The power of a Driving Question

At a recent training event we were asked “what’s your driving question?” This took a significant amount of soul searching and once I got it I realised it wasn’t driving at all and needed changing if I wanted to achieve everything I’ve set out to do. Changing it is a relatively simple process and it can be fully integrated at an unconscious level using NLP.

It all started after I had got even more clarity on my vision and mission and understanding my true purpose.

My purpose is “to be inspired and be inspiring”.

So, my vision is to “contribute massively to the eradication of poverty and child abuse across the planet through education and business activities” and I make no apology for the fact that this is similar to one of my teachers who inspired me in the first place with his own vision “to eradicate poverty through education and entrepreneurial means”.

My mission is to achieve this vision “by teaching, coaching and mentoring people wherever I can, using a variety of educational resources and processes including finding and developing new and innovative accelerated learning tools through research”.

So what about the driving question?

Well, it used to be a number of different questions along the lines of “how did I create that”, “what am I missing” and “why can’t get I beyond this” but ultimately it was simply “what am I doing wrong?” This, of course, did not drive me at all, it simply had me look for the feedback so that I could correct it.

Now, it is absolutely right that we should look for the feedback in all situations and then use that information to improve what we do, in the spirit of “constant and never ending improvement”, however this question as a driving question was not serving me. In fact, it had the opposite effect because I was creating situations to go in a different way than I had planned so that I could gather the feedback.

When I considered my purpose, vision and mission, I realised that a more useful driving question would be:

“How can I create even more love, contribution, inspiration and wealth in my life right now?”
So how does this work on a practical level?

Well, every morning and occasionally throughout the day, I will ask myself this question. At first I hadn’t noticed any immediate difference in the way I behaved until this morning when the light bulb came on…and it’s so simple.

It’s a wet and windy, typical winter’s morning. Still dark and the alarm went off. Kim got up and I turned over thinking I’ll just have another 10 minutes, which normally would have resulted in another 45-60 minutes. Today however, I asked myself “how can I create even more love, contribution, inspiration and wealth in my life right now?” and I answered it with “well, you could get out of bed to begin with”. Duh!!

You see, it doesn’t need to be complicated, it simply needs to work. In this case, the answer was obvious. I can not possibly be serving my purpose or working towards my vision if I’m still in bed. So, get yourself motivated, shift butt and get up!

Needless to say, I was straight up and writing an article, which I trust will inspire at least someone to find their own new driving question. Do let me know if that’s you…


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