Your greatest mental skill, is the questions you ask.
It allows us to build empathy with clients, gain clarity for ourselves, and at a more basic level it is essential to our growth and development. The challenge - we aren’t really taught how to ask “thoughtful” questions.
In a previous article (insert here) I discussed how we are taught open ended and closed ended questions and that is really all we are left with.
If we ask open, ended questions our clients should give us more questions.
If we ask closed-ended questions than we should get more specific, concise answers.
The Challenge…we struggle to build empathy in a thoughtful way, which in turn keeps us unsure about our interventions, instead of confident. This is the opportunity.
THE OPPORTUNITY
Ask questions the elicit meaning. Let’s look at one of the most common challenges we work with clients on in sport psychology - performance anxiety. We may ask the client questions in the following ways:
Have you used mental skills for anxiety before?
How often do you experience anxiety?
When did this start?
What do you typically try to do?
What do you think you could do differently?
Do you feel like you have anxiety because you are worried about your performance?
Do you feel like you have anxiety because you haven’t been performing well?
These types of questions come more naturally for us and they are important. I consider these more “contextual questions”. Questions around the problem itself, but what they lack is our ability for both the client and ourselves to better understand the nature of the problem to begin with. This is where questions that elicit meaning come in handy:
When you experience anxiety, how do you experience it?
How do you view the anxiety?
When you experience anxiety, what does that mean to you?
Describe your experience when this occurs?
What is your understanding of anxiety?
What role does anxiety play for you?
What is anxiety about for you?
These questions, slam the breaks on surface level responses. We gaining depth of understanding. We are clarifying that we have an equal understanding of the situation at hand. How a client answers these questions will dictate our skills training/interventions. Without these questions you could be guessing whether or not your interventions will “stick”.
For example, instead of just teaching physical relaxation exercises you may end up having to educate the client of the role of emotions and sensations because they are confused by their experience when they have anxiety. Or, perhaps you recognize that they are experiencing anxiety in both a mental “thought process” as well as physical sensations and therefore, need a two-tiered approach with diaphragmatic breathing and mindfulness exercises or instructional self-talk.
THE PATH AHEAD
As we wrap-up today, the point is this. We need to have two sets of questions. The first set is what we already engage with, the types of questions that help provide context around problems. The second set, is questions that force us and the clients to pause. Questions that ask for meaning and understanding behind the experiences. Questions that allow us to gain a depth of clarity, to better align our skills and training.
It’s not easy, but having on our radar can really help make the intervention process simpler!
I love this blog post!