This podcast episode features a key tool in the Self Development toolbox - Questions. Questions allow you to take control and give guidance on where you are going to end up. Better Questions, bigger questions generate better thinking.  That thinking leads to better results and bigger outcomes.  Choose to be the one asking the questions and choose which questions are asked.

Welcome to this episode on Questions. This is a little bit bigger, as usual, than I thought it was going to be. I'll give you a clue. When I asked Stephen for the definition of a Question, he said, It is to elicit a challenge or to inspire a response.  Immediately that helped me to move into a higher gear. We get taught at a young age, we see it in the classroom and we see it in our careers that the person who's asking the Question is controlling the conversation, is controlling the room. So don't you want to be the one asking the Questions? To the room and to yourself. So there is that element of control.

Also this idea that Questions determine the thinking, which determines the results. So if you're not getting the results you want, dont question the thinking. Go back to your original Question. And this also takes us on to the idea that the bigger Question, gets you bigger results, bigger outcomes, more powerful. The basic idea to first of all, be aware of this, and how can you do this better? How can you manage this? And how can you use this to your benefit? How can you help this knowledge of how questions can work and their impact, they can have, how can you use this and turn it to your advantage? We spend a lot of time on this. Stephen goes through lots of different examples of questions, type of questions you can ask. And the sort of impact they can have.

Questions are at the heart of so many of the different conversations we've had and so you'll see so many things that we touched on before coming back. I've genuinely had this one resonating my head ever since we did it. I hope you enjoy this one too. Any thoughts or questions, please get in contact podcast@coachpro.online. Check out the CoachPro.online website. Loads of information on there. Please take a look at that.

Full transcript on https://rhinoconsulting.nl/podcast-entries/betterquestions

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Below an excerpt from the transcript:

So today, as always, is a great topic: Questions. Now Questions is something we talked about pretty regularly, it came up a lot in the solution focused one, we spoke a lot about it there. And even in our tagline is we talk about the importance of questions. So this one's probably way overdue. So as always, let's get started. You always make the subject a lot more interesting than it sounds when we start. If we say to people, we're going to talk about questions, people aren't going to understand how deep and wide and important this is going to be. So let's start with the first question. What is a question? Lets start there. What is a question? What's the definition of a question, Stephen?

Stephen Gribben  04:34

Technically a question is a method to elicit challenge or inspire a response.

Warren Hammond  04:42

elicit a challenge or inspire a response. Okay. So you've already made it bigger. Just not just to get an answer. It's to elicit a challenge or inspire a response. Okay.

Stephen Gribben  04:56

It could be to get an answer, but it's a powerful method to elicit challenge or to inspire a response. So it's a method of communication. It's a strategy of influence. It's a demonstration of your value. And it can be a catalyst for greater impact and outcomes. So a question is to get an answer. But it can be used to communicate, to influence to demonstrate, and also to make things happen.

Warren Hammond  05:27

But even just using words like challenge and inspire in the definition, this is a weapon. This is a useful tool. And I don't think of questions as necessarily always being a part of my armory. But I should be.

Stephen Gribben  05:44

Questions are one of the most important things to have, to connect and to have impact, is having the questions.  You will have more influence from the questions you ask, than the answers that you give. One of the most important things about questions is that long after the answer has become redundant or irrelevant. The question is still standing. The answer may change. But really good questions stand the test of time, even though the answer to that same question in a year's time may be different.

Warren Hammond  06:20

That makes sense. So we talked about in these difficult times, for example, as a leader, what your team want to hear is that you're asking the right questions, even if the answers aren't available yet, or as you said, things will change. How people get confidence is knowing that you're asking the right questions. So as always, now I start to understand that I should be taking my questions more seriously, or how I use questions more seriously. Where do I start in building out my awareness of my questioning technique? Or is it about how many questions I ask? Or is it how I ask the questions or to whom I ask the questions? What's the first things I should be thinking about when it comes to my questioning approach?

Stephen Gribben  07:07

Well, the first thing is, once you're starting to understand the value, and the potential of having the questions, and it's one of the most common requests that I get is, can you just write down all those questions and give me them? And I have done that a couple of times, but finding your own questions is the most effective way of doing this. But there's the why you're asking this, the types of questions you're going to ask, there's the when to ask, there's the whom to ask. There's a whole number of areas and aspects of questioning that will determine how effective it is, and we're going to cover them all. So we're going to look at why questions are so important. And then we're going to look at the different types of questions to ask, we're going to look at how you're best to ask them. And then so we are fulfilling that popular request is we're going to give you some good questions at the end of this, in particular categories, that are going to help experience the value of those questions.

