I received this comment in response to one of my last newsletters on the subject of goal setting:

Hello Wolfgang, thank God you are not living at the time of the Inquisition, you would surely be burned at the stake. Because you are questioning the dogmas and unwritten laws of successful coaches worldwide. That's almost like the fall of the Berlin Wall, and it's a good thing.

Questions determine the quality of the answers and therefore the quality of our lives. A well-known saying. But what about our questioning, our daily questioning?

We've mostly all grown up with one sentence: "Don't ask so many questions." Or answers like: "You don't understand that yet." At school, it was all about knowing the right answers, good questions were not rewarded. So where does it come from that we feel it is part of our nature to question something? Without specific questions, however, there is no progress. All great inventions are based on the fact that someone has asked a new question.

But our scientific model works differently. If you want to be considered a professor, you have to put forward a thesis and defend it for the rest of your life. If it is wrong - and I maintain that it will always be wrong, at least incompletely - we do not find this out and defend something that is "wrong". Science, the perpetuation of the current fallacy.

Only by questioning theses can we find out whether they really hold water, whether they need to be changed. But this also means that we have to be happy when we have new insights, even if they render a thesis obsolete for which we have once won praise. We should be more happy about our further development, about our expansion of consciousness.

Otherwise the earth would probably still be a disk and the sun would revolve around the earth. But we're not giving up so easily, there's always the sunset.

In marketing, people always try to pin someone down to one topic. "You have to position yourself! Fix it!" But I don't like that. Can I really still move forward freely in my thoughts? I really hope that I will become more mature, wiser and more aware as I get older. Will I then still be able to represent everything in the same way?

If I have to make a commitment, it's that I like to question everything.

Again and again, what is it really, really about?

Let's take a look at political discussions. How bad is it when someone takes the opposite view today of what was said a year ago.

It is not further development that is being rewarded, but the opportunity to discredit someone by changing their opinion. If we are awake, we should realize that the person making the accusation here is not aiming for the truth, but only for power.

Of course I don't mean someone who hangs his flag in the wind and wants to play tricks.

But questions can also be used to manipulate. Politicians in particular like to do this, but we all do it when we're not awake.

If a politician says something about how we want to shape our future, the other side usually says: "How do you want to finance that?" You can kill a lot of things with the "how" question. But that is usually the intention.

How about answering "Yes, financing is an important issue. But before we get to that, how do we want to live? Would it be good to look at the proposal if we could fund it?"

Why is it really, really possible?

If we follow this question consistently, the world will become a different place. For example, what would be the task of many industries? Wouldn't it be a good question for the pharmaceutical industry, what can we do, invent, to be superfluous? Would it be a good question for the banking world, what could we do to make our customers wealthy? For social welfare, how can we become redundant? For parents and teachers, how do we best support the child so that it can best develop and live its natural potential?

Yes, I like tearing down walls. Monumental walls!

What is the right question? Usually the one that leads to something being recognized as wrong or something becoming superfluous. Yes, old beliefs can become superfluous.

Our fear can become superfluous. If we have enough confidence in our creativity, we can solve any problem in a way that is constructive for the future.

It would therefore be good to allow and train more questions at home and at school. A Nobel Prize winner once said: "When I came home from school, my mother never asked what you had learned. She always asked, did you ask a good question today?

Things don't always get better when they change. But whenever things get better, something has to change!

What good question did you ask today?

How about: How can I have more joy in my life?

Yours sincerely,
Wolfgang Sonnenburg
winning for life