Positive thinking and Affirmations are not enough!

Questions Are the Answer

There's a voice in your head, an inner roommate, that never quite lets you off the hook.

You know the one. You stand there, having just decided to change something about your life, and you say out loud, the positive affirmations that you learnt from your Life Coach, your online life transformation guru or favourite self-improvement author…

I am confident. I am disciplined. I am getting better, and better, every day, in every way. . And somewhere behind your own eyes, a second voice answers back, dry and unimpressed: are you though?

That voice isn't your inner enemy. It's the part of you that keeps you honest, that won't let you claim a version of yourself you haven't earned yet. The trouble is most of the advice out there tells you to fight that voice with bigger, bolder statements. Louder affirmations. More conviction in the mirror. And every time, the voice wins, because it’s your very powerful subconscious and you've handed it something to argue with.

But I want to show you a different approach. Not a louder one, a quieter, sharper one. It doesn't ask you to believe anything. It asks you to get curious instead and is a way to bypass your subconscious.

Why Your Mind Can't Argue with a Question

Here's something worth sitting with; A statement invites judgement, from your inner roommate but a question invites a search.

Tell your mind something it doesn't yet believe, and it will find every scrap of evidence to prove you wrong. Ask it a question instead, and something changes. It can't rule a question true or false. All it can do is go looking for the answer. The is its natural state, the reason it exists.

This isn't just a nice turn of phrase. Your subconscious mind operates like a goal-seeking system, a guided missile, point it at a target and it will work, quietly and relentlessly, to close the gap.

Deep in the brainstem sits a structure called the RSA ‘reticular activating system’, and its job is brutal in its simplicity: out of the roughly twenty million pieces of information hitting your senses every second, it decides which two percent actually matters to you right now, and it deletes the rest before you're even aware it happened.

You've felt this before, even if you never named it. Decide you want a particular car and within days it seems to be everywhere on the road. Nothing changed about the traffic. Your filter changed. That's the reticular activating system doing exactly what it's built to do, and the quiet power of a well-built question is that it points this same filter at whatever you want, instead of leaving it to filter for whatever you happen to be worried about.

There's a window each morning when this filter is especially open to instruction. Right as you wake, before the day's noise arrives, your brain sits briefly in what's called the alpha state, the Alpha frequency, a light, relaxed frequency, somewhere between sleep and full waking.

Jose Silva, creator of the Silva Mind Control Method, who spent decades studying the mind's more suggestible states, made the point that whatever you plant here, in the Alpha frequency state, tends to embed itself more deeply than anything you tell yourself later in the day, once the noise has started.

It's also why Silva argued that affirmations so often fail, not because the idea behind them is wrong, but because a flat statement gives that inner voice a flat target to shoot at.

There's research behind the question itself too. Psychologists studying what's called the QBE Question-Behaviour Effect have found, across well over a hundred separate studies, that simply asking someone whether they intend to do something measurably increases the odds they'll go and do it. No plan attached. No motivation speech. Just the question, left to do its quiet work. The mind starts answering before you've consciously decided anything.

Building a Question Worth Asking

Not every question earns a place in that morning window, though. Some questions just repeat the problem back to you with a question mark on the end. There's a simple five-part check I run every question through, and it happens to spell something worth remembering — LOFTY.

L = Lifting. Say the question out loud in your head and notice what it does to your energy. "Why do I eat well?" lands flat, it sounds like homework. "Why does my body crave exactly what it needs to thrive?" lifts you just hearing it.

If a question doesn't lift you even a little, it's the wrong question. Rewrite it.

O = Ownership. A good question still asks something of you. "Why do I sleep so deeply every night?" only means anything if you're creating the conditions for it, off the screens before midnight, giving yourself enough time to rest. You don't need to know how it all resolves. That's not your job. Your job is the direction; but the walking still must happen.

F = Future-focused. Move toward something, not away from something. "Why do I have the body of an athlete" points forward. "How do I stop being so unfit" just replays the problem on a loop.

T = Truthful. This one matter more than people expects. If your ambition was handed to you by someone else, a parent's expectations, a path you never chose, don't build a question around a life you don't actually want. Your own mind knows the difference between someone else's dream and yours, and it will quietly resist a question it can tell isn't honest. Read about this is my book, The Dojang Mind.

Y = Yes-inducing. Does your question pass the LOFTY Test?

Read the question back and check for a genuine, felt yes.

"Why do I have such steady energy every day?" Yes, absolutely, I want that. If instead it makes you feel nothing, or worse, like you're lying to yourself, it's failed the test. Rewrite it.

Look at the difference this makes side by side. Non-lofty: why do I need to work out five hours a week? It fails almost every check, it feels like a chore, it doesn't move you forward with any real excitement, and if you're honest, you're not sure you even want to. Lofty: why do I have avalanches of energy flowing through everything I do? Same general territory. Entirely different direction of travel.

Where the Questions Live

A single good question is useful. A handful, spread across the areas that actually make up a life, is where this starts to change something. Health. Relationships. Career and purpose. Money. Personal growth. Don't only build questions around the one area that's easiest, the man who’s a great success in business and a broken relationship with his own family hasn't solved or achieved anything.

LOFTY rules:

In your morning, evening Alpha frequency state or during mediation, where you can also reach the Alpha state ….

State your LOFY question Once. Not as a chant, not repeated on a loop, once, in that quiet window before the day begins, and let it sit. Then go about your day and pay attention to what comes back to answer it. You'll notice it in strange, small places, a conversation that happens to land exactly where you needed it, an opportunity that shows up a week later that you'd have walked straight past a month ago.

James Clear made a point in his book Atomic Habits that sits well alongside all of this, real change doesn't happen at the level of outcome or even process, it happens at the level of identity. You don't become disciplined by declaring it once in front of a mirror. You become it the same way you become anything worth becoming, by asking, every morning, a better question than the one you asked yesterday, and letting your mind go to work on the answer.

When you ask your subconscious real LOFTY questions, it will change your identity, the way you identify to yourself and this is where the magic happens, your aspirations, your goals and visions align with who you now believe you are and when this happens, you become unstoppable.

So tomorrow, before you reach for your phone, try it. Pick one question. Run it through the LOFTY test. Say it once, and see what comes looking for you.

For this and other insightful, paradigm changing posts, check out my blog at dojangbooks.com

Take care

Tony Davies

Books mentioned:

Atomic Habits - James Clear Availible at Amazon Click here

The Dojang Mind - Tony Davies - Click here