International Teaching Seminars Blog

Developing Questions

Over the years I have worked with practitioners to help them make distinctions about change and to develop on-going diagnostic questions for themselves and their clients. Questions can be like tools. Having the right questions can make it much easier to do the job in hand. Just as you don’t want to be stuck with only a hammer for every job, so you don’t want your thinking limited by only ever asking the same old questions over and over.

So what would it be like to develop your own customised set of questions which you are always adding to and modifying? Maybe you’d come at things from a quite different perspective and be able to achieve more as a result.

This is particularly true if you’re feeling stuck in how to proceed with a particular client. After all it’s not just our clients who can feel stuck! Many times in working with groups of practitioners I have found that these kinds of questions can help colleagues step back and see things afresh.

We could begin with our three change questions above. These give us different ways of coming at change. They certainly are not watertight compartments.

Try this: think of a ‘tricky’ client and ask yourself:

• What might be replaced or substituted?
• What new elements might be introduced to trigger change?
• What might be altered, varied or modified – and how?

On one occasion when I asked a particular practitioner these questions his answer was brief and to the point. He answered the first and third questions with just one word – “me”. It was a profound insight for him. In a way he felt more stuck than his patient. If he could change that would open up new possibilities for all his patients.

At one time or another this has probably been true for all of us. So as practitioners we might want to start by asking these change questions of ourselves.

Defining Change

Change is one of those interesting words which has an extraordinary variety of meanings. Here are three different shades of meaning being flagged up in ordinary language:

• You need to change this dressing.
• Prozac changed him.
• The medical profession’s views on complimentary medicine have changed somewhat.

From these examples we can see that change may involve:

• Replacing or substituting (you need to change this dressing).
• Making something different by introducing a new element (Prozac changed him).
• Altering, varying or modifying (the medical profession’s views on complimentary medicine have changed somewhat).

I think a useful question for any practitioner to consider is ‘what kind of change does this particular client need and want?’ The distinctions above could be one way of starting to explore this question.