One powerful framework for evaluating your life and creating change is the co-active coaching suggestion that “the quality of your life is the quality of your questions.”
What questions are you asking in your life?
Often, when we tune in and listen to what questions we are asking, we hear something like: “How am I going to get X done? Why does it take so long to do Y? When am I ever going to get to Z? Why can’t I X? What’s wrong with me that I can’t seem to do Y?” etc.
Generally our questions are either small, confined within a framework of what we think we should be doing, or they are self-critical.
Is this how you want to be shaping the quality of your life? What would happen if you started asking yourself questions designed to discern where you are making compromises, to identify what you actually want, and to support you in creating that?
Here are a few powerful questions to try out:
- What do I want?
- What am I resisting?
- What do I want to say yes to?
- What do I want to say no to?
- What am I compromising?
- What would my most whole and centered self say?
- What would make it easy?
- What am I tolerating?
- What does my body know?
- What do I want to let go of?
- What would make it fun?
- And one to use again and again in combination with any of the above: What else?
There are lots of ways to use these powerful questions. Here are three:
- Write each one on a card, put all the cards face down in a bowl, or in a bag, and pull one out when you feel stuck.
- Choose one of these questions to explore for a given week, or month, or year. Create a structure for exploring it (put it on post-its all over the place so you’ll see it regularly, commit to journaling about it for 10 minutes every day, invite a good friend out to lunch to talk about it, put in on your computer as wall paper, etc.)
- Work your way, in writing, through five or six or even all of them in response to a specific frustration, fear, inability to move forward, or any other way in which you feel stuck.
© Tasha Harmon, 2009. Feel free to share this, but please share it with my name and contact information attached, and do not publish it without my written permission. Thank you.
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