About That 1 Simple Question-Hack to Achieving Your Goals

Photo by Camylla Battani on Unsplash

If you’ve digested a fair amount of self-help content, there’s one particular piece of advice to help you shift your mindset so that you employ your mind to solve a problem instead of becoming stuck at one. It goes something like:

Instead of assuming “I can’t do that” or “that would be hard,” we should ask “how can I accomplish that?”

There are also follow-up questions to help hone in on more specifics of the solution:

• What is the next action I should complete in order to make progress and advance forward?
• What does or should this executing this action look like based on similar real-life experiences?
• If you know what you need to do, are you sure you’re still not simplifying it enough?
• If it can’t get any simpler, then based on the standard sequence of events that lead to not executing on the action, what patterns might be sabotaging you?

I find it quite clever — questioning yourself to success. It’s also inspiring as it assumes that you already possess the answer inside you, a sort of self-sufficiency created through a combination of your own resourcefulness, curiosity, and resilience.

But there is an important part of asking questions that you should make sure not to skip: answering them.

Asking the right questions can help us pivot into more advantageous positions, and answering the right questions can help us see that we are capable of more than we think. The most terrifying thing about asking and then answering questions, especially when we’re honest, also happens to be the most valuable. We will finally realize that there is nowhere left to hide.

All that’s left is to show up and have some courage.