Powerful Transformational Business Approach to Successfully Engage Your Audience w/ Marcus Sheridan

Yeah. So here’s the quick 101—I’ll try to make the long story short. It’s great to be here, Shane. I started a swimming pool company, literally out of the back of a pickup truck with a couple buddies in 2001. I was essentially right out of college, and things were going okay for us up until the market collapsed in 2008, 2009. That’s when I thought we were going to lose the business. It looked like I was going to lose my home. My two business partners lost their homes. Our 60 employees were going to have to be laid off.

And that’s right about the time I really started to learn about what we might call today inbound, or content, or digital—or any of this blogging, social stuff. When I looked at it all in my simple-guy mind, I read it as: “Okay, Marcus, if you just obsess over your customers’ questions and you’re willing to address them, you just might save your business.”

So I said, “All right, we’re going to be the best teachers in the world when it comes to fiberglass swimming pools.” And that’s what we ended up being. To make the long story short, we became the most trafficked swimming pool website in the world, and it saved our business. We became the largest builder of fiberglass pools in the U.S.

Now we’re also manufacturing fiberglass pool shells, because we were getting so many leads that I had to take advantage of those outside our area—Virginia is where we install the pools. So now we have dealers all over the country.

In the process of doing all this, I started to write about what I was learning. I started a really simple blog in 2009—six months after I started “They Ask, You Answer”—and it was called The Sales Lion. I named it that because I love lions, and “sales” sounded better than “marketing.”

Nobody really listened at first—for about six to twelve months—but then I started to pick up a little traction. Some companies said, “Could you teach us how to do that thing you did with your pool company?” And then some conferences said, “Hey, can you share that story?”

That led to two significant things: I started an agency, which today is called Impact. Sales Lion became Impact. We have about 70 employees now, and we do digital sales and marketing strategy consulting for brands and companies all over the world.

I also started speaking professionally full-time. I still spend a couple of hours a week on my pool company—I still own it. I spend about 10 hours a week with the agency. The rest of my time is spent traveling, getting in front of audiences, and spreading the word—of course, the message of “They Ask, You Answer.”

The book came out about three years ago, and a revised version was just released because it’s still gaining momentum. Usually books slow way down after six months, but this one actually picked up after six months and just kept going. It’s been an amazing ride.

So, that’s the journey I’ve been on for the last, I guess, 10 years—since 2009. It’s crazy.

I think there’s a few things. If I’m looking at it analytically, right? One of them is, most people can put their arms around the pool guy story, right? And there’s so many directions we can go from there—there are intricacies to how we had this crazy success. The approach of “They Ask, You Answer” wasn’t one that was genius at all, right? In others, it just made so much sense to me. But it turns out that nobody was really doing many of the things we were doing. It ended up being outrageously innovative for the time.

And what’s crazy about it today, Shane, is we’re a decade later. And still, most companies do not embrace this philosophy. They can put their arms around the story very easily. Also, I’d say I’ve managed this. Call it success or whatever you want, because I’ve never tried to sound smart.

I think this is one of those things—whether it’s your content, your website, your brand, your message—as a speaker, whatever it is, there’s a group of people where, when you look at them, you can just tell there’s something there. They’re trying to sound smart.

And the moment we try to sound smart, we start to lose a percentage of our audience. But if we release that and say, “My only job today is communion. I’m only here so as to potentially induce a light bulb moment by sharing with the world what the world has taught me, in simple terms—not here to prove anything”—that really resonated.

It resonated with all these pool shoppers, right? It resonated as I started to talk about what we were doing, and people were like, “Dude, this makes so much sense. Why are we not doing this?” And then it continues to resonate today.

That’s why it’s been so fun. It’s been so cool for me. But I think we forget that oftentimes we try to sound smart, and it’s probably one of the top pieces of feedback I give to people—whether it’s a speaker, whether it’s a brand that’s doing video, or they’re doing content: “What are you trying to prove here?”

Because it’s obvious to me that you’re trying to show that you’re intelligent. If you just teach me without trying to show it, it’ll happen organically.

There’s a component of it that is—and I say this, you have to take it in the right context. Whenever you teach something, you have to teach in a way that says, “Here it is. You can take it or leave it. It’s okay.” I’m okay either way with what you do with it, right?

So let me give you an example. It’s almost like sharing with nothing to lose. One of the things companies generally struggle with when they produce messaging and content is that it immediately sounds biased. There are certain things we do that make a viewer or a reader say, “They don’t really have my best interests at heart.”

