The Power Of Questions In Shaping Your Life

What am I?

Who am I?

Where am I?

What have I done?

What have I achieved?

What do I have?

Why don't you do yourself a favour - grab a piece of paper and a pencil, write those questions down and begin thinking about the answers. Or you can just fire up notePad or a word processing program of your choice and type these questions out.

Relax. Don't take this as some tedious "homework" or exercise. See it as a fun exploration in getting to know the most complex, fascinating and mysterious creature you've ever known.

You.

Written those questions down already? Answered them already? It helps if you write your answers down as well.

Don't worry about writing grammatically perfect English (or whatever is your language of choice) sentences. But do try to be as specific as possible.

If the answer to your question of "What have I achieved?" is "Nothing", think about why you just said that.

What do you exactly mean by nothing? Do you mean you've achieved nothing which you think is worth mentioning? Or are you just being excessively modest?

Be specific. Think of some very concrete, tangible answers to those questions, focused around the 6 dimensions I mentioned above.

Next, as you take a look at the piece of paper or the notePad window (or whatever), think about how you've arrived at the situation you are in, right now.

Think about the specific decisions, actions, choices you made and the events that lead you to who and what you are right now. Surely the things that you have, do or be right now is a product of a set of important decisions you have made in life.

Even if it's a coincidence, an act of God, a stroke of luck or a serendipity, you do involve some decision-making into it (like whether or not to follow on it when the opportunity presents itself).

Be very honest with yourself. Write down your findings for this as well.

Done that? Now pick just one of those crucial 'decision moments' you've written down. Pick the one which you think is the most significant in your life.

Now take a fresh sheet of paper, or open up a new notePad window, and write down a headline for that crucial decision moment you've just picked. Below this headline, write a brief description of what happened when you made that decision.

Close your eyes for a while and recall that moment of decision-making. Relive it in as much detail as possible in your mind.

Now ask yourself what is going on in your mind as you make your decision. Just an instant, a split second, before you come to your conclusion, what is it that happens in your mind that lead you to your decision?

Do you find that, if you could really go back into it, you are asking yourself questions, consciously or not, about the effects of each option you have, about what action to take, etc?

Every time you think, every time you analyse, every time you want to make a decision, you ask yourself some questions.

Questions are the key to the door that will lead you to your answers - whether they're right or not. Now do you see the power questions can hold over the shaping of our lives?

If the present condition of your life right now is determined by the decisions (and follow-up actions) you made in the past, and the decisions you made were determined by the quality of your thinking before making each decision, then the quality of your thinking is determined by the quality of the questions you asked yourself.

To live an effective life, you need effective decisions.

To make each effective decision, you need effective thinking.

To do some effective thinking, you need effective questions.

Now do you see the power of questions in shaping your life?

Think about it for today.