I have said that we have also very recently begun to understand that the mind seems to think in ‘waves and pauses’, not in ‘parts’. (Formerly I thought the road to the incisive question consisted of ‘parts’ and could be mapped. I was wrong. The mind is not so predictably linear.) It then determines in the pause the ‘just right’ question among those ‘innate questions’ to generate a new wave. As the listener, we are now able to navigate that same ‘pause’ process to determine the right question when the person cannot do it for themselves.

And this is the best way I know of to check. Ask the question that will generate more independent waves. I know of only one that does it magnificently:

What more do you think?

The question can be made even more potent if it allows for feelings and for the censored to be said (and, conversely, for the thinker to know that saying something is an option, not a requirement):

What more do you think, or feel, or want to say?

We also have seen the power of repeating a question. And we know about the importance of using the thinker’s own words if we refer to their thinking. People think in their own specific words, not just in their own language.

If you knew’, is hypothetical. So the question has to start that way. And ‘how would you’ is hypothetical. So the question has to end that way. And in the middle has to be the truth: the true liberating assumption. It is not hypothetical.