7QUESTION YOUR QUESTIONS

MANY QUESTIONS MAKE CONVERSATIONS WORSE

For the next week, watch what happens any time you or someone else asks a question during a conversation. You’ll quickly find that questions are not always neutral. They make some of your conversations better, but questions make a surprisingly large number of your conversations worse. Like an incredibly talented but wayward cousin, a question has the potential to do a lot of good, but it will often underperform and disappoint instead.

It’s not always easy to divine another person’s intent behind a face-to-face query, and the task is much harder in the digital age of mediated and asynchronous messages where we lack nonverbal cues and the ability to gather immediate feedback.

Even ...

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