“Once you start to notice not just the questions you are asking but the questions you aren’t asking, you start to really appreciate where questions are exercising power in your life.” ~ Lani Watson

What stopped me in my tracks as I read philosopher Lani Watson’s new book Q: The Hidden Power of Questions in a World That Wants Answers? 

Not all the many and marvelous insights about the potential of questions, but the inabilities.

She calls us toward our unaskable questions.

She savors the rich legacy of unanswered and unanswerable questions.

And she challenges our assumptions with the intriguing ambiguity of a question mark’s absence.

As I relished the wrestle with these inabilities, I felt the strength of her thesis: questions are a form of power.

There are sometimes questions that carry all the force in their own right. It’s not because you’re silently answering that question in your own mind, it’s because it doesn’t require an answer in order to be valuable and significant.

We talked about aporia (confusion & bafflement), what makes a question a question, assessing our questioning strengths and how diversification helps, the extraordinary potency of therapeutic questions and their contribution to Lani’s philosophical work, the possible misuse and abuse of questioning’s power and its uneven distribution — and the legacy of unanswered or unanswerable questions.

Listen to Ep. #335: The Hidden Power of Questions, with Lani Watson

Dr. Lani Watson is a philosopher, author and YouTuber. She is known as The Questions Doctor on social media – @thequestionsdr. Her new book Q: The Hidden Power of Questions in a World That Wants Answers released in the US the day we spoke.

Try the Questioning Strengths Assessment!

Lani will be offering an online course, “How to Build a Questioning Mindset“, including a deep dive into the QSA. Learn more here.

Listen to my first conversation with Lani: What Is a Question, with Lani Watson.

Questions are cool! Think so, too? You might enjoy these C2BC Classics: Beautiful Questions, with Warren Berger; Wrestling with Questions, with Ken Woodward; Great Question: The Art of the Ask & Getting More of What You Really Want, with Larry Robertson; and The Right Questions for Legal Empowerment, with Naomi Campbell.

Theme music by Sean Balick; “The Basket” by The Balloonist, via Blue Dot Sessions.

Lani Watson photographs by Urszula Sołtys.

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