Asking the Right Questions
Updated: Aug 6
Foreword:
It is said that questions lead to the answers, but how true is that really? I mean, when we ask the right questions, don't the questions themselves then become the answer?
After giving it some deep thought, it occurred to me that when it comes down to it, questions don’t lead to answers — questions are the answer.
Let me explain.
I have encountered my fair share of people asking the wrong questions and then griping about why they always hit a brick wall.
And after some time, I grew sick and weary of it. I just could handle it no more. So I decided to analyse and delve into why.
Why do we so persistently keep asking the wrong questions? And is there some deeper underlying mental mechanism whereby we function that prevents us from asking the right questions?
Upon perusing my psychology textbook from Cambridge, and having researched and scoured the internet for answers, I realized that there is indeed more than one factor or reason behind such behavioural phenomena.
The Sunken Cost Bias: When group members remain committed to a plan because some investment of time or money has already been made, even though this plan may now be obviously flawed. It’s the example of asking “How can we make this work at all costs?” instead of pausing and assessing if continuing the same path is even still worth it;
The Einstellung Effect: When the first idea that comes to mind, triggered by familiar features of a problem, prevents a better solution from being found. “Which familiar solution should we use?” may prevent someone from asking “What solution would we consider if we had never encountered this problem before?”;
The Irrational Primacy Effect: Greater reliance on information encountered early in a series;
The Fluency Heuristic: Tendency to think something is true just because it is familiar;
All seem to contribute to our faulty cognitive decision-making processes that, in the end, tunnel our vision, limit our minds, inhibit insightful thinking, and consequently, keep us away from our true potential.
No wonder a lot of people seem to be lost and confused what to do next, but they’re just simply unaware they’re asking the wrong questions.
When confronted with a challenge, faced with an dilemma or even when we stumble upon an opportunity, we often instinctively think about it in a certain way that is not truly relevant or connected to our end goals or is mostly predicated upon emotional grounds.
This is where emotional intelligence comes in handy. When we learn to observe our emotions, we enable ourselves to be self-aware and cognizant of any biases we may hold. Thus, the trick lies not in making the decisions but in reflecting on how they were made; it's not about finding the answer, but rather about figuring out what type of questions will get us to the answers we need.
If we are to have clarity about the future and how we should proceed in life, perhaps we should first start by looking for the right questions to ask instead of directly looking for the right answers. At the end of the day, there is rarely one singular correct answer to a given real life problem; things often boil down to understanding what we’re trying to achieve, what it takes to get there, and what is the most efficient and effective way to do so given the circumstances, constraints and priorities that we’ve set for ourselves.
We have to remember that we can’t be what we can’t envision; we can’t fight what we can’t see; we can’t address what we don’t acknowledge; and we can’t influence or change what we don’t understand.
To achieve anything, we ought to first understand what it truly is; what does it look like when it's done? What does it feel like? What does it take?
There’s a saying I once heard, “You’ll never get where you want to go if you can’t describe where it is.”
If we begin to ask ourselves questions such as “What is it that we are hoping to achieve, and how do we get there given our current constrictions or circumstances?" we then open the intellectual and conceptual doors inside our minds to a place where we can reflect on what truly matters: why we're doing what we're doing, and why do we want to continue doing it moving forward? There are often buried subconscious reasoning, assumptions and motives that are unbeknownst to us which can be dredged up only when we dig deep into ourselves through the habit of continually asking questions.
And even when two answers seem to be in direct contradiction with one another, we can remember that they still might be simultaneously correct.
Ram Dass, a spiritual mentor and sage, once taught us,
“Across planes of consciousness, we have to live with the paradox that opposite things can be simultaneously true.”
And I couldn’t have put it any better than this.
When we know which questions to ask and how to ask those questions, we are better equipped to dig deep into the underlying biases, motives and subconscious reasoning lingering deep within our psyche. Only then can we discover the real and relevant answers that, once found, seem intuitively obvious.
Original Entry Date: 5/30/2023
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