Quality Questions

Following on from the article I recently posted, 3 Ways to Improve Your Life, I thought I would break down each of the ‘ways’ into 3 separate posts.  This is the first...

Whether you realise it or not, we all have the answers to our own issues/problems/dilemmas within us.  What a skilled coach will do is ask a series of pointed questions in order to pull those answers out of you.  However, we don’t all have coaches on speed dial (although we should!), but we can ask ourselves better more empowering questions that will help us to find a solution to whatever the issue is. 

The quality of the questions we ask ourselves is so important as we have the power to turn our situations from negative to positive and vice versa through our questioning process.  I’ve talked about the Reticular Activator System (RAS) before, but in essence it is that part of the brain that has to go and find the answer to any question that we ask it. 

Here are some disempowering questions that are likely to give a negative response if you ask them of yourself:

• “Why can’t I lose weight” - “Because you’re fat and lazy”

• “Why does this always happen to me?” -  “Because you’re unlucky”

• “Why does nothing ever work out right?” - “Because that’s just how it is”

• “Why doesn’t this stuff happen to other people?” – “Because you’re a failure”

WHATEVER QUESTION WE ASK OF OURSELVES, WE WILL GET AN ANSWER – whether we like the answer or not.  It’s therefore really important that the questions we ask are positive ones eg:

• “What can I do to lose weight?”

• “What can I do about this?”

• “What else can this mean?”

• “What can I learn from this?”

• “How can I use what I’ve learned?”

• “How can I turn this in to an opportunity?”

The second set of questions are much more empowering and as your RAS system HAS to give you a response, it’s likely that you will quickly find a solution or the right path to finding a solution for your problem more easily than asking poor/disempowering questions.

It seems incredibly simplistic, and it is.  Listen to the types of questions your ask yourself (we do it all the time so it won’t be hard), I can guarantee you’ll be surprised as how negative they can be and how disempowering our answers are.

Over the next 3 days or as a difficult situations arise (which they do for all of us from time to time) try asking a different set of questions.  If it helps, write some empowering questions down (the ones above are a good start) and keep them somewhere accessible so that you can start to break your old ‘helpless’ questioning habits and replace them with better ones.

Give it a go, you’ve nothing to lose.

Have fun!

Jo