You may not think of yourself as a salesperson, but every day at work, you’re selling something—an idea, a proposal, your capabilities, or even yourself.

In this episode of Career Sessions, J.R. Lowry sits down with sales expert, author, and longtime podcast host Andy Paul to explore what the rest of us can learn from great salespeople about influence, curiosity, and human connection.

Andy explains why the best way to persuade someone isn’t to push harder, but to understand what matters to them. He shares how asking better questions and truly listening can strengthen relationships, why curiosity is often trained out of us as we move through school and work, and how to avoid making conversations about ourselves.

The conversation also moves beyond sales to a bigger career question: Are you building the career you actually want—or simply following someone else’s playbook? Andy discusses why success is situational, how to find environments where you can be yourself, the importance of choosing the right boss, and why it’s sometimes better to leave a bad fit rather than keep trying to make it work.

Along the way, Andy shares lessons from nearly five decades in business—and a reminder that there’s no age limit on taking on new challenges.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why everyone is selling, whether they realize it or not
• How curiosity can make you more influential
• The difference between listening to understand and listening to respond
• Why great questions create stronger relationships
• How to find work environments that fit your strengths and values
• Why you should define success on your own terms

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/andy-paul/.

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Stop Following Someone Else’s Career Playbook, With Andy Paul

You may not think of yourself as a salesperson, but every day at work, you are selling something. You’re interviewing for a job. You’re asking for a promotion. You’re influencing colleagues. You’re convincing your boss to try something different. According to our guest, the best way to do that isn’t just to be more persuasive. It’s more about becoming more curious, more authentic, and better at understanding what matters to the other person that you’re trying to persuade.

Andy Paul has spent his career focused on helping others become better salespeople, working with everyone from startups to some of the world’s largest companies. He’s the author of a number of books, including Sell without Selling Out: A Guide to Success on Your Own Terms. In his own podcast, he has hosted more than 1,300 conversations with some of the leading thinkers in sales and business.

Our conversation isn’t about being a salesperson. We’re going to talk about why curiosity is an underrated career skill, what great listeners do differently, why following someone else’s playbook can hold you back, and how to build a successful career without trying to become someone you’re not or live in circumstances that aren’t right for you. We’re also going to explore a question that matters whether you’re 25 or 35. How do you stop following the career path that you think you’re supposed to have and start defining success on your own terms? I’m J.R. Lowry. This is Career Sessions. Here’s my discussion with Andy.

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Andy, thanks so much for being with me on the show.

Thanks for inviting me.

I’m looking forward to it. Why don’t we dive right in? You have massive experience in the sales space. You’ve written books. You’ve done multiple podcasts in that space as well. For somebody who’s not a salesperson, convince them that they are selling every day.

The Hidden Reality Of Daily Selling

Look at it two ways. If you’re in a customer-facing role in any regard, whether you’re in sales or customer service, customer support, every interaction with a prospective buyer or an actual customer is a reflection on you. The customers take that as an example of what it’s going to be like to work with your company. The way people experience you and every time you have a chance to interact with them makes a difference and builds to its perspective or opinion someone has about you or your company.

My job is even at customer services. If I’m talking with a customer, what help do they need from me? How can I be the most helpful to help them achieve what they want to achieve in the shortest time possible? That’s our goal. How can I make the most effective use of my customer’s time? In my mind, there’s no such thing as an insignificant interaction with the customer because they all contribute to their perception of you.

That’s very fair. There’s also the element of just us. We are selling ourselves when we go to work every day. Hopefully not selling our souls, but certainly selling ourselves.

Whether people like the terminology or not, we all do carry a brand. Some of us consciously develop it and others don’t. People are forming opinions of you. If you have certain desires at work, you want to progress through your career or you want to achieve certain things. You have to be mindful of that. Again, there’s no such thing as an insignificant interaction with the people that matter. We increasingly, in our lives, get our work done through other people. Part of our job is, in order to succeed at what we’re trying to do is, we need to have people help us. How do we persuade people or influence people to devote some other time to helping us achieve certain things?

You’ve worked with a lot of salespeople over the course of your career. What can somebody who’s not a salesperson learn from a salesperson about how to do all the things you were just describing in terms of influencing and collaborating without coming across as aggressive or fake or manipulative?

