Good evening, happy Thursday. I look like a Tangerine in my licorice allsorts.
Today I want to talk about the power of questions. So, in coaching we ask a lot of questions both in business coaching, life coaching, health coaching, sports coaching, money coaching, everything. Questions, questions, questions, questions; they’re how you get to the bottom of anything really. So actually, here’s a good quote, and Napoleon Bonaparte said, “Why and how was so important that they cannot be used too often” or “too often use” sorry, is Napoleon there. And it’s true, that absolutely, yeah, questions are vital to our progress in life. They’re vital to understanding ourselves. They’re vital to understanding people. They are vital to getting on with life basically.
But what I think we’re suffering from, or I know many people I know are, and myself during certain phases, is we’re asking really shit questions. So you get up in the morning, and I’ve talked about decision fatigue lots of times, and you ask yourself a lot of questions during the day. What am I going to wear? What am I going to eat? [inaudible 00:01:22]. And they really, they do fatigue you. So, more simply you can have those things in your life, the better off you are.
But then we ask ourselves these questions, we go, “Oh, why am I so hopeless, and I sleep in all the time? Why can’t I find anybody to love me? Why am I too dumb to get that job? Why can’t I lose weight? Why is she richer than me?”
Can you hear my tonality? Negative, negative, negative, negative, negative. So, what we’ve got to do is flip, we’ve got to ask the questions, because asking those questions is what gets us to the crux of who we are and what we want. But it doesn’t work if they’re always negative.
So, there’s a big difference in, “Why can’t I find anybody to love me?” As there is to, “How can I find a great partner, or what do I need to do to date more?” Just feels better, like really. And you’re trying to find a solution in the question, rather than negative, negative, negative, blame, blame, victim, victim, failure, failure.
So, flipping questions on their head and learning how to do it is really, really, really important. So… why am I so stuck? Ah, turn it around. Where do I want to be in five years? You know, why am I so pissed off all the time? What am I grateful for?
Some big ones that you can ask yourself, I mean I like to do a list of some questions that you can ask yourself on a deeper kind of moment for self-discovery. But today I just wanted to talk about flipping the questions that you do ask yourself. So, instead of “What am I going to wear?” with this drudgery, “Oh God, I’ve got to decide what I’m going to wear before I leave the house, it’s so hard.” Turn it into, “What will make me feel fabulous today?” Simple.
Why is that person so angry? I wonder what’s going on in their life. I wonder if I could help them. Better energy. “Oh God, why is the news so depressing? What would I be better off reading? What would inspire me?”
Track yourself for 24 hours, 48 hours, a month, a week, whatever, pick an hour. You would be amazed at how many questions you ask yourself every single day. And I promise you, when you know how negative a lot of them are, you’d be like, “Oh my God, no wonder I feel like crap when I get to bed.” Like too much, way too much.
So, just flip them on their head. For every… and I talked about this yesterday for law of physics, let’s get balanced; so for a negative, there’s a positive. So, if you’re saying too many negative things, but sorry, too many negative skills, and so your negative scales are going down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down. You flip it, your positive’s gone, it’s flown off and it’s jumped out of the trampoline, it’s gone. So, what you want to do is more and more and more and more positive, more and more and more and more positive, and flip away the negative.
“Why can’t I eat chocolate? What can I eat that would satisfy my sweet tooth?” It’s not that hard, but it does take practice. Seriously takes a lot of practice to flip those questions around from being negative Nancy, to being Penelope positive. Why I needed to use alliteration there is beyond me.
So, “Why can’t I get another job? What do I need to do to get another job?” See, it’s “What would make me happy?” Well, for starters, you make you happy, nothing externally is going to make you happy, but that’s a whole other Facebook live.
But, “What can I do that’s fun? What can I do that would make me laugh today?” There was so many questions. And we do, especially when we make mistakes, we go straight into hopeless stupids, nothing works, why doesn’t anything work? Blah, blah, blah. Flip it and come up with a solution.
I know in most management books of the planet say things like, someone should only ever come to you with a problem or a question in the workplace if they already have a little bit of an idea for a solution, or they can come up with a solution or a little kind of a guesstimate about how they think the situation could be rectified. You’re the same; if you’re asking yourself questions, the better the questions are, the solution’s sometimes partly in there. And if it’s not in there, it will help you dig out what the solution is to whatever you’re feeling.
So, that’s all I wanted to share with you today is, look at the questions you ask yourself. Take note of again, like I said yesterday, is it if you’re hungry, tired, end of the work day, that you’re getting more and more negative with that kind of questioning. And try and flip it on the head and ask yourself some better questions. Simples. Now I sound like a meerkat. Have a great night.