The Power of Asking Questions (2024)

-Omi Bell, Originate, Motivate, Innovate: 7 Steps for Building a Billion Dollar Business.

Curiosity is a life hack! Asking questions is a powerful tool for gaining knowledge and understanding, and it can be used in various situations, from personal interactions to professional settings. By asking questions, we can learn about others, their perspectives, and their experiences, and we can also gain insights into ourselves and our own thinking. In this book chapter, I am sharing my story a step deeper than I’ve publicly shared it. I am talking through how becoming a single mom caused a few people to count me as a statistic that didn’t favor a positive outcome.

When we ask questions, we open ourselves to new ideas and perspectives. By asking questions, we can gain a deeper understanding of a topic or situation and learn further information we may have yet to discover. By asking questions, we can challenge assumptions and biases with ease. It is a way to lessen the burden of blame in a conversation and pull a topic into the open to be objectively explored.

Questions facilitate problem-solving - By asking questions, we can also better understand the problem itself, which can be crucial in finding an effective solution. An investor told me once, “it takes about 25 pitches to understand what you have.” I have always remembered this when coaching business owners and executives because most of us have been told to become better speakers without becoming better listeners to our voices. The power of asking questions is the power to listen to the problem differently.