Top Question: What is happening right now?
In the coaching and consulting world, we're always asking questions. Clients start a relationship with us by asking big questions: What's the real problem here? Can the problem be solved? What should I do to fix it?
Getting answers to big questions alters the course of a company. Good answers change lives. This happens because big questions ignite a process. Engaging in the process to answer our questions is what changes us.
This same process happens within our culture when we ask big questions and if we engage them, we can change the direction of our collective future.
After 15 years of professionally asking big questions and being responsible for finding big answers, I've noticed three things.
Big questions come with a story. The story is important.
When talking to clients, I always prompt them to 'paint the landscape', to put the session, the problem, the discussion, in context.
When they answer, the landscape begins to sound like a story. Go ahead, try it real quick. Pick something. Pick your dream. What's your dream? What's happening right now with your dream? Paint me the landscape.
In a few sentences, you'll likely have told me the dream, the problem or the path you're on, your role in the story, and a little context to your perspective.
Now what?
Big questions require investigation.
The more meaningful the question, the less likely you can get a meaningful answer quickly.
When we invest time and money into answering big questions, it's usually because we are suffering in some way. We want to understand 'what's happening' clearly enough to take strategic action. In the consulting world, if we can properly define 'what's happening right now' we already have half the solution. Getting those clear definitions around the question involves a little work. It requires an honest investigation into the story around the question.
This is where it gets tricky.
Big questions require an internal process
One of the biggest time wasters is jumping in to solve a problem or answer a big question without taking the time to go through the proper process. It's easy to assume we know what the problem is, only to work on it for months without results and discover the core issue is not what we've been working on at all.
Skipping this process and going straight to the 'answer' is possible in some cases but it will never satisfy. It can't because the seeker did not go through the process. The process is for the seeker, not for the answer. The answer already exists. The process required is what changes us so we can see, accept, integrate, and understand the answer.
There is an unfolding that needs to happen. The greater the question, the more important the answer. The more important the answer, the greater the process required to achieve it. There's a big difference between pure information and the process it takes to arrive at the answer.
Top Question: What's Happening Right Now?
Let's apply those three things to our collective situation.
Whether it's clients or us regular folk, this popular question of 'what's happening right now?' carries something important with it. It carries an assumption that 'If I understand what's happening, I'll know how to prepare for what's next, I'll know what to do, I'll make sense of the chaos'.
If you've ever been online you've noticed there's nothing that we can all agree upon. Despite our massive differences, there is a pressure building that is pushing people on all sides to finally agree on one thing: We do indeed have a problem, the world is not as it should be, and big change is ahead.
We agree there's a problem, we share the big questions. Everything after that is up for grabs.
Some of us are searching to answer the big question because we're suffering. Some of us are driven by the dream inside of us and running up against the strange circumstances of the world, baffled as to how we fit in this mess. We want to know what's happening so we know what to do about it.
The answer to the biggest questions of our time belongs to those willing to go through the process to find them.
This is the bottlenecked traffic jam of our time: many of us are searching, some of us are demanding, and only a few of us are going through the process to answer the tough questions.
We have more access to information and answers than ever before. Without the proper process, it does nothing. Instead, this access to quick answers gives the false pretext of achieving something when our bucket is still empty, still unexpanded, still unchanged except now we think we have something we don't: answers that mean anything.
Quick Answer Culture is propped up through our short feedback loop of social media clips where we are surrounded by giant facades built on shallow information promoted by a large number of people who skipped the process and in the end, are just selling something. This is the makeup of the majority of our mainstream information sources.
Those who are thirsty for truth, for answers, have already seen through this. We're beginning to realize that the kind of answers that can change our lives, change our futures, change our families or teams require a process beyond just viewing. Those asking the big questions understand that they must surrender themselves to a process to get the results and the answers they seek.
We are in an incredible time and for those that seek answers, for those that dream, for those that crave the full maturation of their potential on this planet then you must go through the process. The answers require a little work: paint the landscape, take the time to do an honest investigation and engage in the internal unfolding process.
If you're interested in what this might sound like, I invite you to join us on the upcoming podcast. I've asked the thinkers, storytellers, and those who dedicate their life's work to asking big questions to delve into the process of answering these three big ones for all of us:
What's Happening Now?
And What's Our Role in the Story?
Tune in as we paint the landscape, crack open an honest investigation, and go through an internal process to find big answers to big questions.
PS- don't forget to read a book this week.