Let me give you an example. The principle of They Ask, You Answer is that you obsess over your customers’ questions, and you feel it’s your moral obligation to address them on the front end—in that digital realm—because if you don’t address it, you know they’ll look somewhere else. And that’s who they’re ultimately going to do business with. That’s it in a nutshell.

People used to ask me, as a fiberglass pool builder, all the time: “So Marcus, be honest—what’s the difference between concrete and fiberglass pools? Why should I choose fiberglass?”

Now, 99% of pool companies will immediately start listing all the reasons why you should choose fiberglass. That’s what they do—and that’s exactly why they fail to stand out. It doesn’t induce trust, and it clearly shows they’re biased.

So how should you do it?

Let’s say I’m going to produce an article or a video comparing concrete and fiberglass pools, and all I sell is fiberglass, right? Let’s say I’m doing that—it might sound like this. And by the way, this structure is something we’ve replicated thousands of times. It’s the same framework over and over again, but most companies still don’t do what I’m about to show you.

So, as I say this, if you’re listening, think about it—is this how we communicate online?

It might go something like this:

“Shane, one of the questions I get all the time is, ‘Marcus, be honest—why should I choose fiberglass over concrete?’ Well, the truth is, you shouldn’t always choose fiberglass over concrete. In fact, there are times when concrete is the better option. So what this article—or this video—is going to do is honestly and transparently explain the pros and cons of both types of swimming pools. And by the end, hopefully you’ll have a great sense of which is the best choice for you.”

Now, when I say that to an audience, I ask them: “How often do companies communicate with you that way?” And they say, “Almost never. Almost never.”

I was with a really big brand—heck, I’ll say their name—Bass Pro Shops. We were launching their new ATV line that Tracker makes. Tracker builds boats, and now they also make ATVs. We were shooting videos at their headquarters, and I was overseeing it.

And it was fascinating, because during the scripting process, part of it said: “In this video, we’re going to help you get a sense of whether or not this is the right ATV for you.”

And the folks from the manufacturing side, who were there onsite, were like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa—what do you mean, ‘help you decide if it’s the right fit?’ Of course it’s the right fit!”

And I said, “No, it’s not.”

We proceeded to have this nice little debate. But when you base things on psychology—when you ask, “What would I want if I were the viewer, the listener, the reader in this moment?”—it actually gets pretty simple to make those types of decisions.

This is easily one of the highest-converting pages of your site—if you have it all right. And so once again, this goes back to simple psychology.

Generally speaking, everybody’s going to say who they are and why they’re special—maybe the problems they solve. But almost never does somebody say, “Who we’re not a good fit for.”

But the moment you say what you’re not is the moment you become dramatically more attractive to those who are a good fit for you, right?

So it’s the same thing. If I say, “No, fiberglass pool is not for you. If you’re looking for something longer than 40 feet, wider than 16 feet, very customized in terms of shape or depth,”—but if you’re looking for a low-maintenance pool that’s going to last your lifetime, that’s less than 16 by 40 and less than eight feet deep, and we do have a shape that fits your needs—well, then it might be a great choice for you.

Now the qualified person that is a fit is going to hear that and say, “Oh, perfect. I wanted a 16 by 32 rectangle, three to five feet deep. This is absolutely what I was looking for.”

So it creates a greater sense of wanting in that moment. But it’s so fascinating that companies are almost never willing to say that.

So if you put a section on your site that says who you’re not a good fit for—and you do it without sarcasm, if you’re not snarky, but if you really do it with honesty—you will find that it is a very high converter.

What’s fascinating about this, right, is I see this across the board, and companies—they just don’t do it. Right? And that’s because they’re coming from this place of, to your point, “We need as many leads as possible.” But all the studies have proven otherwise. Like, there’s a recent B2B study that came out that said on the typical B2B sale, over 50% of the time, the prospect is not a good fit.

Think about that—over 50% of the time. So why in the world are we not telling them that and teaching them that on the front end? They really appreciate it. And this is how you set a tone early on that says, “No, this company, this brand—they’re not like everybody else.” And yes, they do have my interests at heart here.

That’s something that’s unique. These are little things we can do. It’s no different than, let’s say, looking at messaging from the homepage of your website. A lot of people on the homepage might have a section that says, “What makes us special,” or “Why we’re great,” or something like that. “What makes us unique.”

