Ask Better Questions for More Relationship Connection

Relationship hack: ask better questions to get more connection with your partner. Because when your brain is regularly inundated with information, it uses selective attention to filter out the noise.

The problem is, that unconscious (but scientifically beneficial) selective attention might unwittingly filter out the intimacy you crave.

 

What questions are you asking yourself on a regular basis?

Let’s say you’re making scrambled eggs and you realize there’s no ketchup in the fridge. (Are you one of the people who’s asking the question right now, “What does ketchup have to do with scrambled eggs?” I know. This is a long-term debate in my house. Just go with me for a moment.)

My husband and my son would not want to eat scrambled eggs without ketchup. So, when my husband sees there is no ketchup in the fridge, he heads to the pantry in search of a bottle. Luckily, he finds one, and, when he returns, I ask him if there’s any jam.

“I didn’t see any,” he tells me, so I write jam on the grocery board and buy it at the store. But when I go to put the jam I bought at the store away in the pantry, I find three other jars of jam.

This is mildly annoying to me, but my husband was telling the truth: he didn’t see the three jars of jam because the question he was asking himself was, “Where’s the ketchup?”

 

Lousy questions. Friendly questions.

My husband was asking a very productive question in order to enjoy his breakfast. He likes ketchup on his eggs. He asked, “Where’s the ketchup,” and viola! He found it.

But he didn’t see the three jars of jam.

He was being efficient. He got to eat his scrambled eggs flavored just the way he wanted.

Of course there is a place for the efficient questions. They offer so much sanity when life threatens to overwhelm us.

But when you rely on the efficient questions alone, you’re likely to miss out on some of the best stuff that your pantry, your relationship (and maybe even your life) has to offer.

Efficiency is good for finding ketchup. But it’s terrible for deepening intimacy with your partner.

Today, I invite you to notice the questions you’re unconsciously asking yourself. Different situations require different kinds of questions. Sometimes you want that singular focus. Other times you want a question to broaden your focus.

Sometimes you want a question to help you solve a specific problem. Other times you want a question to help you see the bigger picture.

People who come to coach with me are typically pondering questions like:

• Why won’t my partner talk with me?
• Why am I in charge of all the chores?
• Why is my life such a pile of crap?

Relationship questions are different than pantry-related-questions. When it comes to your relationship, efficiency is typically counter-effective. But our brains like simplicity and solutions.

Let’s start today’s discussion with a quick win. We’ll rewrite the above list:

• Instead of, “Why won’t my partner talk with me?” try asking yourself, “When is my partner most likely to talk with me?” or “What does my partner enjoy discussing with me?”
• Instead of, “Why am I in charge of all the chores?” Ask, “Of all the chores I do, what am I most proud of?” Or “What is one thing I can do today that will align with my values?” or even, “What are the chores that my partner is likely to enjoy taking ownership of?”
• Instead of, “Why is my life such a pile of crap?” Ask, “What do I most want to change in my life?” Or, “Who do I know that is living a life I admire?”

The questions we ask become a filter for the life we live. And not all questions are created equal.

Take a moment and consider the questions that frame many of your days. Do you recognize any of the questions from the following list?

• What do I have to get done today?
• What’s for dinner tonight?
• Will I be able to grab a moment to relax?

What would you add to my list?

We ask ourselves questions all the time. Questions help us to frame up our lives. We need questions. But even these seemingly benign questions can be asked slightly differently.

What do I need to get done today becomes:

• What’s the best thing I’m doing today?
• And what’s my least favorite?
• Now, how do I want to orient my day?

Can you hear the slight, energetic shift my rebranding of the question offers? What do I need to get done today feels ever so slightly like my day is running the show, and I’m reacting to this giant list.

 

Here’s an example

When I ask a client—let’s call her Mandy—to notice how her body feels as she asks the question, what do I need to get done today, she raises her eyebrows. This is the dumbest question she’s ever heard. “How do I feel?” she says. “I don’t feel any particular way. It’s just a question. Same as yesterday’s question.” She is certain she has wasted her time and money coming to see me. But I’m quiet, so she asks, “Why? Don’t you ask this question of yourself every day, Rebecca?”

That’s when I pull out my notebook. It’s spiraled. And green mostly, but it has a bouquet of flowers on the cover. I love the hard cover, but the pages tear out easily. I show Mandy how I’ve created a pocket inside the front cover with a daisy sticker.

