We did two presentations at the 2013 IMDHA/IACTAnnual Conference in Daytona, Florida. The 2nd presentation was About Asking Questions.
Kindly, one of the registrants co-shared his problem:
I always fail to do my morning appointments on time.
If one is presented with a problem, one has to elucdiate the nature of the problem in order to solve the problem. So, we then opened it to the class to posit their questions to get to the nature of this problem. Of course we knew that each person would put his/her question out of his/her neuro-linguistic instincts and neuro-semantic intuition, i.e. there would no pre-cognitive evaluative assessment as to what is best to ask. The questions would automatically come out the questioner.
The first two persons chose to ask the same question:
How do you feel about what you do?
The subject confessed that he did not feel good about his pattern of repeatedly failing to 'do my apppointments on time'.
We acknowledged to the class that the question was a good question since the structure of the question had a fame given to it by the late Virginia Satir, creator of Conjoint Family Therapy. For this it is known as the Satir Question.
However, with his answer, is there the meat with which one could use to solve his problem. Obviously, it was "NO!"
From then on - to the 5th question by the selected participants, every answer was a cul de sac. We then demonstrated to them in two questions how we got to the root of the problem and by extension how it could then be solved.
The signiticant thing was that we then inferred that
people do not know how to ask questions!
Post conference we were now back home and on my first work day I went next door to the office my web master. One of his staff, on invitation shared his problem:
I cannot balance my work and social life!
My webmaster and his number two then started to put their questions to elucidate the nature of this problem. Sadly their questions tracked into cul de sacs. Again in two questions we peeled open the nature of the problem. If he wanted his problem solved, he then knew he would need to come to be my patient.
Richard Bandler once taught us:
If a thing happens once it is an event.
If it happens twice it is a coincidence.
If it happens thrice, it is the work of the Devil.
If it happens four times it is the work of God.
If it happens a fith time, the it is a universal pattern.
If you do not get a follow up on this blog, then you may conclude that we have found five consecutive cases situations in which people do not know how to ask questions. And from RBs teaching this means that if then are 5, then:
People do not know how to ask questions.
If so, how do they manage? They manage because they know that they have not found the answer; so they press on by fumbling, bungling and stumbling until, VOILA, they get the answer.
This is not exactly an efficient way to go about doing such an important thing.
So:
Where can you get to learn how to ask questions?
We teach it in our two-weekend Power Seminar.