Sharon Drew Morgen – What? Did You Really Say What I Think I Heard?

As a preamble to a discussion about failing, I’d like to retell a story. Many years ago Xerox was beta testing a then new-type digital printer. The testers sent back complaints: it was hard to figure out how to work the damn thing, and the user guide was confusing. Obviously, User Error, the designers concluded. Yup. More stupid users. So an internal focus group was set up by senior management to test what exactly was happening.

They brought in three middle managers, put them in a room with the new printer and user guide, and from the one-way mirror watched while mayhem ensued: as the managers spent literally hours arguing amongst themselves trying to figure out what the directions meant and pressing the wrong buttons, finally giving up – never getting it to work.

User Error, the designers again said. Obviously, went the thinking, the managers weren’t smart or savvy enough to understand simple directions. Except they didn’t know a trick had been played on them: the testers were actually PhD computer scientists. Oops. It wasn’t User Error at all. They had failed to design a machine and user guide that had clear user interfaces. So while the printer itself might have been a marvel of machinery for its day, it couldn’t be used. It was a failure. Or was it?

WHAT IS FAILURE

I contend that until every ‘failed’ step was taken, and every ‘failed’ assumption made, there was no way to know exactly what problems needed to be fixed or if indeed the printer was a success. The failure was part of the march to success.

We call it failure when we don’t achieve a goal we’ve set out to accomplish, whether it’s starting up a company, reaching a job goal, learning something new, or starting a new diet. As humans we strive to succeed, to be seen as competent, to be ‘better than’, even if we’re only in competition with ourselves. It’s natural to want our products, our teams, our families, our competitive activities, to reap success. To be The Best. And we plot and envision how to make it happen.

But the road to success isn’t straight; sometimes we face disappointment, shame, and self-judgment along the route. We get annoyed with ourselves when results don’t seem to comply with our mental images, and tell ourselves maybe we didn’t follow the original plan, or didn’t plan well enough, or maybe we’re self-sabotaging. We blame teammates or vendors, spouses or neighbors.

I’m here to tell you that failure is a necessary part of success. It’s built in to learning and succeeding, actually a natural part of the process of change and accomplishment. Before we win we gotta fail. Tiger Woods didn’t wake up the best in the world. Neither did Pavarotti or Steve Jobs.

For anyone to get to the top, to achieve success in any industry, any endeavor, any sport, it’s necessary to fail over and over. How surprising that no one teaches us how to fail consciously. I suggest we develop conscious failing strategies that become built in to our success procedures.

WHAT IS OUR STATUS QUO? AND WHY IS IT SO STUBBORN?

Getting to success is a sequential process that includes trial and error – i.e. winning and losing are both part of the same process, and each adding a piece of the puzzle. Of course there’s no way to know what we don’t know before we start – no way to even be fully curious, or ask the right questions because we don’t know what we don’t know. And unfortunately, part of the process is internal, unconscious, and systemic.

Change – and all success and failure is really a form of changing our status quo – has a very large unconscious component, and when we only try to add new behaviors we miss the unconscious elements that will rear their ugly heads: you can’t change a behavior by trying to change a behavior. It just doesn’t work that way.

All change is systemic. Anything new you want to do, anything new that requires, ultimately, new behaviors, or added beliefs or life changes, requires buy-in from what already exists in your make up – your status quo.

Indeed, as the repository of your history, values, and norms, your status quo will reject anything new, regardless of how necessary it is, unless the new has been properly vetted by the originating system. In other words, until your system accepts the new choices, it will reject whatever you try to change, regardless of its efficacy.

Sample Sample

Setting a goal that’s behavior-based without agreement from the system, without incorporating steps for buy in assures resistance. Sure, we lay out the trajectory, attempt to make one good decision at a time, and use every feeling, hope, data point, guess, to take next steps.

THE STEPS TO FAILING CONSCIOUSLY

Here are the steps I’ve developed during a change process to garner success and avoid large-scale malfunction:

The Beginning: to start the process toward succeeding at a goal, you need:

Include all (all) stakeholders (including Joe in accounting) and all who will touch the final solution;
Agree upon the wording for the final goal, including specifics of new behavioral elements, rules, politics, outcomes – i.e. what, exactly, will be different;
Write up a ‘guess list’ of problems that might occur (failures) to the status quo as a result: what they might look like, as well as possible workarounds;
An agreement clause from all stakeholders to act when something is going off course. Note: listening without bias is urgently needed here;
Consider possible ways your starting goals may shift the status quo and make sure it’s tenable;
Know how the new outcome will be maintained over time (including the people, rules, norms, changes, that will be involved) and what else has to buy in to maintenance;
State potential, detailed steps toward achievement that are agreeable to all stakeholders;
Agreement to reconsider all previous steps if the problems that show up cause new considerations.

The Middle: to make changes, add new knowledge to trial, get continuous buy in, you must:

Rewrite the original goals, with delineated outcomes for each;
Notice how the new is disrupting the status quo. Is it necessary to amend the new plans to ensure Systems Congruence? Is the cost of the new lower than the cost of the original? There must be a cost-effective decision made;
Find ways to acquire the right knowledge to learn from;
Check on the ways you’re failing. Were they expected? Do they conform to your goals? Do you need to shift anything?
Agreement to develop new choices where current ones aren’t working as per plan.

The End: making sure the outcome is congruent with the original goal:

Go through the Beginning steps and check they’ve been accomplished;
Compare end result with original goal;
Make sure there is congruent integration with the thinking, beliefs, values of the original;
Make sure the status quo is functioning without disruption and the system ends up congruent with its mental models and belief systems.

Here are more specifics to help you integrate the necessary failure, and avoid guesswork and reactions to what might seem inconsistent with your goals:

Lay out specifics for each step you’re considering to your goal. Include timelines, parameters, and consequences of results, specific elements of what success for that step should look like, and what possible failure might look like. Of course, you can’t truly know the answers until they occur, but make your best guess. It’s important to notice something new happening when it’s happening.
If something unplanned or feared occurs (i.e. failure), annotate the details. What exactly is happening? What elements worked and what didn’t, and how did they work or not work – what/who was involved, how did the result differ from the expectations? What does the failure tell you – what IS succeeding instead of what you wish for? How does the remedy for the problem influence the next step? How long should you allot for each occurrence before determining whether it’s failure, or just part of the success trajectory you weren’t aware of?
Are all stakeholders involved and shared their input? Do you need to bring in more stakeholders?
Notice the consequences of the outcomes for each: employees, clients, hiring, firing, quitting, vendors, competition, state of the industry and your place in it. What comes into play with these factors when considering if you want to continue down one trajectory rather than designing a new one? What will it look like to decide to change course? How will your decisions effect your vision of an outcome? How are the stakeholders affected by each choice?
How much failure are you willing to risk before you determine that either your outcome is untenable, or you need to make structural changes? What part does ego and denial play? Does everyone agree what constitutes failure? Success?
What will you notice when your trajectory to success is negatively effecting your baseline givens? What are you willing to change, or accept, to reach your goal?
What will it look like, specifically, when you’ve concluded your efforts? Will parts of the failure be factored in as success? Do all stakeholders buy in to the end result? If not, what remains unresolved? And how will you bring this forward?

Of course there’s no way to know before you start what any specific stage will look like. But using the steps, the thinking, above, you’ll be able to get a handle on it. And by including the failure, you’ll have a far better chance of succeeding.

For some reason, as leaders or individuals, companies or small businesses, we shame ourselves when we don’t achieve what we set out to achieve during our change processes. I contend we must think of each step as an integral part of the process of getting where we want to be. As they say in NLP, there’s no failure, only feedback.

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If you’re enjoying these Monday Articles, please subscribe to make sure you get them delivered to your inbox on Monday morning. I use no cookies, they’re free, and I never use the database to market. As an original thinker I offer these to share out-of-the-box ideas as part of my life’s work. And I’m always eager to hear your thoughts and start a conversation: sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com. Enjoy.

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Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including her new book HOW? Generating new neural circuits for learning, behavior change and decision making, the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

Sharon Drew Morgen November 9th, 2026

Posted In: Communication, News

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As an influencer, how often do say to yourself “Why doesn’t she understand me?” or “If he understood me better this decision would be a no-brainer.” It’s natural to assume Others will understand – and comply with – your suggestions. Have you ever wondered what’s happening when they don’t?