“Actually, I get out this notebook, grab this fabulous purple gel pen and ask myself, ‘What wants to go on my list today?’”

“Well, aren’t you special,” Mandy says to me. Caught in Mandy’s wry gaze, I feel anything but special. But I’m used to people thinking I’m a little dorky.

“What’s your favorite thing that you did yesterday, Mandy?” I ask her.

More wry looks from Mandy, but she ponders. “I drove my teenage son to basketball. I wouldn’t typically list that as a favorite thing, but yesterday he told me about a project he’s doing in his robotics class. He was really excited and I heard more about his day than I usually do.”

“Cool!” I say, “That’s so good to notice.” (If you’ve been listening to my podcast, you’ll know that’s my signature phrase, “good to notice.”) Mandy’s eyebrows raise again. She is completely over my cheerful, optimistic attitude. Her chin drops and she glares at me from under those skeptical eyebrows.

“No, really,” I say, “How many times, when you’re pondering your day, have you thought, ‘I have to take my son to basketball?’”

Mandy shrugs. “Every day. In fact, if it’s not basketball, it’s something else I’m driving him to,” she says.

“What if, instead of asking yourself what do I have to do today? You asked yourself I wonder what my son will tell me while we’re driving to basketball practice?”

Mandy actually sat back in her chair. She took a beat, her eyes focused on her fingers fiddling with her rings. About ten seconds passed in silence. Then she looked up and stared me right in the eye, “You’ve gotta be kidding me,” she said, “You mean I’m gonna have a better relationship with my son because I ask a different question?”

I live for these moments. Oh how I wish you could be there. The shift is so immediate. The eureka moment was so profound.

 

How to feel a question in your body

Now Mandy was willing to play my silly games. “How do you feel in your body when you think ‘What do I have to do today?’” I ask her.

I have her close her eyes. I have her notice her skin. Her gut. Her throat. And then Mandy surprised me. “I feel heavy. I feel like I want to run away. It’s like all these post-it notes have come to life as monsters and they’re chasing me down. I want to run away, but my feet are so heavy I can’t move. They’re just post-it notes, but as they come toward me, it’s like they’re a steamroller and I’m about to get flattened.”

Wow.

We notice that feeling.

Then we stand up and shake. I love getting people to shake it off because most people are completely stiff. As I start demonstrating the shake off, they roll their eyes at me, but I’m tenacious. And sweet. And I’m shaking vigorously: hands over head, then bending at the waist to shake all the way down until my hands are on the floor. Then I rise up and do it again.

Mandy begins to laugh. This is one of the other great things about coaching. My clients laugh at me. And when they see that I’m happy they are laughing at me, this frees them up to laugh at themselves.

And that is where the magic lives. As Mandy shakes and laughs, she’s developing a new relationship with this question, “What do I have to do today?” She sees it might be as ridiculous as I look shaking up and down and up and down.

Then we sit back down.

“OK,” I say, “Now I want you to try noticing how your body feels as you ask the question, ‘I wonder what my son will tell me while we drive to basketball?’”

Mandy tears up. Another sign she’s permanently getting access to a new way to ask questions. “Rebecca,” she says to me, “I think my son would talk to me more if I were asking myself that question. I’m always overwhelmed and flattened by post-it notes. I bet he thinks I’m not listening to him. Or that I don’t have bandwidth to hear what he’s doing.”

See what happens when you begin to notice the questions you ask yourself?

Let’s take a look at the science. What’s happening in your brain when you land on your default questions?

 

The questions you ask make up your filtering system

Your brain receives way more stimuli than you can process consciously. So your reticular activating system or RAS helps you have selective attention. Your brain—and the questions you feed it—is constantly scanning the environment for the most relevant information you need right now.

The RAS helps a young parent sleep through a giant thunder storm, but awaken at the slightest stirring of a sleeping baby.

My husband’s RAS gave him selective attention for ketchup. There were hundreds of things in our pantry, but he was filtering all those things out, allowing him to be conscious only for sensory information about ketchup.

There is a famous experiment of basketball passing that illustrates selective attention. There are six players, three wearing white shirts and three wearing dark shirts. Your task is to count how many times the white-shirt-wearing basketball players pass the ball.

If you haven’t seen that video, skip ahead to the next section, because I’m about the spoil the video for you. The thing about the basketball video that’s most remarkable, however, isn’t whether you can correctly identify the number of passes.

