The ninth component of a Thinking Environment is Incisive Questions.
Incisive Questions is a component at the heart of which lies pure magic, because it's the component which is about surfacing and removing untrue limiting assumptions. So, inside an Incisive Question lies the liberation of the human mind.
We create Incisive Questions for ourselves and for each other, when we recognize what it is that we're assuming that is holding us back, that is limiting our thinking on whatever it is that we're trying to think about, and then having the courage to interrogate those assumptions, and to see whether or not we actually have realistic proof for them being true. If an assumption is true, or possibly true, then it's not really the culprit.
What we've discovered over and over again, in the Thinking Environment, is that - if we can help people to find the untrue limiting assumption that they're making, that is in the way of them being able to progress towards an outcome that they want to produce in their lives, and help them to see for themselves that that assumption is untrue - it's in the nature of the human mind to be able to replace untrue assumptions the minute that we see that they're not true. It happens naturally.
The minute you see that you've been assuming something, and then you get new information that proves to you that that actually wasn't true, you can straightaway start to go: “Oh, well, if that's not true, then what is true, and what's more liberating, and so we can actually generate, for ourselves, liberating alternative assumptions?”
An Incisive Question is one which joins a liberating alternative assumption to an outcome that you're trying to produce.
If you knew that you are worth listening to, where would your thinking go next?