1: “If I’m going to get to know you,” David Brooks writes in his book How to Know a Person, “it’s not because I have the magical ability to peer into your soul; it’s because I have the skill of asking the sorts of questions that will give you a chance to tell me about who you are.”
David believes there are good questions, and there are bad questions.
What are the worst types of questions?
Those that evaluate. For example, “Where did you go to college?” Or “What neighborhood do you live in?” Or “What do you do?”
Why? Because they imply, “I’m about to judge you,” he notes.
2: “Closed questions are also bad questions,” David observes.
“Instead of surrendering power, the questioner is imposing a limit on how the question can be answered,” he writes.
Let’s say someone mentions their mother. If we say, “Were you close?” we’ve boxed in the other person. We’ve limited their description of their relationship with their mother to being either close or distant.
A better option? Ask: “How is your mother?” Because that gives the other person the ability to go deep or shallow.
Vague questions are also bad questions. Like “How’s it going?” or “What’s up?”
“These questions are impossible to answer,” David notes. They say, “I’m greeting you, but I don’t actually want you to answer.”
3: Open-ended, humble questions, on the other hand, allow the person to take control of the conversation and where they want it to go.
We begin with phrases like “How did you…,” “What’s it like…,” “Tell me about…,” and “In what ways…”
Sometimes, simple questions work best.
“One of the greatest interviews of my life happened in Moscow,” David recollects.
The year was 1991. “Tanks were in the streets. The whole city was in turmoil. . .
“I met a ninety-four-year-old woman named Valentina Kosieva. I asked about her life story. She told me about the pogroms in 1905 when the Cossacks shot members of her family; the events around the 1917 revolution when she was nearly executed by a firing squad; the time in 1937 when the police raided her apartment, seized her husband, and sent him off to Siberia, never to be seen again; the time in 1944 when the Nazis beat her son to death; and on and on. Every trauma that had been inflicted on the Russian people had been inflicted on her.”
“I just asked her the same question over and over again,” he writes, “And then what happened?”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: What can I learn or apply here?
Action: Experiment with avoiding questions that evaluate or are closed or vague.
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