HOW DO I TURN QUESTIONING INTO A HABIT?
NOW THAT WE’VE looked at the value of questioning, the techniques to come up with good questions, and the underlying mindset to be a great questioner, how do we make questioning a habit? The first step is simply to begin. The following process should get you started.
1.List a few people that you’d like to help or that you may need to influence. In future, this step should be automatic in almost all engagements with other people in the workplace.
2.For each of these people, what is it you believe they should be doing? That is, how do you wish to help them or influence them?
3.To make that change, what will they need to think? What, specifically, will they need to realise or understand?
4.What series of questions will help them reach that realisation or understanding most swiftly?
5.Ask questions.
6.Remain silent after each question and listen well.
7.Celebrate the breakthroughs!
Once you’re underway, it becomes possible to start making this a true habit. A true habit of questioning is one where it is your default or automatic response to any relevant situation. Making this final step takes a little effort but should not take long and has a great payoff — do it once and you’ll benefit forever!
For a habit to occur, three things need to be present.
1.A trigger — for example, you’re about to provide some performance feedback to a member of your team.
2.A process for the habit itself — in this case, it might be to immediately ask some very open questions with a selection of more directive or even closed questions ready that relate to the specific feedback you’d like to provide.
3.Immediate payoff.
Since we’ve already discussed the first two — the trigger and the process — let’s jump to the third aspect of forming a habit, the payoff.
The payoff
The payoff recognises that a habit is, in some ways, like an addiction. Your mind triggers the habit almost automatically because it wants the sensation or reward that it brings. In this context, I’m not referring to the long- or even medium-term reasons you’re doing the habit. For example, I’m not referring to the long-term development of a staff member to whom you’re giving constructive feedback, nor to the medium-term uplift in their performance. While those are good outcomes, they are probably not sufficiently immediate for the purpose of building the habit of using questions.
Instead, the payoff needs to be received immediately upon doing the habit. This payoff can be a tangible payoff (for example, every time you revert to asking good questions while giving feedback to your staff, you take five minutes afterwards to go and buy a coffee). However, this is more practicably — and probably more effectively — an internal, emotional payoff. In this example of giving performance feedback to a team member, it might be consciously acknowledging immediately after the event how well you asked questions while giving the feedback, as well as celebrating the clear realisations and ideas that those questions prompted from your staff member.
Mentally celebrating every time you create these aha moments in other people will certainly help to cement the habit. Creating this type of payoff is something that you can do immediately and intentionally and will assist greatly in creating the habit. (For more on the science of habit-forming, I recommend Charles Duhigg’s book The power of habit as well as Atomic habits by James Clear.)
“ Mentally celebrating every time you create these aha moments in other people will certainly help to cement the habit. „
Habit-forming tactics
There are plenty of simple tactics that can be used to help form a habit. Including some, or all, of the below actions as part of your documented learning or development plan will start the process. Such actions include:
•recording yourself in various conversations to enable a review of the quality of your questioning
•asking others around you to observe you and provide feedback specifically on your use of questions
•tracking yourself hour by hour and noting down how often you asked questions during that time
•asking an active question at the end of each day such as, ‘On a scale of 1 — 10, how well did I endeavour to maintain a good questioning habit today?’
Remembering the elements that make up a habit, as discussed earlier in this chapter, to lock this in as a habit, I encourage you to answer three further questions.
1.What is the immediate payoff you are experiencing every time you ask good questions and help someone achieve an intended realisation or aha moment?
2.What actions do you have in your learning plan or development plan that are specifically targeted at developing the skill and habit of questioning?
3.Every evening, when asking yourself, ‘How well did I endeavour to employ a great questioning habit today?’, are you scoring 8 or more out of 10?
When you are consistently answering yes to that final question, then questioning is indeed becoming a habit for you. It is becoming your default in most conversations. People are likely ‘getting it’ most of the time when you talk to them. You know because they are responding in the ways you’d like, and they’re genuinely engaged in what you’re asking them about.
Considering also the need to build the right mindset as a questioner, you could also include activities within your broader mindset development processes. While this book will not attempt to provide full instruction on all learning and development activities, here are a couple of examples.
•If you use daily affirmations as a tool to develop your mindset, perhaps one of your affirmations could be something like, ‘I am relentlessly curious and a great questioner, always defaulting to asking good questions that will help myself and others to progress effectively.’
•If you use visualisation to develop your mindset, you can intentionally visualise yourself in any of the relevant situations and visualise your questioning process while verbalising aloud the questions that you’d be asking.
Again, each of these suggestions will help to ensure that your subconscious, which has such a significant impact on who you are and how you operate, remains focused on the development of this habit.
If you’re struggling with the process of forming the habit of questioning, or simply don’t feel that the habit is forming as well as you’d like, you may need to explore why not. What is the actual blockage? What is preventing you from developing a great questioning habit? Is it a continuing desire to demonstrate your knowledge? Perhaps an impatience with the process of engaging others fully? Maybe you’re feeling too uncomfortable with the awkward moments that follow the most powerful questions?
All of these may seem to be barriers, but they are simply examples of old habits (that you’ll replace with this new questioning habit), or previously held mindsets that are the opposite of those discussed in Chapter 3. Be sure to recognise and acknowledge these challenges, think deeply through the clear value of forming this habit, and then follow the process outlined in this book.