Wise Questions

The idea is not to find out what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’.  The idea is to find out the path to decision making.  How can we make a decision or judgment or reach a conclusion on a person or a subject?  Is there a way to do this?  I think there is one.  It’s simple! It’s just how you ask a question.  It is the art of questioning!

In the previous article we discussed about categorizing ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ and we had so many questions to think about to find out an answer.  Now the big question is – Did I ask the right questions to find the answer?  Did we find an answer at all?  I think it still need be discussed, perhaps at a later stage.  For now let’s talk about the power of questions

Our decision on a person or a subject is mostly influenced by personal perceptions, which are derived from the answers to our own questions.  So what matters is the way we frame these question. In most situations the biggest mistake (or lets also call it as the Err….The Human Error), is that we tend to ask wrong questions.  As the popular saying ‘Garbage in, Garbage out’, this Human Error may lead to a wrong perception leading to a wrong judgment which is the result of a wrong answer received for a wrong question.  So our judgment or conclusion can be wrong if we do not take proper care in asking the right question before making a decision. 

So how do we ask the right question?  Different views on the power of questions have been discussed and debated.  We need to be clever.  We need to be wise. We need to be logical.  We need to feel emotions!

Remember the saying by famous Egyptian writer and the Nobel Prize winner, Naguib Mahfouz: “You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers.  You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions”.  Yes! This is the key factor.   We need to be wise to frame the right question.    We need to train ourselves to be wise!  All human brains have the power to engage and shift mindsets.  So the best way to learn the art of questioning is to train ourselves to ask good and strong questions.  We need to start within ourselves.  We all go through different phases of questions every day.  In fact we start the questioning sessions from the moment we wake up and carry it through the day until we rest our body and mind.  We realize some of them and others go un-identified. 

How does this happen.  We will get an answer if we spend some time thinking backward into our growing phases from being a baby to the point we have reached now.  We have been learning on a daily basis by gathering information which is in reality answers to so many questions we have come across.  And where do we get the answers from?  We all go through conscious and sub-conscious questions.  Let’s think about the routine things we do from the point we wake up in the morning: brushing our teeth, taking a shower, and getting dressed up, having breakfast, going out, evening shopping, returning home and all.  Each activity is being performed as a result of the answers to the sub-conscious questions.  The answer for each question is being performed as our action.  But if we go and ask ourselves standing in front of a mirror, we will perhaps realize it better.  

Just try asking: ‘why did I take a shower today?  Why did I wear the black shoes today? Why did I choose to wear a white shirt today? Why did I buy chocolates today?  We will realize that every conscious action we had performed were answers to the many sub-conscious questions which came into our mind.  Answers to the sub-conscious questions are transformed into action.  There is always a question in our sub-conscious mind, at every point in our steps, prompting for the next step.  When our sub-conscious mind stops asking the right question, we either end-up doing wrong things or take wrong steps or become totally blank doing nothing.  So it is very important to keep our minds strong and focused to ensure right question is prompted at every stage of sub-conscious questioning.  This will also help us to develop the skill of asking wise questions in our conscious stage.    After reading this part I believe we all should and I hope we all will spend few minutes to ask ourselves few questions and let me know if you feel any difference.  We haven’t reached to the power of questions yet!! We will continue…….