What Questions Do You Meet Along Your Orbit?

Yes/no questions get yes/no answers. Open-ended questions get open-ended answers. The kinds of questions we ask determines the kinds of answers we get. And questions we ask ourselves frequently, have a powerful impact on our lives. In his book One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way to Success, Dr. Robert Maurer relates an interesting experiment that illustrates why this is the case. 

At the beginning of multi-day retreats at which he lectures, Dr. Maurer likes to ask participants to remember the color of the car to the left of where they parked that morning. Almost nobody remembers the color because they didn’t think to pay attention. The next day, Dr. Maurer asks his participants the same question and more people remember. By the third or fourth day of asking the question, almost everybody can remember the color of the car to the left of theirs. Dr. Maurer says that this is because, “Your brain can’t resist a question.” If you ask a question regularly, your brain gets to working on it in the background. Even without trying, your brain trains you to remember to pay attention to the car on your left when you park because the repetition of the question signals that this is something important. Repeated questions teach you where to focus. 

Dr. Maurer planted a question at a regular position within the participants daily routine and this led them to automatically generate an answer. Planets orbit along a regular path, moving past the same places over and over again. We too move through our lives following certain cycles. We get up in the morning. We sleep at night. We brush our teeth twice a day. We exercise three times a week. Or maybe have a cappuccino after lunch. Our physical health benefits from the regularity of a routine and posting a question somewhere along the orbit of our lives can lead to greater insight and inquiry. 

This week, I invite you to place one question within your orbit by asking: 

What’s a question that I would benefit from returning to regularly? To what pre-existing routine could I attach the question, ensuring that I come back to it again and again?

God Bless,
Dan