As an influencer, part of your job is to facilitate change. But how? In general, you’ve likely used great rationale, logic, leadership, data sharing, or just plain directives.

But what if your Communication Partner’s brain isn’t set up to hear you accurately? What if your words are misinterpreted, or not understood? You naturally assume your words carry the meaning you intend to convey. But do they?

Sometimes people misinterpret you and your audience is restricted to only those who naturally understand your message. Sometimes people ignore you, regardless of how important your message, how engagingly you deliver it, or how badly they need it.

What if ‘changing minds’ is the wrong way to think about it, and if your real job is to ‘change brains’? What if the Other’s brain, it’s neural circuitry, was in charge and your job was to facilitate the way it went about decision making?

OUR BRAINS ARE THE CULPRIT

Thinking about using any form of content-based sharing as a persuasion strategy, or assuming people will just heed your message, let me share a confounding concept: words have no meaning until our brain interprets them. According to John Colapinto in his fascinating book This is the Voice,

Speech is a connected flow of ever-changing, harmonically rich musical pitches determined by the rate at which the phonating chords vibrate, the complex overtone spectrum is filtered by the rapidly changing length and shape of the mouth, and lips, interspersed with bursts of noise…It is our brain that turns this incoming stream of sonic air disturbances into something meaningful. (pg 54)

Seems to parallel how we ‘see’ color. We don’t, exactly. Light vibrations enter our eyes and get translated into color by our rods and cones. Otherwise, the world is gray!

Indeed, both what we see and what we hear are largely out of our control, influencing what we notice (or not), how we decide (or not), what we think and hear and are curious about (We can’t be curious unless we have the circuitry to think with!).

Here’s a greatly simplified explanation of how brains translate incoming words (or sounds, or…) as I learned when researching my book WHAT?: Spoken words are merely meaningless electrochemical vibrations that enter our ears as ‘puffs of air’ that get filtered and distorted, then automatically dispatched as signals to what our brain considers a ‘similar-enough’ circuit (one among 100 trillion) for translation. And where the signals don’t match, a Listener’s brain kindly discards the difference!

Sample

People understand us according to the natural deletion processes that occur in the brain when spoken words enter, and from there according to the selected, historic circuits that translate these signals, regardless of how different they are from the intended message.

In other words, people don’t hear us according to what we say but by how their historic circuitry interprets it. To me this is quite annoying and hard to address: not only does that restrict incoming content to what’s already familiar to us, there’s a good chance that what we think was said is only some fraction of what was intended.

Unfortunately, neither the Speaker or Listener understands how far from accurate the translation is. Listeners assume their brains tell them exactly what’s been said; Speakers assume they’ve been heard accurately. Turns out these assumptions are both false; communication potentially ends up biased, restricted, and subjective. Obviously, this makes our job as influencers very unreliable.

INFORMATION IS LAST

After 60 years of studying, and developing models for, systemic brain change and decision making, I’ve realized that offering ideas, directives, suggestions, or information is the very last thing anyone needs when considering doing something different (i.e. buying, changing habits, etc.). And yes, it goes against most conventional thinking. But hang with me.

As a kid, my then-undiagnosed Asperger’s caused me to act differently than people around me. I was in trouble often and never understood why. I began reading voraciously on how to change my behaviors: how to visualize, to motivate myself, be disciplined. But they were all based on trying to fix my seemingly automatic actions, to change my behaviors. And I failed repeatedly to make any of the changes permanent.

I finally acknowledged it’s not possible to change a behavior by trying to change a behavior, my brain was the culprit. I then began developing neural workarounds to:

create new brain pathways to new behaviors,
consciously change the circuits causing my behaviors,
enhance my ability to translate incoming words accurately.

I know, I know. It’s odd, and there was lots of trial-and-error. But eventually I figured it out and dedicated the rest of my life to developing, writing about, and teaching systemic brain change models for conscious behavior change.

Thankfully, my concepts caught on in sales, coaching, leadership, and change management: my facilitation models help people orchestrate their own change based on their own internal norms, values, and criteria: in sales, my Buying Facilitation® model teaches people on route to fixing a problem how to become buyers. In coaching and change management, I provide the skill sets to enable people to discover, and act on, their own unique criteria and avoid resistence.

CHANGE FACILITATION

For those of you whose job is to get Others to do something you want them to do, let’s look at it from the side of the people you seek to change.

In order for change to occur, people must understand the difference between their status quo (their problem) and the new activity you want them to do. Below are some of the specific factors they must address to be ready, willing, and able to change:

Conform to norms: Change is more than doing something different; it demands a reconfiguration of the brain circuitry. By first facilitating people through their discovery – by leading them to the underlying beliefs and values that created the circuits that caused the problem – they can be willing to change. It’s got nothing to do with new content or imposed regulations, regardless how important they are. I created a new form of brain-directive question (i.e. not information gathering) called a Facilitative Question that’s quite effective at leading others to their own, often unconscious, answers.

Cost: It’s not until the ‘cost’ (resource, results, disruption) of a fix is identified and agreed to by all stakeholders (including mental models and beliefs) that it’s possible to know if a problem is worth fixing. No one naturally seeks out change if all seems fine, regardless of the problem or the efficacy of the solution.

Disruption: Because our internal systems seek balance (homeostasis), we avoid disruption. And the time it takes us to find a route through to a change that matches our values and avoids risk is the length of the change cycle. If new behaviors are required that cause someone to be out of balance, they will be resisted.

Personal: When change is sought, people must discover their own route to change that match their values and maintains homeostasis. And outsiders can ever understand someone’s history, values, norms, or neural configurations.

EACH PERSON MUST DESIGN THEIR OWN CHANGE

To facilitate change efficiently, we need a shift in thinking. Instead of trying to have the answers for Others, first focus on the goal of helping Others discover how to handle their own change issues enable them to discover their own incongruences. Then they’ll know exactly where they need to add or subtract something to fix it, and the influencer can supply the information to complete the process.

Here’s a situation where I used a carefully crafted sentence to direct a friend’s thinking to where her choice points lie.

I have a lovely young friend who, to me, had serious energy problems. Some days she had difficulty getting out of bed, even with 5 children. Some days she didn’t have the energy to cook or work. And she’d been having this issue for decades. After knowing her a year I finally said, “If the time ever comes that you wish for additional choices around your store of energy to be more available for your kids, I have a thought.”

By shifting the context to her children, by giving her control over her choices and not trying to change her, by leading her to each of her decision points, her system didn’t feel threatened. She welcomed my thoughts, got help (She discovered she was actually dying from a critical lack of vitamin B12.) and now is awake daily at 5:30 a.m. with endless amounts of energy.

No matter what the problem or solution may be, unless someone understands that change won’t cause major disruption, unless the new fits with their values and criteria, unless all the people involved agree to change, they won’t consider doing anything different. So how can we help Others find their own excellence?

You must begin by trusting Others have their own – sometimes unconscious! – criteria for change. Instead of starting with answers or goals, lead them down their unique path through to discovery. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

Would you rather speak or be heard?
What is your job – to serve Others through to their own form of excellence or get your point across to anyone who can listen?
Do you seek a quick hit or a long-term relationship?
Would you rather be a servant leader or an information hawker?

You decide. It’s possible to serve Others and be available with information when and as they need. Sellers can first facilitate buying, coaches and facilitate permanent change, and marketers can develop content that leads people through to brain change. I’m here if you have questions. Or go to www.sharon-drew.com to learn about my facilitation and brain change models.

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Sharon Drew Morgen October 26th, 2026

Posted In: News

With untold millions of sales professionals in the world, sellers play a role in any economy. As the intermediary between clients and providers, sales can be a spiritual practice, with sellers becoming true facilitators and Servant Leaders (and close more sales).

The current sales model, directed at placing solutions and seeking folks with ‘need’, closes 5% – only those ready to buy at point of contact. Sadly, this ignores the possibility of facilitating and serving the 80% of folks on route to becoming buyers and not yet ready.

Until people have assembled all relevant stakeholders and discussed their issues, tried, and failed, to fix their problem themselves, understood and managed the risk and disruption that a new solution might cause their environment, they aren’t buyers. It’s only when they:

know how to manage the risk of bringing in something new,
can’t fix the problem themselves,
get buy-in from whomever will touch the final solution,
understand that the cost of bringing in something new is lower than the cost of maintaining the status quo,

will they self-identify as buyers and be ready to buy. Until then they will avoid our calls/emails and ignore our marketing as they believe they can fix the problem internally. And when we try to sell to them by telling them we have their answers, we get ignored, regardless of whether our solution could help.

