Asking the Right Questions
 
There is so much knowledge available to us, so much that we can learn, understand, use. Every day millions of people across the world enter book stores and buy books which promise to help them make their lives better. Most people buy such books, read a couple of pages and go out and buy more books. While many books do indeed have little useful information inside of them, many people develop an addiction to HAVING such books without actually USING such books. It's almost like they expect by Osmosis that the infomation will creep out of their books at night and sneak into their brains while they sleep.

While this may be possible, it's far more likely that we need to use information as it's presented to us. The crazy thing is though, the information we are provided with does not just come in through the books we buy or tapes or cds, it is EVERYWHERE. It is all around us in the millions of nuances of people communicating with each other. It's in the millions of things we experience each day that we take for granted. The main reasons we aren't getting most of it as we might is down to two reasons... our sensory acuity and our focus.

Now John LaValle often describes how in any given interaction all the information we need about that person is available to us there and then in the interaction IF we have the sensory skill to observe it. If you haven't attended an NLP course yet then get yourself on one. One of the best things you get from most quality NLP courses is a fantastic ability to calibrate, tune in and observe what's in the environment in amazing new ways. Quality NLP courses teach you how to sharpen your senses, GET MORE OUT OF YOUR HEAD (I love that four way ambiguity:- see if you can spot all four, or even five if I've missed one)

The second area in which we can learn to get more information that is available to us is to change our focus. We miss so much because we are too busy filtering all the information through a channel that searches for what is relevant to us at that moment and what is in alignment with the state of our minds.

For example, when you are walking through a park, it's common to miss the entire experience because you were deeply in thought about something. If someone has accused you of something and you are talking to them about something else, your defensive feelings will often make you interrpret most of what they are saying as some kind of an attack. The key to changing your focus comes from changing the questions you ask yourself.

When you ask yourself a question, your brain will go in a specific direction to locate the information or experience. When you come across a problem and you ask "Why me?" you'll get reasons and you'll feel terrible. On the other hand, when you ask yourself "How can I solve this the best way the quickest?" Your brain will search for the solution. Using this to get so much more information from your experiences is simple.

Begin to ask questions like: What can I use from this? What do I need to know from this book? What is this person telling me with their state? What are their intentions? How can I best get the most amount of valuable information from this person/book/experience?

Get the message? When you ask yourself a clear, clean, direct question, it allows you to fine tune your outcomes of getting more information when you need it. Consider it a form of WELL FORMED ELICITATION. It's not rocket science... but we rarely do it properly. It is really effective and it can make a HUGE difference to your life. Consider really what would be possible if you were able to get 10 times more information from your world than you have been... it's the route to enlightenment or at least enlightenment of some sort!!!