John Russell, who planned and organised the BSA open day at Wadham College, Oxford on April 17, 2004

Learning to ask yourself how you can be more effective when faced with challenges can change the direction of your life, says John Russell.

How can we improve our communication with ourselves in a way that empowers not just ourselves, but also our friends, work colleagues, and others? We can do this by asking better questions of ourselves.

For example, when faced with a perceived difficult situation, what do we say to ourselves? "Why does this always happen to me, or how come I can never do .....?" (fill in the gap yourself).

Your brain will come back to you with reasons why you can't - you're silly, stupid, or lazy - reasons that won't help you to move forward, and will lead to nothing but frustration and disappointment.

However, if we ask ourselves questions like: "how can I ensure that this goes well" or "how can I overcome this," your brain will throw back at you possibilities that can get a positive outcome for you. As a result, we become more empowered to help others and ourselves if we ask better questions of ourselves.

How has asking better questions helped me? As a person who stammers, and who had little confidence as a teenager, I am now in a position as a mental health support worker. How I come across to people is very important. Asking better questions of myself has helped me to focus on what can go well when speaking to people, rather than focusing on what could go wrong, which is what I used to do.

It may sound simplistic, but asking better questions will help us to overcome challenging situations in our lives (whether they be speaking or otherwise). This will help us change our thinking about ourselves, and as a result the direction of our lives will change for the better.

Communicating with yourself is the most important skill that you will learn in your lifetime, according to America's peak performance coach, Anthony Robbins. Never mind communicating with other people - you need to be able to communicate well with yourself first.

I will finish with a quote from a London based training organisation. On one of their fliers was the slogan: "In life you get what you focus on, so focus on what you want!"

This is an edited version of a talk given by John Russell at the BSA open day at Wadham College Oxford on April 17, 2004.

From the Summer 2004 edition of Speaking Out