Indeed: buying is a risk/change management problem before it’s a solution choice issue, regardless of the need or the efficacy of the solution. All potential buyers must go through this process anyway – and the sales model doesn’t help them as sellers wait (and wait) for them to show up and buy.

But sellers can be facilitating the Pre-Sales buying decision process to make the process much quicker and more efficient.

WHY PEOPLE BUY

People don’t start off wanting to buy anything; they merely seek to resolve a problem at the least ‘cost’ (risk) to their system. Even if folks eventually need a seller’s solution, until they understand how to manage the change a new solution would generate, they won’t heed our outreach, regardless of their need or the efficacy of the solution. As a result, sellers with worthwhile solutions end up wasting a helluva lot of time being ignored and rejected.

Selling doesn’t cause buying. Sales focuses on only the final steps of a buying decision and overlooks the high percentage of would-be prospects who WILL become buyers once they’ve addressed their possible risk issues and managed their internal change. After all, until they’ve recognized that the risk of the new is less than the risk of staying the same they won’t do anything different.

Their need isn’t the problem. It’s the sales model’s singular focus of pushing solutions before first helping those who will become buyers facilitate their necessary change process. Instead of a transactional process, sales can be an expansive, collaborative experience between seller and buyer.

Sample

As a result, sellers end up finding and closing only those ready to buy at the point of contact – unwittingly ignoring others who aren’t ready yet, may need our solutions, and just need to get their ducks in a row before they’re prepared to make a decision.

Imagine having a product-needs discussion about moving an iceberg and discussing only the tip. That’s sales; it doesn’t facilitate the entire range of hidden, unique change issues buyers must consider – having nothing to do with solutions – before they could buy anything. Failure is built in.

But when sellers redirect their focus from seeking folks with ‘need’ to those considering change and lead them through their change management process before selling, they can facilitate them through the issues they must resolve (politics, relationships, resource, budget, time), help them assemble the right stakeholders from the start, and help them figure out how to address the disruption of bringing in a new solution. Then sellers become true servant leaders, inspire trust, become a respected resource and close more sales.

WHY SALES FAILS

Seller’s restricted focus on placing solutions, and listening for needs (which cannot be fully known until the change management process is complete) all but insures a one-sided communication based on the needs of the seller:

Prospecting/cold calling – sellers pose biased questions as an excuse to offer solution details omitting those who will buy – real buyers! – once they’re ready. Wholly seller-centric.
Content marketing – driven by the seller to push the ‘right’ data but really only a push into the unknown and a hope for action. Wholly seller-centric.
Deals, cold-call pushes, negotiation, objection-handling, closing techniques, getting to ‘the’ decision maker, price-reductions – all assuming buyers would buy if they understood their need/the solution/their problem, all overlooking the real connection and service capability of addressing the person’s most pressing change issues. Wholly seller-centric.

To become a spiritual practice, sellers must use their expertise to become true facilitators that become necessary components in all buying decisions. Indeed, the job of ‘sales’ as merely a solution-placement vehicle is short-sighted.

Buyers can find products online. They don’t need sellers to understand the features and benefits.
Choosing a solution isn’t the problem. It’s the time it takes to manage the risk. – it’s the buyer’s behind-the-scenes timing, buy-in from those who will touch the solution, and change management process that gums up the works.
The lion’s share of the buying decision (9 out of a 13 step decision path) involves buyers traversing internal change with no thoughts of buying. They don’t even self-identify as buyers until they understand their risk of change.

Since the 1980s, I’ve been an author, seller, trainer, consultant, and sales coach of the Buying Facilitation® model. And though I’ve trained 100,000 sales professionals, and wrote the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity, sales continues to be solution-placement driven. By ignoring a large population of potential buyers who merely aren’t ready (but willing!) sales unwittingly ignores the real problem: it’s in the buying, not the selling.

SERVE PROSPECTS, CLOSE MORE SALES

It’s possible to truly serve clients AND close more sales.

Aspiring to a win-win

Win-win means both sides get what they need. Sellers believe that placing product that resolves a problem offers an automatic win-win. But that’s not wholly accurate. Buying isn’t as simple as choosing a solution. The very last thing people want is to buy anything, regardless of their apparent need.

As outsiders sellers can’t know the tangles of people and policies that hold a problem/need in place. The time it takes them to design a congruent solution that includes buy-in and change management is the length of their sales cycle. Buyers need to do this anyway; it’s the length of the sales cycle.

If sellers begin by finding those on route to buying and help them efficiently traverse their internal struggles, sellers can help them get to the ‘need/purchase’ decision more quickly and be part of the solution – win-win. No more chasing those who will never close; no more turning off those who will eventually seek our solution; no more gathering incomplete data from one person with partial answers.

Sellers can find and enable those who can/should buy to buy in half the time and sell more product – and very quickly know the difference between them and those who can never buy.

Once buyers figure out their congruent route to change, they won’t have objections, will close themselves, and there’s no competition: sellers facilitate change management first and then sell once everything is in place. No call backs and follow up and ignored calls. And trust is immediate: a seller becomes a necessary partner to the buying decision process.

No one has anyone else’s answer

By adding Buying Facilitation™, collaborative decisions get made that will serve everyone.

Let’s change the focus: instead relegating sales to merely a product/solution placement endeavor, let’s add the job of facilitation to first find people en route to becoming buyers, lead them through to their internal change process first, and then using the sales model when they’ve become buyers.

We can help people self-identify as buyers quickly, with fewer tire-kickers, better differentiation, no competition, and sales close in half the time.

BUYING FACILITATION®

As a seller and an entrepreneur (I founded a tech company in London, Hamburg, and Stuttgart in 1983), I realized that sales ignored the buying decision problem and developed Buying Facilitation® to add to sales as a Pre-Sales tool.

Buyers get to their answers eventually; the time this takes is the length of the sales cycle, and selling doesn’t cause buying. Once I developed this model for my sellers to use, we made their process far more efficient with an 8x increase in sales – a number consistently reproduced against control groups with my global training clients over the following decades.

Buying Facilitation® adds a new capability and level of expertise and becomes a part of the decision process from the first call. It is NOT a sales model, nor does it focus on placing solutions or introducing products. It’s merely a change facilitation model that enables prospects to manage the internal risk/change decisions necessary before they can self-identify as buyers. Make money and make nice.

Sellers no longer need to lose prospects because the prospect isn’t ready, or cognizant of their need. They can become intermediaries between their clients and their companies; use their positions to efficiently help buyers manage internal change congruently, without manipulation; use their time to serve those who WILL buy – and know this on the first contact – and stop wasting time on those who will never buy. It’s time for sellers to use their knowledge and care to serve buyers and their companies in a win-win. Let’s make sales a spiritual practice.

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Sharon Drew Morgen October 19th, 2026

Posted In: Communication, Listening, Sales

Decades ago I had an idea that questions could be vehicles to facilitate change in addition to eliciting answers. Convention went against me: the accepted use of questions as information gathering devices is built into our culture. But overlooked is their ability, if used differently, to facilitate congruent change.

WHAT IS A QUESTION?

Standard questions gather information at the behest of an Asker and as such are biased by their words, goals, assumptions and intent actually restricting our Communication Partner’s responses:

Need to Know Askers pose questions as per their own ‘need to know’, data collection, or curiosity.

These questions risk overlooking more relevant, accurate, and criteria-based answers that are stored in a Responder’s brain beyond the parameters of the question posed.

Why did you do X? vs How did you decide that X was your best option?

Manipulate agreement/response Questions often direct the Responder to respond in a way that fits the needs and expectations of the Asker.

These questions restrict possibility, cause resistance, create distrust, and encourage lying.

Can you see how doing Y would have been better? vs What would you need to consider to broaden your scope of consideration next time?

Doubt Directive These questions, sometimes called ‘leading questions’ are designed to cause Responders to doubt their own effectiveness, in order to create an opening for the Asker.

These narrow the range of possible responses, often creating some form of resistance or defensive lies; they certainly cause defensiveness and distrust.

Don’t you think you should consider doing X? vs Have you ever thought of alternate ways of achieving X?

Data gathering When worded badly, these questions limit the possible answers and overlook more accurate data.

What were the results of your search for Z? vs How did you choose the range of items to search for, and what results did you get?

