The biggest “ah ha!” moment I ever had was after I read the book Change Your Questions, Change Your Life by Marilee Adams. The premise of the book focuses on idea that you are in control how have you frame every decision you make by selecting which questions you ask. You can choose learner questions or judging questions.
Learner questions seek to fully understand the situation before reacting to it and include the following:
- What assumptions am I making?
- What are the facts?
- What are they thinking, feeling, and wanting?
- What I am responsible for?
- What are my choices?
Judger questions, on the other hand, seek to assign blame in a situation:
- Whose fault is it?
- What’s wrong with them?
- Why are they so dumb?
- Why should I even bother?
So for example, say you have a colleague that snaps at you in a meeting about a big project. You could choose to judge them and start a course of events that sends you both down a negative path for some time to come OR you could step back and ask yourself why they snapped at you and what other elements may be impacting that action. Then, maybe you’ll see that their boss has been putting a tremendous amount of pressure on them over this project, and that the snapping really had nothing to do with them. This allows you to react to the situation with some perspective.
Dr. Adams illustrates this concept in the Choice Map used in the image of this post. You can download your own complementary copy of the Choice Map on www.inquiryinstitute.com.
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