That’s actually not the smartest way to say it. The smarter way would be a headline like, “Are we really any different than anybody else?” That causes me to lean in, because that’s exactly what I’m thinking. Yet that’s not how most companies write a headline.

You see what I’m saying? And it’s all the same principle.

We’ve been teaching companies a lot about video over the past three or four years. And one of the most effective videos we see working is the one that goes right next to forms on landing pages.

What’s interesting is, when someone fills out a form on a website, they’ve got these fears. They’re wondering things like, “Are you going to spam me?” “Are you going to email me nonstop?” “What are you going to do with my info?” “What’s going to happen after I hit submit?”

So what you want to do is put a video right next to that form. And that video needs a title. If it doesn’t have a title, it doesn’t get watched. It’s wild how many videos still don’t have titles on websites today.

But the title—that’s the key. The title has to match exactly what the person is thinking. So a great title would be, “See exactly what will happen if you fill out this form.” That’s what people are wondering.

But what most companies would title that is, “Why you should fill out this form.” And that’s biased. The moment you strip away bias from your messaging, it becomes way more attractive. People lean in.

Yeah. So I appreciate this question, and it is a more difficult one to ask. Because I could tell at an early age—right around 20, I guess it was—that I explained things generally, and it wasn’t arrogance. It was a knowing, if you will. I could tell that I explained things in a way that people understood better than many other people did.

And I noticed—I was obsessive about watching receivers of information and how oftentimes they didn’t get it. So, like, let’s say I was watching somebody teach someone else, and I was watching the student, or the receiver in this case—the audience, whoever it was. And I remember thinking, even at a younger age, right? Even in my teen years, I was like, “Well, this person doesn’t understand yet. The teacher’s moving on. Why? This doesn’t make any sense. Why are we moving on right now? This person doesn’t get it.”

And it would cause me, like, complete anger. Like, really? Why? And so it was this early innate sense for, okay, simplicity is beautiful. And if you can say things in an incisive way that anybody could sit there and say, “That makes sense to me,” you’re going to ultimately be a more effective communicator, right?

And then that’s also where “They Ask, You Answer” comes from. It was the most simple strategy that people could put their arms around. “Okay, so if I’ve gotten the question, I just need to be willing to address it the way they think it, feel it, say it, and search it.” Okay, I can do that. See, there’s nothing complicated about that.

A lot of people have tried to make it more of a science than what it is, but because I really tried to strip it down and make it less of a science, it was more effective.

And when you do really become obsessed—and I don’t mean that word lightly, Shane—but when you become obsessed with the way buyers think, then it really does force you to consider things that you’ve never done before, because you’re constantly saying, “Well, how would I like that? How would I feel about that? Would I understand that?”

And this is why—still to this day—a company, a brand, will show me something and I’m like, “But it doesn’t make sense to me.”

And they’ll say, “What do you mean it doesn’t make sense?”

And I’ll say, “Because it doesn’t make sense. Your viewers are not going to understand this because it’s not abundantly clear. It’s not obvious.”

And here’s how you can tell if it’s obvious: it’s obvious if they can hear it and then teach it to somebody else. That’s the quickest litmus test.

It’s a way you can test certain things on this all the time. So if I explain “They Ask, You Answer” to somebody, and seconds later, they can explain that to someone else—simple.

Now, if you explain the definition of content marketing to somebody, as per Wikipedia’s definition, and if you read that—how spreadable, how shareable, how easy is that to understand from another receiver of said information? It’s not.

You see, this is the reason why we have struggles with buy-in all over the world. And this is the reason why, frankly, a lot of marketers struggle—because they do not speak the language of the rest of their business. They speak the language of marketing, which inherently is built to fail.

So let’s say you said to yourself, “All right, I want to embrace this mindset, this philosophy,” which is really a customer-first mindset. It’s the idea that we’re going to be the best teachers in the world, and we’re going to become obsessively obsessive listeners. That’s the first thing you’ve got to agree to.

Now, once that happens, you say, “Okay, if we’re really going to address our customers’ questions, we need to start with what they’re actually asking.” So you bring your salespeople together and say, “What are the questions you hear every day, all the time, exactly the way they’re being asked?” And you’ll hear a lot. There are always a lot of questions.

