I want to talk to you today about questions....beautiful, amazing, glorious questions. The questions we ask of both ourselves and other people can literally change the way we think, experience, perceive, act, connect and engage. But.....are we asking the right ones? Recently I attended the first part of a certification training I'm going through this year in appreciative inquiry called Leading with Experiential Appreciative Facilitation. This training is run by the amazing Jon Berghoff and the Flourishing Leadership Institute, based on the amazing work of Dr. David Cooperrider and has literally rocked my entire world (seriously, click the play button on this episode because you'll hear me get truly giddy!) Listen + subscribe on iTunes // Stitcher Ok, as I mentioned, I've become completely obsessed with diving into appreciative inquiry, so you're going to be seeing a lot more of it infused into everything I do....especially in the Boss Mom Retreat happening later this year in NC ;) Appreciative inquiry is truly an introduction into how to have better questions when designing group spaces, summits, retreats, meetings, etc. What AI does is it flips the way we talk about things from being focused on addressing the failures, challenges, and things we need to fix to focusing on recognizing, maximizing and leveraging the strengths. What I've learned is that if we only focus on the problems, challenges or obstacles and finding a fix for those, we will only ever help get people back to a neutral point, where they don't feel broken anymore. But what if we could take them beyond that point?? A quote that has been completely rocking my world lately is this: “The task of leadership is to create an alignment of strengths, making the system’s weaknesses irrelevant.” - Peter Drucker Leading for the future is all about strengths. If we focus on our strengths, on our aspirations, on where we want to go, and what we’ve just done to get ourselves to where we are so far, what would the world look like? What would our businesses and lives look like? Can you picture it? So how can we do that? Well, we need to reframe the way we think about the questions we ask. Oftentimes we will default to asking the questions that are easy, the ones everyone is always asking. But might it mean so much more if we actually stopped to really think about the questions we're asking, how they'll land and what kind of feedback or response they might produce? I'd challenge you to start asking yourself the following questions anytime you are posing a question to someone: Am I asking questions because I really care and wanting to know or understand more? Am I asking this question because I think I should ask it? Am I asking the questions that really need to be asked? We’ve gotta start digging deeper into the words we use. Are we speaking to people from their strengths? Are we helping people to see their future, what they want, what their dream will be? When we do this, it opens up this beautiful positive emotional attractor component of your brain that gets people thinking bigger, broader, and in a way that gets them past that neutral point and into this amazing space where they truly believe anything is possible. Which is totally where we want our kids to be, right? It starts with the questions we ask. Now, let’s get tactical to figure out how to actually go about knowing the right questions to ask and how to approach asking questions in our lives and businesses. 1. Determine where you are already asking questions in your business. Are you asking questions in surveys, calls to action, Facebook groups, intake forms, coursework, sales calls, webinars, Facebook ads, etc? 2. Assess the kinds of questions you're asking. Are you questions framed from the positive or the negative? Are you addressing someone's challenges, obstacles, problems or weaknesses? Our questions are meant to illicit response, and if you phrase them right, you'll get the kind of feedback that's really v