this is what changes everything...
I got some great feedback around brain flossing last week. Thank you to each of you who took the time to reply and let me know your thoughts on it and how it worked out for you. This email on the art of inquiring within completes the concept I started last week with brain flossing and the two of them together are the whole thing.
Here is the idea: any time you ask your own brain a question, the answer is already in there. It has been the whole time. This is what self inquiry actually is, going inward to the place the answer already lives instead of hunting for it somewhere externally. The reason most people can't get to it is that they're not used to looking there first. The second something feels complicated or stuck, the automatic move is to go outward, to ask someone else or look for the answer in a friend or scroll to numb out and all of that feels productive because it's motion, and it almost never hands you the thing you're actually after, because the thing you're after was never out there.
It's in here (picture me pointing to your brain).
Self inquiry is the right direction, but it's not completely powerful on its own and here's why: your brain does hand you the answer, BUT it hands you the answer from inside whoever you currently believe you are. The question is never neutral. By the time it forms, it's already been shaped by the identity doing the asking, so your brain, loyal to that identity, gives you back the answer that fits the person it thinks you are.
(Yes, that's true and I need you to read that again, please!)
Ask why you always lose steam halfway through what matters most, and your mind goes quietly to work and brings you a tidy little list of reasons, because you didn't ask whether that was true, you told it it was true and asked it to explain (and it will, every time, it's obedient like that).
So you can do self inquiry all day and unveil real wisdom, and you can do self inquiry all day and keep reinforcing the exact cage you're trying to think your way out of, and the difference between the two has almost nothing to do with how good the question sounds. It comes down to who's asking.
A question coming from the part of you that wants to stay safe will only ever bring back answers that keep you safe, and they arrive dressed as good judgment and good timing, so reasonable you'd never think to question them... That's the cycle of safety doing its most convincing work, asking questions on your behalf that it already knows the answers to.
Which brings me right back to brain flossing, because brain flossing is self inquiry at its deepest level, and this is the reason it works. When you sit down with your timer and your two pens, the first color pen is whatever surfaces, the voice of the identity that's currently on duty. The second color pen, the talking back, that is you catching who held the first one. That's the whole move. It's the observer in the Observer-Commander, the part of you that can look at the question itself before it grabs the answer and get curious about who's asking; “Is this coming from the version of you that's building the thing, or the version of you that's managing the fear of building it?” Those two will hand you completely different answers to the exact same question, and only one of them is telling you the truth about what's possible for you.
OMG if you could see me this is where I do the mic drop...
Most people skip the answering part. They ask themselves a question and then immediately fill the silence with someone else's opinion. They start the eleven minutes and then check their phone. They begin to go inward and then redirect outward before anything real can surface, because going inward requires them to trust that what they find there is worth finding.
It is. I promise you it is.
This is also the honest version of what good support is for. The best of it, coaching, consulting, working with someone who can see the invisible patterns under your results, is never about someone handing you answers from the outside. What it actually does is create the conditions for your own self inquiry to go faster and land more precisely than it can alone, and then pair what surfaces with the strategy and frameworks that help you move once you can see clearly. That's what I'm doing every time I work with someone, I'm helping them excavate what was already in there and catch who's holding the pen, and then we build from there.
You have far more of the answer than you think, about your own life, your own work, your own next move. The whole practice is being willing to ask yourself, and then to stay in the room with yourself long enough to hear who's answering.
That is self coaching paired with the art of inquiring within. My beloved brain flossing framework at its deepest level. And when you practice it consistently you stop needing to look outside yourself for permission or direction because you have learned to trust the intelligence that was always operating inside you.
Ask yourself the question, then answer it... all the way. That is where everything you are looking for is waiting. Go find it and then go CREATE it... your way.
It's all possible.
If you believe it is.
I do.
ps. I'm in the last phase of my DBA program. I snapped this photo this week as I realized this is what the work looks like right now, 11:53pm and editing page 83 or my research on executive cognition and how it affects psychological safety and how it dilutes (or increases) AI value maturity. The researcher/ scientist in me is thriving and the strategic part of me is so excited for the innovative way I am bringing the THINKING of the leader to light (mindology) in Academia and the corporate world! Almost there!!!!!!
FOR THE LEADERS IN THE ROOM
Everything I just walked you through gets bigger the second you are responsible for other people, because a leader's questions don't stay in the leader's head. They set the terms for the whole room. Think about the questions you ask out loud in a strategy meeting. Every one of them quietly teaches your team which questions are allowed and which ones aren't worth raising.
If the questions you're bringing are coming from the part of you that wants to stay safe, your people learn fast to hand you the safe answer, and they stop offering the bigger one because there's no question in the room that invites it. You can sit around a table with brilliant, capable people, every one of them being completely reasonable, and watch the whole thing go nowhere, and the safety was hiding the entire time, sitting inside the questions nobody thought to ask.
This is the part of psychological safety most leaders miss. Your team can only think as far out as the questions you make safe to answer. A leader still managing fear under the surface will keep asking questions that protect the fear, and the team will quietly organize itself around protecting it too, and everyone will call that being responsible. The leader who can catch who's asking, in their own mind first and then in the room, changes what an entire organization believes is possible. That is one of the most valuable things a person in charge can learn to do, and almost nobody is teaching it at that level.