How
How
- used to ask about the condition or quality of something.
- in what way or manner; by what means.
Lately I have been trying to improve my self-talk. As I move through my day I notice more negative thoughts or questions enter my mind. Particularly dealing with my current actions and the future.
Questions such as
1. Why am I not doing what I want to do?
2. Why do I want to do this/that?
3. Why am I still at my current job, doing the same thing?
4. Why can’t I get it together?
Looking at these questions it is no wonder why I seem to feel stuck. These questions, if answered, only give me a meaning, the cause of situation. What it does not give me, which I desperately need, is action. What to do next.
While watching a video of Dan Lok,a successful entrepreneur and deal maker, he talks about deep questions. To get yourself to the next level of your life and to keep improving, you must ask yourself deep questions. The thing I noticed is that the questions he framed were always with “How”. Such as -
How do I make $50,000 more with the same products and customers?
And you could add more conditions onto this question to further deepen it. When looking at “How” I started to realize that it is very hard to make a “How” question negative and that “How” usually led to an action.
Let us tackle the negative statement first.
To make “How” negative we must do something like -
How can I not perform?
How do I fail at this all the time?
When saying these two questions, they feel forced. They seem to long even when writing them. You automatically want to ask the why. Why can’t I perform, why do I fail all the time. Using “How” it just seems out of place. Let’s reverse these into true “How” questions.
How can I perform?
How can I succeed all the time?
Not only are these positive versions of the questions above, they give you a gate to head towards. You have the end goal already set with the question, now it is time to figure out the road.
Action Phase
This is where the action comes in. When you answer these questions, you get the action.
To perform, you must practice.
To Succeed all the time, you must prepare. (if even possible haha)
From there you can ask the questions what? Where? and then Why? At the end of the day, if the “Why” is not there, then the action will not matter. Which I still believe in asking the “Why”, but I think that asking the “Why” is the second question, not the first in situations that you know you want to do. A lot of times we already know the “Why” and still don’t do what we want. This is because the actions are not clear to us, or there are too many actions. Using “How” we can narrow these down.
Question Chain
Let’s look at the chain of questions that might occur. Let our question be - How can I speak Japanese?
Simple answer? Practice every day. But practice what?
What do you want to talk about? - Food and Travel
How do I talk about food and travel in Japanese?
Learn the vocabulary for these subjects and basic Japanese sentence structure.
This process could go on until you are at the very basic word/structure that you want to learn or the skill that you would like to learn.
By using questions, we can narrow down the steps that we need to take and get to the next action to take in our Journey to master the skill or get to the next level of our lives.
Using “How” at the beginning can help start the chain and pinpoint what we need to do next. Also, it forces us to use our imagination and thinking power to find the possibilities to get us to the end goal.
Your turn!
Next time you find yourself talking to yourself and asking “Why” something is happening or you are not doing something, change it into a “How” and see what happens.