The remarkable thing is that a person wearing a gorilla suit walks right through the middle of the game and many, many people don’t even see it. That is because the question they asked themselves is, “How many passes do the white-shirt-wearing people pass the ball?”

The questions you ask yourself filter what you see.

Many people were concentrating so hard on the passes, they simply didn’t see the gorilla. When they were shown the video a second time, they were aghast at how obvious the gorilla was. How could I have missed that?

The answer is a survival mechanism: there are so many pieces of information constantly bombarding your sensory system that you can’t possibly notice everything. So you have a reticular activating system that helps you select the relevant information you need to live a good life, whether that is focusing on ketchup or wondering what your son will tell you about as you drive him to basketball practice.

If you’ve seen the gorilla video, but you want to have a practical experience with selective attention, I’ll link to another video that features a shell game.

 

What are the Key Words shaping the life you’re living?

The questions you ask are like the keywords you’re putting into the search engine for your life.

Have you ever been on the internet and been frustrated because you couldn’t find what you were searching for? Then a friend comes along, changes the keywords and boom! There’s the information you wanted?

That’s a great metaphor for how the questions you ask yourself shape the life you’re able to live.

Mandy was always searching her brain for “What do I have to do today?” So much so that she didn’t have any attention left to ask, “I wonder what my son will tell me on the way to basketball?” Many, many people who come to work with me are stuck in a similar way.

They know they’re not happy with their life. They know they’re feeling flat and empty. But the questions they’re asking themselves are filtering out the very things they wish they could feel, and find, and orient their life around.

The questions you ask yourself direct your attention. Your attention shapes the way you perceive the world. And your perceptions shape your experience.

Mandy’s first question kept her focus on productivity. But her second question, opened her to hear whatever her son might want to tell her. When you treat your relationship like a to-do list, it will feel transactional rather than relational.

What questions are you asking yourself? And how are those questions shaping your experience of the world? Particularly your experience with your partner?

 

Question your questions: Metacognition

Questions direct attention → attention shapes perception → perception shapes experience
I’m not trying to give you a self-help adage. This is how your brain is wired.

The questions you ask yourself direct your attention. And ultimately, the life you lead.

Now that we’ve studied Mandy and my husband, we can see how attention shapes your perception of the world around you—be that ketchup-only-focus, or a son’s news of the day. Can you see how your perception shapes your experience?

As soon as Mandy changed her question from “What do I have to do today,” to “What might my son tell me about as we drive?” she had a completely different experience during the carpool. She was completely focused on her son, which her son could feel.

Because he felt how genuinely curious his mom was, he began to tell his mom random details about his day, which led to more intimate stories. Trust between them deepened.

Instead of seeing that time in the car as moments that got in the way of getting things done, Mandy began to look forward to the car ride as one of her favorite moments of the day. It was not only a true break from her harried schedule, it also became a vehicle for connection with her son.

Here’s the shortcut to remember:

• Questions direct your attention.
• Your attention shapes your perception.
• Perception creates your experience.
• This is neurology my friends.

This isn’t just some woo-woo idea from Rebecca…oh, ask a better question to live a better life…no.

When you choose better questions you:

• Interrupt automatic patterns
• You redirect your attention to notice something new
• And that allows you to create new interpretations of the world around you

 

The questions you ask determine your behavior

Why did the title of this episode promise that if you ask better questions, you live a better life? Let’s remember Mandy. Mandy wants to be connected to her teenager who is pulling further and further away from her.

When Mandy lets her post-it-notes run rampant, they bulldoze her, leaving her very little energy to engage with her son. Thoughts. Feelings. Behaviors.

By changing the question, you change the thought pattern.

• Here’s an example:
  When you ask the question, “Why is this happening to me?” you foster an internal feeling of helplessness.
• However, when you encounter the same circumstance with a different question, “What is this trying to teach me?” you awaken your personal agency. You remind your reticular activating system to search for all the ways you can be empowered to meet the present moment.

Same life. Different experience.

Here’s a couple examples:

• If you’re often feeling harried and rushed, notice how you start your day. What is the first thing you ask yourself in the morning? Is it something that will elicit a feeling of pressure like, how many emails do I need to answer before I leave the house? Or is it something that empowers your personal agency like, what does my body need to feel good before I launch into my day?
• If you want to change the flavor of your relationship, notice the character of your goodbye as you leave the house. Which flavor of question most closely resembles your frame of mind: What do I need to get done before I get into the car? Or do you unconsciously ask, how can I connect with my partner before I leave?

