Try: Write three examples of what you have accomplished in the past and what you aspire to do in the future. Now write two questions about each and answer them out loud. Listen to yourself. Were your answers honest, informative and interesting? Would you hire you?
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ENTERTAINING QUESTIONS
Entertaining, three-course questions spice up conversation and bring out the interesting and the fascinating. Fun, irreverent, or probing, these questions can be served up in healthy portions around the table or in the office to help people connect, engage, and learn more about one another. Ask these questions well and you’re the master of your own ceremonies!
The Theme:
What is the one thing in the world that blows you away?
This is how you set the theme and steer the conversation. Start with a question that will intrigue and engage everyone. Ask in a way that is not threatening or intimidating. Frame the question so everyone can chime in somehow—with an experience or an opinion, a factual observation, or a personal story. You can make the theme question serious or fun, big or little.
Riddles: If we went to Mars, what would change? If you had three wishes, what would the second one be? What will be the big breakthrough of the next twenty years?
These are game-show questions, imagination starters. You’re asking people to weigh in on a riddle that has no right or wrong answer. But in answering, they reveal some of their thinking and personality. These are brainteasers, guaranteed to produce surprises along the way.
Trendsetters: What happens when two-year-olds have smartphones? What would it take for you to buy an autonomous vehicle? Why should we still teach handwriting?
Really? Trends provoke thought and commentary about our time and condition. Questions like these capture the zeitgeist and the human dynamic. They intrigue, surprise, amuse, and captivate. Ask about the present and the future. Invite your guests to close their eyes and imagine.
The News: Is America still capable of doing great things? How will China change the world? What will it take for the home team to win the World Series?
A three-course question gains caloric content if the stakes are real and some people in the room actually know something about it. Ask about the world. Look at your guest list for the gold mines of interesting experience or expertise. These questions make headlines and invite people to talk, think, learn, debate, and disagree.
Supper with Socrates: What is success? Do you need success to be successful? Is success always good? Is it a virtue?
Pick an issue or an attribute. Ask a series of poignant questions to pick it apart, define, and debate it. Challenge conventional wisdom, standing definitions, and just about anything that people take for granted. Ask what is true, how we know, why we care. Steer people away from the personal or anecdotal and toward fact, reason, and experience. This could go deep—or just plain exasperate. So keep the conversation focused, bringing participants back to the core questions. This is some of the most thought-provoking stuff you can serve up.
Laugh: What’s your most embarrassing experience? If you could erase one day in your life, which day … and why? If you made a commercial, what would you be selling?
Questions that point at ourselves show that we don’t take ourselves so seriously. Asking for the funniest, weirdest, or most unexpected can prompt a laugh or entertain a crowd.
Listen: These questions can delight or they can ruin your party. Listen to keep the conversation moving and amazing. But also listen for hints of annoyance, resentment, or impatience. Some topics, framed the wrong way, can be poisonous—religion, politics, money come to mind. You need the right crowd and the right host to come in for a soft landing. Listen to determine when you should exercise the host’s prerogative to change the subject.
Try: Select questions as you’d select a meaclass="underline" appetizers, a main course, and dessert. Make note of the interests and experiences your guests bring to the party. Pick your courses accordingly, starting with something light, moving into the stuff you can sink your teeth into, and ending with something sweet. Don’t overdo it. Let it breathe. Leave room for coffee.
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LEGACY QUESTIONS
Legacy questions ask about what we’ve done, the people we’ve touched, and the contributions we’ve made. They can be asked every day, at every stage. They help recognize accomplishment, express gratitude, set priorities, or fill a bucket list. They help us recognize what is significant and what matters.
Accomplishments: What are the most important things you’ve done? What are you proud of? Asking what you have accomplished, whom you have helped, what you have created is a powerful way of taking stock and seeing your own footprint. These questions identify accomplishments and contributions.
Appreciation: What do you want your great grandchildren to know about you? Ask yourself this: if a stranger read your biography, what would she say were the significant things you’ve done? Fresh eyes may see more clearly than your own the contributions you’ve made along the way.
Adversity: What is a lesson you’d share from a mistake you made? Ask about adversity, mistakes, and regrets. Most everyone will have a clock they’d turn back, but mistakes can be redemptive. These questions seek meaning in mistakes by asking what we’ve learned from them and how we’ve used them to teach others. Asking about the downside in this way has an upside.
The Bucket List: What’s an adventure you’d like to go on? What do you want to do most? What’s your unfinished business? These questions ask you to daydream. You probably won’t do it all, but your bucket can become a road map, a way to focus on the future, on the things that matter and the story you’re writing.
Ending Questions: How do you want to be remembered? Speaking of story, who is the character you want to be? These questions cut through all the others. Time’s up. Book’s done. What do you want the title to be? What do you want on the inside flap? How do you want the critics to write about you? How do you want the story to unfold?
Listen to Your Own Voice: Listen for nuggets of accomplishment, expressions of pride, gratitude and satisfaction. Pick up on names and ask more about each. Listen for the high notes and pursue them. Listen for regrets and ask what lessons they taught.
Try: Set up a time to speak with a family member, making clear that you want to ask about significant moments, experiences and people. Prepare your questions in “clusters” so you have several that flow from the first. For example: What’s the most significant, yet challenging, relationship you’ve ever had? Ask follow-ups from the cluster, corresponding to what you just heard. Tell me more. Where did you meet? What was this person like? Why significant? How were you similar? How were you different? What was the best day you had together? The toughest? The point here is to ask in series—half a dozen questions or more per cluster—to dig in deliberately and listen intently in search of recollection, meaning and the defining stories of life.
INDEX
The index that appeared in the print version of this title was intentionally removed from the eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
A/B testing
accomplishments