Seven Questions to Drive You Crazy

Three years ago I created a series of board games entitled Boiler Room® and a personal profiling tool to help people answer seven simple but beguiling questions. My theory and now my business, is predicated on the assumption that by helping people answer these questions, they will discover, believe and use their natural abilities to live a more successful and satisfying life. Yet for many people these so called simple questions have proven themselves to be very difficult to answer. Interviewees become befuddled, angry,forceful, evasive, dumb founded or on occasion, they try to bluff or pretend it is too trivialan exercise to waste their time. It does not matter if I am interviewing a Fortune 50 executive as I did thousands of times as an Ernst & Young partner or working with individuals in my seminars as an entrepreneur. With over ten thousand individuals in this survey, the only people that quickly and easily answer these straight forward questions have been individuals of strong faith such as theologians, priests, monks, or Franciscan brothers. Rest assured, many a powerful leader has given me answers, but under cross examination, I have found their answers to be inconsistent.

The seven questions, in order, are as follows: What is your plan? What do you believe? What do you fear? Why do you care? What do you hear? What do you need? And finally, what do you see?

Why are these questions beguiling and infuriating all at the same time? Because it is a trick you see. Take the Fortune 100 IT executive who in five minutes told me his plan for the business and then his personal finances, his greatest fear is dying of cancer, the thing he cares about most is his family and yet ninety percent of the time all he ever sees is his office, computer screen, or the tray table on the airplane. He did not know how to answer the question about hearing and he could not think or would not admit that he had any needs. What this executive just did is typical. Most people answer these straight forward questions from three or four domains of their existence, what I call realms. In the case of the IT executive, he talked about four of my seven realms - his company, the market place, his physical life, and finally his family. What he said from his answers were as follows: (1) His plan was all about his work and finances; (2) He was not consciously aware of what helistened to and heard or did not hear; (3) He was suppressing the need to express personal needs, despite our being long time friends.

What he did not say is also very important. He did not say he had a plan for any of the following: (1) How he would overcome a deeply rooted fear of dying from cancer; (2)How he would modify his behaviors to spend more time with the thing he cared about most; (3) That he had any awareness or time for his community, country, planet, or the universe, all of which sustain his existence; (4) And finally there was no mention of what he believed in, which is one of the most difficult but most important question of all because it drives all our behaviors.

The problem is that our IT executive has become trapped in one realm of his life that is sucking the energy out of the others. He has fallen into the trap of thinking that who he is, is what he does. He is fixated on believing that the journey of life is a final destination somewhere in the future and someone, perhaps society, has convinced him that the end game is to maximize his 401 k plan, save for college, buy a vacation home, and ignore the day to day experiences that make this journey worthwhile. In short, his life is all about gratification and he and more than 50 % of the rest of the American population are gratified but not satisfied *. In his journey for success he has dropped fulfillment and happiness by suppressing his deepest needs and losing conscious awareness of what he believes in.

Answering these seven questions is easy only after we answer a series of prerequisite questions: Who am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose and how will I achieve that life mission? It is for this reason that these questions are easy to answer for the more faithful men and women. They are capable of articulating their beliefs and they are in touch with the broader realms of their existence and they know their purpose.

* Pew Research Center Social Trends Report, February 2006, “Are we happy yet?”