of business should I start? What should I create? What should I sell?

Hmm.

The reality is, if you reframe that, and instead of asking what, ask the question who, that helps overcome the single biggest mistake people make when they start a business. Because the who is actually much more important, who you're going to serve. And the reason why I say that is because if you think about your business, you do not have a business until you have one thing. Any guesses on what that thing is?

We're asking questions here. This is very true, a customer.

A customer. People think— I get all sorts of answers when I ask that question. Well, a business license, a website, a product. The reality is you don't have a business until you have a customer. That's your who. And you mentioned the book Choose. And the book Choose is all about how you answer that question, how you figure out who your who is. Now, do you really need a 200-page book to, you know, figure out the answer to that question? I always am challenged with that idea, but I tell people this. If you know the old Abraham Lincoln quote, if I had 6 hours to chop down the tree, I'd spend the first 4 hours sharpening my axe. In this context, you should be spending the first 4 hours thinking about the questions you're asking.

Hmm.

So my first book, Ask, that you mentioned is all about the questions you want to ask to understand your audience, your market, at a deep emotional level. And the questions that you want to ask are very counterintuitive. Whenever I bring up this idea of ask people what they want so you can give it to them, people say, but wait, Henry Ford, he's famous for saying, If I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have told me—

Faster horses.

Faster horses, right? And Steve Jobs was famous for saying, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. Now, the reason why those quotes and statements like that ring so true is because they are true. We don't know what we want. Again, asking ourselves this question, we speculate. Where should I go on vacation? What do I want in my dream car? We're not good at answering those types of questions. There's only a few types of questions that we're really good at accurately answering. I'll give you a few examples. So one of the types of information we're really good at accurately answering is information around past behavior. So for example, if I were to say, how much money would you be willing to spend on your next backpack? You're just speculating, right? You're guessing. I don't know, maybe this, maybe that. But if instead I ask you the question, think about your backpack right now. How much did you pay for that backpack?

Right.

That is a better indicator of of what you'll pay for your next backpack than the answer to the first question, what would you pay? Because you're actually asking people to access different parts of their brain, a part of their brain where they're speculating into the future versus a part of their brain where they're looking at past behavior. And if you have this conversation with someone in person, you actually see this. They have tells. You can see how their eyes move, how they look up and to the left, how they look up and to the right when you're asking these questions. Most of the time, we don't have the luxury of asking it in person. We might be Online, we might be doing it in the form of a survey, we might be doing it, you know, over the phone or something like that. But there are these interesting tells and it just underscores that when you learn to get better at asking better questions, you can make better choices. Better choices in the business you start, better choices in the products you sell, better choices in your career, in your personal life, in your relationships, and it all stems from this one idea: learn to ask better questions, change those questions, and you can change your life.

And so how do people do that? Do they need to work backwards from a specific kind of outcome?

So there are a couple ways to go about it. So one of the ways, if we go sort of meta for a second, is really asking yourself and just going through this process of reflecting Is this the right question? So there's a question within the question, right? I'm asking this question, but is this even the right question? Just that one step right there, pausing, being aware that the fact that the question you're asking might not even be the right question— people rush to answer.

Hmm.

I see this all the time, right? You're— and you might experience this in your personal life. Someone asks you a question, your natural reaction is to answer that question that was presented to you. The reality is you may want to take back take a second to look, think back, and reflect, and wonder, is this the right question to be asking? No, we should actually be talking about this over here, because it's easier to get down these rabbit trails. So I think the first step is to be aware, this awareness that you now have that you might be going the wrong path. Secondly, there are certain questions that in certain circumstances that I have experience in that are true questions to ask. So for example, if you want to figure out in business what to create. You can't just ask people, what, what should I create? What should I sell? Instead, what you can ask people about is their challenge or frustration in that area of their life. So you can ask, when it comes to improving your memory, Mm-hmm. What's your single biggest challenge or frustration that you've run into in the past? What that does, it causes people to look back in their past history once again and think about the challenges that they've run into. Now the second piece of this is is learning to pay attention to the right type of responses. If you pay attention to people who give you these long, detailed, passionate responses, you're uncovering the segment of your market who's most likely to buy from you when you buy— when you sell that product. Now, if you ask this question and you don't really get much response, that's a good thing. It tells you that you haven't hit a nerve. You haven't asked the right question.

Yeah.

Maybe improving your memory isn't the thing. Maybe it's Maybe it's learning, maybe it's speed reading, maybe it's something else, maybe the hot button, the nerve, is just one degree removed, and then when you strike that nerve, you know it, because that's when people start pouring out and telling you their life story and saying, oh my gosh, it's been a— reading's been a struggle for my entire life, and that's what you're looking for. And so the more you practice, like anything in life, the more you become tuned to the nuance, and you start to pick up on whether or not you're kind of going down that right path with the right questions, So is this why you wrote the book Choose? This is why— the reason why I wrote the book Choose is twofold. Number one, in my first book Ask, I talk about the questions you want to ask your market to understand what it is that they want, what it is that you should create, and the messaging you should use to describe those products. When I wrote that book, what I overlooked, the mistake that I made, is that I didn't teach people the single most important decision you need to make in your business, which is before you ask, you need to choose who you're going to ask. Who is your market? Who is your niche? And so Choose is a deep exploration through that process of deciding what market to go into, what niche to pursue, and who is your who.

That's powerful. You know, it's interesting when we do our coaching and we do our live events, Some people, they're in a situation. It could be something where they have to make a good decision, or they're in some kind of crisis, and they always ask— it's interesting— they ask, what do I need to do? But another question that just came to me when we're having this conversation is, what if next time you don't automatically go to, what do I need to do right now, but who do I need to be right now at this moment?

It's incredible. Just reframing that question can cause you to rethink the entire problem. Or, who do I need to speak to? Who has gone through what I'm going through right now? Immediately unlocks this level of creativity where you can solve the problem in a way that you never thought about.

Right, and we know the neuroscience, when somebody asks a question, it directs their reticular activating system, you know, their RAS, because at any given moment, there's 2 billion stimulus we could be paying attention to, and primarily, our brains are these these deletion devices where we're trying to keep information out, and what do you pay attention to? The things that you ask questions about.

Right, exactly.

So this is fascinating. I recommend everybody gets this book, Choose.

Where—

how can people connect with you?

So the best place to connect with me on social is just look for me at Ask Ryan Levesque. So Ask, title of my first book, Ryan Levesque. I'm there on Facebook, I'm there on Instagram, And I'm always posting the crazy experiments, questions, and other advice I'm learning along the way in launching and growing businesses.

Yeah, I would actually challenge everybody right now to take a screenshot of this video or take a screenshot of this podcast that you're listening to and tag Ryan, tag myself, and I would love for you to share your big aha or your takeaway or maybe your biggest question that you have here. And as always, I'm going to repost some of our favorite, and actually, for some of them, we'll actually gift signed copies of Ryan's book. So make sure you do that. Thanks for being on.

Thanks, Jim. Super appreciate it.