The Gift of a Powerful Question
See more of my artwork at Artstation
We don’t provide formal coaching without permission, but that doesn’t mean we stop being coaches when we are in conversation with coworkers and friends. Per my previous post “it’s all Coaching,” we can embody the coaching mindset in every moment. Which means when we see an opportunity to ask a powerful question, if the context and relationship is appropriate, we will ask that question.
This asking is like setting a gift on the table – the recipient can choose to open that gift or not – especially outside a formal coaching relationship, we coaches practice non-judgement and non-attachment to outcome. The question-as-gift is just there to be explored should the recipient wish to open it.
Recently I was talking with a friend and colleague, who outlined her acute struggle to find enough time to write a book that was, as she said, “crying to be born.” She said she had tried, but the time just wasn’t available in her busy schedule. I asked simply: “Is that true?” She documented the conversation and her triumph in a Medium post.
Having known Muffie for almost two decades, I was comfortable enough in our relationship to ask a question like “is that true?” without preamble, qualifiers, or softening.
But where did that question come from? How did it arrive in my mind the second that it needed to be voiced, as a gift for my friend to open?
The answer in two parts:
Part 1: Serendipity
Coincidentally I had just been reading a post by one of my coaching mentors, Robbie Swale, who had been struggling with exactly the same issue, wherein his own coach had asked him the question “is that true,” and challenged Robbie to find the time to write. Ultimately, Robbie recognized he could use his 12 minutes a day on the commuter train to write, even when all other time was scheduled. While you can read Robbie’s own take on this, suffice to say one of his two upcoming books will be titled “I Wrote this Book in 12 Minutes.”
Part 2: Walking the talk
The second part of why I felt comfortable asking Muffie that “is that true” question was the fact that her dilemma felt so familiar.
Two years ago, I ran across an artist who had made a personal internal commitment to draw one portrait a day for 365 days. Scanning through the months of artwork, the progress of his skill in using line, color values, and the quality of his portraiture increased phenomenally month by month. I was inspired, and a bit awed at his discipline. I had been longing to get back to making art, something that had gone out the window two decades before, due to child rearing.
Comparing that artist’s first month to the last month of his portraiture was incredibly compelling, and motivating – which is what convinced me that I should make a similar commitment. The challenge was time. Where on earth would I find enough time to make a drawing every single day, given the time constraints? It became my own powerful question.
The solution gets into an issue I’ll write more about in the future: excising social media. By deciding to make a drawing on my iPad each night right before going to sleep instead of scrolling social media for 20-30 minutes, I made the time (as Gay Hendricks says in his book, The Big Leap, we are the source of time, we make time). Now two years later I have over 700 works of art, and have established this habit as deep and as regular as brushing my teeth. I don’t feel right if I go to sleep without having made my drawing.
This week when I decided to start posting articles, I was caught up short as to what images I could use alongside them. Creative Commons licensing? Getty Images? Until I realized I would never run out of images I had created myself. I’m also fully aware that these first rough articles are like the initial evening sketches I did two years ago – with commitment and consistency, in time they will improve.
What gifts do you have waiting to give yourself, or your friends, in the form of a powerful question?
For the next post: Coaching and working with Chronic Pain
This article is part of a series of posts on life and coaching, with particular focus on the intersection of coaching with our sense of meaning and fulfillment, aligned with what the world needs, and how we can embody leadership (as defined by Master Somatic Coach Amanda Blake: leadership “… as a process of connecting to what matters, envisioning what could be, and taking action to bring that vision to life. When you care about something enough to ask others to care about it with you and you effectively collaborate with others to co-create a new future, then you are leading.”)