Imagine your best friend asked you a compelling question every day for two months.
Now imagine that you take stock of your life and realize that things are somehow different.
You can't put your finger on it, but you are waking up each morning eager to face the day's challenges. You feel more confident, and although the future might not be more predictable than before, you feel sure that you can handle whatever life throws at you.
You feel like you're a hero on an adventure quest instead of a cog in a wheel slowly being ground to dust. You are doing many of the same things you were doing before, but now they feel important. Chores don't feel like a burden but rather a way of expressing love of yourself and others. Unexpected interruptions feel like little calls to adventure. You are trying things that had been unimaginable just a short while ago.
You ask yourself, "Why is this?"
Then, in a flash, you realize that you've been asking yourself a lot more good questions and fewer bad ones. In the past you might fail at something and ask yourself, "What's wrong with me?" Then you began to find all kinds of new things wrong with you to add to the long list you've been accumulating over the years.
But now you realize "What's wrong with me?" is a terrible question because there is no shortage of things wrong with all of us.
Now, if you fail at something you might ask, "How can I become more knowledgeable, skilled, and wise for next time?" Or you might say to yourself, "I made a bad decision because I didn't have time to think. How can I make a rule to govern my behavior next time when an instantaneous decision is called for?" Sometimes, instead of saying to yourself, "This is stupid." you ask yourself, "Was there a reason for what is going on?" Understanding the things that happen for a reason helps you deal with them and the things that happen by chance become easier to shrug off.
You ask yourself, "How did this change in me happen?"
You think back to before you started answering your friend's questions and ask, "What's different now?" Then it occurs to you... What's different is that I've been answering my friend's questions and now when I need an answer it pops back into my head automatically.
Many questions you couldn't answer so you told your friend, "I don't know the answer yet." There was even the time your friend asked questions about salesmanship and your answer was, "I never want to be a salesman." But just recently you needed to convince someone to do something and you automatically thought, "What does this person need? Can I help them? How can I get them to want my help?" You answered the questions and they did what you wanted them to do.
You ask yourself, "Who is this dear friend who has been sending me questions all this time?" You go back through your emails and am shocked to find that the questions were coming from a mailing list server. Sure, someone thought up the questions, but that was long ago before they could have known you. You say to yourself, "I guess I knew that when I signed up, but I forgot."
You ask yourself, "How can a computer program feel like a best friend?" Two months ago you might have thought, "It can't." but now you think, "That's curious... let me see if I can find an answer." As you go back through your emails you realize the program has been asking you to ask yourself these questions, and you've been forwarding the answers only to yourself.
You exclaim, "That's it! I've become my own best friend."
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Our Lens-A-Day mailings work this way for many people.
For others they don't work so they unsubscribe.
You won't know what these questions will do for you until you try.
If they don't do anything you can always unsubscribe.
You've reached a fork in your road.
Ask yourself, "Which way do I go?"
Note: Perhaps you are the kind of person who wants to research a claim before experimenting on yourself.
As it so happens, researchers have discovered considerable evidence that questions like ours work well because how you talk to yourself is very important. Many self-help books and coaches suggest you repeat positive statements, such as "I can do this." and "I am confident." Scientists call this "affirmative self-talk" and they have discovered that although sometimes it is better than nothing, it doesn't work very well. When you consciously affirm that something is true then your subconscious mind says, "good as done" and stops thinking about it.
You are not going to become a great tennis player by saying "I am a great tennis player." You might fool your brain into thinking there is no work to be done, but you won't fool your muscles or develop the habits of a good player. It is much better to ask, "Can I become a better tennis player?" This is called interrogative self-talk, and the reason it works is because your subconscious mind works at answering the questions you consciously put to it. This might sound foo-foo at first,but imagine that while watching a TV program you ask yourself, "What will I have for dinner?" You continue watching and then this thought pops into your head: "I think I'll have a steak tonight." That thought was formulated somewhere before you became aware of it. We call that your sub-conscious.
Asking yourself questions is called interrogative self-talk and you might begin your studies by reading this: Motivating Goal-Directed Behavior Through Introspective Self-Talk: The Role of the Interrogative Form of Simple Future Tense.
Or you could try signing up for our Lens-A-Day questions because even if research shows it works for most people it might not work for you. It's not going to cost anything and it won't hurt.
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