Why I Needed Help Answering My Questions
Alright, I’ll be honest. My head felt like a messy junk drawer lately. Stuck at work, stuff not flowing right, just circling around the same old worries. Kept asking myself “Why is this happening?” or “What’s wrong with me?” Felt heavy, man. Heavy and kinda pointless. So when I stumbled on Mike Neill talking about answering questions simply, I figured… eh, why not? Couldn’t be worse than stewing in my own juice.
Step 1: Dumping The Question Churn
Mike says stop asking the same crappy questions. Hard to argue with that. First step was simple but felt… weird.
- Grab paper & pen. No phone notes, old-school.
- Write down EVERY worry/question bouncing around my skull. All the “Why can’t I…?” and “What if…?” stuff. Got them all out onto that page. Looked like a crazy person’s shopping list. “Why am I so unmotivated?” “What if this project bombs?” “Why does nothing feel easy?”
Felt a little lighter just doing that. Seeing them on paper was different.
Step 2: Hunting For The “Better” Question
This was the real trick. Mike calls it “finding a better question.” Sounded fluffy, but here’s what I actually did:
- Stared at my list of downer questions.
- For each crappy one, I forced myself to ask: “What’s a more useful question here?“
Man, it wasn’t instant. Took effort. Like swapping “Why am I stuck?” for “What’s one small thing I can do right now?“. Or “Why is this so hard?” became “What’s actually working okay about this?“. Flipped “What if I fail?” into “What resources could help me figure this out?“. It felt… different. Less stuck, more possible.
Step 3: Picking One Tiny Piece To Move
The third step felt almost too easy. Once I had a better question brewing, Mike says: “Do the smallest thing you can towards answering that better question.”
- Looked at my new questions.
- Took one. “What’s one small thing I can do right now?“
- Literally, the smallest action I could imagine. For motivation, it was “Open the project file.” Just open it. No pressure to do anything IN it. Just open it.
Opened it. Sat there for a minute. Closed it. Then… weirdly… opened it again 20 minutes later and changed one font size. That was it. Tiny. Insignificant? Maybe. But it was movement.
How It Actually Went Down & What Clicked
Here’s the real tea. Doing those tiny moves didn’t solve my big problems overnight. That’s not the point.
What shifted? My brain chemistry, seriously.
Getting the negative questions out stopped the churn. Finding a better question felt like clearing fog – suddenly I could see a tiny path forward, however small. And acting tiny? That built a tiny flicker of confidence. Instead of feeling helpless asking unanswerable questions, I felt… capable. Able to engage. Just a little bit.
It felt counter-intuitive. Simple almost to the point of seeming silly. But focusing on shifting my questions – moving from the unanswerable doom loops to more practical, actionable ones – and then acting minutely on that… it changed the game. Not magically, but reliably. It’s become my go-to junk drawer clearing technique now. Simple, effective, no wizardry needed.