But here’s what’s interesting, and I talk a lot about this in the book—I’ve never seen an industry that’s an exception to what I’m about to say. Whether it’s B2B, B2C, product, service, big, small, local, national—across the board, there are a handful of things buyers are universally obsessed with before they do business with you. In the book, we call these the Big Five.

These are the types of questions people ask before they buy because they want to feel like they’ve done their homework and can move to the next step. So for example, we as buyers always want to know how much something costs. We want to know what could go wrong or what the drawbacks are. We want to compare it to other options. We want to see what others are saying about it—basically reviews. And we want to know what the best option is, even if we’re not necessarily going to buy it. We just want to know what that benchmark looks like.

So that’s what we want to know as buyers. And what’s crazy is, we’re obsessed with these things, but most businesses don’t like talking about them. They just don’t. So here’s a quick test you can run: take a look at the content on your website and ask yourself, how much of this could actually be used by your sales team right now, today? How much of it would make a salesperson say, “That’s exactly what I needed. I’ve got a prospect asking this right now.”

If the answer is “not much,” then you’ve got a problem. I’d say at least 80% of your content should align with what we’re talking about here—what we call the Big Five. And I know someone might hear that and say, “Wait, just five topics?” But the reality is, those five categories cover way more than you’d think. They include dozens, if not hundreds, of questions that buyers ask at the bottom of the funnel.

That’s another big issue—most content strategies start at the top or even outside of the funnel. It’s fluffy, it’s vague, and it’s not useful to the sales team. Let me give you an example. Let’s say I’m a pool guy, and I create a blog post or a video titled “Five Fun Games to Play in Your Swimming Pool.” That’s nice, but as a salesperson, it’s completely worthless. In nearly ten years of selling pools, nobody ever asked me what games they could play in the pool. They were asking me things like, “Should I get a fiberglass pool?” or “What’s the difference between fiberglass and concrete?” Those are the questions that matter. So that’s where we focused, and that’s why we got results.

Most companies shy away from that. They avoid the tough questions—the ones that buyers actually want answered. But that’s where the opportunity lies. And I’ll give you an example because this is really the core of what we’re talking about.

I used to get asked all the time, “Marcus, how much does a fiberglass pool cost?” People just wanted a general idea. And this applies to both B2B and B2C, so don’t talk yourself out of this by saying it’s not relevant. It is. If I asked everyone listening right now, “Have you researched how much something costs online in the past year?” you’d say yes.

Then I’d ask, “If you’re on a site trying to find pricing and it’s not there, how do you feel?” You’d probably say, “Frustrated.” And I’d ask, “Why?” You’d say, “Because I’m the buyer, and it’s my right to know.” So then I’d say, “When you feel frustrated, do you dig further on the site?” And you’d say, “No, I leave.”

And if I asked, “Do you tell yourself, ‘It’s fine, they’re a value-based business, I’ll call them instead?’” Of course not. That’s not what any of us do. We keep searching until we find someone who gives us the answer—and that’s usually who gets our business.

And if we really break it down, the reason we get so frustrated is because we know the company has the answer. They just aren’t giving it to us. So now we feel like they’re hiding something, and the second we feel that way, trust disappears. And trust is what we’re all really selling, right? That’s what matters most.

Now, some people say, “Marcus, you don’t understand my business.” But I do. I’ve heard all the reasons companies don’t talk about cost and price. And there are really three big ones.

The first is, “It depends.” It’s a customized solution, every job is different. But if I came to you and asked, “Can you explain what drives the cost up?” you’d say yes. If I asked, “What brings it down?” you’d say yes. If I asked, “Why is your quote different than your competitor’s?” you could explain that too. Because if you’re in sales, you’ve explained all of that a hundred times. So “it depends” is not a good reason—it’s actually the easiest thing to explain, and also the most important.

The second reason is fear. “We’re more expensive, and we don’t want to scare people off.” But the truth is, what scares people off isn’t the price—it’s not knowing the price. That’s what creates doubt. Think about going to a restaurant you’ve never been to. You’re probably going to look at reviews and check out the menu. If the menu doesn’t have prices, are you still going? Most people won’t. And it’s not about affordability—it’s the lack of transparency. That’s what plants the seed of doubt. And when that seed is planted, we stop. That’s just how it works.

The third reason is competition. “We don’t want the competition to know what we charge.” But if you’ve been in your industry for a while, you probably already have a sense of what your competitors charge. And guess what? They know what you charge too. This whole idea that pricing is some big secret is nonsense. And by trying to protect it, you’re really just hurting your chances with buyers.