One of the things that I live by is I’m working with you as I’m trying to understand, not just know, but understand what are the things that are most important to you that you’re trying to achieve? How can I help you get those? If I operate in life, it’s saying, my job is to understand the people that I’m dealing with. They all have things they’re trying to achieve that are important to them.

When I’m coming to pitch an idea or something, how does that align with helping them achieve these things that are most important to them? The central part of what I’m trying to do is understand this person, understand what that is. You’re so much better off. As you come from a perspective of, “I’m here to help you.” Maybe we can help each other, but I’m here to help you. I’m here to listen and understand. If you can do that, people think you’re there to serve them as well as yourself, then you’re a much better footing.

I’ve heard that the construct of approaching things with a sense of generosity is applied in networking. Certainly, that’s where Keith Ferrazzi made his name, among others. It’s this idea more generally of negotiations, trying to find a win-win. Not that you’re necessarily going to work every day to negotiate something. The concept of it all feels very similar in terms of trying to find the win-win.

I would go a step beyond that, though, because if you’re saying, “I want to understand what’s most important to you.” I’m not thinking about myself in that regard because I know that if I can help you, I am going to get perhaps what I want, what I’m looking for, and the help I need. If I’m thinking about the win-win, that tends to fall into quid pro quo. I’ll give you something if you give me something, which is the opposite of generosity. Generosity is like, “I’m going to give without the expectation of return.” When you are generous, you do get the return.

I think I said it badly earlier in terms of describing it as win-win, because I agree with the idea that you are approaching this saying, “How can I help you?” If you do that enough times, it will all come back to you.

Zig Ziglar said, “If you help enough other people get what they most want out of life, you’ll get what you want out of life.”

Curiosity In Sales: Empathy isn’t just about sharing a feeling. Learn how cognitive empathy helps you understand what truly drives your team.

It’s very well said. You were just describing a use of curiosity in terms of trying to understand what the other person is trying to get. Whether you’re in a formal sales or not a formal sales situation. Curiosity is central to the way that you think about how to manage your career and your day-to-day work life. How else does it factor in for you?

Unlocking Cognitive Empathy In Conversations

It operates on multiple levels. One is general curiosity about the world and staying informed and abreast of what’s going on and being a lifelong learner. That’s certainly an aspect of curiosity. The level I look at is more important in the long term. It’s being curious about other people. It’s making an effort to truly understand them. I write about this in my book as there’s this gap between knowing something about someone and truly understanding. Unfortunately, we reinforce this gap.

Even though there’s a segment of the population now politically in the United States that thinks empathy is a weakness. Empathy is critical, but we approach and teach empathy the wrong way. What we do is we say, “It’s important to walk a mile in someone’s shoes.” You understand what they’re feeling. We can’t help someone if we just understand what they’re feeling. There’s this difference between compassionate empathy and cognitive empathy.

Passionate empathy is to say, “Walk a mile in someone’s shoes. I understand how they’re feeling.” Whereas cognitive empathy is understanding why they feel the way they do. Now, if I understand why you feel the way you do, then that gives me information to be able to help you. As long as I just know how you’re feeling, that doesn’t give me a clue as to what’s at the root of it and how I can help you.

For me, curiosity is going beyond this knowing, “J.R feels bad about this.” I don’t go that step further and make sure I understand it. Expand that gap between knowing something, understanding it, and understanding why. It requires persistence in questioning and curiosity to get to that point where you develop a true understanding.

Listening has to be a big part of that. What do most of us misunderstand about what it means to truly listen? We think we’re listening, but we’re not.

Breaking The Habit Of Listening To Respond

The biggest thing that I see is that we tend to make conversations about ourselves. There are two things you see. One is, we listen to respond. This is one of the biggest things I see when I’m coaching people and working with people in the sales environment or even in real life. People have a tendency to want to make things about themselves. That is the opposite of what you’re trying to do to truly understand this person you’re talking to.

A perfect example of this is and you may have heard this example before. It’s this idea that when you can respond to someone, your responses fall into two categories. One is called a shift response and one is a support response. Typical example, coming to work. You talk to a colleague and you say, “How was your vacation this summer?” You say, “I showed up at this resort with the entire family,” and they didn’t have a reservation.

