How to ask good questions
Bloom argues that we should use non-empathic compassion (creating the desire to help) rather than empathy. Feeling another’s pain affects your ability to judge objectively. Compassion allows you to dig more deeply and ask questions about the other person rather than about you, which will allow you to help.
“Feeling another’s pain affects your ability to judge objectively”. What is compassion then?
Listening begins with setting your intention for a conversation. There are three primary intentions, which you can switch between in conversations:
- The ‘I’ intention — what do I make of this? This is where you engage with the situation by considering what you would have felt or done in a similar situation. This type of position often triggers a fix, or advice.
- The ‘You’ intention — what exactly do you mean? Listening with this intention reminds you that there is a lot you don’t know (the other person’s experiences or perceptions). You really try to understand the other person’s way of thinking. You never give advice or explain how you would have dealt with the situation. Your questions focus on getting deeper.
- The ‘We’ intention — how are we doing? This is a meta position, observing you and the other person as if from above. You are conscious of how you are feeling and how the other person is doing. Is the conversation going in circles, how is the body language (relaxed, fidgety, tightening)?
This gets into the more technical skills of how to ask questions. The author proposes a fascinating technique, which she calls questioning up and down. Questioning up refers to abstract concepts and downwards refers to concrete facts and reality. This technique should allow a person to move downwards until they establish the facts, and the ‘critical moment’, a key point/statement/fact/attitude around which the entire conversation revolves. Then the questioner can repeat the data they have heard and move upward to establish the underlying beliefs.
Upward questions (towards concepts and underlying beliefs):
Why is that? What do you mean by x? What does x have to do with y? Downward questions (towards facts, events, statements)
When did this happen? What exactly did z say? What happened from there? The idea is to ask downward questions to establish the facts of a situation. Then move upwards to understand the beliefs and concepts that influence the person’s thinking.
A why question can seem like a direct assault, like a detective shining a light into the face of a suspect. “Why did you vote for X party”? “Why do you associate with Y”? Instead, try to soften this effect by using what. “What is it about party X that causes you to vote for them”. “What makes Y a good person to hang
Vague questions — where it’s unclear what the questioner is looking for. This is often because they use a concept which is personal to them, like good, or high, or appealing. It’s difficult to know what the questioner means by those words. For example, “was the concert good?” may get a different answer from ten random participants. Instead of asking “Is that tower high”, ask “how high is that tower”, or instead of “was the meal tasty”, ask “how did the meal taste”?
don’t ask vague questions!
tags: #relationships #insights #howto uid: 202207041750