Listening – What? Did You Really Say What I Think I Heard?

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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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 October 19th, 2026

Posted In: Communication, Listening, Sales

230 Comments

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

7 Comments

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

We often make assumptions during our conversations about the meaning of what’s been said or sharing our best responses. But how accurate are they? I used to think that if I listened carefully I would accurately understand what was being said. I was wrong.

While researching my book What? I discovered that there’s a high probability we aren’t accurately understanding what we think we heard: due to the way ears ‘hear’ (not very well) we only accurately understand less than 35% of what’s been said.

Since our listening is subjective, and there’s a high probability we’ve misunderstood what’s been said, any assumptions we make must be subject to self-doubt.

Sample

Listening is a brain thing. Turns out we don’t have choice over how our brain (mis)translates incoming words:

We only retain words we hear for approximately 3 seconds, and since spoken words have no spaces between them, our brains must also listen for breaks in breath, tone, and rhythm to differentiate words and meaning.
Spoken words, as sound vibrations, go through several rounds of deletions and distortions on route to being translated into meaning in a neural circuit, causing a maximum of 35% accuracy in understanding what was intended.
Spoken words get translated by already-existing circuits for translation ensuring we ‘hear’ what we’ve already heard before, most likely misinterpreting the new content.

A simple example of this just happened today when I was introduced to someone:

Joe: Hey V. I’d like you to meet my friend Sharon-Drew.

V: Hi Sharon.

SDM: Actually, my first name is Sharon-Drew and I always use both names.

V: Oh. I don’t know anyone who calls themselves by their first name AND last name.

SDM: Neither do I.

V: But you just told me that’s how you refer to yourself!

Because she had no existing circuits for my double first name, her brain used an existing pathway and misinterpreted my name. Her assumptions overrode both Joe’s introduction and my correction.

This type of thing happens daily. We believe what our brain tells us, make follow-on assumptions then act on them, and never doubt ourselves. Unfortunately, because what we think we’ve heard may not be the Speaker’s intended message and our interpretation is inaccurate, we often assume we’re ‘right’ and end up being wrong.

ASSUMPTIONS RESTRICT AUTHENTIC COMMUNICATION

Brains are set up to routinize and habituate most of what we do and hear. It makes the flow of our daily activities and relationships easy.

But there is a downside: because our brain is mechanical, electrical, meaningless, unconscious and automatic, it doesn’t consider ‘meaning’ during the electrochemical process between a Speaker’s words and a Listener’s understanding and we end up making faulty assumptions.

Years ago, when I asked a magazine editor to correct the name Charlotte Morgan that appeared under my photo instead of my actual name, he replied (and I can’t make this stuff up!): “I didn’t get it wrong. You must have sent it to me wrong.” True story: he’d rather assume he got it right and I sent him an incorrect name instead of my actual name!

THE COST OF ASSUMING

Assumptions are a natural part of how we think. But especially in leadership situations, they can cause harm:

Sellers assume prospects are buyers when they ‘hear’ a ‘need’ based on their biased questions and end up wasting a huge amount of time chasing prospects who will never buy;
Consultants assume they know what a client needs from discussions with only a few top decision makers causing resistance to change when they implemented to people not included.
Decision scientists assume they gather accurate data from the people that hired them and discount important data held by employees lower down the management chain, inadvertently skewering the results and making implementation difficult;
Doctors, lawyers, dentists sometimes make flawed assumptions when they hear issues similar to other patients they’ve had potentially causing harm – especially when these assumptions keep them from finding out the real problems. They also offer important advice that clients/patients don’t heed when the patients themselves hear inaccurately;
Coaches assume clients mean something they are not really saying or skewering the focus of the conversation, ending up biasing the outcome by leading clients away from the real issues that never get resolved;
Influencers and leaders offer their solutions then blame the Other for resisting, ignoring, or sabotaging, when the assumed solution procures resistance.

To have more personal choice around when, how, if you make assumptions, ask yourself:

How do I know if my assumptions are accurate? And if they’re inaccurate, how will I know?
What would I need to believe differently to ‘assume’ I might not be correct, and be willing to ask clarifying questions to elicit accurate data?
What is making inaccurate assumptions costing me or those I’m speaking with?

Assumptions are costly when they’re inaccurate. How will you know the difference between accurate ones and faulty ones?

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Sharon Drew Morgen August 10th, 2026

Posted In: Listening

I recently chatted with a VC invested in 15 healthcare apps that use Behavior Modification to facilitate patients through permanent behavior change for enhanced health. He said although many of his apps use it, there’s no scientific evidence that Behavior Modification works. Hmmmm… And the reason you’re still using it is… “There’s nothing else to use.”

I contend that current Behavior Mod approaches are not only faulty, but seriously harmful to a large population of people who need to consider permanent change.

CAN’T CHANGE BEHAVIORS BY TRYING TO CHANGE BEHAVIORS

Behavior Modification cannot permanently change existing behaviors. In diet, smoking cessation, and exercise maintenance alone, there is a 97% failure rate for ongoing adoption of altered behaviors. You see, it’s not possible to change a behavior by trying to change a behavior.

If you’ve ever tried to keep lost weight off, or habituate a new exercise routine, or stop smoking, or… you’ve probably tried to modify your current behaviors by doing something differently without making the necessary structural changes to hold it in place.

