Five Levels of Right Questions

Energy, energy, energy! Where do visionary thinkers and 3-year-old children get their boundless supply of it? It’s all in the unique way they each ask questions—a way that keeps their intuition fully engaged and generating wave after wave of creative energy through its insights.

Shown below is a five-level structure of “what’s-right” questions that describes quite precisely how the visionaries do it. (The 3-year-olds do it quite naturally and spontaneously.)

Notice, too, that what is described here is NOT just another “feel good” exercise in “positive thinking”—which, unfortunately, is negative thinking in the extreme the way most people practice it!

Level 1
What do I know is already right?
The agenda-setting question

Level 2
What is it that makes it right?
The vitally important, insight producing, energy generating question

Level 3
What would be ideally right?
The vision-building question that requires high energy

Level 4
What’s not yet quite right?
The motivating question that defines the gap to be filled

Level 5
What resources do I need to make it right?
The focusing question that guides constructive action

Note that most people will use the first question above as a dismissal question. If it’s already working, they reason, then why waste energy thinking about it? They then skip questions two and three entirely, moving on to a self-protective version of question four, which expresses their concern about, “Where am I at risk?” This commonly used approach actually drains energy under the guise of protecting against the loss of energy.

In contrast, the visionary thinker looks for things that are working, and upon finding one thinks, “Aha! Here’s something worthy of my attention.” They then proceed to examine why it works—an approach that sooner or later will spark some kind of an energy generating intuitive insight.

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