Ask better questions

If we would have new knowledge, we must get us a whole new world of questions.

Susanne K. Langer

I started reading “change your questions, change your life” by Marilee Adams, and yes, it is all lowercase. I have yet to get far enough to have much of an opinion. Still, the title got me thinking about the quality of the questions I am asking myself.

We are an answer-driven society. But the answers depend on the questions, and maybe we don’t spend the time we should thinking about our questions. I, in the past, tended to ask unkind questions of myself. “What’s wrong with me?” or “how do I do everything I need to do?”. I think better questions would have been “how can I improve?” and “what really deserves my focus?’. The answers to the first two questions were “lots, let me make a list.”, and “I can’t, and I am going to fail.” The second set of questions seems more growth-minded and less limiting.

Are you asking good questions? If not, how can you upgrade them?