Now, what most people do is they say, “That’s horrible. That same thing happened to me.” What you’ve done is you’ve shifted the focus of listening from them to you. Whereas, a support response, “That must be horrible. What did you do next? How did it get resolved?” You turn it back. What’s the next question? Again, you’re trying to understand the situation. When you’re listening, that’s a critical thing because you’re thinking, “What’s the next thing I need to learn in order to understand that?” Extend my curiosity.

Whereas, we tend to turn off our curiosity. There’s very simple things you can do to practice this. One thing I encourage people to do, if they’re struggling with this concept, I say, “Go to a social setting. You’re going to meet somebody new and see how many questions you can ask that person before you have to say something about yourself.” Be able to ask at least three questions before you have to say something about yourself. If you practice that, you get in the habit of saying, “I’ve met somebody new. I’m curious about this person. What can I learn about them?”

That’s just one example that helps you become a better listener because your second and third questions are going to be based on the answer you got on the first one. Simple techniques you can teach people. If you practice these, they become ingrained but just something simple. You ask somebody a question, they give you an answer. “That’s interesting. Tell me more about that.” The response to the person that gets that question is, “This person’s interested in me.” There’s been some studies on this saying that the best way to make yourself interesting to someone else is to be interested in them. If our goal is to try to build some connection at a personal level, that’s a great way to do it.

That exercise that you just talked about is a good one. I will sometimes go through an exercise similar where I try not to say anything about myself for as long as I can get away with because it forces you to learn how to ask those follow-up questions, which is an important skill to have in life. You can also fall back on some of the things you were talking about in terms of like, “Then what? How did that feel? What happened next?” Similar questions that are general enough that you can have them in your repertoire and use them regularly.

When I wrote about the shift response, support response, I got an email from somebody who read the book. They said, “I got back from family Thanksgiving. I was just listening to the conversation. It was all shift responses. When I started practicing support responses, it’s amazing how the conversations start changing.” Again, part of the era that we live in, so much of the focus is on us. Social media is all about us. You have to make an effort to step outside that because that’s the paradigm that people are following these days.

That brings us to thinking about what we were just talking about, questions. What separates a great question from a more mundane one? Whether you’re in a sales situation or at a networking event having a conversation.

The Art Of Asking Better Questions

Have the other person talk about themselves. You want to have people feel comfortable to talk about the things that are important to them. Your job is to understand what’s most important to the other person and help them get that. That plays in every relationship you have in this world. What’s the way to be a better partner, a better spouse? To make sure you truly understand what’s most important to the other person and then help them get that. How do you be a better parent? Understand things that are most important to your kids. Help them get that. I can go through a laundry list of situations where the same thing applies.

I’m curious to get your view as to when you want to just focus on getting somebody to talk about themselves and when you want to focus on getting them to think about themselves, if that makes sense. Ask them a deeper question that’s going to push them perhaps a bit outside their comfort zone.

You have to earn the permission to do that and to get to that point. In my last book, Sell Without Selling Out, I talk about these four core elements of building these trust-based relationships, ability to connect with another person, to be curious about them, truly understand them, and be generous. You have to build that level of trust to start getting the permission to ask those questions. That’s worth doing.

If you’re trying to develop a business relationship, the relationship is not going to go anywhere until somebody reveals something about themselves that you can’t read on a website or that’s just not normally available because that’s what you’re trying to get to. It’s to be able to reveal something about themselves that’s not commonly known.

The deeper relationships are built on that knowledge, but people aren’t just going to give it to you. You have to earn the right to do that. I sound like everything’s so conscious, but we want to get to a point where these things are talking about this connection. The curiosity is ingrained and not performative. If they’re performative, then people sense that you’re inauthentic.

Curiosity In Sales: Curiosity shouldn’t be performative. Here is how genuine inquiry builds trust across teams.

They do. Being genuinely curious and being performatively curious are going to feel like two very different things to people, to your point.

The problem with curiosity, and there’s been studies done on this. I’ve had somebody once challenge me, because I believe, based on my own research and reading, that we’re all born with the same amount of curiosity. Our life tends to train a certain amount of that out of us. I found this especially true with boys because curiosity is viewed as disruptive. You’re asking too many questions. Maybe it happened to you in your life. I know it happened to me a couple times in my life. It’s like, “Enough with the questions. Do what you’re supposed to do.”

