Posts Tagged ‘answers’

You can’t get the right answers, if you don’t know the right questions

Saturday, May 30th, 2009

I heard this phrase yesterday, and it reminded me that, in much the same way that they say that when the pupil is ready, the right teacher will come, if you are feeling blocked, try asking  different questions.

Many people get stuck on “Why?”  but this seldom takes you very far.  “What can I learn from this?”  is often a much better question. 

We tend to think that we are at the centre of everything that is happening.  I suspect more often we are bit part players in other people’s dramas.  We might ask “How could he do this to me?”  but a better question might be “What is going on in his world?” 

A great question to have in your back pocket is “Who do I know who could help me with this?” 

Rather than jumping to trying to understand what is going on, get pen and paper and make a list of every question you can think of and pay attention to the less obvious ones.  Another tip is to ask “How would XXX handle this?”  and you can pick any number of people who you think might have an interesting or resourceful approach.

“Sometimes questions are more important than answers.”    Nancy Willard

“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.”   Dr. Seuss

 

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Many ways to skin a cat

Tuesday, August 19th, 2008

Having never tried, of course, I wouldn’t know!  Today I was preparing for a business meeting which had the possibility of being a little difficult; it involved bringing together  a number of parties all with different needs and interests.  I had anticipated it foundering on the rocks of some of the ‘demands’ of the participants despite the fact that it appeared to me that there were wins for everyone if agreement was reached. 

I was called by one of the parties and had a meeting with one of the others, when a whole new way of looking  at this opened up and suddenly a rather neat, if somewhat different solution begun to present itself.  Obviously we won’t know till the meeting is held, but it is interesting that sometimes the solutions to our problem pops up in unexpected places, and of course, we can easily miss them if we always look in the same old places.

So if today you are wrestling with a problem, try looking somewhere new for your answers….

“Good questions outrank easy answers.”

“If we can really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem”  Jiddu Krishnamurti

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“I didn’t know I had a choice…”

Tuesday, July 8th, 2008

I heard myself uttering these words last night as I was talking to my wife. We had just had a small job done resiting an unsightly power cable at no cost whatever. We had lived with this eyesore for 15 years and I had no idea that all that was required was a call to the utility company and a little man came around and shifted it. She said to me “That sounds like a good topic for a blog to me“….

The thing is, we go through our lives moving along a well-trodden path, often looking neither left nor right, a bit like rats in a maze that have been well conditioned as to where to find their food. There are so many alternatives out there that we no longer see, even more that are there for the finding if only we thought to ask some simple questions. Questions are mighty powerful things and they can bring all sorts of serendipitous events into our lives. “Seek and ye shall find, ask and ye shall receive”

Today might be a great day to ask a few questions, create some new options, make a new choice….

“Quality questions create a quality life. Successful people ask better questions, and as a result, they get better answers.” Anthony Robbins
“Study a lifetime and you see different colours from the same jewel. The same questions, asked again, being you just the answers you need just the minute you need them.” Richard Bach

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