Mastering the Art of Questioning: Transforming Anxiety and Finding Clarity
What happens if you ask somebody how they are and actually mean it? Most of us ask and neither side expects a real answer. Your life is not your depression.
What happens if you ask somebody how they are and actually mean it? Most of us ask and neither side expects a real answer. Your life is not your depression.
Will Young was on the phone most nights when he was suffering badly, and that stuck with me. Everything pours into a funnel and tries to get out through a tiny hole at the bottom. I am managing not to almost bleed to death about once a month now. I still have the ups and downs. Your life is not the anxiety, or the bad day, or the traffic jam.
One thing to try: Ask one person how they are and then stay silent long enough for the real answer.
In this episode
(0:01) The podcast I was listening to, and what he was going through
(2:52) Everything filling the funnel, and the little hole at the bottom
(4:52) Not almost bleeding to death about once a month
(7:37) How are you, and what happens if you really want to know
(9:40) Your life is not depression, or anxiety, or one bad day
Support the podcast and join the Weekly Calm: stevenwebb.uk
Thank you for listening.
Steven
The question this answers
What happens if you ask somebody how they are and actually mean it?
Most of us ask, and neither side expects a real answer. But the right question at the right moment does more than any answer ever does.
The heart of it
Everything you carry pours into a funnel and tries to get out through a small hole at the bottom, so what comes out is, yeah, I'm fine.
Your life is not your anxiety, or your depression, or the bad day, or the traffic jam.
I heard Will Young talking about a stretch when he was suffering badly and on the phone to the Samaritans most nights. Somebody there asked him one question.
Are you tired of life, or are you tired of your anxiety?
It cut straight through. No, he loved life. Yes, he was exhausted by the anxiety. Two entirely different problems, and only one of them was solvable.
My own brain asked me one once. I was sat at the top of a bank thinking about going over it, and it asked what I would miss out on. The answer was seeing my daughter grow up, and I decided to give it another day.
And the question I wish somebody had asked me in the hospital bed, halo screwed into my skull, tracheotomy in my throat, one tut for yes and two for no, is this. Great, you are paralysed. What are you going to do with it? I would have wanted to punch them, and it was still the right question.
Some rewrites worth having. Not how are you feeling, but what are you really feeling right now. Not what do you do for a living, but who are you beyond the roles. Not why is this happening to me, but what can I learn from it. Not how do I get through this, but what strengths do I already have that will help me here.
None of this is turning negatives into positives. That is not a thing. It is going deeper on the same question.
One small thing to try
Ask one person how they are and then stay silent long enough for the real answer.
The silence is the whole technique. Most people never get past the top of the funnel because somebody filled the gap.
Questions people ask
Are ordinary questions wrong?
Not at all. How are you is fine and I ask it constantly. It just does not reach anything, and sometimes you want to reach something.
What if somebody gives me a real answer and I cannot help?
You are not being asked to fix it. Being at the bottom of the funnel with somebody for a minute is the help. Most people have never had that.
How do I do it for myself?
Notice the question you keep asking yourself, then rewrite it deeper. When will things get better becomes what can I do today to make one small moment of peace.
Read along
The transcript
It follows the audio. Press any line to jump there.
anxiety · overthinking · relationships
Read the transcript
I was listening to a podcast the other day, one by Will Young in the UK. And he was
suffering quite badly at the time. And he was on the phone most nights to the Samaritans. And he recalled
with some humour, but also he recalled a question that they asked him at the time. And
they just looked up and said to him while he was on the phone, are you tired of life, or
are you tired of your anxiety?
And wow, what an amazing question. Even Will Young said about it just cut
right through all the different things. It's like, no, I love life. But yes, I'm tired with my anxiety.
And
that's what we're going to talk about on today's podcast. The power of the question. Breaking through all the noise
and the power of asking the right question at the right time. It's so much more powerful than the actual
answer. Just enables people to think deeper. So I'm Steven Webb. This is Stillness in the Storms. And
welcome. I've been struggling the past couple of weeks. I've been busy. I haven't been struggling with my health at
all. But I've been struggling with coming up with a podcast because... I've been terrified of, again, letting you down
and running and, you know, people donate and people give me some really good reviews and really good feedback. And
I'm like, oh no, I'm gonna let you down. I'm gonna mess up. I'm gonna get it all wrong. And
I just need to step in and go, do you know what? Let's just do this. And so yeah, here
I am. And just thank you very much to the people that support this podcast. You really do make a
difference. You keep it free for everybody. And I don't do any advertising on the podcast because I just want
to get on with it. So today we're talking about the power of the question and the art of questioning
in a deeper sense. And the thing is with questions, every day we get asked the everyday question like how
are you and things like that, but they never really cut to what we really want to know or they
never really... Help us to dig deeper. And, you know, what's your role? What do you do for a living?
