How Do We Ask Authentic Questions?

Summary

The article discusses the importance of reviving the lost art of authentic conversation, emphasizing the value of asking genuine questions, active listening, and engaging in meaningful dialogue.

Abstract

In an era where activities and shared experiences are limited due to the pandemic, the article highlights the need to revisit the practice of conversation. It reflects on a transformative workshop on appreciative inquiry that taught the author to ask authentic questions and listen actively. The author argues that true listening and understanding are rare, often leading to misinterpretation of interest as attraction. The article also touches on the author's experience with a neighbor during lockdown, where despite differing opinions, a deep conversation was possible. It criticizes the current state of communication, often filled with superficial updates and lack of genuine exchange. The author advocates for conversations that are like a good tennis game, with back-and-forth dialogue that educates and provides insight, and suggests that meaningful conversation requires patience, persistence, and less frustration.

Opinions

Conversing with friends has become a priority during the pandemic, yet it challenges us to have something to say without shared activities.
The best professional workshop the author attended focused on appreciative inquiry and was transformative in teaching authentic questioning and active listening

How Do We Ask Authentic Questions?

The practice of conversation is a lost art needed now.

Giulio Fabi on Unsplash

Conversing with friends has taken on priority as a pandemic past-time. During those stretches of months where it is difficult to attend a music concert, theater, engage in activities together, we can still talk.

But creating time to talk challenges how little we have to say when we are not planning or sharing activities. Most of us have to revisit the practice of conversation.

The best professional workshop I ever took was on appreciative inquiry. There was not a single power-point; it was entirely experiential. The workshop was transformative and made me a better manager, i.e. a better listener.

I learned to ask authentic questions and to really listen, framing the questions positively. We know how rare it is to be asked questions that make us pause and think about the answers, to reveal to ourselves what we think. We know it’s unusual to be attended to by the questioner, who cares about the response and is not just forming an answer as a counterpoint.

In a January 9, 2015 article The New York Times featured a story titled “The 36 Questions That Lead to Love.” The notion is that as we ask probing questions of each other, we create intimacy by sharing vulnerabilities. I have misappropriated this information unintentionally, by asking real questions and being fully present for the answers, with my conversational partner mistaking interest for attraction. Listening for understanding has become too rare, intimacy misunderstood outside the frisson of sexuality.

When we were all suffering through the first lockdown of Covid, my neighbor in the apartment complex asked if I would join him for a happy hour drink on his patio. I gladly agreed, with fresh air and our limited social contacts providing a sense of safety. We had absolutely nothing in common — he was a retired veteran, on opposite sides of the political divide with contrary opinions on most major issues. But I was interested in understanding who he was and how he got that way, which was reciprocated.

Few people engage in the Art of Conversation anymore. I spoke to an old friend recently to “touch base and catch up” and she blasted the news at me as if she were on CNN, and then I updated her and she said goodbye. I really don’t know how she feels about the major changes in her family circumstance, which is why I called. The additional means of “communication,” i.e., text, voicemail, email, have meant that phone calls most often go to voicemail and I will frequently text someone before calling to make sure a certain time is convenient. Sheesh.

Meaningful conversation is like a good tennis game: serve, return, volley, point. The enjoyment is in a good volley, where one learns, educates, gains insight, shares insight, stretches for the return. The introductory remarks in a conversation could often be exchanged by blah blah blah, but small talk provides the grease for silences and letting time-lapse; it allows the conversation to evolve into a deeper exchange. My friendship circles have even created rules for conversation in these times, such as no gossip — conversation is not updating each other on a third person not present. We might select a topic in advance. Nor is conversation one-upping the other — you loved Italy? Let me tell you about Greece.

A skilled conversationalist draws out the other parties, listens more than speaks. Practicing conversation requires patience and persistence, and less frustration than I am prone to show.

I wish I had remembered these few points in past business meetings, where each person present behaved like the next dog to pass the corner hydrant, leaving their mark. One of the gifts of retirement can be learning retroactively — oh, I could have behaved better, and I have the opportunity to do so in the future.