Living the Questions: A New Year’s Invitation for Women Leaders in 2025
Welcome to a New Year: A fresh start filled with potential and possibilities. As we step into 2025, I invite us women leaders to pause, reflect, and focus on 'living the questions'.
This year, I invite you to embrace the power of questions as a guiding habit in your leadership journey.
Living the Questions
The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke once advised: “Live the Questions Now.” This idea challenges us to view questions not as uncertainties to be feared, but as opportunities for growth and discovery.
In leadership, questions invite us to PAUSE for deeper understanding, stronger communication, and often more innovative solutions. They open doors to fostering curiosity, awareness and adaptability-qualities that can enable us to weather change with increased resiliency.
The most powerful questions in coaching are open-ended, thought-provoking and challenge the leader to explore their inner thoughts, beliefs, and emotions. It encourages self-reflection, generates new insights, and fosters clarity with commitment to action.
Characteristics of a Powerful Question Include:
- Open-Ended: Avoids yes/no answers, encouraging exploration and dialogue.
- Insightful: Discovers underlying values, assumptions, or beliefs.
- Challenging: Invites the leader to think beyond their comfort zone or current perspective.
- Empowering: Highlights possibilities and strengths, fostering ownership of the solution.
- Purpose-Driven: Aligns with the leader's goals, values, purpose, passion, and desired outcomes.
Example of some Powerful Questions:
- "What would success look like for you in this situation?"
- "What’s holding you back from taking the next step, and how can you overcome it?"
- "If you weren’t afraid of failing, what would this look like?"
- "What’s the bigger picture here?”
- "What do you need most right now to move forward?"
These are not questions with immediate answers but inquiries that invite exploration and growth over time. By living the questions, you remain open to possibilities and poised to respond to the unexpected with resilience to embrace a growth mindset.
The Transformative Role of Questioning:
As you embark on this journey of questioning, an Executive Career and Leadership Coach can be your powerful ally. Coaching ensures that leaders are truly seen, heard, and understood. We provide a structured yet creative space for, questioning, reflecting, planning, and action. These are key elements in creating a robust Career and Leadership Development Plan and Leadership Dashboard for you to navigate and advocate your own unique leadership labyrinth.
The Coaching Questions are your PAUSE for your Own “Aha” Moments:
According to Rock, David, & Schwartz, Jeffrey (2006) in the Neuroscience of Leadership, when both my clients and I have an “Aha” moment, this new thought illuminates us to think, behave, or act differently, if we choose to. “The brain releases a rush of neurotransmitters like adrenaline and dopamine. This phenomenon provides a scientific basis for some practices of leadership coaching. Rather than lecturing and providing solutions, effective coaches ask pertinent questions and support their clients to work out solutions on their own. During the ‘Aha’ moment, findings suggest that a complex set of new brain connections are being created. These connections have the potential to enhance our mental resources and overcome the brain’s resistance to change. To achieve this result, we need to make a deliberate effort to hard-wire our brains, requiring repeated attention.”
This is One Side of the Equation... Let me Explain:
On our continuous leadership journey, we will often see that questions and reflection can be pushed aside or left unnoticed with the demands of deadlines and multitasking.
Coaching invites in repetitive questioning and Leadership PAUSES: a mindful space of exploration of your internal self-awareness. What often emerges are key underlying issue that connect us to a larger more transformative truth, or more questions that move us forward.
The example of Louise, a CFO of a large multi million-dollar company, is a testament to the power of the PAUSE and “inside out coaching”. At a time when this company was edging towards the top, despite the pandemic and other outside forces, Louise was excited that she had a clear leadership vision and was ready to move forward.
Yet, she soon realized something was blocking her! These roadblocks were not part of her well-planned strategy: They were blocks within her.
We PAUSED and invited in a calm yet challenging presence by asking her powerful questions and connecting her towards her own wise inner leader. When this happened, Louise had an insight that helped her with this situation, and many others.
It’s Listening Together to What Needs to EMERGE:
In the PAUSE of a Coaching space, both the coach and client are being invited to an open exploration that requires a level of vulnerability, not just critical thinking and problem solving, but a partnership of visionaries who craft the future with their mindful conversations.
I invite in what I call CALM Power™ (Career and Leadership Mastery) that encourages PAUSING to breathe and make space for reflection and the inner journey.
Most leaders I’ve worked with initially rely primarily on one source of intelligence and insight – the mind. In fact, there are at least four centers of intelligence, including the heart, the body, the mind and the spirit. Many leaders are excited when I invite the integration of all these areas, not just the mind!
I started the Coaching Nest after finding myself feeling as if I had to ignore the holistic side of my own leadership journey. My own deep reflective work allows me to partner with you or other leaders like Louise. I advocate to “know thyself first.” Self awareness is a mandatory prerequisite for coaching and leadership.
Leaders who want a competitive advantage and to make the most informed decisions often benefit drawing on all sources of intelligences.
Louise, for example, found that her perspective shifted when she stepped back from the swirl of her conflicting thoughts, and listened more closely to the intelligence of her body. That meant paying more attention to her deeper intuition, sensations and emotions, rather than relying solely on her mind, which could rationalize almost any choice she made.
Louise had her own sufferings from unresolved marital issues and an ill parent. We all have our own “sufferings.” In the past 3 years I’ve lived with chronic nerve pain. The gift of this suffering has been an increase in my curiosity, openness and acceptance. I’m learning to accept daily, that sometimes we can ask the questions and there are no finite answers, only perhaps another question. Each question builds our resilience, compassion, self awareness and strength to move forward or stay in reflection. We learn with each action. It is a choice.
Making the most fully informed decisions requires drawing on all sources of intelligence.
Mine and Louise’s journey highlights the significance of 'living the questions'. We began with introspection about our core beliefs, purpose, values, vision, mission, passion, gifts and so much more. We both found ways to center ourselves before and in between sessions; I continuously journey “inside myself” through mindfulness, yin yoga, and somatic practices to be the presence my clients require. Louise also made space for her own mindful pauses and embraced a holistic view to leadership. She acknowledged her anxiety, the tendency to micromanage, and her need for a safe space to ask questions and listen to her inner leader.
Executive Leadership Coaching, then, becomes a strategic tool that helps women leaders ask the questions to transform a company, and themselves.
This underscores the simple, yet profound premise – to transform a company, you need to transform yourself.
You can't be an impactful leader without evolving as a human first. Exploration of self is key.
The key is to challenge fixed beliefs, biases, fears, and habits that shape our decisions, often subconsciously. It demands the courage to step away from the perception of strength equated with invulnerability and embrace the power of humility, growth, and openness.
Remember, leadership is not about the destination; it's about the journey of self-discovery and transformation. Today’s leaders are invited to 'live the questions' and inspire transformation from within. It’s an investment not just in your career but you, your team, and your organization.
Let 2025 be the year you Lead with Questions!
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Warmly: Shelley Cox