All those things. What you've been up to? They're all fine questions. They're all okay if that's what you want
to know. But there's a deeper role that you can play when you ask the question that really cuts through
all the noise. And I talk about noise on the funnel and everything like that. And, you know, and I'll
really briefly at the point of the funnel and at the point of carrying a compassion and then opinions and
beliefs come on top and then thoughts and stories and everything. And by the time you fill the funnel. You're
trying to get rid of all that stuff through a little hole in the bottom and it's just noisy and
it's just there's so much going on at the top that someone asks a question, it's like, how are you?
It's like, yeah, I'm fine. I'm just overwhelmed. I'm tired on this that and the other. And it's just easier
to go, I'm fine. Because we don't want to dig down but really we want to know what's at the
bottom of the funnel That's what we really want to know. Not so much we want to know what's at
the bottom of other people's funnel. We want someone to ask us a question so we can go deeper in
our funnel and get us back there. And I think this question that Will Young was asked, are you tired
of life or are you tired of your anxiety? How
beautiful is that? It's such a simple question but it's powerful. And I remember when
I was thinking about suicide myself. And my brain asked me a question. And I didn't,
I never really thought about it this way. But my brain looked at me. And I was sat there at
the top of the bank. And I was thinking about throwing myself off. And, you know, I I was also
thinking I'm probably going to get caught up and spend three days here. And know my luck, I'm going to
do a terrible job at it. And, you know, that kind of thing. But my brain just lived up and
goes just that it just asked me a question said Will you miss kemba growing up? What
will you miss out on? And my brain went, do you know what? I really will. And
I just thought, I'm gonna stick here another day let's Let's give it some more time I but I like
Will, I love life. I absolutely love life. I'm paralysed just below the neck. I have pain most days. You
know, the last two or three years, I've lived on painkillers. I go now a week without taking painkillers and
I'm like, oh my god, my life is incredible. I'm managing to not almost bleed to death about once a
month. But I still struggle, I still get ups and downs and I would never have experienced all this if
my brain didn't ask me that really important question. And I just don't think we ask questions enough that dig
deeper and... I can remember when I was lying in bed in hospital I
just broke my neck and I'm lying there paralysed, 15 pounds of weight on the top of my head with
four pins going into my skull. Oh boy, did that hurt when they used to tighten up because your brain,
your mind shrinks or your skull shrinks every few weeks so they'd come and tighten up and before that hurt.
You think you've got a headache? You imagine four bolts. And the very first time they put the halo on,
I screamed at them and said, you're gonna crush my skull you're gonna And I had this image of my
head just caving in. Sorry to give you that. But I had the halo on top of my head and
I had a tracheotomy in my throat so I couldn't speak. I'd say yes with two tuts and no to
one time And yeah, it wasn't very good and Everybody would always ask me, how are you doing? How are
you doing I You know, no, life sucks at the moment. You know, people are not even telling me what's
on the plate of food and they're just putting it in my mouth and people were just feeding me like,
I remember them giving me cream cheese oh who eats cream cheese? It's disgusting. It
should be illegal. But the question I would have loved for someone to come and ask me at the time
is, great, you're paralysed. What can you do with it?
And I know I often say about this question on the podcast, because when things happen, the earlier you can
look up and go, how can I use this to my advantage? How can I use it? And how can
I go deeper? How can... Because you can't change it. And I talk about this a lot, so I'm not
going to go there on this one. But, you know, the power in the question is so, so important. So
I'm going to go through a few questions that, you know, we could really rephrase. And imagine how much these
questions lead to insight. On one level, they're just surface level. They're about our habits. They're they're not deep. They
don't lead to meaningful change or anything. But powerful questions can really lead to intentional, thought-provoking. And
they're designed to uncover of truths and perspectives. If you really want to know a person, ask some of these
questions. A common question is, how are you? How are you feeling? And I ask that all the time. So,
and it's not wrong to ask that. But if you really want to know, if you really want to dig
deeper, you know, ask a deeper question. So instead of, how are you feeling today? You can say, what are
you really feeling now? And what are they chatting you?
Instead of saying, what do you do for a living? You could say, who are you beyond the roles and
the titles you hurt you are in life you
know Why is this happening to me? You can say what can I learn from this situation? How can I
how can it help me grow? What
if I fell You
could turn that around and say, what would I do if I couldn't if I knew I couldn't fail? And
how can I take the next step towards that today?
You get the point. You can really dig deeper on questions. How can I get through this that's a
That's such a huge open-ended question. How can I get through this? You imagine just writing down what strengths
and resources do I have already that I possess to help me navigate this challenge?
What wisdoms have I already got to help me get through this?
And boom, just like that. It just digs to a deeper level.
You imagine how much more insights and wisdom you have inside of you just by cutting through that. And
going back to Will's question. Why was that question so powerful?