Conventional thinking usually explains the WHAT and WHY. But permanent change needs the HOW – HOW your brain causes your behaviors, and where the inflexion points are so you can intervene and generate new ones (or lead your patients and clients through to their best choices).

This essay explains what behaviors are, where they originate from, and the elements necessary for permanent change. For this, I must take you briefly to the source – into your brain – to not only explain why you behave the way you do or resist new behaviors, but HOW to actually elicit the behaviors you want. I’ve made the brain explanations brief. But if you want to understand precisely how to facilitate permanent change from the source, it’s worth the effort. Enjoy.

BEHAVIOR

There are two major problems with Behavior Modification:

1. Behavior 2. Modification.

I suspect most people haven’t considered what a ‘behavior’ denotes. Behaviors are the way we exhibit our identity, our beliefs, our history/norms/life experience.

In short, behaviors represent us. They’re our beliefs in action – the demonstration, the expression, the external actions that portray our internal essence and morals. Like an autobiography is the written representation of a life but not THE life. Like going to church represents us practicing our faith but not FAITH. Behaviors are the visible depictions of each of us.

Behaviors don’t occur without a stimulus, some sort of input. Nor do they operate in a vacuum – they don’t arise from the sea like Venus. And they are always, always congruent with our beliefs. You know, without asking, that someone wearing a bathing suit to a wedding most likely has different beliefs than the other guests. It’s not about the bathing suit.

Behaviors are automatically and unconsciously triggered from our neural circuits – the end result of a series of automatic and meaningless chemical signals that face congruency checks before taking form into action. In other words, behaviors are the result of risk-averse neural activity – not actions that show up on their own.

Sample

Below is a greatly simplified summary of what happens in our brains that ultimately lead to behaviors. It’s here you’ll understand what’s needed to make permanent changes and why Behavior Modification isn’t able to accomplish it.

HOW TO CHANGE BEHAVIORS PERMANENTLY

Here are three of the key elements involved in how we choose to behave differently – the modification portion of change. It’s systemic.

SYSTEMS CONGRUENCE. Systems are the glue, the conglomeration of mental, physical, emotional, physiological, neurological elements make us human. I am a system. You are a system. Your family is a system. And everything we do, think, notice, are curious about, follow the unique rules of our individual, idiosyncratic, and historic systems. And our individual systems define our status quo.

Ultimately the job of our status quo is to maintain Systems Congruence, or balance, so we can wake up every day being who we were yesterday – to know to brush our teeth each day and be kind to the colleague we don’t like.

One of the important things to know here is that systems don’t judge our behaviors. Whether we’re fat or controlling or mean, our neural systems only work with electrochemical signals and have no meaning. So it doesn’t care if you lose weight – just that it remains congruent.

All day, trillions of signals enter into our brains and trigger us to behaviors that have met our Systems Congruence criteria. Indeed, our brains check all incoming signals for incongruence before behaviors are agreed to and triggered, making sure we remain in balance. Without doing so we’d be at risk for incongruence.

Any time you try (and try and try and…) to behave in a way that unconsciously causes imbalance within you – when you push against an existing habit or action to try to get a different behavior – you’ll experience resistance or sabotage because you’d be trying to disrupt your system.

Unless we change the system that holds our problematic behavior in place, it’s not possible for permanent change to occur. For any proposed change, to maintain congruence, your system must agree, Buy In, in a way that matches your beliefs, identity, and norms. And it’s physiologic, chemical, automatic, and unconscious. Our brains do this for us every second of our lives.

Behavior Modification attempts to replace this process, trying to change the final output (like trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube) without making the changes in the system that would hold the new in place permanently and maintain Systems Congruence.

When something ‘new’ hasn’t been vetted and agreed to, your putting the system at risk and generating an imbalance. And the system will ultimately reject it.

INPUT. Any new input for change will only become a permanent behavior if it’s congruent with the person’s system. To change a behavior, it’s necessary to 1. find an existing neural circuit, or generate a new one that accepts and triggers the new request, and 2. input a message that will be acceptable.

Let me give you the simple version of how I lost weight and kept it off. My original message to myself was:

‘I want to lose weight.’

While the words requested a different behavior, they’re merely behavior-change focused and didn’t get to my specific neural circuits to trigger a change or get agreement from the rest of the system that had maintained it for some time. In other words, that input message caused me to do what I’d always done and end up maintaining the weight because there’d been no circuit change to trigger different actions.

After failing for decades (pictures of skinny women on my fridge, dozens of diet books) I changed the input message to include my identity and beliefs, precise action required, and precise goal.

Starting with a newly expanded ‘identity’, I became a ‘healthy person’ and gave myself a new rule that I had to be healthy mind, body, and spirit. With that rule, I began studying nutrition and discovered I was eating foods that were unhealthy for me and changed the way I was eating entirely. Here is the message I eventually came up with:

‘I am a healthy person who seeks to find the best nutrition and exercise protocol to get to the best weight for my body’

That did the trick, and I’ve eaten my revised food plan (and kept the weight off) for 30 years.

TRIAL LOOP. This one needs some patience. Here you’ll need to try different input messages to find the one that incorporates the right systemic elements that will cause a permanent change. But note: if at any point a risk is determined to put the system out of balance, it will reject the new behavior. Not to kick a dead horse, but Behavior Mod does not address this at all – the reason behavior change attempts fail so often.