Standard questions restrict responses to the Asker’s parameters, regardless of their intent or the influencer’s level of professionalism, care, or knowledge. Potentially important, accurate data – not to mention the real possibility of facilitating change – is left on the table and instead may promote distrust, bad data collection, and delayed success.

Decision Scientists end up gathering incomplete data that creates implementation issues; leaders and coaches push clients toward the change they perceive is needed and often miss the real change needed. The fields of sales and coaching are particularly egregious. The cost of bias and restriction is unimaginable.

Sample

WHAT IS AN ANSWER?

Used to elicit or push data, the very formulation of conventional questions restricts answers. If I ask ‘What did you have for breakfast?’ you cannot reply ‘I went to the gym yesterday.’ Every answer is restricted by the biases within the question.

Because we enter conversations with an agenda, intuition, directive, etc., the answers we receive are partial at best, inaccurate at worst, and potentially cause resistance, sabotage, and disregard.
There are unknown facts, feelings, historic data, goals, etc. that lie within the Responder’s unconscious that hold real answers and cannot be found using merely the Asker’s assumptions or curiosity.
By approaching situations with the natural biases inherent in standard questions, Askers only obtain good data from Responder’s with similar backgrounds and thought processes.
Because influencers are unaware of how their particular bias restricts an answer, how much they are leaving ‘on the table’, or how their questions have skewered potential, they have no concept if there are different answers possible, and often move forward with bad data.

So why does it matter if we’re biasing our questions? It matters because we don’t get accurate answers; it matters because our questions instill resistance; it matters because we’re missing opportunities to serve and support change.

Imagine if we could reconfigure questions to elicit accurate data for researchers or marcom folks; or enable buyers to take quick action from ads, cold calls or large purchases; or help coaching clients change behaviors congruently, permanently, and quickly; or encourage buy-in during software implementations. I’m suggesting questions can facilitate real change.

WHAT IS CHANGE?

Our brain stores data rather haphazardly in our brain making it difficult sometimes to find the right answer when we need it, especially relevant when we want to make new choices.

Over the last decades, I have mapped the sequence of systemic change and designed a way to use questions as directional devices to pull relevant data in the proper sequence so influencers can lead Responders through their own change process without resistance.

This decision facilitation process enables quicker decisions and buy-in – not to mention truly offer a Servant Leader, win/win communication. To manage congruent change, and enable the steps to achieve buy-in, I’ve developed Facilitative Questions™ that work comfortably with conventional questions and lead Responders to

find their own answers hidden within their unconscious,
retrieve complete, relevant, accurate answers at the right time, in the right order to
traverse the sequenced steps to congruent, systemic change/excellence, while
avoiding restriction and resistance and
include their own values and subjective experience.

It’s possible to help folks make internal changes and find their own brand of excellence.

FACILITATIVE QUESTIONS™

Using specific words, in a very specific sequence, it’s possible to pose questions that are free of bias, need or manipulation and guide congruent change.

Facilitative Question™ Not information gathering, pull, or manipulative, FQs are guiding/directional tools, like a GPS system and lead Responders congruently, without any bias, down their unique steps of change to Excellence. How would you know if it were time to reconsider your hairstyle? Or What has stopped you from adding ‘x’ to your current skill set until now?

When used with coaching clients, buyers, negotiation partners, advertisements, or even teenagers, these questions create action within the Responder, causing them to recognize internal incongruences and deficiencies, and be guided through their own options. (Because these questions aren’t natural to us, I’ve designed a tool and program to teach the ‘How’ of formulating them.).

The responses to FQs are quite different from conventional questions. They cause the Responder to expand their perspective and recognize a broad swath of possible answers.

Instead of pulling data, you’re directing the Responder’s unconscious to where their answers are stored. For change to occur, people must go through change anyway; we’re just making it more efficient for them as we connect through our desire to truly Serve. We can assist, or wait to find those who have already completed the journey. They must do it anyway: it might as well be with us.

I welcome opportunities to put Facilitative Questions™ into the world. Formulating them requires a new skill set that avoids any bias (Listening for Systems, for example). But they add an extra dimension to helping us all serve each other. For those wishing to learn how to formulate them, please contact me. sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

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Sharon Drew Morgen October 12th, 2026

Posted In: Communication, Listening

I used to assume that what I hear someone say is an accurate interpretation of what they mean. My assumption was wrong; what I think I hear has a good chance of being inaccurate, regardless of how intently I listen. But it’s not my fault.

During the years I spent reading, thinking, and researching for my book (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?) on closing the gap between what’s said and what’s heard, I was quite surprised to learn how little of what I think I hear is unbiased, or even accurate. Listening, it turns out, is a brain thing and has little to do with words or intent.

Link to Purchase and Sample

HOW BRAIN’S ‘LISTEN’

When we listen to others, we’re not directly hearing their words or intent but an interpretation of a set of meaningless, automatic neurological activities in our brain that have little-to-no relationship with what’s been said. As I’ll explain, our brain translates what was said according to what we’ve heard before.

What we think we hear is wholly determined by our historic life experiences (education, family, values, Beliefs, mental models) that have been stored in our brain and filter all incoming words:what we hear someone say has been translated by what we’ve heard before, creating biases and assumptions that keep us from translating incoming messages accurately.

Generally speaking, our brain determines what we hear. And it’s not objective. Here’s what happens:

Words are merely puffs of air that emerge from our lungs, formed by our mouth and tongue – meaningless sound vibrations – that enter a Listener’s brain and get made into signals that get sent to ‘similar-enough’, existing brain circuits for translation. In other words, there’s a high probability Listeners can’t accurately understand what’s been said because their brain has translated what’s been said by what they’ve heard before.
A Listener’s ears

– capture some portion of incoming sound vibrations,

– conducts them through historic filters (Beliefs, mental models, etc.)

– translate the remaining vibrations into signals that get sent to

– match ‘similar-enough’ existing circuits, which

– discard what doesn’t match.

The remainder – with an undetermined relationship to what was intended is – what we think we ‘hear’.

Listeners have no idea what has been discarded in the process of hearing/translating what’s been said. Statistically, we accurately hear no more than 35% of what’s been said.
Both Speakers and Listeners have no idea how a Listener’s brain has interpreted or biased what been said or how close to accurate it’s been received. We all assume what we think we hear is accurate, although it rarely is.
We speak in run-on sentences, not individual words, and a Listener’s brain must make sense of the variations in vibrations of each word.
People speak for approximately 600 milliseconds; Listeners begin formulating their response in 200 milliseconds. Approximately two thirds of what’s been said is not even heard.

What we think we hear is some version of our history of hearing something similar. With people we’re in regular contact with and already have circuits to translate, it can be pretty accurate. With others not so much.

DIAGRAM OF HOW BRAINS ‘LISTEN’

Herein lie the gap between what’s said and what’s heard: we all make inaccurate assumptions of what we think we hear, causing us to respond and choose actions from a restricted or flawed knowledge base. Of course, it’s not done purposefully, but it sure plays havoc with communication and relationships.

I once lost a business partner because he misinterpreted something he thought I said, even though his wife told him he had misheard. His comment: “I heard it with my own ears! Are you both telling me I’m crazy??” and stormed out, never to speak to me again.

Unfortunately, and different from perceived wisdom, brains don’t allow us to ‘actively listen’ as neither Speaker or Listener can accurately translate the incoming words/sound vibrations.

Sure, Active Listening allows us to ‘hear’ the words spoken but doesn’t capture the intent, the underlying meaning. And given our neurological hearing processes are automatic, mechanical, and thoughtless, we’re stuck with what we think we hear. Here’s a simplified diagram of the process of listening:

Incoming sound vibrations as electrochemical signals get distorted and deleted through the brain’s filtering and transmission processes, eventually getting translated by ‘similar-enough’ existing neural circuits causing us to hear some rendition of what we’ve heard historically. There’s little chance any of us can understand a Speaker’s intended meaning accurately.

GUIDELINES TO MAXIMIZE UNDERSTANDING IN DIALOGUE

Given how vital listening is to our lives, for those times we want to make sure we understand and get on the same page with a Communication Partner (CP) to reach consensus, here are some guidelines:

Get agreement for a dialogue: Often, Communication Partners have different life experiences and, potentially different goals – many of which might be unconscious. Begin by agreeing to find common ground.

