Four Questions to Change Your Life
Posted on July 05, 2022 by Harry Goldberg, One of Thousands of Leadership Coaches on Noomii.
These are the fundamental questions to ask yourself every week to create fundamental shifts in your life. There's no secret, you can do this too.
I have asked myself variants of these four questions every Monday for 6 years and it has fundamentally changed my life.
Why these questions?
These questions are all built on the premise that if we focus on where we want to go, then our lives with follow.
Do you remember learning to drive a car? A driving instructor once told me that the most common mistake people make is to allow the natural instinct of turning the wheel when we turn our heads.
That’s why it takes so long for people to learn to hold the wheel straight while turning their heads to check their blind spots.
If we’re not careful, we change lanes because we are thinking about changing lanes as opposed to intending to change lanes.
In normal driving, this is a simple fix – keep the wheel straight when you turn your head (but this required discipline until it becomes natural). In race car driving, on the other hand, you need to turn your head to where you want to go. Otherwise, you’ll likely go exactly where you’re looking.
Imagine you’re travelling 200km/hour and about to smash into a wall and the only thing that saves you is the experienced driver in your passenger seat physically turning your head away from the wall and to the road again.
And when we apply this concept to our own lives, we can see that whatever we think about or look at is what we tend to become.
Our actions follow our thoughts, not our plans. And this can be an exceptional strength or a debilitating weakness.
These difference between the two?
Our thoughts.
And what drives our thoughts?
Our questions.
Hence, ask the right questions and you will move toward to right answers.
My Four Questions:
1. How successful was your week compared to your intentions?
2. Who are you becoming?
3. How will you know in 7 days that this was a successful week?
4. What intentions will you set for this week?
Each of these questions have slight nuance to them, especially defining “intentions”, “becoming” & “successful”. Perhaps I’ll talk more about that in future newsletters.
The questions themselves are designed for what I choose to focus on. You can apply this to money, health, relationships, habits & career too. It’s entirely up to you.
What’s Next?
If you want to steer your life in line with your intentions despite your environment, then you need to come up with questions for yourself. There are daily, weekly, fortnightly, monthly, quarterly & annually versions of these questions that many of my clients enjoy using.
But if you want change, you need to adapt them to yourself and for yourself.
And if this feels like a struggle, then I welcome you to reach out for a conversation.
