Get unstuck in JUST 2 minutes!

From a young age, I always had a deep belief that I had choice. And I believe this for you too. I pretty much grew up knowing I could make my own choices. During my later years, I would joke with friends saying choice was my middle name.

Growing up in very different parts of the world made this conviction even stronger. In Nigeria, where I spent some of my teenage years, I would walk in the bush with my father and meet the nomadic Fulani tribe in that area. They were so generous with the little they had. They also seemed happy and fulfilled. At a spot for some days, gone the next. I put it down to living life by choice.

Choice came up in several conversations this week and I attended a series of webinars by WBECS (World Business and Executive Coach Summit) that showcased choice. I want to highlight one that caught my attention in this week’s article. It is practical and simple to use with great impact. It can be done in twos or with your team, but it is just as effective done by yourself. The aim is to be self-sufficient in solving our problems or challenges.

We all need tools that we can use when we get stuck. My ethos is to self-coach, and self-mentor our way out of our ‘stuckness’. How to step away from our challenge by asking pertinent questions to help us put some distance between us and our challenge AND get a different perspective.  

And that’s exactly the aim of the 2-minute exercise from the webinar by authors Hal Gregersen and Amy Edmondson. And here is how it works. Best to do this with pen and paper or notebook (the paper kind).

1.      What’s your challenge now?

Think of a current challenge and write it down.

2.      How do you feel about your challenge?

Write down the emotions you feel about your challenge

3.      Set a timer for 2 minutes – the most important step

Take 2 minutes to write down 10 questions you have about your challenge. Don’t overthink it, just write down everything that comes to your mind about your challenge. If there are more than 10, write them all down.

This exercise aims to use the power of questions to enable new ways of thinking about your challenge. It is NOT to find answers to your 10 questions (or more) but to help get a different perspective on your challenge. And these should only be questions relating to your challenge.

Try it, it works! (See the statistics below.)

Because we can get so caught up in our challenge that we loose clarity of our challenge. It’s like trying to see underwater without goggles. It is a blur. The goggles help to displace the water from our eyes allowing us to see. Your 10 questions are your goggles.

I have a serious bias toward action and get very caught up in what I want to achieve sometimes to the detriment of my wellbeing. Active self-reflection is something I am consciously working on and whenever my brain alerts me to the ‘dog with a bone’ sensation I stop and reflect. Taking 2 minutes to step back from the challenge and asking questions is a great way to make reflection a habit. And sometimes I notice that some of the questions that come up are repeated.

Something that Hal raised in the webinar too. He suggests doing an audit of our questions over time. Are there recurring ones? Are some stale? Is there a pattern? The exercise aims to get us unstuck and shift our emotions to ones that serve us better. This also allows us to ask ourselves tougher questions like, ‘am I making the challenge worse than it is?’

In this webinar, we took 2 actual minutes to write down our questions and the host ran 4 polls to see what changes the participants noticed. The results were astonishing!

1.      How do you feel about your challenge now? 81% felt better

2.      Did you reframe your challenge by asking your 10 questions? 85% said yes

3.      Did you ask yourself uncomfortable questions? (a small majority did – didn’t get the stats)

4.      Did you discover one new idea to help you? 67% said yes.

That is the power of questions.

AND the power of choice!

As always, you can reach me at yoga@yoganesadurai.com

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