I’ve developed a model for this to lead you through the steps if you’re interested in the entire process.

There are plenty of uses for this. Think of enabling patient Buy In for obesity or cardio clinics, to help patients design a work-out regimen for heart health. Or for diabetes sufferers to design a healthful food plan for life. Or athletes trying to change an inferior swing, or develop a new pattern to their feet differently to run faster. What about helping yourself meditate daily or organizing your life. Or to get more sleep.

We can help people alter their behaviors in a way that’s not only congruent with who they are, but helps them make their own best choices. But not with Behavior Modification alone.

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Sharon Drew Morgen July 20th, 2026

Posted In: Communication, Listening

I moved to London in 1983 to start up a tech company after spending years as a successful sales person. For years I had qualified prospects, created decks and wrote great content, chased appointments and networked, presented, and followed up. And I was a million-dollar producer. When I became an entrepreneur, I thought I understood buyers well-enough to become one. But I was wrong.

SELLING VS BUYING

My new role taught me the differences between selling and buying. I hadn’t realized the complexity of the Pre-Sales activity necessary to become a buyer. Indeed, there were two buying processes: the buyer’s side and the seller’s side.

As a sales professional my ultimate job was to place solutions; as a buyer, my main focus was to get buy-in and avoid risks while creating and maintaining Excellence.

As a sales professional my job was to get folks to make a purchase. Even as a successful seller I struggled to say/offer the right thing, at the right time, to the right prospects, in order to convince, persuade, and build relationships to close; as an entrepreneur and potential buyer I had to continually manage any necessary change we needed using the most efficient, integrous, and least disruptive route to success to maintain happy employees and clients, and continue to develop a great product.

As a sales professional, I sought to find and influence people who ‘needed’ my solution; as a buyer, I couldn’t fully define my needs, or recognize the best way to resolve problems until all voices (stakeholders) and impediments to change were factored in and until we were absolutely sure we couldn’t resolve our problems internally. We certainly couldn’t make any changes until we fully understood the risks that any change would generate.

Selling and buying, I quickly realized, involve two different activities: different goals, different behaviors, different communication and thinking patterns, different types of responsibility.

Before becoming a buyer myself, I hadn’t fully appreciated how severely the sales model limits who will buy by seeking only those with ‘need’ – the low hanging fruit, those who had completed their internal change management determinations and bought-in to any risks, any disruption, a new solution would bring to their environment.

In other words, folks who might eventually buy weren’t interested in speaking or reading about my solution until they managed their internal issues, regardless of their ‘need’ or the efficacy of my solution.

The act of making a purchase, I realized, was a risk/change management problem before it was a solution choice issue. Any needs I had as a potential buyer were secondary to maintaining consistency and team agreements. After all, we were doing ‘just fine’ without bringing in anything new. And because the sales model focuses on selling to ‘need’, it could only seek and close those folks who considered themselves buyers already (the low hanging fruit), overlooking those who could become buyers with some risk/change facilitation.

My book Dirty Little Secrets lays out all the steps people must take before self-identifying as a ‘buyer.’

Sample

THE JOB OF A BUYER

As a buyer, the ‘cost’ of a fix had to be lower than the ‘cost’ of maintaining the status quo. So (hypothetically) if I needed a CRM system but had to fire 8 people to buy one, I had to weigh the ‘cost’, the risk, of the change. And the time it takes to make this calculation is the length of the sales cycle. Unfortunately, the sales model does not offer tools to address this.

As a seller, I had never realized that my sales biases – biased questions (to ‘uncover needs’ of course), or listening specifically for where my solution could be pitched – were restricting my success. The sales model just didn’t offer the tools to facilitate prospects through what they must complete before they even self-identified as buyers.

As a seller, I limited my search to folks with ‘needs’ and overlooked an 8x larger audience of folks in the process of becoming buyers but not yet ready. Not to mention that my definition of ‘needs’ was often biased by my own needs to sell, and didn’t necessarily mean the person was a buyer.

As a buyer, I had more to worry about than solving a problem. I had to take into account

the need for buy-in by all who involved in the ultimate solution,
the risk a change would bring,
the rules and brand of the company,
the well-being of the employees and staff,
how the problem got created to make sure it didn’t recur,
the integrity of the product or service provided,
the congruence and integrity of the status quo,
the needs of the customers.

As a buyer, my challenge was to be better without losing what worked successfully, to ensure

– everyone involved agreed to a common solution,

– there was consensus and a route through to congruent change,

– we were all absolutely certain we couldn’t fix the problem with something familiar,

– the risk of change was less than the cost of maintaining the problem.

As the Managing Director/Founder, I had a well-oiled machine to consider – great staff, great clients, fantastic ROI – one that had a few problems, but did a lot successfully; I didn’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

WHAT I NEEDED TO KNOW BEFORE BECOMING A BUYER

Here’s what I needed to know as an entrepreneur before I began looking ‘outside’ for answers:

– Who did I need to get agreement from? And how would their combined voices inform our needs or a resolution?

– What would the ‘cost’ be to us, the downside, of bringing in something external? Was the downside worth the upside and could we recover?

– How could we fix the problem ourselves? At what point would we realize we couldn’t and needed outside help?