That carries on into life where people subconsciously have been coming to believe that, “If I asked too many questions it’s a negative,” and it’s not. It’s coming from a sense of real interest and true interest, then people will let you ask as many questions as you can. I started my career in sales almost 50 years ago now. I’m selling large computer systems to business owners. I knew nothing about computers and nothing about business. It’s a great combination.

I was genuinely curious. This was my first year at sales or it was my MBA. I go and talk to these CEOs and these founders of these companies. I was genuinely interested in how they had built the company, what they were doing, what was next for them. When I approached it from that perspective, I got all the time in the world I wanted with the prospects. That lesson stuck with me.

The other reason that we get enculturated is to not ask so many questions, because especially when we come into a work environment, we feel like we have to have all the answers. Being curious is almost like an admission of weakness.

Yes, it is unfortunate that is the case. I see it all the time in consultant work. The new vice president of sales needs help, but is afraid to admit they need help because, “Wasn’t I just hired because I have all the answers?” No. Somebody hired you because you have potential. Not because you have all the answers, but people find themselves backed into that corner where they refuse to ask for help. That is unfortunate.

You can’t always see ahead of time when you come into a job, but it’s one of the things for people that are job seekers that they need to think about. Success is situational. I can take somebody that is great, performing well at company A and moving to company B, and they won’t succeed. It’s the same level as I did before. They’re the same person, same set of skills. Maybe even selling very similar products, but the environment is different.

It’s important when you’re looking for work, you’re looking for the next assignment or next gig. Is this the right situation for me? Is this an environment I can succeed in? Is this the boss that’s going to be able to help me get to the next level? You should sense a lot of that through the interview process you’re going through. It’s like, “Do they think they just have this nailed or are they open to giving me the freedom, flexibility and the autonomy to succeed in a way that aligns with my strengths and my values?”

That’s important and brings us to another topic that I wanted to discuss with you, which is this idea of finding a way to be yourself. You’ve described yourself as an introvert who didn’t necessarily fit all the stereotypical images of being a successful salesperson. How did you figure out how to make that work for you in a way that was authentic to who you are?

Why Your Career Success Is Situational

Trial and error for one. What I learned was this lesson I just talked about, is finding the right situation. I was about 30 when I was between jobs. I worked for somebody that was a horrible boss. It dawned on me that as much as the company’s hiring me, I’m hiring a boss. I’m looking for someone that’s going to be able to help me learn what I need to learn in order to take the next steps in my career and will support me in doing that. That became most of my sole focus.

The roles that I was interviewing for and trying to get are like, who’s this person that I’m going to be working for? Will they give me not just their knowledge and their experience, but will they also give me the autonomy to try new things, to bring myself to the job? I found that in almost every role I’ve been in, that’s been important. Those where I’ve been able to express myself and the boss wanted me to express myself. I did much better at them.

There was a great quote and I’m going to paraphrase it. I’m a huge soccer fan. If you’re in London, I don’t know if you’re a Premier League fan. This one soccer coach said, “What I want is players who are going to show up and bring their personality to the game. Express themselves through how they play.” I thought it was a great way to talk about it. It’s the opposite of what so much of what corporate America is about. I want you to show up and fit into our process.

I want you to be this interchangeable cog in our machinery. That was just never going to be me. Again, after a few failed experiences in my twenties, once I turned 30, then I was like, “This is what is important.” By and large, I was able to escape when I started my own company, and I was 45. For this middle part of my career, I was able to navigate and find those environments where I was working with smart, talented, capable people that just wanted to say, “Here’s the job. Go figure it out.” That was great. That’s what I wanted.

Using your example of the Premier League coach who said he wanted players to bring their personalities to the field as that player or as a player in a corporate environment, how do you figure out the balance between bringing your own personality to bear but also fitting into the system? The team that you’re playing for, the system that you’re on in a corporate environment.

I don’t think they’re antithetical. I’m sure you see this too in managers, especially younger managers. They’re afraid to step outside the tightly circumscribed bounds of what they think is going on. They have to be more enforcer types and make sure people are compliant with this process. As if they’re afraid to individually manage the people on their team. I see this again in the sales world all the time. It’s like, “You got to follow the process,” but you got this person who’s got these unique skills. Develop them individually. They’re like, “I don’t have the time.”