Be patient with yourself. Keep asking yourself to find the questions you unconsciously ask. You’re waking yourself up from a deep state of auto-pilot. This takes time. Be gentle and forgiving even as you are tenacious in the quest to live a happier ever after.

The second step, notice the flavor of your questions. Once you’re able to notice the question you ask, this will happen pretty much immediately. But it’s hard to find those invisible questions you ask yourself, so sometimes I use this step to help me find my questions.

By noticing the flavor of the questions you ask, it’s easier to spot them. If you don’t believe me, check out those videos of selective attention again.

This is sort of metacognition on steroids. We’re using metacognition to help you find the questions you’re asking. By looking for particular flavors of questions, you help bring what is currently unconscious into your consciousness.

Here’s a couple examples to help you find the flavor of questions you ask yourself:

• Am I asking questions that help me be more efficient or more aware of my partner?
• Am I asking questions that narrow my focus or widen my focus?
• Am I offering myself questions that account for how my body feels? Or more so driving myself to get something done?

Once you’ve found your unconscious questions and noticed their flavor, now it’s time to rewrite them.

Sometimes this is super easy. It was easy for me to give Mandy a different question, “I wonder what my son will tell me on the way to basketball?” But Mandy would not have been able to make that leap.

So here are 3 questions—it’s all about the questions, right?!—to help you search for a completely different way to flavor your life:

• What matters most to me? And when and where am I asking myself regular questions to help me focus on that?
• Who matters most to me? When and where am I asking myself questions to bring those people to the top of my consciousness?
• How can I be more kind to myself? And, by extension, more kind to the people around me?

Try it right now with me.

How can you be more kind to yourself with the questions you ask yourself?

Instead of why am I so stupid? Try asking one of these questions:

• Have I had enough sleep? Exercise? Or good food so I can operate at my best?
• Is there something that’s stealing my focus and making me distracted?

For me, it all comes back to kindness. Kindness to yourself. Kindness to your partner. Be gentle with yourself as you examine your questions.

I love you so much. And I’m so aware of all the ways you’re trying to just stay afloat. I know. I’m not asking for more from you. I’m just trying to give you a life raft so you can float on life’s waves, rather than feel bowled over.

Here are a few questions you and your sweetheart could entertain:

• When does it help to ask a ketchup-type question?
• When is our negativity bias polluting the premise of a question?
• How can we expand our RAS (or whatever appropriate … filter?) over simplifying the question we’re asking?

Let’s take these one by one.

Ketchup-flavored questions are designed for simplicity and straightforward answers. These questions are good for a thousand things you need to do running a household:

• What are the tasks we can each assume to get us out the door each morning?
• Who’s in charge of bedtime for the kids tonight?
• Where’s the best place to set up a diaper changing system?

Next, be on the lookout for your negativity bias. Your negativity bias wants to creep in on a regular basis. Remember, that negativity bias is trying to protect you, so harness its power and then put it safely into the backseat of your life so it’s not allowed to call too many shots.

I like to invite my negativity bias all the way in when it comes to two things: safety and sanity. Try these questions in your home:

• Is everybody buckled up?
• Can you take your bouncy ball outside?
• What other safety or sanity questions do you want to keep front and center in your life?

For most other ponderances, it helps to open your filter as wide as possible. This allows you to live a bigger and bigger question.

• How can we go on vacation more?
• What are we building together?
• Who are the people that really fill us up and how can we hang out with them more?
• What kind of future are we setting ourselves up for today?
• What relationships do we want to be cultivating? (foil: what relationships is it better to let go?)

Once you and your sweetheart have a good handle on separating out the different kinds of questions you ask, here’s one last question for you to ponder together:

• When are we likely to turn Big Filter Questions into Ketchup Questions?

Believe me, I’m an efficiency seeker too. I’m tempted by the ever-alluring Ketchup Question. But I want a Big Filter Life. The questions you ask yourself aren’t a cure-all, but they have a disproportionate impact on your happily ever after.

What questions have I forgotten to ask today? What is your favorite take away from this episode? Text me at 970-210-4480. I love being included in your life and relationship.