Ask What, Instead of Why

Jun 2, 2018

When it comes to emotional awareness, learning to ask what purpose an action or choice served will yield more useful results than asking why we do what we do. This post explores a bit about the difference between these questions, and takes a look at the emotional responses both types are likely to evoke and how to leverage those responses for our own gain.

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When it comes to building interior emotional awareness, there’s a question that I have worked to excise from my vocabulary. I still occasionally ask this form of question, but I’ve trained myself to at least recognize it and then backtrack so I can ask the better question. What is the question to be removed?

Why?

This question has many forms, including: Why do I do that? Why does this always happen? Why am I like this?

Especially when it comes to interior work, asking “why” about motivations is pretty much just opening Pandora’s box. It invited me to judge myself, condemn myself, and often was the trigger for a downward spiral. Go back and re-think about those Why questions – listen carefully to the tone of voice used (mentally or out loud). You’ll hear things on these questions such as confusion, anger, resentment, frustration, etc. in the way the words are said. This is judgment before the exploration can even get off the ground. This form of questioning puts me at least on the defensive right away. Once the emotional defenses are up, I recommend stopping – nothing useful will happen as long as the defenses are active.

Personally I’m done with judging and condemning myself for being me. I’m trying to step up into my potential, and that means accepting who I am to start with. Now, I still want to understand what is going on with behaviors that don’t appear to actually serve me well, but demanding of myself WHY doesn’t work. It serves only as an excuse to punish myself for perceived failings. That question rarely invites the kind of insight that I consciously think I’m trying to gain. After a while, when you’ve had a lot of practice diffusing this tendency towards judgmental demanding, then perhaps the question of “why” can be used again but I find I don’t really need it anymore.

So what will take the place of Why?

What?

Remember my three Why questions above? (Why do I do that? Why does this always happen? Why am I like this?) Here are the What questions to consider instead: What am I trying to gain from this action? What am I trying to keep from loosing? What purpose does this serve?

These ‘what’ questions get into real inner work territory, into the motivations that drive me.

Notice that when I’m asking what questions, I’m asking for something specific: such “what am I trying to gain from this choice”. Even the phrasing of the question becomes more useful than “why do I do that?” Notice the what question actually delves into something. It’s looking for a specific answer rather than being a vague demand for explanations without any guidance. Use the phrasing of the What question as a guide for direction. If I discover that the question isn’t accurate, as in it doesn’t actually evoke any real answers, then that itself helps me get a better handle on things. I know than that the question is wrong, and I can work with it until I find a question which does have some emotional meat on its bones. The work of finding the right What question to ask is the real heart of this particular tool. It’s like I was retraining my subconscious mind to work with me to understand the hidden motives that drove me, and the more I worked on it the easier and faster it became to come up with the most effective What question. It’s a trial and error process, and like all of the steps to building genuine internal emotional intelligence it does require awareness, diligence and curiosity.

Since we’re working to build awareness of ourselves, be sure to pay attention to the response each of the questions posed inspires within you. These might include anger, sorrow, wistfulness, disappointment, joy and a host of others. Let the responses happen, but don’t act on them. Just imagine you are watching a movie and the emotions are the actors on the screen. I can watch a movie scene featuring rage or lust and not be inspired to act on those. Instead the goal is to use them as the guides that they were intended to be. I’ll talk in my next post about building the observer self and how incredibly useful this is. Here I’m just introducing the concept so that if you do encounter any strong emotions as you work to develop the skills to stop asking Why and instead asking the right What questions, you’ll have some idea of how handle what might come up.

I’ve learned a lot of secrets in my ongoing journey toward awareness, and one of them is that self-sabotage … isn’t. I spent the longest time frustrated and angry at myself for the constant “shooting myself in the foot” syndrome. Once I started switching away from the why and into the what, I was able to uncover answers such as “because if I do that, then my identity is compromised.” Holy moly what an answer! And that’s one I can work with. I’ll get into self-sabotage isn’t in another post, but for now just practice catching all those Why questions.

Find a method that works for you. One of the early tools that I used was keeping a rubber band around my wrist and snapping it when I heard Why. NOT as punishment, because really, it’s just a rubber band and a light snap. For me it was a tool to serve as an attention-getter. In the movie “Kingdom of Heaven” with Orlando Bloom, the Knight’s oath ended with a slap across the face and the phrase “and that’s so you remember”. That is exactly the purpose that I used the rubber band for. I snapped the band when I heard myself asking Why and that action served as a physical highlighter reminding me “Oh yes, change that why to a what.” I also added in “thanks for the reminder” to ensure some part of me never interpreted that action as a punishment.

There are a million other ways you can train yourself to recognize when the why question comes up. Be creative. Learn to work with yourself, use your natural tendencies as an ally. Maybe a hand gesture would work better, or keeping a hash mark tally in the notes on your phone. Whatever, I don’t care. You are unique, find what works for you and leverage it. Eventually, you won’t need whatever tool you’ve settled on. The training and awareness will be in place and it will be easier and easier to seamlessly replace Why with What, until eventually Why stops being a useful question when it comes to inner work.

Ironically, I had written this post and within a day or so I was listening to one my product management podcasts. The topic was on emotional intelligence. Unfortunately, I cannot remember the interviewee’s name, her book, or even which of the podcasts it was (though most likely either “This is Product Management” or “Everyday Innovator“). Based on her lifelong research, the lady was talking about the few people who taught themselves how to be emotionally intelligent all had a few things in common, one of which was asking themselves What questions instead of Why. And for exactly the same reasons that I cited above. It’s just so nice to be vindicated by a field expert, even if I can’t tell you right now who that expert is. I’ll find it eventually and it’ll be one of the resources I link to. Just know this tool is a HUGE one. Once you’ve mastered it, it will help you tremendously. Not only with understanding yourself, but with working to understand those around you.

Video

Video is now also available through the YouTube Channel. The background during the speaking portion is a close-up of my 75 gallon freshwater planted tank at feeding time, so it’s relaxing and still fun to watch.

About The Featured Image

We took a trip to England in 2013, well before I got decent at photography. One of the places we visited in Wales was an elementary school which actually had a set of Neolithic standing stones on the grounds. Unlike Stonehenge, these standing stones were small, about waist high. I chose this image because asking “why did they build these” is too vague to effectively answer. But asking questions such as “what purpose did they serve”, “what function made them worth the investment to build” and other what (and how) questions provide pathways not only to real, usable answers but also reveals additional questions which might have been overlooked initially.