Answer your questions to yourself

Richard Brewin • June 27, 2019

“Why did I do that?”

“What’s wrong with me?”

“How did I miss that?”

“When will I learn?”

“Who’s in charge here?”

We all do it. At least I hope we all do, or is it just me!

We all question ourselves from time to time. Usually, it’s an expression of frustration, a response to something going wrong. But how often do we then actively seek the answer to our own question?

Because the expression often arises out of an immediate situation, we quickly move onto fixing the issue and our question to ourselves remains hanging in the air, but wouldn’t we benefit from giving it more attention.

Let’s take “Why did I do that” as our example. Chances are we’ve done something stupid so we fix it and move on, but, why did we do it? Is there an issue with time management, concentration, focus, workload, stress, knowledge, communication? Can we identify it, fix the underlying issue and stop a recurrence of the surface ripples?

There is always something that we can learn from understanding our own actions better, a way that we can improve our own performance and the performance of our firm. If we don’t take the time to understand our actions, and therefore ourselves better, then we run the risk of simply repeating our failings, or the failures within our firm, something which we often won’t tolerate in others.

Kavitha Chahel, in her excellent book on leadership and engagement, ‘Compassionism’ (Panoma Press), talks about the need to be self-aware and the importance of understanding ourselves if we are to better understand others. Her book demonstrates clearly the links between our own performance and the expectations and performance of our teams. We have to start with a better understanding of ourselves.   Analysing why we do (or don’t do!) what we do is a great way to build this in a practical, work-based sense.

So, the next time you question yourself out of frustration, fear or fury, take a breath and recognise that you’ve been asked a question. Don’t just fix the problem, show yourself some respect in answering it.

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