Real Women Ask Empowering Questions
In today’s rapidly changing environment, the ability to ask better questions is imperative for individuals, teams, and leaders. As more women step into leadership roles and learn to negotiate power dynamics, the ability to manage complexity, sort through rapid-fire information, and quickly reach rational decisions are highly valuable skills.
Empowering questions are the secret sauce to these skills with the potential to diffuse hostility, work towards cooperative agreements, and build productive teams.
Research at Harvard shows:
“Questions and thoughtful answers foster smoother and more-effective interactions, they strengthen rapport and trust, and lead groups toward discovery.”
How Do We Ask Empowering Questions?
Personally, I am a seeker. I find human behavior fascinating, particularly my own. I am endlessly curious about why we behave in the ways that we do. Once a friend asked me if I had read a certain fiction book that was popular at the time. “No,” I replied, “I haven’t made it out of the self-help section.”
For years, I felt like there was something wrong with me. A piece of the puzzle that was missing. If I could unearth that one missing piece, it would unlock everything. I would be complete, whole, accomplished, happy, and successful.
I even had a recurring dream where I would discover exactly what “it” was I needed to know. While still in the dream, I would promise myself that I would remember. Only to wake up, remembering that I had discovered “it” but unable to remember what “it” was. It was incredibly frustrating.
In my quest to find the missing piece, I read a lot of books. There are select books that I view as seminal guideposts in my life that changed my view of the world and myself. Change Your Questions, Change Your Life is one of those books.
It helped me to see that there were better questions I could be asking myself. It also came with a graphic. This one sheet of paper changed the way I viewed reality. It helped me to see that I always had a choice, and even if I started off down the wrong path, I could always course correct.
It’s called the Choice Map. It showed me that the questions I asked myself determined my state of mind. Questions that produced anxiety include:
What’s wrong with me?
What’s wrong with them?
Who’s fault is it?
But different questions created possibility, optimism, and empowered me:
What am I assuming?
Do I have all the facts?
What is the opportunity here?
How can I see this with fresh eyes?
What are my goals?
Asking the right questions was the missing piece I had been searching for. By changing the questions I asked myself, I could recognize when I was in victim thinking. I started to realize that maybe I wasn’t as powerless as I had thought.
I began to question my belief there was something “wrong” with me and ask instead, “Where did that belief come from?” Slowly, I came to see my beliefs as the problem, not me.
A belief is simply a thought we think over and over again. I learned to questions my beliefs and assumptions. In doing so, I freed myself from the tyranny of victimhood.
I still catch myself in victim thinking, but I am able to spot it and move off it quickly before it is able to gain momentum and debilitate me.
Resources for Better Questions
The Right Question Institute has spent over twenty-five years designing strategies and teaching organizations and individuals how to ask questions in order to become powerful advocates and allies in key decisions that affect our lives. They offer easy to use free resources and instructions.
The Book of Beautiful Questions by Warren Berger is filled with empowering questions and includes a chapter, “Questions For Stronger Leadership.” Beautiful questions leaders can ask include:
Help me to understand, what led to…?
What is the one thing I can do that would make everything else easier or unnecessary?
Am I willing to step back in order to help others move forward?
Why do I want to lead this endeavor?
The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Lead More & Change the Way You Lead Forever by Michael Bungay Stanier is an easy read on how to change your behavior as a leader from advice-giving to question-asking. He boils it down to Seven Essential Questions:
What’s on your mind?
And what else?
What’s the real challenge for you?
What do you want?
How can I help?
If you’re saying Yes to this, what are you saying No to?
What was most useful for you?
Whether you want to be a better leader, build rapport with others, or advocate for change, learning to ask empowering questions is the first step. Empowering questions free our minds to work on solutions rather than ruminate on the problem itself. Empowering questions offer hope, possibility, and right-action.
Empowering questions are liberating questions.