– How could we be certain upfront that the people, policies, rules, and goals we had in place would fit comfortably with anything new we might do, any solution we might purchase? And was it possible to know the downside in advance?

– How could I determine the risk of change before I brought in a new solution?

I had to make decisions that didn’t cause too much disruption and garnered buy-in.

Eventually, as my business grew, I began annotating the change process I was going through. Eventually I realized everyone goes through the same change management process.

13 STEPS OF CHANGE

As someone trying to solve problems without causing disruption, my decision making process had very specific activities, from understanding the elements of a problem to ultimately ending up with a resolution. Turned out there were 13 steps for change, and people didn’t self-identify as buyers until step 10!

In other words, when selling focused only on those with need, they restricted their prospects to those who had already done all their risk management and gotten buy-in – overlooking those who were on route to becoming prospects…. and sales offers no capability to help them get there.

I used these steps to design a Change Facilitation model (Buying Facilitation®) as a new sales tool kit to lead potential buyers through their risk issues. Indeed, with a Buying Facilitator hat on, I could identify folks who were on route to becoming buyers on the first call.

As a seller I ignored the personal issues people had to resolve before buying. In fact, with all my awards for being a top producer, I never realized selling didn’t cause buying!

I taught Buying Facilitation® to my sales staff so they could help people on route to becoming buyers to

Assemble all the right people – decision makers and influencers of all types – to get consensus for any change at all. It was quite a challenge to figure out every one of the folks whose voices had to be heard.;
Enable collaboration so all voices, all concerns, approved action by a consensus. This was a systems-change issue, not a solution-choice issue;
Find out if there was a cheap, easy, risk-free way to fix problems with groups, policies, technology we had on hand or were familiar with;
Discover the risks of change and how we’d handle them;
Realize the point where there was no route to Excellence without bringing in a new/different solution;
Manage the fallout of change when bringing something new in from outside, and determine how to congruently integrate a purchase into our status quo.

And our sales increased by 600%!

For those who want to understand the process, my book Dirty Little Secrets lays out the 13 step Buying Decision Path or go to my site www.sharon-drew.com where I not only explain it but have hundreds of articles on the subject.

The time it takes buyers to navigate these steps is the length of the sales cycle. And buyers must do this anyway – so it might as well be with us.

BUYING FACILITATION® FACILITATES THE BUYER’S JOURNEY

Buying Facilitation® eschews trying to sell anything until or unless the buyer knows exactly how – not what – they need to buy. After all, you’ve got nothing to sell until they have something to buy.

Here’s what we don’t know as sellers:

Where buyers are along their decision path.
How many, or if, the requisite Buying Decision Team is in place, and ALL appropriate voices have been heard so a full evaluation of the upsides and downsides to change can be considered.
Until ALL voices have been heard, there is no way to recognize or define ‘need.’ As outsiders we can NEVER know who belongs on the Buying Decision Team because it’s so unique to the situation.
Who is a real buyer: only those who know how to manage change, and get consensus that they cannot fix the problem internally are buyers. Need doesn’t determine ability to buy.
The fallout of the risk factors, and the ability for any group to withstand change.
The types of change management issues that a new solution would entail.

For less time and resource, we can actually lead buyers down their own change route; and we can easily, quickly, recognize who will, or won’t, be a buyer. In one conversation we can help them discern who they need to include on their Buying Decision Team; if we wish an appointment, the entire Decision Team will be eagerly awaiting us.

And with a Change Facilitator hat on, on the first call it’s possible to find buyers at early stages along their decision path who need our solutions but aren’t yet ready to buy. We just can’t use the sales model until after it’s established who is actually a buyer.

Let’s enter earlier with a change consultant hat on, to actually facilitate buyers to the point where they could be ready to buy – and THEN sell. We will find 8x more prospects, immediately recognize those who can never buy, and be true Servant Leaders. Otherwise, with a 5% close rate, we’re merely wasting over 95% of our time and resource seeking the low hanging fruit, and missing a vital opportunity to find, and close, those who WILL buy. And more will buy, and quicker. Help people become buyers. Then sell.

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Sharon Drew Morgen July 6th, 2026

Posted In: Listening, Sales

Alexa, Siri, Google, AI, and all programs that answer questions have mechanisms that determine the answers. If you’re like me, you largely assume they’re accurate, without knowing the reference material or checking further.

This assumption is normal: in our daily lives we regularly pose questions to friends, colleagues, and clients about stuff we’re curious about, and receive responses we don’t check for accuracy or congruence.

But have you ever wondered what a question actually is?

Conventionally, questions are posed to elicit a response or answer a curiosity. Sometimes we use them rhetorically or posed to elicit a specific response. Sometimes questions are deemed ‘closed’, like in, “What time is dinner?” Sometimes they’re ‘open’, like in, “What do you want to eat?”

But all standard questions share the same features. They:

assume the words within the query will extract the information needed;
are posed according to the curiosity, goals, assumptions, and intent of the Asker;
use words that limit responses to narrow interpretation;
get interpreted uniquely, according to a Responder’s historic, unconscious, world views and mental models;
potentially ignore more important and accurate information.

Of course, most of the time, conventional questions work just fine. How else could we find out how many acres there are at Machu Picchu, or which movie our spouse wants to see?

But what if you can pose a question that leads others to discover their own answers and path to decision making and change?

