Ask better questions to shift your outer world...

The power of creating new possibilities comes from the magical effect that questions have on our lives. The kind of questions we ask ourselves consistently have an affect on the quality of our lives.

If you ask yourself “Why is my life so horrible?” you will get lots of information about why your life horrible. If you ask yourself “Why do I always fail?” you will get lots of information about why you always fail. By doing this again and again, you will see an adverse effect of the results you desire, partially because you will start associating yourself with your mistakes and thus decreases your self-esteem.

However if you ask yourself questions like “What if I were to turn this around?”, “How can I turn this around?”, “How can I make it better?”, you will get lots of information about how to go about doing it. But more importantly, you will be driven to take the action to produce the result. What would you do if you knew you could not fail? By changing the quality of the questions you ask, you can start changing your entire experience of life. Questions are the Answers, so ask intelligently and precisely!

Suboptimal thinking is when you ask questions like, “What’s a good/great way to do this?” or “How can I solve this?” Optimal thinking is when you ask, “What’s the best way to do this?” or “How can I solve this in the best way possible?” It may seem like a subtle and unimportant difference, but when you start applying this rule to your life, you’ll see an improvement in results.

For example, when planning your next day, you might ask yourself (perhaps subconsciously and nonverbally), “What’s a good way to schedule my time tomorrow?” And by answering that question, you’ll plan a decent schedule for yourself. But it’s most likely a suboptimal schedule. Try instead asking yourself, “What’s the best way to schedule my time tomorrow?” Now you’re seeking the optimal solution, the best instead of just good or even great.

Sometimes you don’t immediately know the best solution to a problem. So what you can do in that situation is to ask, “What will the best solution look like?” And then you start listing attributes and constraints that your optimal solution will need to exhibit. This helps you narrow your list of alternatives. If you know a particular attribute of the optimal solution, then you can reject all possible solutions that lack that attribute.

Going back to the example of the best possible scheduling of your day, you might list some of these attributes such as awaken early, exercise, work at least eight solid hours, eat healthy meals, spend time with family, do something fun and rewarding in the evening, stretch myself in some way, get email inbox completely emptied, read for an hour, etc. Then you can work backwards from these sub-goals to piece together your optimal schedule.

Keep in mind that the best solution always takes into account the resources you have available. If a possible solution is impractical, then it certainly isn’t optimal. So if the best way to schedule your day would require a supercomputer and six hours of planning time, then that solution is far from being the best. You might wish to include your key constraints in your original question, such as, “What’s the best way to schedule my time tomorrow in twenty minutes or less?”

The most beneficial aspect of optimal thinking is that it helps you raise your standards. Instead of settling for suboptimal solutions and mediocre results, you commit to doing your best, yet in a way that’s practical and which considers the reality of your situation. Often when you ask yourself, “What’s the best …?” you’ll find your mind zooming towards a very different kind of solution than you would if you asked suboptimal questions.

When you find yourself asking questions that are not really good, change to asking better questions. Observe how you feel about it and the response from your subconscious mind. Ask and it shall be given, ask better questions. Ask for the best and go for it. 💜Kristy Lee