Ask Small Questions

Small steps forward – the key to personal growth and development.

Small questions act to program and engage our brain.  Larger questions tend to create fear, inaction and loss of creativity.  Lets say that you need to clean the cab of your truck.  You open the door.  Once you side step the can of tuna fish that is still rolling in the parking lot, you look at a sea of papers, parts, books and something that smells pretty bad.  You say to yourself, “how am I going to clean all of this?”  You shudder, gather up the tuna fish and climb into the truck.  “Too much, I’ll do it another time.”  Instead, try asking yourself, “what one thing can I throw away?”  And then do it.  Ask another small question and do that as well.  Pretty soon you’ll have your task done.

Robert refers to the hippocampus, a part of our brain that decides what information to store and what to retreive.  The hippocampus’ main criterion for storage is repetition.  If we repetively ask ourself a small question like, “what one small step could I take to improve my appearance?” our brain will soon provide an answer – like, “shave every single day Dan.”