Change Your Questions, Change Your Life

Change Your Questions, Change Your Life will revolutionize your thinking with questions that create a learning mindset.

Thoughts, feelings, and circumstances fill every waking moment of our days and spill over into our dreams. As recovering judgers, our first opportunity for change presents itself when we observe our thoughts and recognize their nature.

Questions like: What am I responsible for? and What are they thinking, feeling, and wanting? steer us toward rational choices, solutions, and win-win relations. In contrast, when we ask Why are they so stupid? or Why bother? we find ourselves stuck in a pit of judgment.

Imagine receiving a call from your teenager who just backed your brand-new SUV into the shopping cart corral at the grocery store. Or, an email from your boss highlighting every benchmark you did not hit over the last quarter. Maybe you received a summons for jury duty, and it’s scheduled for the same week as your much-anticipated vacation. All of those scenarios elicit thoughts and feelings. How should you deal with them?

Will you ask: Why am I so careless? Why am I a failure? Why Bother? Or, instead: What happened? What are my choices? What’s best to do now?

Events, good and bad, flow through our lives like a river. When you mindfully paddle, you master the ability to skirt rocks and find less turbulent waters within the rapids. Asking learner questions keeps you moving forward.

Imagine yourself at a long, rectangular conference table waiting for a meeting to begin. For ten minutes, the woman to your right has been rapid firing opinions about your child’s primary school, which her children previously attended. You endure her complaints about the teachers, the lunch program, and the new math curriculum. She even has an opinion about how the janitor mops the floors. Running through your mind are questions like, How did I get seated here? and Who does she think she is? If you stop to think about it, you are asking yourself judger questions about a judgmental person. Ironic? Two judgers do not lead to possibility. How can you turn the situation around? Feelings of anger and frustration alert your observer to your judger mindset. Now is your opportunity to shift into questions that will keep you out of the judger pit. A Switching Question gives you the freedom to explore options like What does she need? and How else can I think about her? When your observer wakes you up, you can flip the switch to learner mode and turn the conversation around for both of you. Practice asking yourself questions like What assumptions am I making? and How can I be more objective and honest? One Switching Question has…