Questions hijack your brain.
Once challenged, your brain is driven to come up with answers.
Depending on the nature of your questions, this neat little factoid could help or hinder you as you try to solve your problems.
Your brain is ready and waiting for you to direct it on its next problem solving mission.
Your whole brain is stimulated when you ask it a question.
It releases the neurotransmitter serotonin which causes the brain to relax. This enhances its ability to find answers and develop solutions to problems.
Following serotonin, your brain stimulates the release of dopamine which triggers the “instinctive elaboration” reflex.
This means that when a question is posed, it takes over the brain’s thought process.
Hijacked!
When your brain works on an answer to a question, it can’t contemplate anything else.
Here’s how Fast Company explains it:
Research in neuroscience has found that the human brain can only think about one idea at a time. So when you ask somebody a question, you force their minds to consider only your question. As neuroscientist John Medina puts it in his book Brain Rules, “Research shows that we can’t multitask. We are biologically incapable of processing attention-rich inputs simultaneously.” Likewise, Nobel Prize–winning economist Herbert Simon has written that human beings consciously “operate largely in serial fashion. The more demanding the task, the more we are single-minded.”
So why do questions have such influence on the decision-making process? First and foremost, they prompt the brain to contemplate a behavior, which increases the probability that it will be acted upon.
In fact, decades of research has found that the more the brain contemplates a behavior, the more likely it is that we will engage in it. That’s not all. Just thinking about doing something can shift your perception and even alter your body chemistry. For instance, imagine sipping some lemon juice. What does it taste like? As you briefly think about lemon juice, notice the sensations occurring in your mouth. You’ll find that something totally beyond your control occurred—you began to salivate more and you could almost taste the tartness of the juice
Questions to guide your brain toward helping rather than hindering your problem solving process.
Many helpful questions start with Why are you choosing to…
- … think that?
- … feel that?
- … do that?
- … accept those results
These questions are so powerful because they place the responsibility for everything that happens in your life on YOU.
This is the best news ever.
Now you can reclaim your power to control the outcome.
Most of the time you go through life thinking that everything just happens to you.
Your thoughts spring up in reaction to whatever is going on in your life. The good, the bad, the ugly.
That your feelings are unbidden instinctual responses, as if your behavior has come upon you as a natural consequence of your circumstances.
As if the results you see in your life are some haphazard array of outcomes, some lucky, some unlucky.
But none of this true.
You have way more power to control the results in your life than you realize.
You can choose deliberately how your want to think and feel about any circumstance in your life.
Don’t ever leave your thinking and feeling life to chance.
Decide, intentionally, exactly how you want to think and feel about any circumstance.
Use powerful questions to explore how you want to think and feel so you can solve the problems and achieve the results you want in your life.
Useful questions to ask yourself:
- What do I really want?
- What do I want my results to be?
- Do I like my reason(s)?
- How is this happening for me?
- What if nothing has gone wrong?
- How can I see this “worst thing” as also the best thing?
- What am I making this mean?
- What is my best next step?
- What’s one thing I can do today to make progress?
- What am I making this mean?
- How do I want to think about this?
- How do I want to feel about this?
- What do I want to do about this?
- How will I know when I’ve achieved my goal?
Identify which helpful questions will guide you to choose the thoughts and feelings that motivate you to solve any problem.
Ready for help?
Click right here to set up a free strategy call with me to get your problem solving mojo working, stat!
I can show you how to intentionally create the thoughts and feelings you need to get the results in your life you really want.
