How Better Questions Transform Careers.
“How do you move your career forward post-pandemic?”
I love a good question, especially a question that takes me somewhere new.
Statements are fun too, but they tend to more static; they announce what is and not what might be. Questions, on the other hand, can open us up to completely different universes.
Do I pursue a career or a family, or both? Depending on which part of this question you choose to answer your life is going to look very different. And how we ask these questions can frame our options, and therefore our opportunities, in vastly different ways. For this reason, it's worth exploring what questions we've already chosen to answer in our careers and what some better alternatives might be.
How do you move your career forward during a pandemic? I've encountered this question in dozens of different forms in my coaching practice over the last year and it’s come from artists of all types. It's also been phrased as ‘How do I continue to write one of my own plays when every theatre in the country is closed for the foreseeable future?’, ‘How do I make my art when I haven't the room in lockdown to make a cup of tea?’ or ‘How do I transition from directing to writing, make money, and keep creative?’. I'm sure you'll have had many of your own over the many lockdowns. What is the question that's bubbling away at the top of your mind now as you read this?
I lean heavily towards being non-advisory as a coach, which broadly means I'm not in the business of providing answers. If particularly relevant, and only as a last resort, I might offer some advice, but I don't really believe it helpful to developing big career-shifting ideas. Let me briefly explain why I believe it's better to avoid advice-giving when coaching. I've found it's much more empowering to help someone tap into increasing the depths of their own creativity and resourcefulness than to offer them advice. Like great questions, coaching works with someone to open up new alternatives. It's not that I think giving advice is bad, it's just that it seems to get in the way of people creating their own big ideas. Once someone opens that internal Pandora’s Box of possibilities for themselves and learns how to do so as needed, it tends to stay open. This allows people to engage more of their own resourceful ways to tackle whatever might be getting in the way. The by-products of this are often confidence, clarity and a renewed energy. Put simply, questions start new journeys and answers tend to end them.
So, if big ideas grow from the questions we create what are better questions to ask, and how do we go about forming them?
Asking Better Questions:
Better questions create insight, meaning, direction, perspective and possibility. Let's examine better questioning through the example of NASA's attempt to put a man on the moon. We could suggest the question driving NASA from its conception to 1969 was: How can we be the first to put a man on the moon? The clever little structuring of this question enabled those who set out to answer it the opportunity to change the world in terms of technology and what we believed was possible for human kind. So, what specifically allows a question of this type to create change in ways others don't?
Perspective and Possibility: I've put these two together because they are interdependent when asking better questions. 'How can we...?' Implicit in this is the idea that what's being sought is possible. It projects our minds onto the moon straight away and asks what kind of suits would be needed, what would the shuttle landing gear look like. Images of suits adapted for walking on the moon’s surface, lunar capsules that could land safely but light enough to ascend back into orbit, cars that could travel across the terrain all spring to mind. None of which are present if we were to simply ask 'can' we put a man on the moon? Our minds stay firmly on the ground looking up. We see no suits. No cars and possibly, no way forward. Other questions that NASA could have chosen to focus on primarily were; Why are rockets so heavy? Would it not be safer to keep man on earth? If every attempt has failed so far is there any point in continuing? If the Russians already have rockets that can leave the atmosphere what chance do we have of getting to the moon first? Notice how these types questions fall short. Why are rockets so heavy? for example, is a relevant question but too insular to propel us forward. It's problem-focused and process-orientated but in terms of direction it's a dog chasing its own tail. In our careers these kinds of insular questions can sound like; Why do I always feel like I'm getting nowhere in my career? Why is it I never that get the lucky breaks? and How do I make people pay attention to my work? Alternatives might be; Where do I want to be in my career? What would a self-made lucky break look like? What would make my work gripping to others? We need better types of questions; ones that enable vision and possibility if we want to go to somewhere new.
Direction: "... be the first on the moon". Questions that really move us forward need a specific time and place. While this might sound like common sense how often have we pondered questions like; How might I move forward? How can I earn more money? How can I be more successful? Better questions need a clear landing point; moving forward to where exactly? How much money is more for you specifically? How will you know when you are successful and is getting there by a certain time important for you? Questions without a destination leave us drifting in space. We may end up in the right part of the universe but somehow we feel unsatisfied and like we've missed the mark.
