Can you stop for just a few moments and allow yourself to become aware that you are outrageously happy?

Can you think back to the last moment of joy you felt – perhaps this morning, or yesterday?

The quality of your life is determined by the quality of the questions you ask yourself each day. In personal development – this simple statement holds the key to transforming your life, personal power, agency, and joy.

Powerful questions change your focus, open up your awareness, turn on your creativity and activate your unconscious mind to create new results.

Great, right? But, 95% of what we do in a day is unconscious – we do it without being aware of it. Our thoughts happen “below the radar” and we spend a lot of our time on auto-pilot rather than truly alive in the moment.

So when is “question asking time”?!

You know me – I have a mindfulness answer to this one that is about using the fact that we do things automatically in order to start to do things automagically!

First, what are great questions?

Second, how do we know when to ask them?

Great Questions

Great questions are those that get you to uncover new resources, look at things in a new way, feel objective and open and curious about something that would otherwise have you stuck. There are many places that coaches use questions to help a client discover the answers and truth that are already inside them.

One of the big ways is to help remove limits.

Limiting Belief Questions

Find them and Change them

1. What is a problem or limitation that has held you back for a while?
2. What is it you would like to do/have, except something is stopping you from getting it/doing it?
3. What is REALLY stopping you from getting what you want?
4. This is a problem because? or How is this a problem for you?
5. And this means? (Repeat as many times as necessary)
6. What must you believe that makes this problem even exist?
7. What is it you believe about YOURSELF that has made this a problem?
8. What do you believe about the WORLD that has made this a problem?
9. What is this problem an example of?
10. …and what is THIS an example of?
11. When did you decide that your problem was a problem (roughly)?
12. At what point in your life did you by into this concept?
13. What decision did you make that caused this problem to be born?
14. What does this problem mean to you?
15. What will life be like when you don’t have this problem

Questions of Change

1.  What is the evidence that supports this belief? If you look objectively at all of your life experiences, what is the evidence that this belief is true?
2.  Is this belief always true for you? about everyone, everything, does it have to be 100%
3.  Does this belief consider the whole picture? Does it take into consideration both the positive and negative ramifications?
4.  Does this belief encourage your own peace of mind and well-being?
5.  Did you choose this belief or has it developed from the influence of your family/friends as you were growing up?

Remember that whatever value these mistaken beliefs may have offered you in the past, they no longer offer you and only serve to create stress and anxiety for you now.

Lofty Questions

• What if this is happening for you, not to you?
• How can I learn from this?
• How can you take advantage of this gift?
• What would be the value of changing this?
• How/Who/When could I ____________ in order to get/gain/create even more/faster _______________ and feelings of greater __________  easily and effortlessly today, now?

For example:
•How can I jumpstart my day in a way that helps me make even more progress on my goal to build a powerful community with even greater energy and delight adding more ease and play today, now?

•Who can I collaborate with so that I can launch my new program even faster and with bigger results and feelings of greater motivation and joy easily and effortlessly today now?

When to Ask those Great Questions

With big emotions – when you find an emotion hijacking you. (Use the RAIN + LAS worksheet)

Problems – any time you find you have a problem.

Any time you sound weak, victims or whiny to yourself: Why does this always happen to me? How am I going to survive?

Tie New Habits to Old!

List the habits and behaviours you always, always do:

• have a morning coffee
• brush your teeth
• drive to work
• turn on the computer
• check email
• hug your partner when you get home
• put your head on your pillow

List all of the stimuli that you can count on each day too:

• hear your phone ding
• hear your child ask “what’s for dinner?” (for the 20th time)
• your cat jumping on the keyboard (for the 20th time)
• being hungry
• needing to use the bathroom
• feeling frustrated perhaps?
• seeing a car drive by
• seeing a red car drive by

How to Edit a Habit

Decide which of these to which you can buckle on an additional habit.

In NLP we would literally reprogram the habit to add in a picture of
When this happens ____________ 
Then this happens ______________

You can do this yourself by simply having a dialogue with yourself about it:

Choose the activity that you want to have trigger the new behaviour. eg Brushing your teeth

Choose what you want to add: Creating a Lofty Question to get your unconscious mind open and aware

When you think about brushing your teeth, do you have a picture? Step into that picture so that you are looking through your own eyes, hearing with your own hears and can practically taste the toothpaste (mmm, is that wintergreen?)

Now step out and clear the screen.

When you think about brushing your teeth and asking yourself a great question – a lofty question – do you have a picture? maybe your head tilts, your pupils dilate, your eyebrow is raised? You can exaggerate this too. Step into that picture and make it bigger, brighter, more colourful, louder, tastier? Feel the feeling that this question creates, feel the sense of openness, curiosity and positivity. Make that feeling bigger.

Now step out of the picture.

For many people, just that step of visualizing the old picture and then the new picture will make a change. To re-program it though, we like to Swish it in.

Pull up that old picture so that you are in the picture, looking through your own eyes.

Far away, the size of a postage stamp, notice that new picture. See yourself what over there in that tiny picture doing the new behaviour. In a moment, when you are set, allow that new picture to rush toward you very very fast and blow out the old picture.

Repeat until you cannot get the old picture back. In this case, until when you pull up a picture of brushing your teeth, that new way with the lofty question is what automagically comes up!

Bonus – some standard every day questions like “What is happening right now?”  “What am I grateful for?” go with a couple of good habits:

You may want to attach meditation to that first cup of coffee in the morning.

You may want to attach gratitude journalling to getting your jammies on.

Where to go from here? There are whole books written on coaching questions and self-coaching. You can also experience a coaching conversation by booking one with me!