20. How to Ask Yourself Powerful Questions

The quality of your life is determined by the quality of the questions you ask.  This famous quote by Richard Bandler is the theme of this week’s episode.

I am sharing with you how to ask powerful questions that will help you move in the direction of your dream.

There are 3 types of powerful questions that you can ask yourself:

• Questions that get you into action
• Lofty questions that help you tap into the guidance from your future self
• Thought/Feeling questions to ask yourself to tap into what you are thinking and feeling and what you want to think and feel in service of your goals and dreams.

The most powerful empowering question is : "What would I love?"

The best question to ask yourself to get into into action is

What can I do

With what I have

From where I am

In the next 5 minutes

The next 5 hours

The next 5 days

I’m offering you a free visioning and strategy call! Let’s get together and dream together. Click here to book a call so we can create a vision for your life and get clarity on your next steps.

What You'll Learn from this Episode:

• How empowering questions help you move towards your goals and dreams
• Recognizing disempowering questions and their negative impact
• Shifting attention to powerful questions
• Understanding the brain's inclination towards negativity and how it affects our questions
• The subconscious mind's role in answering questions and providing evidence
• The importance of focusing on what you want, not what you don't want
• How lofty questions such as "Why am I so happy and successful" allows us to tap into the wisdom of our future self
• Using lofty questions for visualization and tapping into intuition
• The power of asking questions about what you are thinking and feeling
• How to use the question "Does this feel constrictive or expansive" when making decisions
• Schedule your FREE private session with me here:  https://www.thedreamacademy.com/schedule

Listen to the Full Episode:

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• Richard Bandler

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Full Episode Transcript:

 📍 Hi y'all and happy summer. I hope that you are staying cool. We are over a hundred degrees here pretty much every day now in Montgomery, Texas, outside of Houston, and I know that there's, it's even hotter than that in other places in the country and in Texas. So we are doing our best to stay cool and conserve energy.



Today I am gonna share with you a very powerful coaching tool that you can use to get yourself into action, to achieve your goals and create the life you are dreaming of. It's asking powerful questions. It is the single most effective way to achieve your goals. Asking questions is how? We get answers, guidance, and direction.

And typically we think of asking questions as something that we do to other people. We ask other people questions or other people ask us questions, but you can ask your self questions, and that is the focus of this episode, which ties in perfectly to the last few episodes, episode 17 and 18, where I shared with you the self-coaching model. How to coach yourself.

Asking yourself questions is another way that you can coach yourself. There is a famous quote by Richard Bandler, who is the co-founder of NLP Neurolinguistic Programming, and you may have heard this before, the quote is, "the quality of your life is determined by the quality of your question".

Yes, and just let that sink in. The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your questions. So powerful and so true, and that's why I am dedicating an entire episode on how to ask powerful questions. So all questions that you ask yourself will fall into one of these two categories. They're either empowering questions or disempowering questions.

Empowering questions help you move in the direction of your goals and dreams. Questions that empower you and help you feel courage, discipline, responsibility, integrity, abundance, fulfilled, generous, kind, loving, peaceful, joyful, et cetera. You get the picture empowering questions help you feel good and inspired and motivated.

The most empowering question you can ever ask yourself when you are going for your goals and dreams is this, what would I love With that one question, you open yourself up to all the possibilities available to you in your life. Anything you answer this question with is not only possible for you, but it is meant for you.

And continuing to ask this question and move in the direction of your dream is the way. Disempowering questions on the other hand, keep you stuck in fear, doubt, overwhelm, confusion, limitations, scarcity and constriction, which results in procrastination, perfectionism, avoidance, distractions, stopping and starting, changing your mind, changing your goals, which slows you down and makes you feel bad, and it creates a negative self-fulfilling prophecy.

Here are some examples, and I'm only providing these to you so you can notice and recognize them. When you cut yourself in this, we all have these negative, disempowering questions, but it's your job. It's our job to move your attention to a powerful question each time.

So here's some examples of negative disempowering questions and I started to make this list and then I Googled this and there was a long list of questions, so I'm just gonna give you some of them cause I don't wanna spend too much time on this.