Meaning: How meaningful was getting to the moon for America? Incredibly. It sought to unite a fractured America post the traumatic period of the 1960's, symbolically they would win the cold war and give every American (and every human) a sense of pride and potential for human endeavours. A great question opens you up to creating change on multiple levels of your life and career. It feels like an adventure. When thinking of better questions to ask ourselves we need to ensure they genuinely connect with what we feel is important. Society and culture provide many recognisable symbols of success in almost every field of the arts; Hollywood, Carnegie Hall, a National theatre, the Tate etc, and we can spend years chasing these before discovering that we've been chasing someone else's idea of success and not our own. Or worse still a collective idea of success that's evolved from the soup of celebrity, culture and capitalism that none of us ever really wanted but somehow got caught up in.
Create better questions before seeking answers.
Status Anxiety was a term coined by the writer Alain De Boutton to describe "the constant tension or fear of being perceived as 'unsuccessful' in a materialistic society". I believe we all experience this to different degrees over the course of our lives. This constant pressure that we often feel seeks relief in the form of finding quick answers to our most immediate problems. We spend our time desperately firefighting without making progress. Creating better questions first is about stepping out of our culture which demands immediate answers long enough to able to see the wood from the trees. You are the only one who will know what kind of question is really going to propel you forwards and that kind of insight is not to be sought in the web or from the viewpoints of others. Too often we look for answers from everywhere and everyone but ourselves. It's the equivalent of buying an overpriced bottle of Ballygowan from the local Tesco when you have a wonderful natural well of spring water in your own back garden. What would be a meaningful and thrilling project to start? Where do you want to end up? Once you have your better question then, as NASA did, seek out the best expertise you can to help make it happen. If indeed you feel it would be useful to do so. Get creative first and then you can tackle the smaller problem-focused questions without needing to worry about that chasing your own tail (or someone else's).
If you’re interested in doing a bit more of this for yourself, you can find a free career development workbook here. It’s riddled with better questions.
Identifying your implicit questions to avoid self-sabotage:
There is the idea in one school of psychology that our behaviours are led by explicit and implicit questions. The explicit ones we are conscious of most of the time and would be the answer you give to the question What do you do? phrased as a question. If you are or want to be a writer, the explicit question you're working from is 'how do I be a writer'. Much of our behaviour though is driven by the implicit, unconscious questions, lying a level below these explicit ones and it is worth spending time identifying them. The implicit question under 'How do I be a writer' might be 'How do I be a writer without making myself or anyone else uncomfortable?'. The behaviour resulting from this implicit question might look like that writer procrastinating on a new writing project, assuming they aren't good enough to apply for a grant or competition, not connecting with other writers they admire, only writing in one form despite always wanting to try another etc. Other implicit questions underpinning unwanted behaviour in creative careers might sound like: How do I impress everyone, all the time, to get acting work? How do I best look busy while avoiding failure as an artist? How do I not worry my family while still pursuing a career as a theatre maker? I'm sure we can recognise, if not imagine, some of the unhelpful and self-sabotaging behaviours that these questions might lead to. So, reflecting on your own experience:
What's the explicit question you're working from currently? What's that question which has brought you to where you are today?
What might be the implicit question under it and how might it be holding you back? What would be the question that would result in the things you are doing and not doing now?
What would be a better implicit question for you to have?
The joy with questions, implicit or otherwise, is that once we become aware of their power we can begin to re-construct them to work in our favour. We can do this by becoming aware of the questions we are working from first and then constructing better more useful ones. "How do I be a writer without making myself or anyone else uncomfortable" might become "How do I share what's most unique about me as a writer with an audience who'd be deeply grateful to hear it?" I for one would much rather read a book written from a writer working from the latter perspective as opposed to the former.
Developing better questions for every stage in your career and following their path is a challenging and creative process. It requires self-awareness, tackling our old ways of seeing things and exploring new ones. Coaching is that process as facilitated by a trained professional in structured ways which are focused, rigorous and supportive. This type of approach to change can be defined as transformative. Advice-giving is more typically defined as an informative approach; while we receive new information, little about how we see ourselves & our own potential changes as a result. The first is harder to do by ourselves alone, which is why I coach, and the second is often easier if you know where to go (the internet is quite helpful here as to books, your network of friends, family and colleagues). Both have their place, but both serve different purposes. This transformative process is by no means exclusive to coaching and anyone can start it for themselves (or restart it) at any point by choosing to ask better questions.
So, how do we move your career forward post-pandemic? We could commit time to finding an answer to this, but I wonder what you think a better question might be? One with a perspective that implies possibility, a destination which is meaningful and that feels like an explicit adventure.
What is the question you need to ask to take you to where you want to be in your career?
*Inspired by the work of Marilee C. Goldberg Ph.D in The Art of the Question and 15 months of coaching creatives through the Covid-19 pandemic.