Ep 241 Asking Questions: The Secret to Building Relationships in Your Career and Beyond
Ready 4 Pushback
Nik Fialka
4.8 • 716 Ratings
🗓️ 1 May 2025
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Nik Fialka is back and shares a powerful reflection from a recent trip with a fellow pilot—one where the conversation never turned into a true connection. The key takeaway? Asking questions matters. Whether you're chatting with a recruiter, networking at an event, or riding the airport bus, showing interest in others is how real relationships begin. Nik dives into the value of humility, connection, and turning one-way conversations into meaningful two-way streets. If you want to stand out, build authentic relationships, and create unexpected opportunities, it starts with curiosity. It starts with asking.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
The importance of asking questions
Why being curious makes you memorable
How to build genuine relationships in aviation and beyond
What happens when we shift from self-centered to other-centered
Simple ways to practice asking questions
Why even “small” connections (like with a grocery clerk or bus driver) matter
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, pilot, welcome back to Ready for Pushback. I'm Nick Fialca. It's an amazing day. It's a little |
| 0:09.5 | motivation Thursday, and it's time to get down to it. Most pilots don't understand what career |
| 0:18.3 | opportunities are available in the world of aviation. |
| 0:22.0 | They're making career decisions based on advice from friends or posts on internet forums, |
| 0:27.7 | meaning they are taking huge risks with their livelihood without having all the details. |
| 0:32.9 | This podcast was created to help you understand the aviation industry so you can find your dream job. |
| 0:39.8 | Let's get ready for pushback. Here's your host and my dad, Nick Fialca. |
| 0:46.2 | Recently, I had a three-day flight with a person. I really enjoy meeting all the people that I get to meet. Everybody's different. |
| 0:55.6 | Everybody's from a different walk of life. They've got different perspectives. Lots of cool stuff. |
| 1:00.6 | This person that I flew with was very nice. And for three days straight, that person talked at me. |
| 1:10.1 | They told me their whole background. They told me everything they've |
| 1:14.0 | ever thought about. They told me how they started flying. They told me about their family. They |
| 1:22.5 | told me about everything. I asked questions. I asked all the questions, all of them. Every question |
| 1:32.4 | I could think to ask, I asked questions. And he talked at me for three days straight. Not once, |
| 1:39.8 | not during flying, not during lunch or dinner or whatever. Three days straight, not one question |
| 1:47.7 | came from that person directed toward me. So we spent three days together. I found out everything |
| 1:55.1 | about that person, but that person found out nothing about me. I don't, like, I don't need that person to ask me the questions. |
| 2:03.0 | I don't. |
| 2:03.8 | But it really made me start thinking about all of us and how important it is to ask those questions |
| 2:13.9 | and to exclude yourself and to look away, stop being self-centered and start |
| 2:22.8 | centering yourself on somebody else. Because at the end of that trip, he felt great. |
| 2:29.1 | Because I asked all the questions. At the end of that trip, he had no idea who I was. Not that I'm somebody |
... |
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