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Questions for Meaning and Understanding

Guest post by: Eric Garner

Article Overview: If you want to manage people well, you need to be able to understand them, particularly when they have problems. This article explores how to ask the right question at the right time to elicit meaning and understanding.

Questions for Meaning and Understanding

Writer Allan Pease says that there is no such thing as a natural-born salesperson, negotiator, or people manager. When someone succeeds at any of these roles, it is down to one thing: their ability to ask questions about the other person they're talking to. The same is true when you are helping someone with personal problems. Your ability to discover information and bring clarity to the way ahead depends primarily on what questions you ask. There are 3 categories of question that will help you do this. They are: 1. Questions for Information In the exploration stage of counselling someone, you will need to use three kinds of question for information. They are: a. Open Questions Open questions do what they say they do: they open people up. These are questions that can't be answered by a single word or phrase, such as "Yes", "No", "red", "18". Instead, they force people to give you explanations. For example, "What do you mean by that?" or "Could you tell me what happened next?" b. Closed Questions Closed questions do the opposite of open questions: they close people down to one word or one phrase answers. That's why they are helpful in giving factual answers. Closed questions often begin with "Who?", "Where?", "When?", and "Which?" type questions, as in "When did this happen?" and "What did he say?" c. Summarising Questions Summarising questions can be used to sum up information. In a counselling session, you should get into the habit of asking summarising questions at the end of each stage, ie at the end of contracting, exploring, challenging, and solution-hunting. They check out what has been agreed and help you move on. 2. Questions for Confirmation and Response These kind of questions are valuable when you want to confirm information with someone else. They are used when you want to know more information than you've already been given. There are 3 kinds of question in this category: a. The Reflect-Back Questions Here you simply echo what someone has just said so they can tell you more. "I couldn't do it." "You couldn't?" We'll see more of this in a minute. b. The Empathic Response This question is used when you want to confirm something you think may be going on with the other person, as in "I bet that makes you feel angry, doesn't it?" c. The Tentative Hunch This does the same as the Empathic Response. You put forward a theory and want the person to confirm it or not, as in "You smiled when I mentioned her name. Do I sense you get on really well?" 3. Questions for Understanding In counselling, people are often dealing with issues that may be difficult to discuss and unclear to them. They will often use language that masks what they truly mean. As a helper in the process, you can ask two types of question that either dig deeper into what is going on, or stand back and look at things from a different perspective. These kind of questions are sometimes called "downtime" and "uptime" questioning. They are often used in conjunction with the Reflect-Back question we've just looked at. Here are 7 examples: a. deletions, as in: "it's obvious what she wants." "Obvious?" b. distortions, as in: "You'll think me stupid.." "Stupid?" c. generalizations, as in: "She always does that..." "Always?" d. new angles, as in: "Can you see something positive in not getting the job?" e. wider angels, as in: "How do you think this will look in a few years' time?" f. counter-evidence, as in: "You say that you don't usually get on. What about times when you do?" g. metaphor, as in: "what does it feel like when you work together?" Any exchange with others is a live, unrehearsable, and unplannable exercise. How successful you are depends on the range of questions you can call upon and your skill at using them in the right place and at the right time.

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Article Tags: interviews, questions



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