I said, “What do you mean you don’t have the time? This is your job as a manager.” You’re only going to succeed if they succeed. It’s to help them become the best version of themselves. I’ve seen the shift in the last 20-25 years as to, “Everybody’s got to comply with the process.” It’s so self-defeating because, certainly in the sales world, chapter and verse in enterprise sales, B2B enterprise sales, where people become so focused on the process that they think the process is good and the people are the failures, when it’s the opposite.

It’s the process that’s failed. It’s too easy to point the fingers at the individuals that say, “The salesperson is no good.” When you take that approach, the process is great and the people are failures. You’re failing as a manager. You’re failing to develop them. You’re failing to give them the instruction, inspiration and examples that they need in order to succeed.

Back to your original question. You have to put yourself in a situation where you have the freedom to experiment. As an individual, that’s the critical thing, an environment where I can try new things and bring the best of me to it. Sometimes it involves leaving the situation you’re in and going find another one. Very few people have employment contracts. Go find a better situation.

One of the hardest things about this is when you’re sitting in that job interview. How do you figure out whether this system is going to be a good system for you? There is a system. I hear your point about letting people bring out their individual strengths and I’m completely aligned with you in that. One of the things that I think about and I don’t think I’ve come up with a great answer for yet is, how do you sit in that job interview and suss that out in a way that is not just the tell me about your culture and get the same boilerplate answer?

Curiosity In Sales: You are not just interviewing for a job. You are hiring the boss who controls your daily autonomy.

The hard answer is you can’t. Things are a guarantee. I was talking to a client of mine, a coaching client, where they lied to me in the interview process and I’ve experienced that. I’ve been misled. This was interviewing for a senior position where they showed me a false set of financials. The answer is you can’t be afraid to make a change. It’s okay to say, “I made a mistake.” Why torture yourself for 6 months, a year, or 2 years in an environment that’s not going to be a fit?

It’s not like in the old days where if you change jobs too frequently that used to be held against you. If you find yourself in a bad situation, it’s better to cut it off short and go find that next thing because you just learned a lesson. Don’t make it worse by staying in there because you’re not going to be happy. They’re not going to be happy. It’s worse to be in some place in a year and not have anything to show for it as opposed to cutting the cord quickly and finding something.

More generally, and you write about this in your book. How do you pursue your own definition of success versus the one that gets put onto you or ascribed to you?

Hiring Your Next Boss Deliberately

It starts with defining what you want out of any situation, what you want out of life. I was having this conversation with a client. Bemoaning the fact that they’d had an opportunity to join a reasonably hot AI startup that had announced they were going to go public. They were saying, “They had offered me a job and I hadn’t taken it. I regret not having done that.”

We had talked at the time about it, and I said, “The things that they weren’t offering were the reasons that you didn’t take it. You weren’t going to have the same autonomy that you wanted. You were going to have to relocate. The money wasn’t good enough to replace what you’re currently doing now, but what they were offering was the mythical upside of our equity,” which they weren’t even offering enough to almost compensate for the money this person wasn’t going to make in their salary.

It’s like, “You chose because you wanted autonomy. You wanted the freedom to be able to make the type of money you want to make. The situation wasn’t going to allow you to do that. You made a good decision.” It’s harder when you’re earlier in your career. You gain more perspectives. As you get older, you get a family of obligations, whatever that influences your decisions. You want to be clear headed about, “What are the things that enabled me to go to work and enjoy it?” For me, autonomy was always one.

Even as an individual contributor, one of the things that attracted me is sales in the first place, because I certainly wasn’t a salesperson by nature, inclination. In my first sales interview, the boss I’m interviewing with said, “You’re going to be the CEO of your own territory. That’s the role. That’s why you have to look at it. You’re the CEO of your patch.” That’s like music to my ears. It’s like, “I’ve got control over how I’m going to do this.” That just stuck with me. I always wanted to find those situations where I could enjoy that similar type of autonomy.

You’ve talked a little bit about this already, but what else would you want your younger self to know that you know now or advice that you would give somebody who’s in the early part of their career?

Stress less. You do the best you can. Try to learn as much as you can about the field and the world you’re in and try to have fun. Fun was certainly the element of my career. I’ve had a lot of fun and have had a lot of fun throughout my career. A lot of variety, which was important for me. In contrast with my dad, I worked 36 years with one company and I liked the variety. That’s one of the reasons I started my own consulting company.

