The What If Game

We live in the world our questions create. I love the kind of questions that shift our reality. I love the questions that take a black and white image and paint it bright with color. I love the questions that turn the world upside down.

Growing up my sisters and I used to always ask one question on repeat “But, what if?” It was our way of thinking of the worst case scenarios. Any and all of them. “What if?” on repeat. As we would worry about all of the things that could go wrong my dad would say, “let’s not play the what if game.” This was his way of calming us down and pulling us out of our spiral.

As a coach, turns out that one of my favorite games to play is the “What if” game. And one of my favorite questions to ask is “What if….” But not in the way I did as a child; rather, in a engaging in a new kind of “What if” game. When clients get stuck on questions like “what if I fail?” or “what if it doesn’t work?” I love asking, “But WHAT IF it does work?” and “WHAT IF everything shifted because you took this step?” Now that is a fun game!

We live in the world our questions create, so we might as well create a little bit of possibility.