Question: How good am I? What's missing for a 10?
The question is a tough one:
On a scale of 1 - 10 - how good am I?
Part 2: What would I have to do to get to 10?.
Jack Canfield, who has them in his Book Success Principles asks his wife a variation of this question every (!) week:
How well do I behave as a husband? What would I have to do to get to 10?
Week after week, he learns in concrete terms how his wife is doing with his behaviour and what he could change.
I asked two of my closest friends this question. They asked me the same question in return. It was exciting. Even though we all rated the quality of our friendship as very high (somewhere between 7 and 9), we were all missing something for deep satisfaction.
What's missing: Excursions
- I missed the outings in a friendship. We used to do a lot together and the shared experience of beautiful, but also bizarre things welded us together.
- We experienced such fantastic things as a staged production of Handel's Messiah or Mozart's Magic Flute in a metro station. But also such bizarre things as pseudo-medieval markets and overnight stays in a hotel that hadn't been renovated since reunification. When I was lying on the bed, I could make the whole bed shake just by tensing my stomach muscles. That was something.
And I and we missed it. When we talked about it, it became clear that we wanted to experience more together again than just going to the cinema and drinking coffee. And we made plans.
What's missing: Real letters
- In the other friendship, we both miss the letters. Today we email and phone each other. But we've known each other for a quarter of a century - from a time before the internet, email and flagrants for phones. We never lived in the same town. That's why we wrote a lot of letters to each other: Smart, reflective, humorous ones.
While I missed the written stories and the greetings with loving, good wishes, she especially missed the ideas that I had often sent her in the past. Sometimes it was a newspaper article, sometimes a book tip. She told me how much it enriched her and how much she misses it now.
- Yesterday, as I sat in a café leafing through a magazine, I wrote down all the interesting links and quotes for her - on a very classic homemade greetings card, which I decorated with a photo that I took myself.
I love Questions both in my job as a coach and in my private life. Anyone who asks will find out more.
This question about satisfaction and opportunities for improvement is guaranteed to be included in the repertoire of the many questions that I will often ask coaching clients, friends and members of my team. I am looking forward to the answers.
Tip: You can find more questions that promote closeness in my free ebook „36 questions“.