The bottom line is I’ve had a good time doing it. I’ve made an effort to work with smart people. I wanted to put myself in situations where I was challenged. I went for a history major. I sold big computers. I don’t think about big computers, big or small. I spent fifteen years in the satellite communications business, selling highly complex technical products. I know nothing about them, but I put myself in a situation knowing I was going to have to learn and it was going to challenge me. I had a good chunk of selling large systems overseas. Again, that was just so much fun.

It’s having a sense of enjoyment of what you’re doing. We all have obligations. Again, try to find those situations where you’re going to be challenged and you look forward to that challenge. Somebody asked me once, how did I choose a particular job? I said I chose this one because the boss scared me. They said, “What do you mean scared you?” I said, “I knew it was going to be a challenge. This guy was so smart.” Especially about sales and he turned into a lifelong mentor.

He was just going to force me to think about everything I did and I loved it. It became so much better as a result and so much smarter in so many different dimensions because of just the intellectual rigor of that. For me, that was important. I wanted to work with painfully smart people. I’ve always tried to do that in my career.

I appreciate your thoughts and appreciate some of the perspectives you’ve brought to taking ownership of your career, being who you are and figuring out who that is and finding situations that allow you to be your best self. Thank you for being with me and sharing your perspectives. I wish you well and whatever is coming next for you, which is probably a lot more variety.

Redefining Success On Your Own Terms

I speak in chapter with you and I talk about chapters before we started. Career is a series of chapters. I’ve been working on my first novel. I’ve always wanted to write an espionage thriller, so I’m working on that. Another sales book I’m working on now. I’ll be stepping back into the sales thing but again, I’m always trying to do it on my own terms. These are the types of challenges you want. I don’t ever envision stopping or not doing anything, retiring completely.

I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. It’s good to pick new challenges and learn something new. My first of these 1,300 podcast episodes, I didn’t publish the first one until I was 60. I didn’t publish my first book until I was 50. There’s no limitations based on age. It’s just based on your curiosity and desire to learn new things. That keeps life fun and interesting.

Yes, it does. Thank you again.

Thank you.

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A great discussion with Andy. Let me cover some wrap-up points to help you take away some things from the conversation. First is to recognize that we are all selling, whether we realize it or not. Anytime you’re pitching an idea, interviewing for a job, asking for a promotion, or trying to influence a colleague, you are asking someone to make a decision based on what you are saying to them. The best way to influence that decision isn’t pressure or clever persuasion. It’s understanding what matters most to the other person.

Second, lead with curiosity, not certainty. Some of the most effective people don’t worry about having all the answers, despite the fact that’s what many corporate cultures seem to want to promote. They’re the ones who ask the best questions and then genuinely listen to the answers. They are truly seeking to understand. Curiosity helps immensely with this. It allows you to understand other people, to challenge your assumptions, to uncover things that otherwise you might have missed. The third point is to build your career on your own terms.

Learn from successful people, but don’t assume that you need to be like them. Understand your strengths, develop your own approach, be deliberate about defining your own version of success and what you need in your life. Ultimately, taking ownership of your career means choosing your path rather than simply following someone else’s playbook.If you found this conversation valuable, please subscribe, leave us a review, and share this episode with somebody who’s looking to become a better leader or build a stronger career. You can also sign up for my membership community, PathWise and our newsletter PathWisdom. Thanks for tuning in.

Important Links

• Andy Paul on LinkedIn
• The Win Rate Podcast with Andy Paul
• Sell without Selling Out: A Guide to Success on Your Own Terms
• Keith Ferrazzi
• PathWisdom Newsletter
• PathWise on LinkedIn
• PathWise on X
• PathWise on Facebook
• PathWise on YouTube
• PathWise on Instagram

About Andy Paul

Andy Paul is a sales expert, author, speaker, and podcast host who has spent nearly five decades studying what makes people successful in sales, business, and their careers. He is the author of several books, including Sell Without Selling Out: A Guide to Success on Your Own Terms, and has worked with companies ranging from startups to some of the world’s largest organizations. As a podcast host, Andy has conducted more than 1,300 conversations with leading thinkers in sales and business. His work emphasizes curiosity, listening, generosity, and authenticity—and helping people succeed without sacrificing who they are in the process.