What questions are you carrying that you haven't asked out loud? And what is not asking them costing you?

We ask questions for a living. But what about the ones we don't ask?

In this episode, hosts Dr. Patti Fletcher, Lynne Cuppernull, and Dan Ward get honest about the questions they avoid. They talk about why we skip certain questions: we're afraid of the answer, we don't want to do the work that follows, we're worried about crossing a boundary, or sometimes we just don't think to ask.

They each share questions they've been carrying. Dan talks about not asking for help or feedback. Patti examines the questions women in their 50s face about defining life on their own terms instead of through roles they play for others. Lynne shares questions she's afraid to ask about politics and her kids' experience of divorce.

The conversation covers personal territory and bigger questions. When does avoiding a question protect you versus hold you back? Where do you feel unasked questions in your body? How do you create environments where people can actually ask hard things? Is asking questions an anti-authoritarian act?

They also look at AI's role in how we ask (or don't ask) questions. Are we using it to go deeper, or to avoid going deeper? What makes human conversation different when it comes to the questions that matter?

This episode won't make hard questions easy. But it might make asking them less hard.

Key Themes:

• The psychology and physiology of avoided questions
• Creating environments where questions can be asked safely
• The difference between waiting for the right moment and avoiding indefinitely
• Question-asking as anti-authoritarian practice
• How AI enables or prevents deeper questioning
• Making it easier to ask hard questions without making them less hard

Resources We Found Helpful:

Books & Research:

• On Tyranny, by Timothy Snyder
• Internal Family Systems therapy information
• The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace by Amy Edmondson
• The Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well by Amy Edmonson

Referenced Media:

• Blue Bloods (CBS) and it's spin-off, mentioned in this episode, Boston Blue (CBS) for the portrayal of family dinner conversations as a space for difficult dialogue

Practices Mentioned:

• Reflection practices for identifying avoided questions
• Somatic awareness when questions arise
• Mindfulness techniques: asking "Am I safe now?" and "What do I need?"
• The coaching move: responding to questions with "What do you think?"

Listening for the Questions is where curiosity is our compass.

Valentine’s Day is supposed to be about love. But for many people, it lands as pressure, performance, exclusion, or quiet disappointment. In this episode, Lynne, Dan, and Dr. Patti take a familiar cultural moment and do what we always do on Listening for the Questions: we slow it down and ask better questions.

Together, we explore what Valentine’s Day reveals about how we define love, worth, success, and belonging. We talk about the stories we inherit about romance, the commercial scripts we rarely interrogate, and the invisible hierarchies that decide which kinds of love are celebrated and which are ignored. We also ask what gets missed when love is framed as a milestone instead of a practice.

This is not an episode about how to “do” Valentine’s Day better. It’s an invitation to examine what love actually means in your life right now, who it’s for, and how curiosity might open up more honest, humane, and expansive ways of relating to ourselves and others.

Questions we explore include:

• Who is Valentine’s Day really designed for, and who gets left out?
• When does love become a performance instead of a lived experience?
• How do scarcity narratives around love shape our choices and expectations?
• What might love look like if we treated it as a verb, not a status?

Whether you love Valentine’s Day, dread it, or ignore it completely, this episode offers space to reflect without judgment and to reconnect with love as something broader, messier, and more human than a single day can hold.

Resources we found helpful when prepping for this episode:

1. All About Love by bell hooks
   A grounding exploration of love as action, ethics, and responsibility rather than fantasy or possession.
   
   
2. The Gottman Institute Relationship Research
   Evidence-based insights on what actually sustains connection, trust, and intimacy over time.
   
   
3. Esther Perel’s work on modern relationships
   Particularly her talks and writing on desire, independence, and the tension between security and freedom in love.
   
   

Available wherever you get your podcasts.

Listening for the Questions asks better questions so we can live more honest lives, together.

Listening for the Questions is where curiosity is our compass.

We are surrounded by misinformation and disinformation, but reacting faster is not the solution. Asking better questions is.

In this episode, Patti Fletcher, Dan Ward, and Lynne Cuppernull explore the difference between misinformation shared without intent to harm and disinformation spread deliberately to deceive. More importantly, they examine why both work so well and what they reveal about fear, identity, trust, and belonging.

Drawing on the U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory Confronting Health Misinformation, the conversation frames misinformation as a public health issue that requires collective responsibility, not individual perfection. The episode also explores deeper meaning-making frameworks, including Richard Rohr’s work on Order, Disorder, and Reorder, and why periods of disruption create fertile ground for false certainty.

Along the way, the trio reflects on cultural touchstones like Schoolhouse Rock and ABC After School Specials and what we lost when we stopped teaching people how to think instead of what to think.

This episode is not about debunking. It is about slowing down, noticing our reactions, and asking better questions before belief hardens into certainty.

Resources mentioned

• Confronting Health Misinformation, U.S. Surgeon General
  https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-misinformation-advisory.pdf
  
  
• Richard Rohr, The Cosmic Egg
  https://cac.org/daily-meditations/the-cosmic-egg-my-story-and-our-story/
  
  
• The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder
  https://store.cac.org/products/the-wisdom-pattern-order-disorder-reorder
  
  
• Schoolhouse Rock
  https://www.youtube.com/user/SchoolhouseRockTV1
  
  
• ABC After School Specials
  https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4_H2rkrpOuvXd-7hJoZBzIoUdo09NdnM
  
  

🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Listening for the Questions is where curiosity is our compass.