“I wonder if we can find common goals so we might find agreement to work from. I’m happy to share my goals with you; I’d like to hear yours as well.”

Set the frame for common values: At a global level, we all have similar foundational values, hopes and fears – for family, food, shelter, health. Start by ‘chunking up’ to find areas of agreement.

“I’d like to find a way to communicate that might help us find a common values so we can begin determining if we share areas of agreement. Any thoughts on how you’d like to proceed?”

Get agreement on the topics in the conversation: One step at a time; make sure CPs agree to each item and skip the ones (for now) where there’s no agreement. (Put them in a Parking Lot for your next conversation.) Work with ‘what is’ instead of ‘what should be.’

Enter without bias: Unintentionally our historic, unconscious beliefs restrict our search for commonality. Replace emotions and blame with a new bias for this conversation: the ‘bias’ of collaboration.

“I’d like to tell you what I think I heard. Please correct what I’ve gotten wrong.”

Summarize regularly: Because the odds are bad that you’ll accurately hear what your CP means to convey, summarize what you think you heard after every exchange:

“Sounds to me like you said, “XX”. Is that correct? What would you like me to understand that I didn’t understand or that I misheard?”

“I’ statements: Stay away from ‘You’ if possible. Try to work from the understanding that you’re standing in different shoes and there is no way either of you can see the other’s landscape.

“When I hear you say X it sounds to me like you are telling me that YY. Is that true?”

“When I hear you mention Y, I feel like Z and it makes me want to get up from the table as I feel you really aren’t willing to hear me. How can we handle this so we can move forward together?”

Get buy-in each step of the way: keep checking in, even if it seems obvious that you’re on the same page. It’s really easy to mistranslate what’s been said when the listening filters are different.

“Seems to me like we’re on the same page here. I think we’re both saying X. Is that true? What am I missing?”

“What should I add to my thinking that I’m avoiding or not understanding the same way you are? Is there a way you want me to experience what it looks like from your shoes that I don’t currently know how to experience? Can you help me understand?”

Get agreement on action items: Simple steps for forward actions will become obvious; make sure you both work on action items together.

Get a time on the calendar for the next meeting: Make sure you discuss who else needs to be brought into the conversation, end up with goals you can all agree on and walk away with an accurate understanding of what’s been said and what’s expected.

COMPASSION, EMPATHY, AND RESPECT

By learning how to hear each other with compassion and empathy, by closing the gap between what’s said and what’s heard, our conversations can begin. We must be willing to start sharing our Truth and our hearts and find a way to join with another’s Truth and heart. By hearing each other accurately, it’s the best start we can make.

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Sharon Drew Morgen October 5th, 2026

Posted In: Listening

Direct Route to Communication Part 1 includes Listening, Brains/Change, Assumptions, and Risk.

QUESTIONS

For those who use questions as part of the Helping process, your questions may not be gleaning a full, or accurate, data set.

Many of us use questions to gather complete or accurate data, assuming

we formulate unbiased, targeted questions that will be heard as intended and provide good information;
our questions extract the information necessary for assessment and mutual comprehension or cause introspection;
Helper and client can accurately hear what the other says and means;
we need information to facilitate a client’s change;
clients need us to guide them when they’re stuck;
we’re not causing any risk to the client.

Like everything we say, standard questions are formulated and biased by the needs, goals, and assumptions of the Asker, making the above assumptions flawed:

standard questions are biased by our assumptions and goals and may not be heard as intended;
standard questions may not extract accurate or complete information;
standard questions get to the conscious mind, not to the unconscious, electrochemical neural circuits where values-based criteria are stored and where change/decision making are triggered;
neither Helper nor client can accurately hear/understand each other;
information doesn’t reorient a client’s unconscious;
because the presenting problematic issues come from the unconscious brain, neither client nor Helper know what’s at risk initially.

I’ve invented a wholly new form of question (Facilitative Question™) that alleviates these issues and are formulated in a very specific way to reach the specific neural circuits that hold the elements that will trigger the preferred change. They’re used with a 13 Step Change model that consciously gets to the unconscious for permanent change. I call them ‘brain directional’,

designed to find underlying systems, not gather information;
causing Listeners to get into a witness/meta state;
are posed using specific types of words and phrases in very specific sequences;
require a goal of discovery rather than assessment or understanding.

Here’s a simple comparison between a standard information gathering question:

Why do you wear your hair like that?

and one that leads the Listener to unconscious discovery:

How would you know if it were time to reconsider your hairstyle?

This Facilitative Question™ (FQ) might begin a sequence that leads the Listener to several neural circuits that encapsulate the systemic elements in a change decision. The FQ above captures elements in of the Listener’s system that must be included if they were to, say, have trouble deciding on a new ‘look’ – in this case, time, historic comparators, willingness to change, and a change in mental perspective.

While a simple example, it gives you an appreciation of the difference in skills needed to help clients get to their unconscious triggers: it overrides the conscious biases and gets directly to the unconscious.

My book HOW? has a 100-page chapter on how to formulate the FQs, or you can purchase a Learning Accelerator. Both will teach you how to switch Perceptual Positions, listen in Observer, understand the sequence brains take when generating activity and how to ensure the questions are formulated to match the sequence. They cut through bias and enable the brain to find the right circuits necessary to maintain Systems Congruence and achieve systemic buy-in for a new decision.

Sample

THE OLD AND THE NEW

When clients approach us to help them get unstuck , we assume

1. we must gather information to ’assess’ and understand their current situation. That’s certainly true when diagnosing illness or a car breakdown, or to identify a misunderstanding, for example. But

a. neither Helper nor client accurately hear each other,

b. standard questions can’t extract unbiased or complete information,

c. Information is the last thing needed in decision making,

d. clients don’t need us to understand their specific story details in order to make a change.

Clients have the elements necessary for new solutions stored amidst trillions of neural circuits in their brain and only need help finding them.

e. because we each have unique mental models (subjective) and listen through our brain’s subjectivity, outsiders cannot fully understand what’s going on as we can’t understand each other.

2. we have the tools, mindset, experience, and care to help clients resolve problems once we understand the goals and problems involved. Clients can understand their own issues, make their own assessments, and plan their own strategies when they find the values-based circuits that triggered their situation.

It’s possible to lead clients to the origination points in their brain that triggered the current problems and from which they can generate new values-based solutions.

3. our curiosity, expertise, and assumptions can uncover the issues causing the problem. Our queries and data gathering are directed at the conscious mind where information is stored and don’t get to the neural circuits in the unconscious where decision criteria reside.

All outputs (behaviors, choices) arise from neural circuits in the unconscious where our values-based criteria are stored, and not readily available to respond to direct questions that seek to extract historic information stored in the mind – and may not even be heard as intended.

4. our ultimate job is to facilitate permanent behavior change or congruent decision making in alignment with the client’s beliefs and values. We can’t help clients change their behaviors permanently by merely trying to help them change the outputs. We must help them generate new circuits that trigger new behaviors and contain the systemic elements to maintain Systems Congruence.

Once the origination points are discovered and modified, or new circuits generated, new behaviors emerge automatically.

Using this thinking our job transitions from understanding, assessing, assuming, or guiding to being real facilitators that lead clients to their unconscious circuits where the offending behaviors and choice originate so they can discover and design their own answers from the source.

HELP CLIENTS FIND THEIR ANSWERS

While I passionately believe it’s vital for clients to share thoughts, unwrap feelings and get feedback (Full disclosure: I spent 12 years in talk therapy, 15 years in group therapy, and have three NLP degrees – Practitioner, Master Prac, and Beyond) I now believe the portion of the change process dependent upon unconscious change can be shortened.

I suggest we need new tools: to listen differently (for systems, metamessages, patterns instead of information) to hear/recognize metamessages and the client’s systems, and new bias-free questions that and lead clients directly to their unconscious drivers (rather than remain in their conscious story-lines).

One of the most important elements necessary to facilitate change: choice in Perceptual Positions.

To accurately listen for metamessages and patterns, to avoid bias and restriction, to know where to place and formulate a question, we must move beyond our natural curiosity or assumptions.

A simple way to achieve this is to shift Perceptual Positions (moving between different viewpoints) from listen-for-understanding position to a coach/witness/meta position that offers a neutral, detached, less biased perspective. And I’ll stop here for a moment: I’m aware that different practices define ‘Self’ differently than I do. For this paper, I define Self as being in your natural, automatic, instinctive, unconscious viewpoint (Self), where we reside most of the time.