But here's some examples of disempowering questions. Why am I so unlucky? Why am I always broke? Why can't I get my business off the ground and be financially successful? Why can't I lose weight? What is wrong with me? Why can she do it and not me? Why does this always happen to me? Why is life so hard?

Why is nothing working out for me? Why am I so stupid? Why do I always make these mistakes? How can I never get ahead? Why am I so unlucky? You get the feeling. I mean, doesn't that just make you feel bad listening to all these questions? Why does everything suck? When will I ever be happy? Who am I to do this? It's such a waste of time. Why do I always quit and what is wrong with me? These are just questions that make you feel bad and really have no positive answer. Or unless you frame it in a really inquisitive and curious and compassionate way where you're open to the possibilities of the answer to that.

But typically, when we ask these disempowering questions to ourself, we're asking it from a very negative place, and we're expecting negative answers to that question. That makes me feel bad just thinking about all those questions. So these questions are still going to come up, but notice them and then move your attention every time.

Do not give these questions your time, energy, or attention. You are probably picking up a theme in these podcasts, and that is that  we always want to be moving toward tapping into our own personal power. Feeling empowered is a great starting point and reference point when you're going after a goal, creating the life and business of your dreams, and even minute by minute, going through your day.

In episodes 14 and 15 of the podcast, I did a series called Meet Your Brain, and as a refresher here, I'll share a little bit about how we can use our brain for us or against us. So we are hardwired to be right and to be negative and look out for danger. It is our human nature to ask these disempowering questions.

Our brain thinks it's keeping us safe. But of course these are not helpful questions, and when you ask these questions, you're telling your brain and activating your reticular activating system to give you all the evidence to prove these questions true, to answer these questions. So we want to ask empowering questions and tell our brain to give us information and evidence to answer questions that will move us forward, not keep us stuck.

Our subconscious mind is always working, and it always wants to answer your questions and give you evidence to support your stories and beliefs. So put your brain focused on what you want and where you want to go, not what you don't like, and where you don't wanna go. So I like this example. Think of a pink elephant.

Okay? You got that image in your mind. Now don't think of a pink elephant. Don't think of a pink elephant. Don't think of a pink elephant. Are you still thinking of a pink elephant? Do you see how you, once you tell your brain something, it keeps thinking it, even if you tell it not to, that's why you have to just move your attention to literally think of something else.

It works the exact same way with the questions we ask ourself. If you focus on what you don't want, if you ask yourself questions to support your negative thoughts, your brain will answer them. There is no other way except to change the questions and ask empowering questions, and there are three types of empowering questions that I will share with you today.

So number one, questions that get you into action. Number two, lofty questions to use for creativity, insight, intuition, and guidance. And the third type of questions are what I just call thought feeling questions. These are questions to help you get in touch with your thoughts and feelings, and then decide how you want to think and feel and what you want to do.

These types of questions can also help you make decisions in the moment and about your goals and dreams for the future. Okay, so the first type of empowering questions is action questions, and the, in my opinion, most powerful question you can ask yourself every day as you are creating the life and business of your dreams.

And I learned this from my current mentor and coach Mary Morrissey. And she is personally training and mentoring me in her powerful transformational techniques and coaching programs. And I'll be sharing more of that with you as I go through the program and get certified to teach and train in that.

But here's the question that I learned from her. You ready? Here it is. What can I do with what I have from where I am and then I added right now or in the next five minutes? In the next five hours, or in the next five days? With this one question, you can literally change your life and create the results that you want.

This powerful question moves you into action, and my mentor, Jim Forton, says, action is where the action is. I actually have a sticky note right next to my desk that says, this action is where the action is. Money is attracted to activity, and the magic spot is action with your energy in the right place, and asking yourself powerful questions is how you get your energy in the right place.

And in the Timeless Classic book, the Science of Getting Rich Wallace Waddles says, our thoughts are where our dreams are created and action is how they are received. Really think about that. Our thoughts are where our dreams are created and action is how they are received. That has, I've really been.

