Page 52 - 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself

When you prepare a meeting with someone, prepare your questions.

Cultivate your curiosity. Don’t ever be at a loss for questions to ask. Most of us
do the opposite. We prepare our answers. We rehearse what we are going to say.
We polish and strengthen our presentation, not realizing that our host would
much rather talk than listen to us.

If you are in business, you know that when prospective customers contract
for long-term services, they want a company that’s truly interested in them, that
understands them, that will be a good consultant to them. To show a prospect
that you are genuinely interested, you must be the person who asks the most
thoughtful questions. To convince a company that you understand it, you will
ask the best follow-up questions—based on its answers. To convince a company
that you will be a good consultant during the course of the contract, you will
have out-learned your competitors by the inventiveness and quantity of your

questions. Your curiosity will get you the business. But you can’t just rely on
impulsive, on-the-spot questioning. Being prepared is the secret. Preparing your
questions is even more important than preparing the presentation of your
services.

Indiana’s former basketball coach Bobby Knight always said, “The will to
win is not as important as the will to prepare to win.” This is not only useful in
business. If you are about to have an important conversation with your spouse or
teenager, it is very useful to prepare your curiosity rather than your presentation.
When you prepare your curiosity, you always seem to have one more question to
ask before you leave, just like Lt. Columbo from the old TV show. As the
character played by Peter Falk, Columbo disarmed his subjects by asking many
seemingly impromptu questions. Like a disorganized but innocently charming

child, he would ask about the tiniest things. As he prepared to leave, he always
paused at the door, as if absent-mindedly remembering something he forgot to
ask. “Excuse me sir,” he would say, apologetically. “Would it inconvenience
you if I asked you one more question?”

Great relationship-builders ultimately learn that the sale most often goes to
the most interested party and the quantity and quality of your questions will
measure your level of interest. You might be thinking that this doesn’t apply so
much to you because you’re not in business, or you don’t sell for a living. But
heed the words of Robert Louis Stevenson: “Everybody lives by selling
something.”

In Follow the Yellow Brick Road, Richard Saul Wurman writes about