Questions: Thought and Behaviour Directors

Questions are everywhere, and they are important!

Your life is the answer to a virtual question that you pose to the life you live in. Marilee Adams, in her book challenges “Change Your Questions, Change your Life.” Natural science gives “validated” (e.g. statistical) answers to questions asked by experts. But natural science is itself subject to change as scientific paradigms shift. Paradigms get replaced when they stop giving acceptable answers to new or different questions (one dramatic example is the birth and popularity of quantum physics; and dip into epi-genetics to get a big smile of familiarity: “I am more than my genes, even though they determine the colour of my eyes”).

Questions determine what content your mind goes in search of. At a neurological level a question works like Prof Google on your behalf: it goes after what you want to know without getting side tracked to what you don’t want to know. It is amazing how fast your mind delivers the answer if you know it. It is also not uncommon that some of the answers are pre-verbal: what is beautiful about a sunset? “ One of the most famous questions: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” strikes a balance between what can be said, and what are not clothed in words yet.

There are questions that bring information to the forefront of the mind, information that is powerful enough to shape and craft behaviour but is outside the person’s awareness. One such example is the function of values. Values are the internal permissions we give ourselves to do or not to do, and how to do it. For this particular cognitive function, “value” can be used as a synonym for standard, or criterion. Values are constantly expressed as preferences or distinctions. Values are everywhere. As a thinking function it operates at all levels of concrete to abstract: from preference in taste, to what I am prepared to sacrifice my life for. Some typical questions through which you can hear answers about values are

• What is important to you in/when …?
• What do you pay attention to when …?
• What is significant to you about …?
• What matters to you when …?

How we live, what we strive for, that we would like to achieve in our life is like answering a question. These questions are typically what I need to get: satisfaction, confirmation, love, recognition, affirmation, love, and respect. Needing to get, and how the question is framed, draws attention to the world (outside of me) where it should be coming from. For a long time in our lives we are trying to answer this “get” question in all its forms. As we mature, we might get to a place where more and more frequently we ask about giving. The question about giving that is different during the process of inner development, is asking “how do I give appropriately, but unconditionally, in that moment when I do give?” It is giving to give away, without the tag “what’s in it for me?” Etsko Schuitema said during one of his Personal Excellence programs: “when I am focused on taking, the moment defines me. When I am focused on giving, I define the moment.” To the extent that I need from the world “to put into my private world” as it were, I am dependent on the givers in the world. Who gives, what they give and when they give does not have to be aligned to what I need, when and how I need it. The nature of the question I pose to the world and others, in it I allow the world power over me. Now the world is not just the place I function in, it becomes a fickle source of answers to my question about what I need to get.

Marilee Adams, in her book, “Change your question, Change your life”, (see her choice map at www.InquiryInstitute.com) states how in every moment we have the choice, through our questions, to learn and develop and be more growing, or to get ourselves stuck with judger questions. Judger questions would include “what’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with them?” Having concluded your badness or weakness, or their badness or weakness, you are at a starting point in the “judger pit,” now for the long haul to convince “them” to give so that you can get.

Last word: questions set the frames within which we operate. Questions set the boundaries of the world we occupy. We may occupy a small world filled with loss and fear, or we could be aware of potential and growth. My wish for the reader: I wish you wisdom in designing your questions.