A lot of friendship is about asking questions.
A few weeks ago I was on a beautiful hike/odyssey with some good friends of mine: The kind of adventure that rides the thin boundary between “This is so fun!” and “Great, now this is an ordeal.”
At one point, one of my friends got into a “rut” of sorts, complaining repeatedly about the weather where she lives — a feature of her life that she:
a) had consciously chosen
b) has zero control over
I love this person, so I wanted to stimulate a change in her thinking.
The first thing that came to mind was: “Stop it!”
That’s usually extremely ineffective as a communication technique.
Coach says: Ask a question.
Great, ask a question.
Like:
“Can you just stop complaining about the weather?” (hmmm, lacking the spirit here…)
Really — in my mind — this is about recognizing commitment and autonomy.
Better Candidate Questions:
“Are you committed to living here?”
“On a scale of 1 to 10, how committed are you to living here?”
“What does your decision/commitment to live here mean to you?”
One of my teachers, Ken Cloke, has a framework for this in his latest book (The Magic of Mediation).
Some questions we ask have a single “winner” and establish power relations.
What would happen if you invited a bunch of people from your neighborhood over and asked them:
“Who in this room is the most committed to living here?”
If people can agree on the answer, you’ll end up with a ranking or hierarchy of sorts.
But more likely, you’ll just end up with an argument.
Other questions have a single “correct” answer per person and create an implicit ranking system.
That’s like my second question (above): “On a scale of 1 to 10, how committed are you to living here?”
The third type of question can have infinite “correct” answers per person, is very difficult to simplify, and can lead to very surprising results.
My third question (above) gets closer to that, as would:
“What does it mean to you to live here?”
or
“What does commitment to place mean to you?”
It’s immediately clear to me when I see these types of questions together that it’s the last type that unlocks the magic in friendship.
Rather than putting someone in a box, I’m building them a scaffold to go anywhere they want and be accepted wherever they end up.
And what’s good for friendship is good for almost every type of human relationship: family, workplaces, community, and society as a whole.
Ankur Shah Delight: Community and Conflict 