The Self viewpoint is where we hold our unconscious biases.

Self: subjective, automatic, natural, instinctive, unconscious, restricted, detailed, out-of-choice, (re)action/emotional, mind-based, content.

Sometimes we need a neutral way to listen that provides a offers a broader range of choice and options and makes conscious choice possible. If you’ve ever been with a small child who’s writing on a wall, you’ve made an automatic, unconscious, quick mental switch – from screaming (Self) to a more thoughtful (Observer) choice that would subvert the toddler to paper coloring instead of walls. I call this change of perceptual stance the Observer position. We all do it unconsciously, but I suggest it must be a conscious choice when working with clients. So:

Observer: objective, witness, broad range, rational, brain-based, minimal emotion, conscious choice, voluntary, meta, unbiased, neutral.

Listening from Observer seems to go around normal listening biases, and more accurately hear your client’s intended message. It also provides a broad, neutral view. And no, you won’t hear many details (from Observer you’re not listening for details/content anyway) but you’ll hear patterns, metamessages, underlying beliefs and assumptions where you both can recognize the where current choices were made and the underlying values necessary for proposed change.

I work with all of my clients and students while in the Observer position to avoid bias. Try it.

CONCLUSION

As you can see, our general Helping practices may not facilitate clients through to lasting change due to the way our brains process information:

We can’t understand each other and can only accurately hear a maximum of 35% of what’s said.
Our questions are biased by our own assumptions and goals and can’t extract accurate information.
We seek information from a client’s mind, and their change capability is in their brain.
It’s not possible to change behaviors by trying to change behaviors. For permanent behavior change, it’s necessary to generate new neural circuits in the brain.

While it’s possible our current models may eventually trigger new neural circuits, it’s not a certainty, it’s inefficient and it might be risky for them unconsciously.

For times when you are helping Others reach their best decisions or need help changing patterns, assume they have their own answers that are merely difficult to find amidst 100 trillion neural circuits where they’re currently stored. It’s far more effective to help folks find these circuits rather than conventional helping, or coaching techniques dependent on gathering, assessing, brainstorming information that has a high probability of being misinterpreted.

I teach skill sets for Helpers to lead clients to their offending neural circuits or generate new ones for permanent change. For those who merely want a quick fix, use these questions below – a mix of standard and Facilitative Questions™, as a guide.

Listen for systems, patterns, beliefs.
Listen from Observer.
Ask the following questions, in this specific sequence (although they may iterate):

a.  Where are you now?
b.  What’s stopping you from X?
c.   What would you need to know or believe differently to do X instead of Y?
d.  How would you know when it’s time to X?

Once clients have discovered where their presenting problems came from, they will need you to extract specific information as to what else is needed, brainstorm from the new revelations, deliver additional information and create an action plan. But by then, the client has already discovered their answers.

For those who want more detailed information or learn how to facilitate change from the unconscious triggers in the neural circuits, email me to either get more complete answers or take training. sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com. For those of you who want to learn it on your own, get my book HOW? as it teaches how, specifically, to generate new circuits.

Remember: clients already have their own answers stored in difficult to find circuits among the 100 trillion in their brain. Your job is to help your clients find them. What would you need to believe differently to be willing to facilitate/enable an Other to define and discover the criteria they’d need to match to make a good decision?

For those interested in seeing this model in action, I presented a paper at the Columbia University Learning Ideas conference in 2024. Enjoy. https://tinyurl.com/45tsf

Part 1 includes Listening, Brains/Change, Assumptions, and Risk.

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Sharon Drew Morgen September 28th, 2026

Posted In: News

Those of us in the helping professions often provide services to clients (patients, coachees, etc.) when they’re stuck during life or business decisions, need different perspectives for decision making or to stop harmful habits. We ‘actively listen’ and pose questions to assess their situation, understand their goals, and guide them to what seems like their own answers.

But what if our exchanges contain biases that prevent them from finding their best solutions? Or unwittingly lead clients to flawed conclusions or personal risk? What if

we can’t understand each other due to the way brains process incoming words?
our questions are biased by our own assumptions and can’t get accurate information?
we’re seeking information from a client’s mind and their change capability is in their brain?
it’s not possible to change behaviors by trying to change behaviors?
we don’t need to gather information or assess a client’s needs/problems to lead them to their own best answers?

What if there’s a more direct, unbiased, and precise route to helping clients discover and accomplish their ideal solution that avoids these pitfalls?

What if clients (and patients, and buyers, etc.) only need help finding where their answers/solutions are already stored in their unconscious and your intervention could lead them to it?

For those of you who like new ideas and don’t mind a bit of complexity, who work with consulting, OD, and counseling models that use verbal interactions as part of their process, I’ve written a Thought Paper to introduce a new way to think about change and discovery. Note: for Helpers working with non-conscious states, body-centered therapy, or mindfulness models that don’t use questions, I suggest the information on how brains listen, decide, and enable change will be helpful. If you’re interested in a more detailed discussion, email me at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

OVERVIEW

We each make sense of the world and our lives through our unique mental models (beliefs, values, norms, assumptions, history) which form the basis of our decisions and life choices, restricting what we do, notice, think and hear.

As Helpers we’re especially affected: due to the way brains

store and process our history and values-based criteria,
form the choices that govern our lives,
determine what we think was said,

there’s a high probability our natural biases and unconscious subjectivity will unwittingly get in the way of us accurately hearing each other, or noticing the client’s historic triggers to be considered.

WHAT THIS PAPER WILL DO

For times it’s important to hear and be heard without bias, there’s a direct route to change and decision making: lead clients to the unconscious choices where their current problems have been triggered and generate new ones for new outcomes. In other words, instead of understanding or assessing their problems, change your ultimate focus and merely lead them to their unconscious triggers for change.

At this point, it might be important for you to know who I am as my concepts don’t fit standard models. I’m an original thinker and have Asperger’s Syndrome. Like most folks ‘on the Spectrum’, I naturally think in systems – interconnected elements in the Status Quo that have agreed to the same rules, and work hard to maintain balance (Systems Congruence).

My lifelong topic has been discovering the elements involved in getting to the unconscious for conscious choice, and developing tools and models (Learning Facilitation, Buying Facilitation®, Change Facilitation, Facilitative Questions™) that enable permanent change at the source. I’ve successfully taught these globally to 100,000 sellers, leaders, coaches, and healthcare practitioners for over 40 years, and written a book on generating new circuits for behavior change a decision making (HOW?).

In this Paper, I’ll explain why current helping models (coaching, consulting, leadership, healthcare, etc.) often fail to produce permanent change and introduce an approach that’s more direct and long lasting. For those of you interested in learning any of the models, please contact me as it’s impossible to delve deeply into specifics in this paper. sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

Let me start by defining what I mean by change.

CHANGE

Most of us have our own definitions of change. Mine comes from my work with systems and neural connections:

Change represents a modification to a unique system that holds existing choices in place.
Any proposed change must maintain the core identity and beliefs of the larger system (the Status Quo) to maintain balance and Systems Congruence.
Be it behavior-based or interior feelings, change emerges from the unconscious, physiologic, chemical, automatic, and meaningless neural activity that trigger our choices into conscious actions.

Currently, Helping professionals are taught to enable behavior change but fail to include and get buy-in from the client’s often-unconscious system that produced the offending behaviors to begin with. Note:

until or unless all the elements that created and maintained the presenting problem, and those that will be affected by the new choices, agree to do something different, the system will feel at risk and will resist any change regardless of the problem.

Permanent, congruent change requires:

identification, assessment and agreement of the problem by the systemic, underlying elements that hold the Status Quo in place;
buy-in from the system – the new must match the core beliefs, values, and norms (Systems Congruence) that represent the Status Quo;
risk management – the system must understand, and consider solutions, for any potential risks before any changes occur.

Indeed, all change is systemic and must

Maintain Functional Stability. Any change initiative must maintain the foundational balance of the original system. Change is not so simple as replacing one behavior with another.
Achieve Buy-In. For a system to be willing to change successfully and avoid resistance, a system must
understand and the risk of change;
recognize exactly what fallout will occur when anything is added;
know how each affected element must modify to maintain the integrity of the system.
Maintain Underlying Rules and Beliefs. Great data or solutions, important needs or dangerous consequences do not influence change if they run counter to the system’s beliefs and rules, overt or covert.
Avoid Risk. Risk can only be recognized by all who touch the status quo/system. Then it must be determined the magnitude of the risk. If it is seen to be less than any proposed change, it will be accepted. If the risk is greater than the proposed change, it will be resisted.