Your competitors don’t pay your bills. So why let them come between you and your customer’s trust?

At my pool company, we wrote an article called “How Much Does a Fiberglass Pool Cost?” and we went all in. We talked about everything—what drives price up, what brings it down, provided ranges, broke it all down. We were the first pool company in the world to be that aggressive with pricing content. And that article alone has generated over $7 million in sales. One article. $7 million.

Why? Because we didn’t avoid the question. We addressed it. You can’t always give an exact answer, but you can always explain the factors. And that’s what most people forget.

Usually, the win goes to the one who’s willing to have the conversation—even if the answer isn’t exact. As long as you help the buyer feel like they understand what they’re getting into, that’s enough.

For the majority of the companies we’ve worked with—hundreds of them now who have embraced They Ask, You Answer—the number one traffic, lead, and sales-generating content is about cost and price. And when I speak at events and ask how many people talk about cost and price on their website, it’s never more than 10%. In B2B service-based rooms, it’s usually less than 2%.

It goes against all logic, and yet it’s a massive issue around the world. We’re just not treating people the way we’d want to be treated as buyers. We want to know the price. If we feel good about it, we’ll call you. But if you don’t tell us and expect us to call anyway, you’re setting yourself up to lose.

That’s the business we’re all in.

Well, to me, I’m just really good at analyzing my own behavior, right? So I’m constantly, throughout any given week, saying, “Oh, I would like that. I’d want to know that. Or that would turn me off. That would annoy me.” And so I think we actually overanalyze. I don’t think you need to read any books on psychology. I haven’t.

But if we’re just willing to look at what makes us feel good about a company or a piece of content or about a video—what makes you look at a thumbnail on YouTube and say, “I don’t like that guy”? You haven’t hit play yet, but you’ve already decided. Analyze that—there’s something there. And the answer, by the way, is usually that the person is trying to appear smart in the thumbnail. And that immediately turns you off. That’s the reason. If you get to the core of it, it’s a threatening component.

So I just don’t think most marketers spend enough time in this land of self-awareness, really looking at it and calling it what it is. And we’ve all got this capability within us—I think it’s untapped for the most part.

Yeah. Well, I really appreciate that—and these are good questions, because people don’t normally ask me these. And I’m not just saying that, Shane. I’m serious. You’ve got a great observer’s gift too.

I’d argue the biggest element to this is, I literally see the world in the form of a question. Let me give you a couple of examples, just starting at a level we all understand—parent and child.

Most parents today, if a child comes to them with a question, they give an answer. Why? Well, there are two reasons. The easy one most people would say is, they want to be efficient. Quick. But that’s not the fundamental reason. The real reason is, most parents want their child to believe they’re smart. Absolutely.

Now, my kids—they’re screwed up in a really good way, okay? I’ve got four: oldest is 18, youngest is 9, three girls and one boy. They know that if they come to me with a question, we’re going on a journey together.

Now, I’m not saying if they ask me something I just say, “Well, what do you think it is?” That’s not what I mean. But I do believe the answer is often within each of us. And my job, especially as a parent, is to facilitate that moment of self-discovery.

Let me give you a crazy example. My daughter came to me one time and said, “Dad, why does the sun rise in the morning?” Classic case. You can just explain it—or you can ask the right questions to help the child discover it on their own.

So instead of just telling her, I asked her a series of questions. She would think about it, respond, then I’d ask another. And you could see she was getting it. Then suddenly, she goes, “I got it! I got it, Dad!” I said, “Okay, what is it?” She said, “The sun’s not actually rising. The earth is moving, which makes it look like the sun is rising.”

That moment is hers forever now. She owns that. No one told her the sun doesn’t rise—she figured it out. That discovery is lasting.

Now—can you do that with a prospect? Can you do it with a client? A team member? 100% yes. The sad reality is, the one skill we’ve lost the most as a society—and it’s not taught in universities, elementary school, high school, or even the workplace—is the art of effective communication.

The closest you’ll see is maybe a sales team being taught some cheesy closing techniques. If you ask most salespeople, “Are you good at asking questions?” they’ll say yes. But if you give them an exercise where they can only ask questions to help a prospect, over 90% of them fail. Because it’s not what they’ve learned to do.

When I look at something, I’m asking myself a series of questions—not just out of curiosity, but because I genuinely want to understand. I’m really saying, “Why is that the way it is?”

