This is about a small, quite specific thing that makes an enormous difference to how much help you actually get. And it’s all in the way you ask.
Picture the situation. You feel a bit stuck on something in your business, so you do the sensible, sane thing, you ask someone. A friend, a peer, someone whose opinion you trust. And the question you ask, almost always, is some version of, “what do you think? does this look okay? am I on the right track?” And the answer that comes back is warm, and kind, and, so often, completely useless. “Oh, it’s lovely. You’re doing so well. Keep going!”
And you come away feeling briefly reassured, and not one bit clearer than before.
The thing is, that’s not their fault. It’s the question. Because a vague question can only ever get a vague answer. When you ask someone what they think of your business, you’ve given them nothing to hold onto, so they reach for the kindest, safest, most general thing there is, which is encouragement. It’s all very nice. It just doesn’t move you anywhere.
A specific question is a completely different animal. A specific question gets you something you can actually use.
So rather than “what do you think of my website?”, you ask, “when you land on my homepage, what do you think I actually do, in one sentence?” Rather than “does this offer look okay?”, you ask, “if you were exactly the client I’m hoping to reach, what’s the one thing here that would make you hesitate?” Rather than “how’s my Instagram doing?”, you ask, “which of these three posts made you want to know more, and why?”
You can feel the difference straight away. One invites a shrug and a compliment. The other hands someone a precise, answerable question, and precise questions get you real answers, the kind you can genuinely do something with.
But there’s a deeper reason asking matters so much, and it’s the thing I most want to leave you with, because it’s really been underneath everything.
So often, the most valuable thing about you is the very thing you cannot see. Because it’s too close. It’s so woven into the way you naturally work that you’ve long since stopped noticing it’s there at all. And this doesn’t get less true the more accomplished you are. If anything, it gets more true, because the longer you’ve done something brilliantly, the more it just feels like the ordinary way you do things. Nothing special. Simply how you work.
And here is the lovely part. The thing you can’t see in yourself is very often the most obvious thing in the world to someone standing just outside your business. They can see it in a heartbeat, precisely because they’re not standing where you are.
I think often about an interior designer I once worked with, who’d run her business beautifully for more than twenty years. She had this one truly extraordinary strength, and it was right there, in every single testimonial she’d ever been given. And she couldn’t see it. It was far too close to her. It took someone outside her business pointing straight at it and saying, that, that’s the thing, for her to finally see it. And from there, she built her whole business around that one distinctive, hugely valuable thing she’d been doing all along without ever quite realising.
That’s what asking well actually gives you. Not the surface-level reassurance that feels nice for an afternoon and changes nothing. Fresh eyes on the thing you’re standing too close to see.
So perhaps this is the thing to sit with. If there’s a fuzzy, nagging worry you’ve been carrying about your business, the “is this working, am I doing this right” feeling that never quite resolves, see if you can turn it into one precise, specific question. Just one. And then ask it, to one person whose eyes you trust.
Because the answer you’ve been waiting for is very often already there, sitting in plain sight. You just can’t see it from where you’re standing. And sometimes the bravest, most useful thing you can do is ask someone who can.
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