Pondering this concept, that action is how you receive your dreams and goals, which is so different than taking action to achieve it, but taking action to receive it. It's just this little shift in perception, but to me it's so powerful and I love this quote by Mary Morrissey and she says, dreams without action is are just entertainment.

Okay, so that was the first type of empowering question was getting into action questions. The second type of empowering questions are lofty questions, and I was introduced to this concept by Vision La Lani. I hope I'm saying that right, with Mount Mindvalley. He's the founder of Mindvalley, and if you don't know about Mindvalley, you should check it out and I'll put it in the show notes he brings into his.

Organization, authors and coaches and trainers from all around the world and all these different trainings from really thought leaders and personal development and spirituality and health and wellbeing and longevity. And he just a great curator of thought leaders and thought.  Ideas that are sort of happening in the zeitgeist.

And I heard this concept from him, and he says that lofty questions are positively phrased questions that encourage helpful answers, insights, or solutions. Lofty questions are posed by you and are answered by you, and so here's some examples  of lofty questions. I just love this concept. Why am I always happy and positive?

Why are  your brain loves to answer these questions, so ask it lofty questions and put it to work, answering these kinds of questions. Lofty questions can be a way of visualizing the results you want, and it can be very powerful way to source ideas from your subconscious mind to tap into your intuition, your own internal wisdom and guidance.

So in here is how you can phrase the vision that you want for yourself as a question in the present tense. So here's some examples. Why am I so easily able to visit incredible countries? Why am I so good at making, keeping and multiplying money? Why am I so successful in love? Why am I at my ideal weight?

Do you see how powerful asking these lofty questions can be? Huh? Why am I so successful in love? Why am I at my ideal weight? And just answer, live into the answer of that question. And that's really tapping into the wisdom of your future self, because when you ask that question in the present tense, You are asking that from your future self.

You are asking that from where you want to be and who you want to be, and you're asking for guidance from your future self, and it gets you into the energy and the mindset of being who you want to be and bringing that into the here and now.  Your subconscious mind is like chat GPT, have you heard of this? It's this new AI tool that's sweeping the world these days. And I'll put a link in the show notes. It's a pool of information that's been gathered. By artificial intelligence, just mining basically all the information on the internet in the world and putting it into basically like a large database.

That's not the technical term for it, but it's basically a way to leverage all the information that's available and synthesize it to present it to the user. And one of the ways that you extract from chat GPT,  you ask it a question or you give it a directive. And one of the things that's so powerful about chat GPT is that there's no restrictions on how big of a question you can ask.

So just as an example, I asked chat GPT, how can I create a million dollar business in a year? And it gave me a 10 step process. Just, that's it. Now I know it's in the implementation, obviously that makes it hard and taking a lot of twists and turns and then at the end, so it did give me a 10 step process and at the end it said, remember that building a million dollar business in a year is an ambitious goal, and success is never guaranteed.

It requires a strong work ethic, perseverance, and a willingness to adapt to changing circumstances, be prepared for hard work, long hours, and potential setbacks along the way. And I just love that, that even chat GPT will give you a little coaching and really what chat GPT is saying really how you need to be the mindset that you need to have.

And the characteristics of an entrepreneur that you need to have strong work ethic, perseverance, willingness to adapt to changing circumstances. And so anyways, that's just an example that I loved about asking  a lofty question and listening to the answer. And then I asked Chat GPT another question, and again, I'm using this as an example, but you can actually ask yourself these questions.

How can this be easy? And Chat GPT then gave me nine steps, a nine step list of ways to make it easier. The 10 steps that they had just given me nine steps to make it easier. And it included things like getting mentors and delegating tasks and testing out ideas. And there was nine steps to it.

And then at the end, it did remind me again that this will take time and effort. So there you go. You can remind yourself that this will take time and effort, or how much time and effort do I think this will take, or what if this was easy, or how could I do this in a year? So you can just ask yourself these lofty questions and just like Chat GPT you could just write the answers down that your brain comes up with.

