It started with a phone call.
In 2020, Brian Fretwell got on a call with three friends. No agenda. Just one question: what went well this week, and what was your part in it? They’ve been on that call every week since.
What one question kept doing.
The call has held that group through the death of parents, through professional crises, through the ordinary grinding weight of a life being built. Several of them have said it: at some point, the call helped save their life. Not dramatically — just by being a place where someone asked what was good, and meant it.
During the pandemic, Brian began running the same format with others — people trying to stay connected while working in isolation. The result was consistent. When someone was asked about what they had done well, and someone else listened without trying to fix, advise, or redirect, something changed in both people. The speaker left believing something about themselves they hadn’t believed before. The listener left seeing something in themselves too. Both people grew — every time the practice held.
What Brian noticed on those calls became the framework that is now Finding Good — applied since in leadership development, training curricula, schools, healthcare teams, and sales organizations. The format changed. The mechanism didn’t.
Why it works — in plain terms.
Everything a person needs is already within them — it just needs drawn out. That’s not a philosophy; it’s a testable observation. Independent lines of research explain why it holds.
People underestimate their own influence.
In a series of studies, people underestimated how likely others were to say yes to their direct requests by roughly half — the influence was real, but the person carrying it couldn’t see it. That’s the gap this work lives in: the story is already there. It just hasn’t been drawn out.
Bohns & Flynn, 2013 — underestimating influence over othersSeeing your impact changes what you do next.
In Adam Grant’s field experiments, fundraisers who spent a few minutes with a scholarship student their calls had funded went on to raise dramatically more — in some studies, multiples of their previous numbers. The nuance matters: a leader relaying “your work matters” had no measurable effect. The same message from the person who lived it changed everything.
Grant, 2007–2013 — task significance field experimentsA crowded workplace can still be a lonely one.
Recent research finds that loneliness at work is not the same thing as isolation. People can be surrounded by colleagues all day and still feel unseen — not because no one is there, but because no one has asked about the story of what they actually do and what it means to them.
Portland State University, 2025 — workplace lonelinessThe question is the intervention.
Decades of randomized trials on motivational interviewing show people move when they hear their own reasons in their own voice. Self-perception theory adds that we come to believe what we hear ourselves say; saying-is-believing research shows that telling a story to a real audience shapes the teller’s own memory of it; and listener studies show the way someone attends changes what the story becomes. One question — what went well, and what was your part in it? — sets all four mechanisms running in a single conversation.
Motivational interviewing RCTs · Bem, self-perception · Higgins & Echterhoff, saying-is-believing · Pasupathi, listener effectsBoth people are changed by the telling.
When a story truly lands, brain-imaging research shows the listener’s neural activity begins to track the speaker’s — and a well-told story measurably carries its audience into it. What the weekly call kept showing — that the listener walks away changed too — is consistent with these findings, but the study that formally measures that two-way effect for this practice doesn’t exist yet. The practice data being gathered now is designed to make it possible. We’d rather tell you that plainly than claim it early.
Hasson et al., PNAS 2010 — speaker–listener coupling · Green & Brock, 2000 — narrative transportationHow the method is practiced.
The mechanism is one move — asking toward what’s already there, then listening without fixing — practiced three ways, depending on what’s in front of you. Each door opens with a free tool.
Harness your capability
When someone you work with is struggling, a free tool builds the questions that draw out the capability already in their story — instead of handing them advice.
Open this door One team decisionCreate authentic buy-in
When you need people to move with you, it starts with recognition built from what someone actually did — connection people can feel, not persuasion.
Open this door One organizationBuild capacity
When the whole team needs to grow, the same practice runs across it — so the next challenge meets a stronger team, not another program.
Open this doorThe question has a history.
Before Finding Good, Brian worked in juvenile corrections, mining, and the oil fields — environments where communication failures had serious consequences. In those environments, the cost of not knowing what someone brings to the work isn’t a missed opportunity. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.
That history became a TEDx talk, a book, and years of speaking, training, and coaching. But the work started with a phone call between friends — and it’s still the same question.
None of this is about becoming a better communicator.
It’s about removing what prevents you from being the one you already are.
A conversation to explore the work in your organization — or the case studies, to see the practice in real rooms first.