When I’m with an audience, I want to walk them through a journey by asking them questions, so they arrive at the insight themselves. It’s not my goal to just tell them—I want them to discover it. Because that’s when it sticks.

Now, on a podcast, that’s harder. The format is different. But if I could see the audience? It would be a constant conversation between me and them, where they keep having those moments of discovery. Not “Oh yeah, I heard it from Marcus, so it must be true.” That’s not the goal.

I don’t want to sound smart. I don’t want anyone to worship me—not the audience, not the client, not even my kids. I want them to walk away feeling like they figured it out. Because when we feel like we discovered something, we own it. And when we own it, we might actually do it. It might become part of who we are.

If we feel like it was forced on us, it’s never as effective.

So here’s a quick litmus test you can use. If your kids, your coworkers, your clients, your prospects are consistently saying to you, “Yeah, you’re right. You’re right. That’s what we need to do,” that means you failed to induce a moment of discovery.

But if you consistently hear them say, “Wait a second… I know what we need to do now,” that means you are a world-class communicator.

And it’s a major problem. In my agency, I have 100% college grads, and the biggest problem I have is helping them communicate in a way that they’re on par always with the client or the prospect. It is easily our biggest problem as a company. And when there’s a feeling of not being on par with each other, that’s when you as the company end up saying yes way more than you should. You don’t push back when you should, and all because you are fearful of losing the prospect or losing the relationship, versus knowing that if we’re on an equal plane here, if I say something with love and respect that is contrary to what they believe, and if I do it in the right context, they’re going to really appreciate it.

And so this is the skill set that is the great lost art. And I don’t, for the life of me, understand why. We don’t spend way more time talking about it. And it’s marketers who have the same issue, because we’re all we’re doing is communicating, right? We’re just doing it in different formats. We’re doing it on video. We’re doing it in an article. It’s like, but the principles are just tied together. It’s like, what causes you to read the first two paragraphs of something and say, “I’m into this. I like this company. I like how this feels.” What causes you to watch a video and within the first 30 seconds, say, “I really like this person. Something about them.”

What causes you to do the same thing when you were listening to this podcast today that made you say, “I either like this person or I don’t”? These are all elements of simply the way that you’re communicating in the moment, right?

And again, you don’t read about it, you don’t hear about it. It’s not taught nearly enough. And this, I really believe it’s a great tragedy.

I mean, yeah. You know, this is a frustrating thing for me. I’ve started to teach a lot more about communication. A lot of people don’t know me for that—they know me for sales and marketing, and they know me as the pool guy.

What I’m most inherently passionate about is transformative communication—in the home, in the office, and on the stage—because that’s where you see this unbelievable domino effect that can change lives. I mean generational influence, and I’ve seen it.

I’ve gotta share this one personal story with you, if that’s okay.

By the way, I don’t have a book I tag on—I wish I did. I wish I could recommend one right now. I always tell people, my favorite book is How to Win Friends and Influence People. I think it’s one of the great books of all time. I think everybody should read it at least once every couple of years.

And you know, it’s beautiful because it’s really old by this point. It’s probably almost 100 years old, and it’s still as true today as it was when it was written. That’s how you know it’s truth.

So I had an experience last week. I was teaching at a conference, and I was teaching on communication. A gentleman comes up to me when I’m done—I’m packing up—and he says, “Can I have a personal conversation with you?” I say, “Okay, sure, let’s do it.”

We go off to the side, and what I’m about to say, Shane, sounds odd—but stay with me, because it’s going to make sense, I think, by the end.

He says to me, “So Marcus, I was, as you know, I was here with my wife today.” (I had called on him while I was speaking, and I noticed he and his wife were there.) He says, “My wife and I, we were divorced at one time, and we’ve been back together for a while. But she does something that really, really bothers me a lot. I don’t want it to bother me, but it really does. She bites her nails. She does it at the wrong times, and it just drives me crazy.”

Okay, so I’m stepping out of the story for a second. What do most people do in this moment? How would most people answer this question?

Plus, you have to ask yourself—why is he coming to me and asking this right now? I’m not a counselor by any stretch, right? But he just heard me talk about communication.

So he asked me this, and hopefully, if you’re listening to this right now, you’re thinking to yourself, “Okay, here’s what I would’ve said.”

Here’s what I said:
“Was there ever a time when she wasn’t biting her nails?”