WHAT QUESTIONS DO

Because of their inherent biases, standard questions extract only a portion of the possible responses. Indeed, standard questions can be misunderstood or interpreted badly.

Information: because information is elicited in a way that represents the requirements of the Asker (even when they aim to help the Responder), a Responder’s real answers may not be captured. The wording, the request, the topic, the intent, the underlying assumptions, and/or the vocabulary may unwittingly offend, confuse, or be interpreted badly, causing partial or inaccurate responses.
Listening: words and meaning are merely our brain’s interpretations of sound waves that enter our ears through our historic neural pathways, guaranteeing we assign meaning according to our unconscious biases and history. Obviously, we might miss the intent of the question entirely. I wrote an entire book on this (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?). Recent research has shown that the maximum we understand from a Speaker’s intent is 35%! In other words, it’s likely that what we think we’ve heard is some degree different from the Asker’s intent.

Sample

3. Biased question formulation: Askers use words meant for a specific goal and outcome, but may not obtain the best, accurate, or truthful, responses. Sadly, it’s possible that higher quality answers could have been retrieved with a different wording or intent.

4. Restriction: questions restrict answers according to the boundaries of the question. We cannot uncover data we never asked for, even if it’s available. We cannot elicit accurate data if the question is heard differently than intended.

Are you getting the point here? Questions have so many in-built biases, get translated as so mysteriously within a Responder’s brain, that it’s a miracle people communicate at all.

This is especially disturbing in coaching, healthcare, and leadership situations. Well-meaning professionals believe the ‘right’ question will uncover a truth from a Responder. Every coach and leader I’ve met deeply believes in their own knack – ‘intuition’ – for posing the ‘right’ question because they have a history of similar situations.

Sadly, when Responders share answers that prove unhelpful or inaccurate, Influencers may not even be aware of it, or worse, blame them for being non-compliant. Hence: patients end up keeping bad habits, clients end up not making needed changes, buyers end up not getting what they need.

A NEW FORM OF QUESTION

As someone who has thought deeply, and written, about the physiology of change and the neurology of decision making for decades, I began pondering this conundrum in the 1980s.

What if healthcare professionals asked questions that triggered patients to positive, immediate habit change, or coaches knew the exact questions that enabled new habit formation and behavior generation? What if scientists and consultants could elicit the most accurate information? And imagine if it were possible for questions to help sellers and advertisers actually inspire action to generate Buyer Readiness.

What if a question could be worded in a specific way to act as a GPS to lead a Responder – a buyer, a patient, a client – through a sequence in their brain to make it possible to discover the full set of criteria to make a decision from and a permanent change without resistance?

FACILITATIVE QUESTIONS

I’ve invented a new form of question – a Facilitative Question™ -that addresses the above problems. With a goal of helping Others consciously enter their unconscious brains, they use

specific words, in a specific order to go to the most appropriate memory channel to enable discovery without resistance;
no bias from an Asker’s curiosity or need;
a very specific route to specific, unconscious, memory storage circuits that avoid sparking defense or resistance.

Facilitative Questions (FQs) help Responders uncover their own criteria, beliefs, and mental models to find their own unique answers within their existing neural circuitry – great for permanent behavior change and decision making.

Once you learn how to formulate these questions, prospective buyers can be led through change and buying stages; coaching clients can discover their own path to resistance-free change; doctors can elicit behavior change in patients rather than push to try to cause change; and advertisers can trigger interactive responses to normally one-sided push messages.

Conventional questions keep Responders in a very small, idiosyncratic, and personal response range. And while the Asker is most likely attempting to elicit a response, they are out of control. FQs actually define the parameters and give Askers real control.

USES

Here’s a few industries that could benefit from FQs.

Healthcare: Intake forms that create an interactive doc/patient experience from the start: What would you need to see from us to know we’re on your team and ready to serve you? [This FQ automatically creates a WE space between patient and provider.] Doctors could lead people to how they’d create new habits for health: What has stopped you from being able to exercise regularly until now? What would you need to know or believe differently to be able to add regular walking to your weekly schedule?
Advertising, for an ad for a Porsche, for example: How would you know when it was time to buy yourself a luxury car? [This FQ makes the ad interactive and gives a reader time to reflect on personal change.]
Sales: What has stopped you until now from resolving your issue using your own resources? [This FQ enables potential buyers to look at how they’ve gone about solving a problem on their own – necessary before realizing they can’t fix the problem themselves and might need to buy something.]
Coaching: What would you need to see or believe differently to be willing to consider new choices in the places where your habitual choices are more limited? [This FQ gives clients an observer viewpoint, thus circumventing blame, to notice old habits/patterns, and limits viewing to the exact historic behaviors that may not be effective.]

These can be used in advertising and marketing campaigns; healthcare apps that sit on top of Behavior Mod apps and facilitate new habit formation; AI where apps or robots need to understand the route to change and decision making. I’ve been teaching it in sales with my Buying Facilitation® model for 40 years and companies such as DuPont teach how to use them with farmers; Senior Partners at KPMG use it with client consulting; Safelight Auto Glass uses it to compete against other distributors; and Kaiser Permanente uses it to engage seniors needed supplemental insurance, to name a few.

