Your brain answers whatever question you give it, and it is very good at it.
Ask “why isn’t this working?” and it will hand you a long list of reasons, all of them convincing and none of them helpful. Ask “what am I doing wrong?” and it will find evidence for you. Most of us have been asking ourselves questions like that for years, and then we wonder why we feel stuck.
At our latest She Leads Change taster, “Asking the right questions”, we did something different. We stopped reaching for the clever question, the one that sounds good in an appraisal or impresses a board. Instead we asked the question our heart needs to hear.
What we did
We checked in with pictures rather than “how are you?”, because a different question gets a different answer. Jo Kaye led a short visualisation, letting one question drop like a pebble into a still lake: why am I here? We let the first, polite answer pass and waited to see what came up underneath.
Then we worked in threes. One woman spoke. One reflected back exactly what she heard, her words and not ours. One simply noted the questions that came to her and offered them at the end.
It sounds simple. It is not, because most of us are rarely listened to like that.
What happened
One participant said hearing her own words reflected back “turned a feeling into a fact”. She had been carrying something vague and heavy, and once she heard it said aloud it became something she could work with.
Another noticed she was listening for what was not being said. That changed which questions she found to ask.
And one question stopped the room: “If all the barriers were removed, what would you do first?” It got us talking about how many of our barriers are ones we built ourselves, often so long ago that we have forgotten they are there.
Why this matters for women who lead
Women are rarely short of answers. We spend our days solving problems for teams, organisations and families. What we often lack is the space to ask ourselves a better question, and someone to listen while we find the answer.
That is not a luxury. When we keep asking ourselves the wrong questions, we lead from depletion and doubt, and the people around us feel it. Ask better ones and we lead from clarity.
My own question from the evening was about having the courage to be imperfect, and to run with it anyway. I am still sitting with it.
This is what Leading From Within is for
Our next cohort starts on 3 November. It is built on exactly this: space, deep listening and better questions, alongside women who understand what you are carrying. If you are ready to stop circling and start leading from what you know, I would love to talk. Get in touch for a short chat about whether it is right for you.
Before then, join us for “Finding joy as a leader” on Wednesday 21 October, 12:00 to 13:00, with Jo Kaye and Ana Mundim.
And this week, try asking yourself one new question: what would make this really good?