Why are you so creative?

What is the difference between these two questions?

How can I become more creative?
Why do I always procrastinate?

Here is a way of thinking that I learned from Anthony Robbins. He did not “invent” it, but he teaches this principle really well.

The difference of the two questions is that the first one gets you into action to actually do something while the second question just makes you find reasons why you procrastinate (or why you think you are so lazy…)

What are questions?

Everything we see, we evaluate: “Do I like this? Is this good? Will it be safe?”
Maybe you wonder if this article is any good so perhaps you ask yourself: “Is this worth my time?”

We ask questions all the time. We actually have internal dialogs with ourselves constantly and most of these dialogs are happening unconsciously; we are not aware of them.

Better questions

But we can help ourselves a little by being more aware of the questions we ask.
Look at both of these questions:

Why am I always late?
Why am I always on time, relaxed and ready to go?

As mentioned above, evaluating a situation is asking questions and then answering them. But your brain does not care how you ask the questions, it just tries to answer them. It does not care if your questions are true or not, it will find an answer no matter what.

What do I mean if the questions are true or not?

Well, in the example above, the first question presupposes that you are always late. Is this truly always true? Maybe you are not always late but if you ask that question you will find an answer to why you are always late and then you will probably will quite bad about yourself for always being late.

So, the question itself is not entirely true, is it? But if you ask this question you will still find an answer and that answer will feel like the only truth. When we criticize ourselves it often feels totally true and it quite hard to get out of that feeling. We normally never question the original question. And most of the time we don’t even know what we are asking ourselves; these questions happen in our unconscious.

Going back to the example, the second question assumes that you are always on time, relaxed and ready. This is probably not true either but if you ask the question, you will find an answer to this question as well.

What you ask yourself you will answer, also making you feel this way, meaning you will start to behave this way eventually. Your questions do control your emotions in a way.

Reality check

I know many of you think that the first question is more realistic and that it would be stupid to ask the second question.

I find that very interesting.

Neither of the questions are totally the truth (no questions are). Why is the negative one more correct? Why not ask something that actually makes you more alive and excited?

I also find that the second question makes me feel more open to new possibilities and the second one is really just a way to make me feel bad. It is really just saying “Why are you so dumb?”

So, go find some questions that empower you. It can be a great way to break out of procrastination. “How can I paint and have a good time?” or “What do people like about me as an actress?”

It won’t solve your life, but it might give you a better outlook.

Cheers! photo credit