If anyone would like to learn the HOW of formulating Facilitative Questions, I developed a primer in a FQ learning accelerator. Or we can work together to develop or test a new initiative. Given how broadly my own clients have used these questions, I’m eager to work with folks who seek to truly serve their client base.

By enabling Others to discover their own unconscious path we not only help them find their own best answers but act as Servant Leaders to decision making.

What would you need to know or believe differently to be willing to add a new questioning technique to your already superb questioning skills?
How would you know that adding a new skill set would be worth the time/effort/cost to make you – and your clients – even more successful?

Should you wish to add the ability to use questions as a way to truly serve others, let me know. sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

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Sharon Drew Morgen June 29th, 2026

Posted In: Communication, Listening

Trust. The big kahuna. The sales industry seeks it; doctors assume it; couples demand it; change can’t occur without it. But what is it? Why isn’t it easier to achieve? And how can we engender it in relationships?

I define trust as the awareness of Another as being safe, similar, and sane enough to connect with, and occurs when they

have core beliefs that align and seem harmonious with mine,
feel heard, accepted, respected, and understood by me,
feel compatible or safe as a result of our interacting,
believe their status quo won’t be at risk when connected to me.

Unless these criteria are satisfied, trust can’t occur no matter how kind, professional, necessary, or well-intended another person or message is. It’s a Belief issue.

BELIEFS DEFINE US

Every one of us has Beliefs unique to us. Our Beliefs are the norms and rules we live by, developed over our lifetimes to make decisions and act against. We gravitate to, and trust, folks with similar foundational Beliefs and world views that match well-enough with our own to proclaim “safety”.

Largely unconscious, illogical to others and hard to change, our Beliefs regulate us, define who we are and enable us to show up congruently in the world. We even listen through ears biased by our Beliefs.

Beliefs instigate our habits and assumptions, restricting our life choices such as our occupations, politics, values, mates – even our child rearing practices. And our Beliefs are the initiators of our behaviors – behaviors being Beliefs in action, the expressions of the values that define who we are.

Sadly, because everyone’s Belief systems are unconscious and idiosyncratic, and because we each view the world through our own Beliefs and perceptions, it’s difficult to accurately perceive Another’s internal world view. It’s here, in our Beliefs, where our world views collide.

For those folks whose jobs are to influence, there’s an immediate problem. The content they share, or even their unique delivery style, may unwittingly offend the Belief system of the Communication Partner (CP). Bad news for sellers, coaches, managers, etc. who attempt to promote change or buy-in by pushing their ideas and instead cause resistance and distrust.

DRIVERS FOR TRUST

I’d like to offer thoughts on some of the ways we fail when trying to engage trust, then provide some ideas of how to stimulate it.

Relationship Building: We’ve been led to believe that having a relationship encourages buy-in to new ideas. But it’s a conundrum: polite as an interaction appears or how necessary our message, we can’t easily build a relationship with folks with divergent Beliefs as our individual, and automatic filters react immediately. In other words, “pushing in” doesn’t work, even if our data and intent are accurate, and even if we think we have a relationship that entitles us to ‘share.’ We might have a superficial connection, but not a relationship; “making nice” does not constitute a relationship, or engender change or trust.

Information: As influencers we often attempt to “get in” with the information we assume our CPs need, without accounting for how it will be perceived. Sometimes the “right” data inadvertently tells our CP that they’re wrong (and we’re right). We fail to realize that our CPs only understand our intent to the degree it matches their Beliefs, or how their listening filters translate it for them. With the best will in the world, even with good data to help folks who need what we’ve got to share, we aren’t heeded.

In fact, information is the last thing needed to facilitate change or buy-in since people unconsciously defend their status quo. It’s our brain’s fault! Because all incoming data is translated for us automatically by our historic neural circuits, new ideas aren’t always interpreted accurately and run the risk of causing resistance. (See my book WHAT? on this topic.) So save the information sharing for when a clear path to mutual Beliefs and trust has been developed.

Sample

Think about it: ‘Right’ or ‘rational’ data won’t convince if it goes against someone’s Beliefs. It can’t even be heard accurately. If you’re an environmentalist, the “rational/ scientific” data you offer to “prove” climate change won’t persuade those who disagree; if you’re a proponent of the medical model, you won’t use alternate therapies to manage an illness no matter how strong the data for changing your nutrition.

Clear Communication: We all think we communicate clearly, yet we’re not as effective speaking in ‘Other’s language’ given our CPs unconscious, biased listening filters that prevent our “risky” data from being heard accurately. Certainly we believe we’re choosing the “right” words and approach to convey our intent. Yet our message is heard accurately only by those with similar Beliefs and resisted by the very people who need our information the most.

FACILITATE BELIEF CHANGE FIRST

Since our great ideas and eager strategies don’t engender trust in folks with different Beliefs, and without trust we can’t change minds, what should we do?