Here’s a rule I consider sacrosanct:

regardless of how extensive the problem or necessary the change, permanent change cannot occur if the system believes it’s at risk and may face major disruption.

There’s a way to get directly to the neural circuits that triggered the offending choices to enable permanent change. But first, let me explain why our current models are problematic.

YOU CAN’T CHANGE A BEHAVIOR BY TRYING TO CHANGE A BEHAVIOR

Unfortunately, today’s standard practices for change management as well as standard Behavior Modification practices ignore the brain change element and focus on attempting to modify the habits, the behaviors, decisions, actions etc. AFTER they’ve been generated. But by then it’s too late.

So what’s a behavior? Behaviors are merely outputs, expressions of our values and beliefs that announce to others who we are and what we stand for. They reside in neural circuits in our brain that trigger them when instructed to do so.

Every behavior is a symbol of who we are – a representation of our personal system. Every behavior is a belief in action, a statement of our values and beliefs, and a representation of our internal unconscious system.

Any proposed alteration to a behavior (or habit, or choice, or…) potentially represents a risk to the current system. When we attempt to make a change without modifying the neural circuits that triggered the problem, our lazy, habituated brain resists, preferring the originating pathways that maintain Systems Congruence. After all, it’s been working ‘fine’ for some time and habituated into daily norms and routines.

Sadly, behaviors can’t simply change themselves because we want to make a change. After all, our personal system must remain balanced (Systems Congruence). Therefore, permanent change must incorporate the underlying system of beliefs, norms, history, culture, and assumptions that form of the foundation of the offending actions.

When we merely try to change offending behaviors and overlook changing the origination points that triggered them we unwittingly cause imbalance, which results in resistance and non-compliance (the downside of current change models) as the system attempts to return to its normalized routines.

Indeed, it’s not possible to change a behavior by trying to change a behavior. This is the reason behavior-change models often fail to cause permanent change: permanent change requires reprogramming a new input message into the client’s unconscious. Once the new input (new message, new instructions) is accepted, it will automatically trigger a new output. Trying to change a behavior once it’s already an output is akin to putting toothpaste back in the tube.

BRAINS – WHERE SYSTEMIC, CONGRUENT ANSWERS COME FROM

Since I refer so often to neural circuits, let me simplistically explain the role the brain plays.

All our actions, what we see, hear, think and do, what we’re curious about and what we notice, our history and our values, originate in the unconscious as part of what makes us each unique: meaningless, automatic electrochemical signals brain, making connections between our 100 trillion neural circuits that each hold unique values-based criteria (beliefs, norms, history, etc.) that form and trigger our choices.

When the brain receives an input (some form of instruction sent via an electrochemical signal) it collates the appropriate circuits and triggers a new output/behavior.

According to Bing,

Electrochemical signals are the fundamental basis of how neural circuits are informed, formed, and operated. Incoming content (triggers) flows through the nervous system via a continuous loop of electrical impulses moving within individual neurons and chemical messages passing between them.

It goes on to explain how values-based decision making is stored in our circuits in the form of dopamine:

Dopamine is a key chemical messenger that operates within specific neural circuits in the brain. It acts as a neurotransmitter, allowing nerve cells to communicate and shape activity across large-scale pathways linked to movement, reward, and thought. Dopamine tags cues in the environment with importance (criteria), driving attention and action toward things the brain deems worth pursuing.

Current helping models don’t purposely reach the neural circuits (in the unconscious brain) where a client’s change criteria originate, necessary to generate new choices.

HOW BRAIN’S LISTEN

One of the unspoken problems Helpers face is ensuring all communication partners accurately understand each other. We can’t. And it’s our brain’s fault.

Since birth, we’ve naturally listened for content, for details, for the story line. This is useful when discussing facts or making plans or sharing life stories that come from the conscious brain. Also, we naturally assume when we speak or pose a question we’ll be understood accurately and, in turn, understand our partner’s responses. Neither are probable.

Due to the way the ‘listening’ process takes place in the brain, we can’t hear each other very well. While we can ‘hear’ words (called ‘puffs of air’ by neuroscientists) accurately, our brain doesn’t translate them according to a speaker’s intent. In other words, it’s likely neither Helper or client can accurately translate what the other has said.

Due to the several distortion and deletion processes involved when the Listener’s brain ultimately translates incoming words, we end up accurately understanding less than 35% of a Speaker’s intended message. I’ve written a book explaining this if you’re interested:

Sample

To make it worse, incoming/spoken words are ultimately translated by existing (historic) neural circuits, making it probable we end up ‘hearing’ some rendition of what we’ve heard before, potentially causing flawed understanding and misguided assessments.

In other words, both Helper and client unwittingly mishear, mistranslate or misunderstand the Other regardless of intent or skill level. With potentially flawed understanding, Helpers and client make assumptions based on what we think we heard. An easy mind hack for this is to say “What did you hear me say?” or “I’d like to tell you what I think I heard to make sure I’ve understood you correctly” during important meetings.

This completes Part 1 of A DIRECT ROUTE TO FACILITATING PERMANENT CHANGE. Part 2 will be published next week and includes: Questions, Perceptual Positions, Mind Hacks, Model in Action.

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Sharon Drew Morgen September 21st, 2026

Posted In: Change Management, Communication

AI has become integrated into our lives. I’m sure we will continue discussing whether it’s constructive or destructive for quite some time. Certainly it’s been a boon to science and medicine. But does AI squelch creativity? Plagiarize? Important discussions to have. Surely we’ve all benefited.

But to date, AI doesn’t enable a user’s brain to discover and apply their core values for personal decision making.

HOW VALUES-BASED DECISIONS ARE MADE

When people ask AI for advice, they’re largely provided with amalgams of historic information. But this doesn’t enable the neurochemical, very complex, values-based and largely unconscious decision process that would guide users to the:

- core values-criteria in their brain that
- form the unique, unconscious, and subjective outputs (actions, decisions, behaviors) that
- emerge when a mixture of the brain’s limbic system, prefrontal cortex, and dopamine
- cull choice criteria from the decision maker’s personal decision making that includes

o history

o mental models

o personal beliefs

o time comparators

o private assumptions

o norms/culture

- and represent the neural activities
- beyond external sources.

In other words, there’s a whole lotta neural processing that must occur before a personal change decision can be reached. For personal decisions such as

“Should I put my mom into a memory care center now?”

“My girlfriend lives near me so maybe I should choose a college near home, but the college I want to attend is across the country. How do I decide where to go to school?”

information doesn’t help, making generative AI a poor choice to facilitate a user’s subjective decision making.

In this paper I’ll simplistically lay out the explanations and elements needed for someone to make a values-based decision – a complex range of circuits and signals, history and processing, that reside within the unconscious and not dependent on information. This will explain the route AI would need to follow to develop a decision facilitation capability. This will explain the route AI would need to follow to develop a decision facilitation capability.

INFORMATION DOESN’T GENERATE PERSONAL DECISIONS

Simplistically, AI uses question prompts to extract information from LLMs. But information is needed in personal decision making only after the criterial portion of the decision is reached.

Don’t get me wrong. Information is vital once values-based criteria are in place. But providing information (from the conscious mind) before the neural work (in the unconscious brain) has been completed causes resistance – the reason sales pitches, leadership requests, coaching interactions face so much opposition: unless the Other’s beliefs, norms, history, assumptions are included, there’s a high probability the Other will resist change.

Decision making is largely unconscious and uniquely personal – a complex, systemic process that involves much neural organization. Until

the system (the full set of foundational elements – beliefs and mental models – that created and maintain the status quo) understands and agrees to the risk of doing/thinking anything different;
the system understands the full set of foundational elements that have mitigated the status quo and must be shifted;
the system understands its risk of change and knows how to manage it with minimal disruption;
the new is congruent with the core beliefs and values of the system;

no values-based decision will be made regardless of the need or the efficacy of the information. And the time it takes the decision maker to figure all this out is the length of time it takes to “come to a decision”.

To make a personal decision, people must align the presenting facts against their values-based criteria, biases, assumptions, emotions, reasoning approach, future needs, hopes and fears, then understand and manage risks, all before choosing the actions to take. Here’s my book on how to do this for coaching and change management situations.

