I’ve heard this phrase “questions are the answer” several times over my life. The most recent was from Anthony Robbins’ Awaken The Giant Within. In fact, the title of chapter 8 is exactly this article’s title.

I write about this today because a good portion of my freewrites are questions. I guess I just have tons of questions for myself. The big ones are centered around “what are you doing with your life.” While this seems like the right question to ask, I found from reading Robbins that this isn’t actually the right question. The right version of a question should push your mind for next steps.

Remember from Thinking, Fast and Slow, that our minds are making up the simplest answers possible. So if we’re stuck in a rut, and we ask ourselves questions like “what are you doing with your life” or “why can’t you do anything”, our minds will come up with an answer that best fits our story. “We’re not doing anything with our lives, James. Duh. Next question please.” “I’m tired and burnt out from years of chasing a corporate dream that I realized is just running in a hamster wheel.” Sweet, these are totally helpful!

It’s hard to show sarcasm through just writing, but I hope everyone got that.

The answers we get will entirely depend on the questions we ask. So if we ask questions that make us ponder what could be next, we then start to inject ourselves with some motion.

By reshaping our “what am I doing with my life” questions to “what could I be doing with my life”, our minds start to think about the possibilities of this question. “Why can’t you do anything” could reshape to “how could you do something” to get our minds to start, as they say, thinking outside the box.

The questions we ask should nudge our minds to give us actionable answers. Answers that give us some new direction or insight. But it won’t work like this right away.

I’ve only tried to reshape my questions for a few days now, and in all honesty, it feels the same. The answers have been the same. My mind tells me “I know this trick now and it won’t work on me.” And it’s totally right. We shouldn’t expect the answers to change immediately. I expect this will take time to change my thinking.

The important thing is that it’s a small step, a small investment into a different future. A future where I’ll be asking “what else could I be doing with my life?” A future that I will have created.

So what questions are you asking yourself and how could it be reshaped to drive you towards a future you want? Take that first step, and start by asking your questions, just reshaped in a tiny way.