I’m curious: what do you do with hard questions?
By hard, I mean the difficult, challenging and not obvious kind of questions.
Perhaps the first clue is whether you walk toward or away from them. Though I suspect that if you’re reading this post, you don’t immediately turn tail…
So what do you do?
I’ve come up with a number of scenarios, try them out for size and add more if you have them:
- Think about it – playing around with it internally, including seeking out supporting information
- Talk with others – folk you would naturally discuss this kind of thing with
- Find an expert – someone whose insight, wisdom or expertise you trust
- Chunk it up – it’s too big to tackle in one go, so separate out the elements to make progress
- Ask why it is hard – what’s behind the question and why is it triggering us in this way?
- Question why we’re even asking the question…
The thing about hard questions is that they can become like a brick wall. Difficult to scale. And after a while we get very tired, slumping into our own particular default. Each of the scenarios above has its own downward spiral that doesn’t necessarily get us over the wall – trust me!
So if they are important enough to give attention to, let’s be more intentional about how we respond. And try stepping out of our default position.