Written by Machen MacDonald

Are you thinking or are you thoughting? Most people don’t really think. They spend most of their day thoughting. Most people have over 80,000 different thoughts a day. The challenge is that 90% of those thoughts are the same things we thought about yesterday, the day before that, and the day before that.

In performance coaching, we know that our thoughts, ideas, and beliefs invoke feelings and emotions. It is your emotions that cause you to take action or behave a certain way and it is your actions and behaviors that lead to your outcome or results. Based on this, it is your thoughts that ultimately lead to your outcome.

I like to think of the word ‘emotion’ as energy-in-motion. So, if thoughts drive e-motions then thoughts must be energy. According to physics, energy doesn’t start and never ends, it just changes form. This is great news. To achieve your desired results you just need to change your thinking.

The way to change your thinking, or move from thoughting to thinking, is to know what questions to ask. You must realize you will ultimately get the answers to your questions. It’s like doing a search on Google. (by the way, if you would like to know what Google is shoot me an email).

If you ask yourself limiting questions like, “Why won’t this work?” or “Why can’t I figure this out?” your search is sure to come back with all the reasons why it won’t work or why you can’t figure it out. Unfortunately, most people spend their time asking themselves questions to which they don’t really want the answers.

To get the results you want, in all aspects of your life, you need to take effective action. To take effective action, you need to feel empowered, confident, curious and resourceful. To feel those emotions, you need to ask possibility questions not limiting questions. Success and fulfillment comes down to simply developing the habit of asking better questions. The answers you want are available to you. You must make yourself available to the answers and the way to do that is knowing what questions to ask. That is thinking.

Questions to ask yourself to achieve your desired outcomes:

How else could this be done?

What does success look like around this?

What would my favorite superhero or heroine do? (remember, you can have fun with it too.)

Would I do this differently a week from now? How so?

If I had more resources what would I do differently?

What would dramatically impact this?

Who or what resources could I leverage?

What’s the safe way to do this? What’s the riskiest way to do this?

What haven’t I considered that would make this better or easier?

Who has the answer I need?

What would make this perfect?

What about this situation motivates me?

What do I need most right now to move forward?

What are three creative things I could do right now to make this even better?

What change should I make now?

What skill or mindset do I need to develop to accomplish this?

What’s my strategy to achieve that?

How would someone who is really good at this be doing it?

The purpose of these questions is to get you thinking differently than you have typically thought. Try them out and let me know what shows up for you.

Make it up, make it fun, and make it happen!