Your subconscious mind loves to go to work on whatever you tell it or ask it. So asking lofty questions, positive questions in a powerful way lets you tap into your subconscious and leverage the wisdom and the creativity and the intuition that you already have inside of you. Just like chat, g b T as, mind all the information using artificial intelligence, you have your own.

Artificial intelligence, well, not artificial. You have your own intelligence in your mind, in your brain, and you can tap into that by asking lofty questions. And the these questions help you take action. It helps you come up with solutions to problems, and it puts you in the energy of positivity and solution focus.

Lofty questions create power and momentum when they are answered and followed with action. So here's a scenario that I wanna give you. So let's say you're having some financial difficulties and have some debt. Could be due to spending more than you bring in each month for whatever reason, you could ask yourself, why do I keep not having enough money for the things in my life disempowering?

Or how can I create an additional 2000 a month while I'm on vacation?  Lofty question. These are equal questions to your subconscious mind. So go ahead and ask lofty questions and you will be amazed at what you can come up with. Okay. The third type of empowering questions are thought, feeling questions.

So these are questions you ask yourself about what you're thinking and feeling, and this is where you notice what you're noticing. You notice what you're thinking and feeling, what you're, what's, what are you thinking about? What's catching your attention? And once you know where you are, what you're thinking and feeling, then you can decide on purpose how you want to think and feel.

And if you're not sure exactly what you're thinking and feeling, you can simply ask this question. I also like to ask myself this question when I'm making a decision or doubting a decision I have already made. This is the question, am I feeling constrictive or expansive? You always wanna move for move towards feeling expansive.

When you are making decisions, I wanna make sure I'm saying that right. Expansive is what I'm saying, not expensive. This is the quickest way to tap into your internal wisdom and intuition is just getting in touch with what you're feeling. Are you feeling constrictive restricted, like tight, or are you feeling expansive and generous and abundant?

Just gauging where you are on that scale. On that spectrum will help you decide what to do next, right? You wanna move towards feeling expansive. You wanna move away from feeling constrictive  and restrictive. So you can always just ask yourself.  You can just close your eyes and just, I always, I close my eyes.

I put my hands on my stomach because that's usually where I feel this kind of feeling in my body. And I just notice, am I feeling expansive or am I feeling constrictive? And I can usually tell right away what I'm feeling. And I will tell you this, when you're feeling constrictive, you usually can go to a negative thought loop of all the reasons why you're feeling constrictive and kind of justifying why you're feeling that way.

But remember what I said, we don't want to ask ourselves disempowering questions. And so when you ask yourself, why am I feeling so negative about this.  You can ask it  from a really open way that you really are trusting the guidance that you're getting. But most of the time when we ask questions from a constrictive place, we're asking for evidence of why we're feeling bad, which is just gonna keep making us feel bad.

So you can use your own Practice of this, and you can get really good at noticing how you're feeling and if it's constrictive and if it's expansive, and getting curious about when you're feeling constrictive, you can get curious about why you're feeling that way and have compassion with yourself, and that will open it up.

It will become less constrictive as you ask yourself more empowering questions. Yes. All right, so that's it. I've talked all about asking powerful questions and I really hope that you take something with this, and just throughout the day. If you ask yourself one powerful question. Ask yourself one lofty question a week.

You can be amazed at what you could be. This is of asking powerful questions. So I've created a worksheet for you with a list of these powerful and lofty questions, and you can get that by going to my website, thedreamacademy.com/worksheet and you just put in your name and your email address and I will send you the worksheet.

And then you'll also be signed up to receive my weekly newsletter. And I also send out mindset and success tips. So you definitely wanna get on that list and get that worksheet. And then I wanna remind you that if you don't have a coach, or even if you do, you can always consider me, your coach. I'm here for you and I want you to feel free to reach out to me with any questions.

My email address is my name [email protected]  and I will be doing a podcast soon where I'll be answering listener questions. So I would love to know what your questions are, and I would love to answer them. I'll send you an email with them, but I'd also love to answer them on the podcast.

So I wanna leave you with this. Your dreams matter and so do you. I believe in you, and I'm so glad you're here. All right. Talk to y'all next week. Bye.

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