The question "What's better now?" offers another simple yet powerful way to expand our awareness in a useful way. It helps us notice, pay attention to and build on positive shifts that occur in our life or work - shifts that may otherwise be ignored or taken for granted. Greater awareness can be the start of many positive changes! Enjoy!
The question "What's better now?" offers another simple yet powerful way to expand our awareness in a useful way. It helps us notice, pay attention to and build on positive shifts that occur in our life or work - shifts that may otherwise be ignored or taken for granted. Greater awareness can be the start of many positive changes! Enjoy!
Hello and welcome to the sixteenth episode of the powerful questions Podcast. My name is David Shaked. The powerful question I’m going to introduce in this episode – “What’s better now?” – is a new invitation to stretch our “noticing” muscle. I've already mentioned this important metaphoric muscle and its significant contribution in enabling positive change in episodes six and seven, so you should be familiar with it. If you can’t remember, feel free to re-listen to those episodes. The question "What's better now?" will provide another way to exercise this important "brain muscle".
The first time I came across this powerful question and its potential was through solution-focus coaching.
One of the key ideas behind that approach is the importance of paying attention, of actively looking for – and noticing – little signs or clues of progress or positive difference being made. When we're able to notice these little signs, we know better what is helpful to us in making progress. That knowledge can be very useful indeed – more so than paying attention to or to knowing what is stopping us from achieving progress.
Another reason to pay attention to small signs of progress is because we are often looking for big, transformational change, and that’s not easy to achieve. By focusing on a big change objective, we miss our actual, more gradual but nevertheless still positive, progress.
In this episode, I'll talk about this question and how to use it. I’ll introduce a few variations of it I sometimes use, depending on the context, and a few alternative questions I like using as well, depending on the person or topic. Like most of the powerful questions in my podcast, you can use it for self-reflection, to coach or support another person, or with a group of people.
So, let's start by talking about when this question is typically used.
In the practice of solution- focus coaching the question "what's better now?” is typically used as a follow-up to a coaching conversation. This means that, if and when the coach and the coachee have more than one coaching session, the coach might use this question at the start of the follow-on conversation as a useful way to help the coachee notice what is improving no matter how small.
While the coach can choose to add a few additional words to it such as: “What is better as a result of our coaching?” or “What has become better since our last conversation?", it is better to leave the question as simple and as open as possible, and simply ask “What's better now?” This is because several things might have changed for the better but trying to link them back to what was covered in the previous conversation is not always easy, necessary, or even helpful.
What truly matters is that some things have possibly got better. If we pay special attention and identify these perhaps little or well-hidden signs of progress, we can enquire further and understand what helps things become better. If we don't ask this question or ask alternative questions instead, such as:
"What has changed since we last met?"
or simply
"How are you today?'
we're more likely to get less useful responses or hear about what isn't going well or what has become worse or more challenging. This is simply due to most people's habit or tendency to pay more attention to negative changes.
The idea that we don't need to link the positive changes that have happened back to anything in particular or, even more specifically, to what was covered in a previous coaching session was quite revolutionary to me at the time I was introduced to this question. My ego wanted confirmation that what I was doing as a coach actually worked and led directly to the improvements.
When I started using this question, I learnt that what is more important and useful than my ego in any case is that the coachee learns to notice what IS better AND what enables things to be better.
These positive changes can of course be thanks to my good work as a coach, the brilliance of our coaching conversation, the coachee’s efforts to improve their situation, or something else altogether!
This powerful question can also be particularly helpful for self-reflection or for learning and development. This is especially true when you decide to do something differently, to explore something new, or when you experience something you've never experienced before. Asking yourself “what's better now?" after that new experience can help you deepen your learning and distil more useful elements of the experience.
You can use this question with others you coach, mentor, or support. Each time you meet them, try starting the conversation with this question. Doing so invites them to stretch their awareness further. Even if their situation has become worse and they are keen to share how difficult their situation has become, you can still include this question so that they also notice what is better. The intention is to expand awareness rather than to supress any problem-conversation.
The question “What’s better now?” is particularly useful if they have experienced or experimented with something new – perhaps a new idea they had during the last conversation, or afterwards. If this is the case, try asking them: "What's better for you (and perhaps others) after this new experience?" Again, through this question, we're looking for the better or more useful parts of the new experience, even if they have mixed opinion about this new experience or if it feels not so great overall in their minds.
Another way I sometimes use this question is when I'm leading, facilitating or supporting a group of people through a particular activity. Posing this question to the group at the end of that activity helps the members of the group notice the difference our time together has made for each Individual, and to the whole group. In this case, I pose this question in the following way:
“Having had this meeting, conversation or activity together, what is better for you now and what has become better in our group?”
So far, I have covered the use of this question in its original form. Let me introduce a couple of favourite alternatives that I like using and find very helpful. One is:
“What do you now know that you didn't know before?”
And another is:
“What can you now see that you couldn’t see before?”
Again, these two alternative questions focus on the progress we make as we complete something or experience something new, with the idea is that no matter whether what we just experienced was good or bad, we are very likely to have learnt something from that experience or to be able to see things in a different way. I use this question at the end of a meeting or a conversation as a way to harvest the learning gained from it. I also use these two questions when I run project or progress review meetings with leaders. It helps bring into the conversation some of the shifts we achieve in what we know or the new insights gained over time through daily, ongoing work on those projects.
And once this question has been given an answer, you can of course follow up with further enquiry to bring out the most valuable aspects of the answer. For example,
“How is knowing this helpful to you?”
Or
“What is useful about being able to see what you can now see?”
Finally, there can be as many alternative versions to the question “What’s better now?” as you can think of, such as:
“What is becoming clearer for you?”
Or
“What has improved?”
Or
“What is shifting or becoming stronger?”
These are some of the ways I vary the question to fit different situations, people or conversations. I am sure that you can come up with others. As long as it focuses on the generative aspects of the changes that have occurred, whichever version of this question you choose to use will be helpful to you or the people you pose this question to.
I hope you have found this episode useful. Let me close by posing this same question to you: Having listened to this episode, what feels fresher or clearer for you now? How might this freshness or clarity be useful to you and to the people you work or live with?