As coaches, sellers, and leaders, we must carefully initiate conversations based on them discovering their own answers, with a goal to match their Belief criteria before offering new ideas. In this way we can help our CPs open up new possibility that actually creates trust:

Enter each conversation with the goal of assisting your CPs in discovering how their Beliefs instigated their behaviors. Entering with the goal to offer information, or get your question answered, or extract promises of action will automatically engender distrust and resistance.
Ask the type of questions that facilitate and enable internal discovery; conventional questions merely pull data biased by the needs of the Asker. I designed Facilitative Questions that enable congruent change without bias by leading the CP through their unique route to discovery.
There is a specific series of steps that change entails. I’ve spent decades coding the steps of change for decision making and new habit generation. These promote congruent change by leading Others down their own choice points. Learn the steps, and help your CP traverse the steps to match Beliefs and encourage acceptance prior to mentioning your idea.
Trust that your CP has their own answers and that they’ll shift toward excellence as appropriate. It won’t show up exactly as you’d hoped; but there will be a new opening for collaboration without resistance.
Understand that until or unless your CP can recognize their own incongruences, there is no way they’ll welcome comments from you that sound like you’re saying they’re wrong or insufficient.

In other words, create a Beliefs-based bond that will open the possibility of you offering information later, once they’ve discovered exactly where they need it and how to use it.

When we facilitate our CPs down their path to conscious choice, we

help them discover their incongruencies,
help them understand the areas at risk,
help them develop their own route to managing risk (i.e. change) and where they can’t do it themselves,
enable buy-in from the elements that will be effected.

Until your audience is able to accomplish this in their own way, using their own Beliefs, they will hear you through biased ears, maintain their barriers, and engender trust only with those who they feel aligned with – omitting a large audience of those who may need you.

Stop using your own biases to engender trust: facilitate your CPs in changing themselves. Then the choice of the best solution becomes a consequence of a system that is ready, willing, and able to adopt excellence. And they’ll trust you because you helped them help themselves.

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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 June 22nd, 2026

Posted In: Change Management, Listening

Remember when a person would answer a company phone? I found myself shocked recently when a live human answered. “Um, Hello?? Are you a real person?”

When we call a company these days we often get caught in one of those automated loops that lead us from one wrong person to another, from one long hold to another, ultimately landing us where we started, with no resolution, lots of frustration, and rage toward the company. Company websites aren’t any better: no way to connect except via links that either lead nowhere or never get responded to; chat bots that have no idea what you’re talking about and keep repeating perky phrases.

As a paying support customer, I once waited 13 hours for a promised ‘one-hour’ call-back from Best Buy to resolve an urgent technical problem. I went to sleep with the phone in my hand, waiting. When the call came at 3:00 A.M. (!) the tech started by asking me how I was. “I’m sleeping! It’s 3:00 in the morning and I’ve been waiting since 2:00 in the afternoon! And I still have my technical problem!” And he hung up on me. This was particularly egregious given I’d been forced to listen (for hours!) to Best Buy’s ‘hold’ jingle promoting fabulous customer service.

We’ve all learned to accept these indignities, to be ignored if we have a problem, to spend hours attempting to resolve a crisis caused by our purchase. And it’s getting worse.

CUSTOMERS DON’T SEEM TO MATTER

We’ve grown to hate our providers, and they don’t seem to care. But they should. We provide the income for their profit and salaries, certainly enough to hire employees to answer phones or help solve problems. In so many ways, hiring a human would be cheaper than the cost of the automation.

Gone are the days when customer service mattered, when three rings was the maximum number before phones had to be answered to keep customers from being frustrated. That doesn’t seem to matter anymore.

Companies now use only two criteria to interact with customers: Time and Cost. And because these companies may be sole providers in regional sectors or global behemoths, users have no choice but to remain customers.

Sadly, there’s no regulation on this, no way to reduce our monthly payment by the number of hours we spend on hold, or the number of problems we can’t get resolved. Until we form a Citizen’s Council, or there’s some sort of regulation – neither of which are likely – we’ll just have to suck it up. Nobody cares, no one is responsible, and no one pays for the problem except us.

What happened? How did our companies go from touting stellar customer service as a competitive advantage to computerizing all human interactions? How did companies decide to stop respecting the very people who keep them successful? Why have they been so willing to cause their customers to distrust them?

POSSIBLE CAUSES

We know what companies pay their ‘C’ level people, their profit margins and how much they pay (or not) in taxes. We know they can afford to hire customer support folks. But somewhere along the way customers became secondary. What’s going on? Is greed the only motivation these days? How did it become a ‘thing’ that customers don’t matter – except for their purchases?

Frankly, I have no way to think about this in an unbiased way. I’ve spent my life developing facilitation models that enable win/win and servant leadership, to respect each individual and engender trust. Making it difficult for the very folks you depend on to get the service they require goes against all my beliefs.

It might come from the momentum of ‘cheap’. Everything seems to require a low price tag, and money becomes the main criteria for choice. We don’t consider what happens when goods are reduced to a price tag, for doing ‘whatever it takes’ for price to be the sole choice criteria. We avert our eyes when we learn that companies use children as cheap labor or when they strip the environment to create cheap products.

We seem to want cheap even when price differentials convey value differentials. Someone once asked the price of my Buying Facilitation® training, a unique model I invented that uses mindbrain connections to help buyers generate their buying decisions. When I told him the price (thousands) he told me he could get ‘almost the same’ course at ATT for $49. I told him to take it 😊

Are we all implicated here? Is automated customer service the fallout from the search for cheap? How did we move away from scrupulous business practices, or good customer care as a competitive advantage? Why isn’t it a simple calculation that happy customers provide more revenue?

Somewhere in the past few years automation became the accepted corporate interface regardless of the toll on customers. And I can’t imagine that focus groups would chose automation and no-human-contact as a preference over being cared for by a human.