Sample

WHAT IS A DECISION?

To choose a new action, to ensure any decision is congruent with the system and won’t cause disruption, personal and neural elements at the core of all values-based decisions must be managed:

Mind/brain: AI largely focuses on manipulating information for use in the conscious mind. But the brain (the unconscious) is where decision criteria are stored.

Misinterpreting incoming content: Due to the way brains ‘listen’, people only accurately understand 10-35% of the information offered. I wrote a book on this.

Managing the status quo: We are each comprised of several systems administered by our mechanical brain processes. New decisions threaten the status quo and must be approved by the system so it doesn’t feel at risk.

Repositioning/reevaluating belief hierarchy: Making a final decision involves a process of weighting values, history, assumptions, and cultural norms and comparing them against future gains/losses…a process unique to each individual and largely unconscious.

Comparators: All change/values-based decisions require comparing historic activity and the decisions that led to the status quo.

Once these have been addressed, the risk of change is deemed manageable, and the system feels congruent with the change, users are ready to make a decision and information is needed to provide details.

AI doesn’t address this yet.

A NEW FORM OF QUESTION

AI requires prompts to trigger answers. But the questions currently used prompt historic, amalgamated information and most likely don’t get to the unconscious elements in a user’s brain necessary for values-based decision making.

Although generative AI is set up to manipulate LLMs, it certainly could have a function that sequences and simulates neural processing and actually make values-based decisions quick and efficient for coaching, personal decision-making, customer support. AL Would need a rules-based capability that would lead users through their own neural circuitry.

In 1988, I read Roger Schank’s book Tell Me a Story that said the only way to find an answer that was tucked away in the brain was to pose a good question. But he never explained what a ‘good question’ was.

I had already recognized that questions are biased and assumptive and couldn’t understand how it could discover bias-free answers. I became intrigued by the possibility of generating a question that

had no biases, assumptions, or principles that would prejudice the answers;
would get to the specific, unconscious, neural circuits where values-based answers are stored.

As an original thinker, I then spent 10 years figuring out the elements involved to ensure personal decisions could be easily made:

the need for Responders to shift perceptual positions to minimize unconscious bias;
the sequence necessary for the Responder to discover their existing values, patterns, specific reference points;
the route to the specific neural circuits that held the values-based criteria to match a congruent answer;
the specific words, sequences, and sentence structures that would get to the specific neural circuits where values-based choice criteria could be found and managed for congruent, systemic change;
the ability to hear/recognize the next question to formulate to enable the listener’s (user’s) brain to take the next step in the multi-step decision-making sequence;
the specific hierarchy of decision criteria that lead to a values-based decision;

I eventually invented a new form of question (Facilitative Questions™ FQs) that is brain-directional and leads the Other, using specific words in specific sequences, to the specific neural circuits necessary to capture their personal, values-based decision criteria and cause congruent change and values-based decisions.

For AI to facilitate personal decisions, a rules-based FacilitationAI could prompt sequences of self-generated FQs. FacilitationAI can provide new capability for AI in:

sales
life/personal coaching;
personal/team decision making;
customer feedback.

I’m happy to discuss and provide examples in detail and discuss possibilities with interested AI developers. Please contact me to discuss. sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

_______________________

Sharon Drew Morgen September 14th, 2026

Posted In: Communication

When I begin an on-site training program I start by saying:

“Hi everyone. I’m so happy we’re together! I’d like to begin with a warning: I use confusion as a teaching tool. Confusion is merely your brain not finding an existing circuit to accept new information. During the first day I will be keeping you in confusion a lot to make sure there’s a way to retain new knowledge to supplement what you already know. So when you’re confused, I’m SO happy!”

The participants laugh uncomfortably. But then it becomes a sort of gentle contest – who can be the MOST confused. Invariably someone says

“Sharon-Drew, you’ll be SO proud of me! I’m SOOOO confused!”

And everyone laughs together and claps in knowing agreement.

WHY IS CONFUSION DEEMED BAD?

I wonder why confusion is something to be avoided. Why do we all have to ‘know’ everything? Why can’t we delight in the mystery, the jumble, the dark moving spaces that bring that slight bit of discomfort, a touch of fear and dollop of curiosity?

When we think we ‘know’ something, it’s because we’re using circuits that already exist in our brains. Sadly, we assume what we ‘know’ is accurate, even if it ends up being inaccurate or biased; even if it means we dismiss new content that might be more accurate; even if it means we restrict learning anything new.

Old beliefs, previous knowledge, habits and assumptions become concretized over time, and new ideas become suspect because there’s no precedent for them even if the new ideas are more cogent. Our brains just love our status quo. Simple. Stable. Quick. Reality? No such thing.

How do new ideas get into the world when they’re contrary to existing myths and norms? Why isn’t ok to be confused and then curious to research, think, debate new ideas?

Entire fields remain committed to researching within the confines of perceived wisdom, even when they suspect, or when they’re known to be ineffective. How does something new enter if confusion, or the ‘unknown’, isn’t considered?

Remember flat earthers? What about radio waves? Did you know only a few of Cezanne’s paintings were purchased during his life? Or that it took 40 years after the invention of the telephone to begin broad use – using Morse Code instead? Are you aware that initially Bill Gates told his team that he wasn’t convinced the internet had value? Seriously.

LISTENING IS PART OF THE PROBLEM

One of the initiators of our confusion is the way words enter our brains to get translated. You see, when we hear someone speak, our brains don’t accurately translate what the speaker intends to communicate!

In fact, we end up accurately hearing a maximum of 35% of what a speaker intends, causing us to unwittingly revert to what we’ve heard before, making learning and retaining something new quite difficult. When we feel confusion, it’s an indication that our brain is having difficulty translating the incoming content. So confusion is a great indication we’re trying to learn.

Sample

I adore confusion. It means I’m creating new circuits. It means I’m learning!

WE COULD ALL USE A BIT OF CONFUSION

Our brains are the problem. Indeed, because of the way we subjectively interpret new ideas we end up restricting our lives. Indeed, everything, regardless of what science thinks, or what our spouses or bosses want us to believe is true, is a subjective interpretation!

What we read or enjoy; the colors we see and the words we hear; the friends and jobs and neighborhoods we choose; are restricted to the circuits that already exist in our brains – what we agree with and the worlds our brain circuits have created for us – obviously a carefully calibrated world view; obviously restricting a whole lotta world out there we don’t recognize or enjoy or share. We could all use a little confusion now and again.

To reconsider confusion, to learn, change, and be enriched, here are some questions:

What would you need to believe differently to be willing to rid yourself from some of your biases? Do you know which ones you’d be willing to part with? How do you know your answer isn’t biased?
How would you know that any confusion is worth the cost of ‘not knowing’ and being uncomfortable?
What issues come up for you when you face the prospect of being confused in an area you’re expert in?
Are there any areas of your life or work knowledge that you protect, that you prefer not to feel confusion around because you believe you have all the knowledge you need – and it’s accurate? Would you be willing to examine these to see if there is anything new to learn? Any areas for you to rethink?
Think of a topic, an idea that runs counter to your beliefs and spend time with it. No, really. Spend enough time to understand it, and know precisely how it differs from your beliefs. See if you can find any fragment in there that confuses you that you’d be willing to think about for a day or two.

We live our lives, work our jobs, vote and go to neighborhood meetings, accustomed to having an automatic answer, knowledge at the ready that has been vetted by our brains, accepted and comfortable. But to gain new knowledge, reconsider old opinions, mature your beliefs and self-asessments, you can create new circuits, and then have a whole new knowledge set.

All you need is some curiosity and the willingness to be confused for a bit of time. You’re worth it, no?
_______________________

_______________________

Sharon Drew Morgen August 31st, 2026

Posted In: News

Failing is a Necessary Part of Success, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Reduce Resistance and Optimize Buy-in: Systems Management can ensure risk-free cultural change, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Influencers Must Change Brains, not Minds: why information, persuasion, and motivation don’t cause change

Sales as a Spiritual Practice

Questioning Questions, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Bridging the Gap between What’s Said and What’s Heard, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

A Direct Route to Facilitating Permanent Change: a new approach to helping clients find their answers – Part Two, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

A Direct Route to Facilitating Permanent Change – Part One, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

AI’s Missing Piece: personal decision making is beyond information, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

The Importance of Confusion, by Sharon-Drew Morgen