Questioning How We Think

This morning, I was an active spectator at the Singapore Biathlon. This was an aquathlon, organised by the Singapore Navy, comprised the Olympic Triathlon Distance of a 1.5km swim and a 10km run. I found it fun and challenging to take photographs and videos of friends running from the transition area, and highly determined sprint to the finish. It was a vast sea of both familiar and unfamiliar faces, and I had to shift my focus (and that of my Creative Vado Pocket Video Cam) constantly.

John Cooke wrote about how ‘Riding and training offers many lessons that can be applied in life metaphorically.’ I was taken by his some of his, apparently, close-ended questions:

Like swimming and riding, can I be efficient in my life, slicing though with the least resistance and by analogy creating the least friction with all around me?

Have I been a model citizen in my country, my continent, and ultimately my earth?

Will I leave a footprint that is richer for my presence here?

These are some of the questions that we pose on Leadership Lessons from Triathlons. It is crucial that when we take stock of what we do, or reflect over our actions and inactions, we ask questions that trigger us into new directions and perspectives. Having said that, being different for the sake of being different would be pointless and purposeless! It is also similar to being asked this question: Why ask stupid questions? There is an inherent flaw in asking the previous question.

If you can recognize what a stupid question is, then by supposition you can recognize or even compose a clever question. I find it fascinating that we can assign the concept of intelligence to a question: stupid versus clever. It is personalizing a mode of communication. It is analogous to objectifying people. What do we really mean when we ask clever or stupid questions? Seth Godin links lists to questions.

There are some questions that are rhetorical or pose no absolute answers. Questioning a person’s emotions is one of them. It can be imposing and arrogant to challenge a person’s feelings. Emotions are a personal thing; they are physiological responses to our environment. For instance, you may have encountered these superficial questions (if indeed they are real questions): Why are you so happy? Why look so sad? Self-help junkies may need to look past their own self-indulgent mindset and become more aware and cognizant of those around them. Shift from selfish to self-less. Move from care-less to careful.

Start sifting through our clichés, metaphors, analogies, euphemisms, idioms, proverbs and other abstracts thought and attempt to crystallize some of these. How do you make sense of them? How do you make sense to others? Are we being clear in our communication? How do we figure out figures of speech?

How do you know that you have done well? Conversely, how do you know that you have done badly? What does a person mean when they ask: ‘How are you doing?’ or ‘How are you?’

Questioning can help us filter the noise from then truth. Ask. Probe. Investigate. Interview. Converse.

Photo credit: Brian Tan