What an exciting confluence of holidays for personal reflection! During the Thanksgiving season, our focus was on reflections of gratitude. For the Christmas/Hanukah/winter holiday season, our focus moves to planning, purchasing, and creating gifts for others. For the New Year, our focus is two-fold—reflecting on prior successes and new learning and a forward look at creating our next phase in our lives. All are times of increased social interaction with those we see frequently and those we see infrequently.

Edward Schein, author of Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling, and emeritus professor of management at MIT, has diagnosed two things he believes are missing from most conversations: “Curiosity, and a willingness to ask questions to which we don’t already know the answer,” he writes.

Insincere acts of inquiry are always detectable, according to Schein. “Humble Inquiry maximizes my curiosity and interest in the other person and minimizes bias and preconceptions about the other person,” writes Schein. “I want to access my ignorance and ask for information in the least biased and threatening way.”

Schein invites us to recognize how much we have to learn and practice and how many impulses to “tell” (rather than ask) that we will need to repress to make room for humble inquiry to filter in.

As you interact with colleagues, family and friends during the often-hectic season that at its best is full of love, learning, laughter and curiosity, how will you intentionally and humbly focus on those with whom you interact? How will you ask questions of others in the least biased and threatening way? How will you be curious instead of being judgmental about the opinions of others? How will the act of humble inquiry add value to your conversations during this time and throughout the year?

And as you make changes, Schein warns, expect friends and colleagues to be a bit bewildered by your new behavior.