Questions are never a problem.What counts is the way you answer them.

― Carlos Ghosn,  Shift: Inside Nissan's Historic Revival 

Since our birth till the day we pass, we never cease to receive questions after questions, and even then, in our time alone with our thoughts, those little buggers seem to have the ability to pop up out of nowhere and invade our mind, with bits of anxiety and self-doubt sprinkle on top. Here are my two cents on how I use questions and hopefully it might give you some ideas on how to ask your own.

What do questions do anyway?

In terms of pragmatics (basically the linguistic science of how people talk), questions are wonderful little tools we can use to do a lot of different things (you guys can check out what’s known as The Speech Act Theory, J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 1962 and Kent Bach, Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts, 1979). Here are some notable use:

•  asking for information: What’s your name? - My name is An. - a simple straight-forward request to get information from the listener. (locutionary act)

•  implying that the listener should be doing something: Excuse me, do you have any pens? - instead of replying with a Yes, I do., one should, lend the speaker a pen to fulfill the implied request Can I borrow your pen?(illocutionary act)

•  suggesting or “inspiring” the listener with an idea or implied thoughts that is not visible but mutually understood by both parties in the conversation.

The specifics are too lengthy and out of the scope of this article, and I would like to focus on the third bullet point on the list above - suggesting or implying ideas.

How to use questions effectively

The question determines the answer - from a yes/no question to an open-ended one, the way we use words to phrase the question drastically affect the scope of our thinking.

In my day job as an ESL teacher, there are two processes that are crucial to the success of the lesson - instruction checking and concept checking - depending on the level of the group of students, the questions vary, but at the end of the day they are used to confirm what has been communicated to them and what is still retained after each activity.

How does that have to do with you, my wonderful viewers - by changing the frame of reference of your questions and thoughts, you can actually achieve the goal of looking at problems with different perspectives as well as creating ways to solve the rut that our tiny minds usually get us into.

Instead of the cliche but oh so not effective Do you understand the instructions?, I might go with Tell me guys, what do we do first?…and then?…finally?to let the students rephrase what was told, and also to let me know how well I did in explaining the instructions to them - and this is just one of many examples on how we could use questions to affect others, and it gets even better when the same techniques can be used to affect our own thoughts. We can ask ourselves In what way can I make this better? as an alternative to the statement I have to make this better.It opens up a lot more possibilities and gives us a sense of direction rather than paralyzing us in a state of not knowing what to do next.

What questions really do to your thoughts

This is the part where I will once again cite the experiment where a psychiatrist tells you to think of a random thing in 30seconds, and no matter what you think of, DON’T think of a pink elephant.

How long did you last? Let me guess, there was an image of the very thing I asked you not to think of - the pink elephant - and that very intrusive thought could become an idea that consume the rest of your days whilst you try and suppress it.

A negative thought or question if suppressed would 100% of the time stay in your brain forever, and expand itself into something far worse: an endless cycle of thoughts that feeds upon itself, and before you know it, you would spend the rest of your day being anxious and restless. Therefore, the way to remove it is not to exert dominance over the idea itself, but to direct it into some other forms i.e. rephrasing your question.

Languages have their limitations, as we could only describe what we think using the words we know, and if we didn’t know, we wouldn’t know. However, by shifting the frame of language that we use to express the questions, we could potentially open up our minds to brighter possibilities. Smart questions make problems go away.

Some of my favorite questions

There are countless numbers of good questions that I’ve heard throughout the years and many of them I am perfectly happy to steal for myself, and here are some of them:

https://tim.blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/17-Questions-That-Changed-My-Life.pdf

What would I do/have/be if I had $10 million?

This one is a big one, as we are usually caught up with the rat race where a 40-hour work week is inevitable and the goal is shortened into trying to make ends meet, without considering what’s working and what’s not. I usually ask myself this at the end of each year to see where I am heading with the current work I’m doing and to make necessary changes to the upcoming years.

What’s the worst that could happen?

The question I come back to time and time again whenever I find myself sitting in my own head for too long for comfort. It prevents over-exaggerating the final outcome of the situations and give me the head space to work on what matters and go through the fear of uncertainty.

What are the 3 things you want written on your tombstone?

I came across this one recently from a video by Ali Abdaal on his decision to quit the medical field and I did resonate a lot with the “a good teacher” part. This one really shifted my focus from being too fixated to growing this blog into something monetizable to providing values through my writing as well as my other forms of content.

Problems are always going to go away sooner or later, but the questions that we should be asking ourselves would still remain. The difference is just our answers and the way we look at them. I hope this has been useful thus far and please let me know your favorite questions through an email or a message on the instagram :)