#187: Questions for powerful reflection

Dear friends

Thank you for your messages after last week’s letter. Although it broke format and ran much longer than usual, it appears it resonated. I appreciated the feedback and the conversations that followed.

Appropriately for the second last letter of the year, today focuses on questions for reflection (You might remember this letter on the Power of Reflection).

In my coaching work, I find the best insights come from good questions. These are some of my favourite questions. Their phrasing is deliberate, designed to trick your brain (and your mouth) into avoiding consulting, self-helping hooptedoodle, the stock phrases and cliches that sound impressive but mean nothing. As author and writing teacher Vivian Gornick put it “Penetrating the familiar is by no means a given. On the contrary, it is hard, hard work”.

/strategy

In the busyness of business, we often fail to reflect. When we do, the fear of failure means we tend to focus only on mistakes, even though the research tells us “Positive attention, is thirty times more powerful than negative attention in creating high performance on a team” (Nine Lies About Work).

These questions are a pragmatic way to uncover an authentic expression of what is going on in your business or team.

• What was fun this year? What made it fun? (Explore what it was, who was involved, when it happened, how it happened).
• What was awful / we’ll never do again? (Again, explore what, who, when and how).

Fun is important because it has energy, energy fuels the consistent momentum you need for success.

Awful is important for the same reason, it tells you about energy and where you’re losing.

Even if you discover that ‘awful’ was your most profitable project, you’re going to struggle to make it sustainable or, at the very least, you have to explore how to do it differently.

The what, who, when, and how, ensure that you keep it concrete.

Strategy conversations can easily slip into abstraction. We do it by default because it makes as seem clever (it really does, check out Jonah Berger’s Magic Words) but it is the concrete details that are the foundations from which we can build next year’s strategy.

• What made us proud?

Proud is different from fun. It speaks to stretch and growth, and growth is one of the 8 key variables that make for a high-performing team.

Together fun, proud and avoid give you a neat framework based on your business or team’s reality. It’s not abstract. It’s not fancy wishful thinking, it is grounded in your experience and that’s the most valuable of all.

Finally, I like this question from Jim Collins and Bill Lazier’s Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0:

• How do we extend our victories?

It is often true that in the turbulence of business life, we’re so relieved to have a victory, that we forget to ask how we could make more of it and yet they caution that “one of the most costly strategic blunders is failing to make the most of victories”.

Asking that question will give you a set of actions that you can take early in the New Year, and their beauty is that you already have momentum in those areas and so your first actions of 2024 will be easier, giving you greater confidence and more momentum. That’s a good way to start the year!

There are, of course, many other questions but these four are better than none at all.  

//self

If you think getting to grips with your business is tricky, then you may find yourself to be even trickier.

The memoirist Emile Rousseau observed, “I have nothing but myself to write about, and this self that I have, I hardly know of what it consists”.

But, it’s worth doing, for as Michael Meade has written “If you don’t know who you are, anyone can name you”.

Before you start, select a few people to share your answers with, make them a mix of professional and personal, and choose people with whom you already have a high-trust relationship. Ask them to also answer the questions. Sharing your answers, will both deepen your insights and further enrich your year.

If you don’t have weekly or monthly ‘best of’ reflection practice, answer with whatever comes first to mind. Then, go back through the year, month by month or quarter by quarter. If you keep a diary, use that to prompt you, otherwise, use your calendar. I know you will remember things that you didn’t remember in your first pass at the questions.

• Who was grateful to you this year? What for?
• What compliments or acknowledgments did you receive? From whom for what?
• In what moments did you lose track of time?
• What are you proudest of about this year?
• What are you grateful for?
• What was difficult?
• How did you manage it?
• What would you do differently?
• As you end the year, what do you need most? How can you give it to yourself? Who might you need to ask for it?

Remember to be specific, what was it, who was involved, when and how did it happen?

/// soul

Over the last few decades, valuable work has been done on the transmission of inter-generational trauma. It has helped us understand how the past’s pain reverberates in the current moment. Alongside this pain are other memories, places of powers, that are embedded in our ancestry. Yet, all too often, we don’t know those stories.

We have mostly lost the tradition of storytelling, of transmitting our family’s triumphs, and victories in everyday life, leaving us poorer. Knowing our people’s stories makes us stronger. Very simply, we become more rooted in the soils from which we come.

This time is one in which families are gathered. Use these questions to deepen your roots.
Psychologist Arthur Aron’s Fast Friends Protocol has 36 questions which often deliver new insights, even for people that know each other well (I wrote more about it here).

StoryCorp, one of my favourite organisations, describe themselves as being “committed to the idea that everyone has an important story to tell and that everyone’s story matters” and their mission “to help us believe in each other by illuminating the humanity and possibility in us all — one story at a time”.

Their website shares ten tips for a great conversation and dozens of questions that you can use to explore your family’s history.

Here are three powerful questions that they don’t list:

• What is the oldest thing that you know about our family?
• What stories do you know about your grandparents?
• What about our family history do I not know?

Each takes you deeper into the aspects of your family that have endured across the generations. Whether they’ve ever been made explicit or not, you can be sure that they’ve had some impact on your life.

Happy reflecting! Let me know how it goes. 

All the best

Karl

PS: You can find the archive of previous letters here and subscribe here. You’ll find me on Instagram and LinkedIn.