Powerful Questions

I wake up amid the usual swirl of thoughts and wonderings. Lying in bed, I scan the contents of my mind to see what was alive. What territory am I in this morning? Everything is gray and fuzzy. I wonder what I will write about? Nothing especially calls to me.   But regardless I circle my wrists and wave my arms in the dark as if I were trying to stir up the stagnant energy pressing down on my chest. With an internal sigh, I get out of bed, pee, put on some clothes and head for the porch.

Even though I have been writing and posting almost daily for five months, I still don’t know how I do it. I am grateful for this. If it was up to me, if I had to figure out what to write about each morning, I’d be in trouble. I suppose it’s a little like walking, if you had to ‘know’ how to walk, you wouldn’t be able to take a step.

The part I appear to be responsible for is to getting out of bed, sitting down with my laptop and starting. Just get one sentence written, then see where it goes. I’m reminded of an exercise I used to do when I taught life coaching. It was an exercise about curiosity and powerful questions.

Curiosity is one of the primary skills for coaches like me. Rather than trying to fix things or give good advice, the skill is to be curious about what is going on. (This is actually much more fun than trying to fix people.) So we’d talk about curiosity—what it is and how it functions. Often participants would bring up words like wonder, appreciation and not-knowing. The image of young children often surfaced as well. I often mentioned that Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot, a former professor of education at Harvard once wrote that curiosity is one of the most sincere forms of respect. Rather than assuming that I know who you are and what you mean, I get curious.

In the workshops, we would then talk about different kinds of questions. There are informational questions, leading questions, rhetorical questions, ‘look at me’ questions and many more. There are also powerful questions. Powerful questions are short, open-ended and evocative. They invite the person you are asking into some deeper place.

We would explore powerful questions by me making a statement and them asking me several powerful questions related to what I just said. I would answer one of the questions, then pause to let them come up with more powerful questions, then answer that…and etc.

I might say: I have a practice of writing every morning.

Then someone would say: Why do you write every morning? And I would explain that why is rarely a helpful word because it takes people up into their head and invites a certain defensiveness. A more invitational way to ask this question is: What leads you to write every morning?   Someone would say How long have you been doing this? and I would say That’s an informational question. A more powerful question might be What led you to start this practice? Then other questions would come: What have you learned from your practice of writing? What is it like when you are writing?

And I might choose to answer the last question and say: It’s early morning, before the day starts. It’s quiet and I feel like a scribe trying to accurately present some aliveness of the moment of my experience.

They might go on: What’s it like for you before everything starts? What do you notice about being the scribe for aliveness? What do you enjoy most about the process? How does your writing process relate to the rest of your life?

Anyway, you see how one thing leads to another when you’re curious. I would then put them in pairs and have them practice powerful questions on each other. One person makes a simple statement and the other person asks a short, open-ended and evocative question. Person number one briefly responds, then pauses. Person number two asks another question. We go on for five minutes.

These conversations would invariably be wondrous both for the questioner and for the person being questioned. I came to realize there were three essential ingredients in this exercise. First is the agreement of both parties and a willingness to have a different kind of conversation. Powerful questions are intrusive and socially inappropriate without some kind of permission, tacit or otherwise, that is given. (e.g. do not try this on your partner without first getting their agreement)

Second, pausing is necessary. If the first person goes on too long, the second person doesn’t get to practice. Saying just a little bit, the first person stops and in that stopping there is a pivot point. Some juncture appears that allows curiosity to enter. The stream of what we already know is interrupted and unseen possibilities can appear.

Third, the asker needs to consciously touch a place of curiosity, of genuine interest. Powerful questions come when we let go of what we already know and begin to wonder about what we don’t know. We’re invited to constantly let go of our opinion and where we think things should be going to follow the aliveness of where they are actually going.

So curiosity is part of what allows something new and interesting to emerge. I have an aversion to writing about what I already know—even if it’s true, it’s kind of boring. So I continue to pursue what it is that I don’t yet know—continue to trust that if I pay attention and follow, the path will appear under my feet.