What is the Question Anyway?
Often we think we know the answer before we even understand the question. This causes even more confusion when our solution doesn’t fix the problem. Every week I try to come up with a question to explore with my life coach. What should I accomplish this week? What’s missing from my life right now? What burning question do I need answered?
My coach never begins by letting me answer those questions. We always begin by exploring the question itself. What is making me ask that specific question? Unpacking the question, reframing it, is often the most powerful part of our session.
Why Are You Asking?
I hadn’t given last week’s question much thought. “Where should I live after my son moves out?” I just needed a question to explore and that one popped into my head. I didn’t even realize how important the question would be. The first thing I discovered was that I had never lived alone in my entire life. Even in the barracks when I didn’t have a roommate, I shared a bathroom with someone else and there was the common room down the hall if I ever needed some companionship. When I got married, I moved out of the barracks and ever since I’ve had roommates– eventually the ever changing personalities of my growing children.
One by one, they started moving out of my house and starting households of their own. My youngest is destined to move out in a few months and I wanted to talk with my coach about what life will look like when he does. It occurred to me I may not want to live in this house alone. “Where should I live?” I asked her.
If you’ve followed me much on social media, you know my solution to life transitions is to move. I love buying and furnishing new homes, exploring new locations, and asking my life coach why I don’t fit in anywhere. I decided to explore the question, Where should I live?, before I pack up and move again.
Resilence Rework
We talked about why I was asking that question and I told her everything I just told you. We used a tool I call Resilience Rework. I pick three cards from a deck of power words: a resilience card, a tool card, and a gift card. I drew transformation, imagination, and mystery. I struggled with the first card not knowing how I would or wanted to transform. My coach recommended I try flipping the order of the cards: Mystery, Imagination, Transformation. Then the magic happened.
Sit with the Question
I pondered the mystery of my question. Instead of Where should I live? I asked myself, Where could I live? A whole world of possibilities magically appeared before me. I left that session without an answer to my original question but with a much more powerful one to ponder. I began making a list of all the places I could live without judging them and let myself imagine what life might be like in each of them. Because I gave myself permission to let the question hang out in the mystery unanswered for a while, I opened myself up to exploring the whole planet of possibilities and even the possibility of transformation right where I am.