And he said, “Well, now that you mention it, she stopped for about two years after we got back together.”

That’s when I said, “Ah, now it’s clear.”

And to make this story really short, I said to him, “I promise you this. During that two-year period, you were so invested in her—to make her feel loved, to make her feel important, to make her feel wanted—weren’t you?”

He said, “Yes.”

So I said, “My guess is you’re probably not doing that today, are you?”

He said, “No.”

I said, “If you go back to who you were then, I promise you, she will stop chewing her nails within the next six months. But this is all on you.”

And literally, Shane, he’s sobbing by this point. He nods to me, and he walks away. That’s it. That’s it.

So there’s a couple things about this story—and it’s just on my mind because it happened last week. I have these things happen a lot. And the only way somebody asks you that question is if they don’t feel threatened, if they don’t feel judgment.

If we’re going to be our best selves, somehow we have to release judgment. We’re not there to judge. We’re there to help them judge themselves, if they need to—but we’re not there to do it.

So he didn’t feel threatened by me. He felt safe. There’s a lesson for me there. You see, that’s the type of question I ask myself: “Why did he come to me?” Not in a “Yeah, he should have come to me” kind of way—but why did he come to me?

The other thing is, a lot of people might have given answers like, “Does she get her nails done at a salon?” or, “Have you tried the formula for your nails?” or, “Have you tried that nasty stuff you can put on them?”

We say stupid things. We say stupid things.

But if you see the world in the form of a question—where you release trying to give your answer, and you’re really, really searching for a moment of self-discovery—what happens in this context is, he’s able to say something like, “Well, there was a time when she wasn’t doing it.”

And as soon as I hear that, now we’ve got our answer.

He knew what he needed to do, because he realized, “Ah, she had stopped because of me. So I need to get back to the person I was.”

That’s the beauty of seeing the world differently.

Yeah, right, right. And I appreciate that. And at 41—which is how old I am today—I’m at the point where I’ve accepted that my calling is not always going to be sales and marketing.

And, you know, I think we misconstrue labels. You know, when I was 23 or 24, a family member came to me and said, “Heard you started a pool company with a couple people.” I said, “Yeah.” She looked me straight in the eye and said, “What a waste. What a waste.” And I thought to myself, I can’t believe you just said that.

And of course, that pool company, that pool story, has been talked about all over the world now. And that allowed me, as the pool guy—that was the step to become what might be considered a sales and marketing speaker, right, for sure. And that took me all over the world to the point where I started having people ask me other questions.

And I knew that there’s more here to unpack, which will lead to the next phase, which is communication. So my 20s were about swimming pools, my 30s were about sales and marketing, and I think my 40s are going to be heavy into communication.

And that’s why we have to be careful about thinking we understand exactly where this is all supposed to go and how we’re supposed to get there. You know, if we release that and just obsess more on, am I really making progress? Am I being my best self here?

Usually, those other doors that were supposed to be open—they’ll open at their own time. And then it’ll all make sense. We’ll look back and say, “Oh yeah, of course. I was supposed to be a pool guy.”

Never, never, never came back. But I gotta, I got a feeling she certainly a crow. Just realized. But who knows? Who knows?

But I only say it, not because it bothers me today. I’m really grateful she said it, for sure, right? Because now I’m like, “Oh, that’s a beautiful thing to hear.”

To be a stimulus, yeah, helps me recognize that it’s not so much the label at all, right? Because you know what? I can honor it. And so when people today say, “Do you mind telling the poor guy story again?” I mean, I know you’ve said it a million times, Marcus.

I’m like, why would I ever mind that it is such a foundational element of my life built you. I’ll always be a pool guy, even though I don’t sell pools anymore, right? I’ll always be a pool guy. And I’m thrilled with that.

So you can email me directly. I always love hearing from people directly. It’s marcus@marcussheridan.com.

So, marcussheridan.com, They Ask You Answer is a course available on all the majors online. It’s got a revised version that just came out last month. So make sure you get the revised version.

The audiobook—the current one—is not me, but the next one that’s coming out, which will be available in about six or seven weeks, for the revised version, that is my voice.

And so just want to give you a heads up if you’re listening to that.

But please email me directly if you have any questions, if you need any guidance, or you want to talk about any of that—sales, marketing, whatever, stuff, tradings—all that jazz. I’m happy to help with you.

You’re welcome.