How Asking the Right Questions Can Improve Your Life
From: Mission Valley
Dear Friend,
Have you ever noticed how often you ask questions in your mind on a daily basis? It’s quite often and typically when we ask a question, we follow up with an answer.
You see, we’re constantly having an internal conversation daily. This is especially true when we’re not focused on anything in particular and our minds just “wander”.
Rarely will our minds sit quietly without a thought — we’re always pondering or asking questions about something.
What am I going to eat for lunch? Did I remember to lock the door this morning? What am I going to do this weekend? These are quite harmless questions as they‘re not related to our mindset or our quality of life — they’re more neutral questions.
The types of questions we‘re going to focus on in this article are empowering questions for personal development and how to use them to improve yourself.
The questions that we ask ourselves will direct our focus and dictate our answers.
Being aware of what you’re asking is important throughout the day. We can ask ourselves empowering questions or disempowering questions.
When asking the right questions, we can change our state to become more positive and productive in an instant.
The definition of empowering is to give authority or power to.
What are empowering questions?
As it relates to personal development, empowering questions will guide you to focus on the positive aspects of the question at hand.
Empowering questions are similar to affirmations — you repeatedly ask the right questions or statements which can have a significant positive effect your thoughts and emotions.
With an improved state of mind, one’s attitude and behavior are also improved and can lead to more positive and uplifting experiences.
Conversely, a disempowering question will bring about negativity to one’s attitude or behavior and ruin potentially positive experiences before they even occur.
For example, if one were to ask “Why can’t I attract anyone?”, they may answer with “Probably because I’m ugly, too short, or too depressed”.
When you ask a disempowering question, you essentially answer with a negative affirmation. It’s like asking your loved one a loaded question where there’s pretty much no “good answer”.
Negative affirmations repeated over time will undoubtedly hurt your self-esteem and lower your overall quality of life.
It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy — if you focus on the negatives, then you begin to forget and neglect all that is positive about yourself.
The same rings true for thinking positively and using positive affirmations. The more you use them, the more you distance yourself and “distract” yourself from negativity.
The reality is that everyone has negative aspects in their lives. But depending on how you focus on them will determine how it ultimately affects your attitude, behaviors, and feelings about life.
Disempowering Questions
So, what are some more examples of disempowering questions one may ask themselves? This will help you get the idea of questions NOT to ask yourself consistently.
- “Why am I so stupid?”
- “Why do I always make these mistakes?”
- “How come I can never get ahead?”
- “Why am I so unlucky?”
- “Why does everything suck?”
- “When will I ever be happy?”
- “Who am I doing this? It’s such a waste of time.”
- “Why do I always quit?”
- “How come no one ever helps me?”
- “Why am I such a bad person?”
So if you’ve read through these questions, you may have noticed yourself trying to answer them. Or, maybe you noticed that some of the questions are the ones you ask yourself from time to time.
I’ll be honest, I use to constantly ask myself these questions and even still do from time to time.
But trying to answer these questions is what we naturally do when we pose questions to ourselves. They’re rarely rhetorical and since our answer isn’t going to be heard by anyone, we answer them — sometimes in our minds but also, sometimes even aloud.
Empowering Questions
Let’s now shift our focus and discuss empowering questions. These questions can help shift your focus so that you can feel good in the moment. But they can also be used as a way to guide you in getting clarity for moving forward.
If you are having trouble determining where you want to go, who you want to be, what you want to do, then asking the right questions can certainly point you in the right direction.
Below, you’ll find a more extensive list of 20 empowering questions.
- “What am I happy about in my life?”
- “What am I excited for in my future?”
- “What was the best part of my day?”
- “What am I the proudest of in my life right now?”
- “What am I grateful for in my life?”
- “How can I make this day awesome?”
- “What can I give today?”
- “Who can/will I help today?”
- “What do I really love to do?”
- “What would I enjoy doing every single day, even if I weren’t getting paid?”
- “What healthy choices am I going to make today?”
- “What action will I take today to move me closer to my goals?”
- “What is my ultimate purpose in life?”
- “What experiences do I want to share with my family?”
- “What type of impact do I want to have in the world?”
- “Who can I forgive today?”
- “What is my goal for the next 6 months?”
- “What motivates me to succeed?”
- “What does my dream life look life?”
- “What must I do in order to live my dream life?”
Similar to the disempowering questions, you may have noticed yourself trying to answer some of the empowering questions as you read them.
If so, then you probably noticed that your answers were more positive and enlightening — that is the beauty in asking the right questions.
Final thoughts…
There’s a scene in the movie, American History X, that always plays in my head when I think about this topic.
In the scene, Derek (Ed Norton’s character), lies in a prison hospital bed after being brutally attacked in the shower (I won’t get into the details). Derek was sent to prison after committing murder.
Next to him sat his high school principle, Dr. Sweeney, who has been watching Derek’s decline in life for years.
As Derek lay there on the hospital bed in pain, confusion and embarrassment, Dr. Sweeney explains to him that he wasn’t getting the right answers because he wasn’t asking the right questions.
And Dr. Sweeney follows up with an example question, “Has anything you’ve done made your life better?”
Derek nods his head no and begins to sob as he realizes that he was asking the wrong questions and therefore, getting the wrong answers.
Hopefully, you now understand how important it is to be asking empowering questions throughout your day.
I recommended that you create a list of empowering questions that you would like to focus on. Either write them down or type them out and begin asking yourself these questions upon rising in the morning, throughout the day, and also before going to bed.
Doing this in the morning will guide your mind to focus on the positive aspects of life first thing in the morning which will help improve your overall mood throughout the day.
Make this part of your morning ritual. And by doing this first thing, this will also help you remember to continuously ask yourself these questions during the day instead of the typical disempowering questions that you may be currently asking yourself.
And by asking yourself these questions before bed, it can help relax your mind for better sleep. This is because you are not focusing on the possible negative events or feelings that you may have experienced during the day.
The ability to ask yourself these empowering questions on a daily basis is a habit which you must develop over time to replace the old habits of disempowering questions.
Initially, it‘ll take intentional effort to develop this habit. But over time, you will begin to notice that it happens on autopilot — which is what habits do for us.
Until next time, continue to learn, grow, and evolve.
Sincere wishes for a great life,
Dan Lu
Call to Action
Looking for more life-changing tools and content? I’ve compiled the resources that have helped me in various areas of life — personal development, self-growth, finance, marketing, and business.
Whether you’re looking for books to read, how to overcome fears in your life, or how to start an online business, you’ll find useful content there.
CLICK HERE TO ACCESS THE RESOURCES.
About the Author
Dan Lu is an author/writer who specializes in the areas of personal development, entrepreneurship, and marketing. He is the creator of the Feardeology concept (a philosophy on how to leverage fear for positive life change) and the founder of Lifestyle Alchemedia.
His mission is to improve the lives of others through sharing insights, tools, and strategies in self-improvement as well as online entrepreneurship.
If you enjoyed or received value from this story/article, please give it a clap & share it with others. It could very well be the article that makes a positive shift in their life.