BEST PRACTICES

I have some ideas that might stop this nonsense. My favorite is that each call is answered by a representative who owns the problem to its conclusion. I suspect that when companies pay their own folks to sit on hold for hours only to get connected to the wrong department, they just might fix the problems. They don’t seem to respect a customer’s wasted time; maybe they might care when it’s their own time.

Here are my ideas:

Human beings will pick up customer service lines; site links will go to real support people who will respond within 12 hours.
The person who picks up the phone will own the problem.
Customer Care will be seen as a competitive advantage.
Companies will pay bonuses to reps who keep customers happy.
A vehicle – a YouTube Channel, for example – specifically for customers’ complaints. Their grievance gets calculated as a cost to the company, with a running tally of how much money the company owes its customers. At the end of a month the company gets sent a Grievance Bill with the proceeds going to charity.
An advertised day a month of “no shopping” in the companies who don’t serve customers adequately.

Sadly, the very people who sell us services have become adversaries. What do we need to do or say to have our needs met, our voices heard, our time respected? What do companies need to know, believe, or do differently to be willing to provide resources to handle incoming calls, or provide websites that offer support? What can any of us do to knock some sense into their heads?

Does anyone have better ideas that might help? God knows, I don’t.

________________________

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 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 May 25th, 2026

Posted In: Communication, Listening

Do you know how you end up doing what you do? How you make those quick, natural, unconscious decisions? Certainly, there’s pondering when you make ‘important’ decisions.

But what about those that don’t demand much thought, that you’ve done so many times and assume are suitable? Do you know how they affect others? The risks involved that remain unspoken but certainly color ongoing activity and relationships?

Unless you know the consequences of your (unconscious) decisions, you can’t know the risks you face.

I’d like to share a story of how unconscious choices have consequences and offer some ideas to have more conscious choice.

CASE STUDY

I mentor a wonderful company in India (Orchvate), led admirably by two visionary women (Panchali Banderjee and Geethanjali Ganapathy) that trains, places, and supervises neurodiverse people into Indian corporations. In a world where diversity, especially neurodiversity, is still not easily accepted in corporate environments, their important work provides both people and companies terrific services and opportunities.

One of my jobs has been to assist Orchvate in building a structure that’s less dependent upon the founders and more organized around growth, supervision, authenticity and servant-leadership.

After a recent monthly team meeting – our second, conceived to ensure all would be involved in cultivating a cohesive culture – I noticed leadership had failed to send out a ‘thanks for attending’ follow up notice.

I wrote Panchali reminding her to send a follow up with a cc to me. What I received was cut and dry – a great effort (to the point, professional, and practical) but lacked the kindness, support, acceptance and inclusion we were trying to engender.

I wondered how she decided to use those words and tone after all our discussions. Here was our conversation.

SD: How did you decide to write the note the way you did?

P: I didn’t decide.

SD: But you did. You chose the words and the tone. Everything we all do involves choosing some things over others.

P: I just wrote it. It was something I needed to do.

SD: Just because your decisions weren’t conscious didn’t mean you didn’t make decisions. You just made them unconsciously.

P: Oh! I never realized I needed different choices!

SD: Most leaders do the same thing – assume their natural choices are effective – without realizing there may be unintended consequences. Let’s figure out when you must make choices more consciously. Remember when you sat down to write this. What comes up?

P: That I needed to get it done.

SD: So this was a task, a DOing (the quantitative) rather than using it to connect authentically – a BEing (the qualitative)? Did you realize you omitted the way you usually speak from your heart that makes it so easy to connect with you?

P: I never consciously thought of it! It was a task. I realize now I tend to treat certain things as tasks to be done rather than moments of connection.

SD: So your DOing is a task orientation that excludes the BEing! Huh. Hopefully next team email will combine the two, maybe by using ‘kindness, authenticity, connection’ as your goal or task.

P: I could do that!

CONCLUSION

Choice. The essential element necessary to recognize the risks that emerge from unconscious decisions.

For those of you wanting to try generating decisions more consciously, here are some Facilitative Questions™ to help you going forward:

How will I know that something deserves my time to stop and deliberately consider my full range of choices before doing what comes naturally? To include both the DOing and the BEing where it’s appropriate?
How can I trigger myself to consider the unspoken – but real – risks that each communication from me produces, before I send anything out?
What new skills must I learn so my communications match our beliefs, to help the teams and supervisors incorporate them into their work?
What do I need to think of to remember to use qualitative words and include kindheartedness in my messages?

Panchali was initially unaware that her choices represented a risk to the changes we were instituting. But this problem isn’t hers alone. Most leaders respond to their tasks without conscious choice, certainly not realizing the consequences.

How will you know when you need additional choices beyond your automatic decisions to ensure you’re conveying the essential elements that will avoid risks and assure your best outcome?

______________________

Sharon Drew Morgen May 18th, 2026

Posted In: Communication, Listening

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

Assumptions: Why being right may be wrong, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Why Behavior Modification Fails to Modify Behaviors and What to Do Instead, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

The Real “Buyer’s Journey”: the reason selling doesn’t cause buying, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Questions: the new superpower, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Trust: what it is, and how to initiate it, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

The Cost of Automating Customer Care, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Are Your Unconscious Decisions Risking Excellence? by Sharon-Drew Morgen