Some questions are hidden commands.

When your Dad said, “Why don’t you take out the trash?” he wasn’t really asking was he?

I was talking with a graduate student advisee about her user interface one day, and I asked, “Why did you choose to make the text blue?”

She said, “OK, OK, I’ll make it green!

In her family, she’d been taught that questions are used to criticize, command, or humiliate.

That didn’t leave me with any punctuation marks that indicate my curiosity!

And I realized I needed to clarify some things about how I communicated within my own organization.

Thomas P Seager, PhD

Written by

TPSeager@StoryGarden.co Self-Actual Engineering https://www.youtube.com/c/ThomasSeager @seagertp Join https://www.linkedin.com/groups/13613731

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