The importance of asking the right question

Your mind is very powerful, and when left unattended, the stories it tells you can be painful and cause you to act in ways you don’t want. But your mind is not a mystery. The thoughts are there. They float across your mind all day. If you want to change your life, one sure way to do it is to pay attention to your thoughts, even though sometimes you won’t like what you see, and then change them.

Attending to your thoughts is life changing. Because you know what? You can change them. Your thoughts don’t own you. You own them. You have much more control than you think you have.

I’ve been doing thought work for a few years now, so I am pretty familiar with this concept. But even while observing my thoughts with compassion and curiosity and investigating them with consistency and vigor, I missed something important.

I missed the questions. As though questions don’t count as thoughts.

But oh how important the questions are. My teacher at the Life Coach School, Brooke Castillo, shared a concept that has facilitated a big shift for me. The idea is that we ask ourselves questions all day long. Until we are conscious of the questions that cross our minds, they are frequently phrased in such a way that we come up with crappy thoughts as answers. Proof that we are unworthy, lazy, selfish or any of our other negative perceptions of ourselves. See if you have asked yourself any of these questions:

What is wrong with me?
Why am I always so (stupid, lazy, selfish, disorganized)?
Why can’t I stop (overeating, overspending, drinking, etc.)?
Why can’t I keep it together?
Why is everything so hard?
Why isn’t this working?
Why can’t I just let it go?
You get the idea...

How do you answer your own questions? Do the answers help you change in a way that works for you? My guess is not so much.

So what if you changed the question so whenever you ask yourself, the answers feel delicious. See if any of these work for you:

-How can I show up 100% as me today?
-What do I really want right now?
-How can I make (losing weight, building a business, etc) more fun?
-What would be even better?
-What would I do if I didn’t care what other people thought?

Here’s an example from my own life. I’ve been playing with the idea of hard and soft. The question I would ask myself frequently used to be “Why is this so hard?” When I tried “How can I make this easier?”, I found that it still presumed that things were hard. So I re-worded the question to: “How can I be softer?”

Ahhh, relief. Here are a few of my answers:

-I can soften my eyes and brow
-I can release tension in my jaw
-I can take a deep breath
-I can relax my shoulders
-I can laugh with my girls
-I can snuggle with my husband

These are thoughts and actions that feel delicious, without having to try and think better thoughts. Just by asking a better question, the good-feeling thoughts automatically come. Try it and let me know how it goes!