Warren Hammond  08:02

That's great. It's good. We're getting the list at the end as well. But I think as we go through this, it's just understanding that questions can take you into so many important places, isn't it? This is what you've explained and taught me before, is about this importance of better questions. But as you said, it isn't just the question itself is, when you're asking it, how you're asking it to whom you're asking it, because there's a lot of different things isn't it isn't just going to be, as you said, rattling off your list is understanding the importance of a questioning strategy. Okay, so what are the important things that I need to be thinking about when I'm asking questions? Where do I start? What's my starting point,

Stephen Gribben  08:43

Important to be first of all motivated to ask questions and so understanding the reasons why you ask questions, and particularly now,  why you need to be more aware and more conscious of the questions that you're asking not just to yourselves. But the questions you're then asking others. Questions are hugely, hugely powerful. And they can have a massive impact, positively or negatively. And so it's really important.  You and I are big exponents of self development, about taking ownership of your growth and fulfilling your own potential. So being more consciously aware of the quality of questions that you're asking. There's a fundamental to that, that you're asking positive questions. Otherwise, you can start asking negative questions, or questions that are neither positive or negative, and just get you to stand still. And this isn't about saying they're right or wrong. It's about being more conscious of making a choice. Am I asking the question I really need to be asking at this stage.

Warren Hammond  09:49

And this is asking yourself is pretty much what you're starting with here. And this is really powerful. So we talked a little bit about this in Affirmations, about the importance of those powerful statements to yourself to help, not drown out, but at least balance out all of the noise around you.

Stephen Gribben  10:07

Yeah, well taking ownership is really important Warren and it starts with you. You will never ask better questions of other people with any credibility than you're asking of yourself. So that personal leadership of you going first. If you're not asking great questions of yourself, you'll not know the great questions to go and ask other people. So it starts with you. And we are all the sum and substance of the question that we ask. And we've touched on this in a number of the sessions is that the quality of the question you ask, is the cause of the quality of thinking that you then have, which then we'll culminate in the quality of the result you produce. So the question is the cause the thinking is the symptom, the result is the consequence. So big questions, you'll have bigger thoughts, you'll have bigger outcomes; smaller questions, smaller thinking, smaller outcomes.

Warren Hammond  11:06

This is great. I love the idea of practicing on yourself as well. I mean, one, because then practice asking yourself bigger questions, and you'll get bigger results. But yeah, of course, you should start with you that makes total sense, doesn't it? Starting with you?

Stephen Gribben  11:22

Even more so now Warren because if you're not asking the question, then who's questions are you listening to? And we are consistently bombarded with other people telling us the questions that we should be asking. And the person who's asking the questions is the person who is in control. So if you're not asking yourself questions, then who's controlling your thinking and your results? So it's about taking ownership and being aware that the question you ask is what's driving your thinking and leading to the result. If you want the result to change, rather than criticising or beating yourself up for the quality of thinking, go to the cause which was the quality of the question, you want a better result? Ask a better question, the thinking will follow.

Warren Hammond  12:12

This is good, isn't it? Because when I was thinking of questioning, I wasn't thinking of the internal questioning as well and so it's good to get that straight out. This is your starting point. Get used to asking better questions to get better results for yourself, which feeds into the purpose, their habits, their confidence, self confidence, so many of these things. Being able to ask yourself, the right questions, is a key tool in this sort of toolbox that you refer to regularly. This is important.

