They had asked themselves a spectacular breakthrough question. And they had gotten there by asking themselves a cluster of other questions first. It was a logical and beautiful sequence, supple and able to leap from one snare to a question to a different snare to another question until it arrived finally at that most liberating question of all. In later years I would label that one an ‘incisive question’, because it was, indeed.

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.

Or for brevity I might have formed the question in my mind this way:

Can I be sure that what I as the listener am about to say will be of more value than what you are about to think?

We can create a thinking environment even in the dwellings of extreme disagreement. We can, quite simply and profoundly, promise not to interrupt. We can honour the three ingredients of that promise: to start giving attention, to stay interested in where the person will go next and to ‘share the stage’ equally.

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.