Simply because it's separated The anxiety to life and to other things.
Because your life isn't depression. Your life isn't anxiety. It isn't the one bad day. It isn't the traffic jam.
There are different experiences you have in life. They come and go on a daily basis, on an hourly basis,
sometimes just on a minute basis. I I get some days where I'm feeling absolutely knackered. I'm feeling terrible I
really had enough 10 minutes later, I'm on top of the world. I'm raring to go. And I don't know
what changed in that moment. Maybe a biorhythms or something in my body. I'm feeling upbeat now. That's why I'm
recording a podcast for you. I don't know where that was going, really. I've gone off topic slightly, probably I
I do that on every podcast and that's cool because that's what my mind does. I should imagine that's what
your mind does. That's why you listen to my podcast. You know, wondering where he's going to go next. Doesn't
matter. I bring it back eventually. Maybe. So, where was I? The power of the question. And the power of
the question by Will um that the Samaritan that asked Will Smith. How skilled are those Samaritans? That's brilliant.
Just by allowing Will to think, wait a minute, am I tired of my
anxiety or are I tired of life? No, I love life. That's how Will replied. So
it's separated. You can deal with the anxiety. You know, it's a it's a temporary um suffering
You
know, and the problem is, I heard it quite recently. It says it's a suicide is a permanent solution to
a temporary problem. On the face of it, that's my experience as well. Because very much
I I feel suicide
or when we want out or when we drink or when we do things to avoid things, we're trying to
reduce our suffering in that moment. We know that suffering comes and goes. We know that experiences come and go.
But when we are stuck in it in that moment, it's hard to see that it's not permanent.
You're stuck down a well. And I'm going to use this as a metaphor. I'm not saying you you all
get stuck down a well. But you're stuck down a well. You can see anything other than the walls you're
in. You can see nothing more than the problems you have. And it's really difficult to see beyond that. But
if you take a deep breath, you'll know that you're not staying there forever. I'm trying to think of a
similar question if you're stuck down a well? That um what you might ask someone if they're stuck down a
well, what might that be? Let's think about it for a minute. You know, are you pissed off about being
stuck down a well or you're pissed off you haven't got a ladder? There you go. Boom. I'm
quite proud of that one. Yeah not stuck down a well. You're looking for a solution. You're
looking for some help. And I think when we realise this, we realise the importance of asking proper
question. Proper question, that's a real Cornish wouldn't it Proper job, proper question.
As you know, I'm from Cornwall in the UK. We have a few words. We have directly, which if you've
never heard it, which means I'll do it at some point. So if I say to you, I'll do it
directly, it's about 50 chance it will never happen um it's Indirectly I suppose.
It's just a lazy way of saying that. I don't know. No idea. And proper like just doing something properly.
Which probably doesn't mean properly at all. But
yeah, the power of the question. Just sit down and write the real question. And I'll put these questions
that I've wrote out to as pointers for this podcast onto... The show
notes because you can read through them and there's many of them that we ask every day ourselves. You know,
I've just noticed another one I wrote down. How can I avoid pain? How
about how can I embrace and learn from the pain to transform it into a source of strength?
You know, and I'll do one more before I wrap up this podcast. You know, when will things get better?
Instead, what can I do today to create a smaller moment of peace and joy?
On that note, don't forget I've got a sister podcast, Inner Peace Meditations. And I've just finished recording a
brand new sleep meditation, Deep Sleep Meadow, which will be up by the weekend. So you must head over
to Inner Peace Meditations. You can get all my links from StevenWebb.uk. And that's the way you can support the
podcast, get other links. You can contact me, email me anything um questions or just tell me how you're
getting on. Tell me questions that you're finding it hard to rephrase. But yeah, the power is in the
question and I just love that.
The answer is not so important as it is to get the right question to begin with.
There's no point in the answer if you haven't got the right question.
Especially if we can do it mindfully. And I suppose the practical way of doing this is take a deep
breath. Mindfully, when you're asking the questions, when you're repeating it in your head, go, ah, I'm repeating that
question. How can I rephrase it? It's not a matter of turning it from a negative to a positive doesn't
work like that. It's a matter of deepening the question. That's really important. There's no negative or positive questions.
It's just how deep is the question? How healthy is the question? And will the question lead me to insights
and moving on from where I currently am would it reduce my suffering? Yeah.
How can this current situation reduce my suffering?
Yeah, I
love it. I really I don't know why. I just really like it um So that's my
podcast this week. I'm Steven Webb. This is Stillness in the storm I greatly appreciate you sticking by me um
and I know I can be a bit flaky with the podcast sometimes and all that. I'm really working on
it and yeah,
looking for the better question here. Perhaps you've got a good question that you can ask me that might really
help actually. So look, take care. Head over to StevenWebb.uk and