Stephen Gribben  12:44

However, like everybody else, and particularly if you're doing something you run as a business, the first time I sit down with some really important people. And for me, everybody I sit down with is really important. My emotions can kick in.  I'm from a broken home from Linwood just outside Glasgow, and I'm sitting in the 72nd floor of a high rise with some global CEO in New York, and I'm selling the thinking, I'm from a broken home and wondered, What am I doing here? That question comes in, what am I doing here? Now, if I gather myself together, my question might not necessarily be how can I help this person? My emotions come in and the question could be, how do I impress this person? How can I justify myself to this person? How can I show this person that I'm good at what I do? How can I win some work? Those questions now they're all kind of positive questions. And then global CEO might not notice the difference. But I know it's slightly off, and I can tell that it's slightly off because if the question I'm asking is how can I help this person I'll really listen. But if the question my emotions are asking is how can I impress this person? I tend to jump in too quickly. I tend to give too many answers, end up saying too much, because I'm trying to impress. Now the result is I might have impressed them, but not necessarily have helped them. And so having that conscious awareness of your question means that you can move to the questions that work best for you to get your best thinking, and therefore your best result. But what I've got to do is try and grab on to that core success question. Before I step into the room before going to the call, before I stand on a stage before I sit down across from somebody, otherwise, my emotions can sometimes choose other questions, which aren't quite as optimal And its having that conscious awareness. Otherwise, you get the situation where all your emotions are determining the question. So as an example, I've been doing one to one, group and team sessions and conference sessions. for 23 years, it's always live TV, You don't always know what you're going into. And I've got a belief that we've all got within us a 'Core Success Question'. So there's a question, we start from there, we tend to have the best quality thinking and produce the best available result. You tend to discover that most when you're going through a real crisis or trauma situation, where all the kind of preferential questions go away and you get to the core question. So my core question in the work I do is, how can I help this person? And I know if I'm connected to that question, how can I help this person? My thinking becomes a bit like Google search, and it starts connecting with things. And the result, is I'll have been of help. Because the results been designed by the question.  The QTR that you talked about before with the question, the thinking and the result. If your thinking is not right, it's deal with your question first. You're saying I wasn't connected to my normal core question, which is why my thinking was off, which is why the result wasn't there. And I love that idea, again, of you being the one asking the question to yourself, not somebody else asking it, because we see it in all the TV detective movies, it's the person asking the question, who's controlling the room? And you see people try and deflect questions and ask the questions themselves. And then that guy says, Hey, I'm the one who asked the questions, not you. And you're right, the moment that person is asking the questions, they're in control. So in terms of yourself, why wouldn't you want to be that person who's asking that question? And then secondly, as you said, why wouldn't you ask yourself the best possible question you could ask yourself to get the best possible thinking? Yeah, and look I've been coaching for a long time, as you know, and two of the fundamental things that was told to you at the beginning was, as a coach, you're not supposed to ask why. (I was always kind of confused by that). Never stuck to that rule, by the way. But I was told you're not supposed to ask why. And the second thing was you never give an answer. And so if someone asks you a question, you answer it with a question. And I get the gist of that. But if you're asking the question of yourself, and if that question is, in my instance, how to help this person, if just giving them a question back isnt helpful, I'll give them an answer that is because what I'm there to do is to help the person, not just stick to a process.

Warren Hammond  17:38

This isn't how do I stick to the coaching protocol? It's how do I help this person? I like that.

Stephen Gribben  17:44

That's a bigger question. So when you first start out on these things, which, it's about learning to drive or learning to do anything, your question is how to make sure I don't get this wrong. And sometimes you're just so focused on not getting it wrong, you never get it right. But as you start to progress and ask better questions, then you'll get better thinking, you'll get better results. And my job, in its simplest form, is to invite people to ask better questions than they currently asking. Not to jump to the ultimate question, but to give them a handrail of what the next best question might be. Because I can normally tell when you look at the results someone's producing, you can take a really good guess at the question that they currently asking.

Warren Hammond  18:29

I mean, why is it then that we don't ask questions? What you've just said, as always with these things which is why it's so powerful, when it's put in front of your face of course that makes total sense. We should all be doing that. But why don't we then automatically, when we think about questions, think about the questions we're asking ourselves. I was thinking immediately about the quality of questions I asked in my family setup, with colleagues and with people I work with. But what is it that stops us thinking more about the questions we ask ourselves. Why isn't this part of our normal set, get up? Or is not part of mine?

Stephen Gribben  19:09

Well, asking questions is a logical and obvious thing to be doing until your emotions get in the way. And then your emotions create barriers to asking questions. And the emotions are all wrapped around the answer. So the main reasons why we don't ask questions. We don't ask questions, because we don't know what the answer is. Or we don't ask questions because we think we know what the answer might be but we don't like it. We don't ask the question because we think everybody else already knows the answer and so it's going to look kind of stupid to ask a question. We don't think the other person has an answer. So we don't want them to feel foolish by not having an answer. So we don't ask the question. We don't ask the question because we don't want to let people know that we don't know the answer. And we don't ask the question, because we're still working off the answer that we've always had.

Warren Hammond  20:06

We think we've already got the answer, you mean, so we don't need to ask again. Okay?

Stephen Gribben  20:13

And questions are a great way to communicate and connect. So 23 years worth of traveling all over. And, Tracey and I have been married for all those years. And we could be literally at opposite ends of the planet. But be connected, because we send a text or make a phone call, or we go on a zoom or FaceTime. And we say 'how are things?' Now, to be absolutely honest, neither of us really want to know how things are because we the opposite ends of the earth, there's nothing we can really do about it. But what we're wanting to do is to connect. Yet there are times when the two of us can be sitting on the same sofa. And Tracy will be sitting there thinking, do I ask him that question? And she'll think, no, because he's gonna say yes. And I'm sitting at the opposite end of that sofa, saying, I'm not going to ask because I know she's gonna say no. So we all know the answer to get in the way of that connection. Because asking questions, is not because of the answer. Asking questions. The value of asking the question is what you communicate by asking. If anybody can remember the kind of first date they went on. And if it was a good date, they asked each other a lot of questions. But if it was one of those dates, where neither was asking each other questions, they knew this wasn't  going to go far.

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