Before you draw,
write the question down

At the Life Transit Market in Four Four South Village, I prepared a “question formula” card and asked everyone to write down what they were stuck on before drawing. The biggest difficulty turned out to be this: halfway through writing, almost everyone took out their phone to check how to write a character.

We really haven’t written by hand in a long time. Even so, I think writing it down is what gives it weight.

Once the thing going round and round in your head lands on paper, you can point at it and talk: is this where you’re most stuck, or is it something else?

The question formula

The sentence on the card goes like this:

Within the next __ (time), about __ (topic), in order to __ (goal), what is in my way right now, and what should I do?

Time, topic and goal give the question a frame. Do you want to look at the next month, or the coming season? Is it work, love, or something else? What change do you hope for?

An example (one I wrote separately; it isn’t a question from anyone at the market):

Within the next three months, about changing jobs, in order to find a job with steadier hours, what is in my way right now, and what should I do?

Asked this way, we can go on to talk about which job conditions you already know, which ones you still need to ask about, and what “steadier” means for you in concrete terms.

It’s called a formula, but you can still change it. If you don’t know your goal yet, that’s fine: write down what troubles you most. The formula is there to help you start talking; you don’t have to squeeze yourself into every blank. You can also fill one in on the home page.

After the cards, write the action on a note and cover the question

After drawing and talking, I ask everyone to do one more thing: write the action they want to take next on a sticky note and put it over the question they wrote at the start.

I love this step. When you first sit down, there’s a question in front of you that weighs on you; after we talk, in the same spot, there’s something you can try.

Watching everyone think seriously about the hard questions in their careers, love, money and lives, with that determination to find a better self and break through a plateau, I believed before a single card was turned that these problems would be untangled one by one and covered over by action.

The action doesn’t have to be big. It can be a condition to check, a question to ask again, or a conversation you haven’t arranged yet. Writing it concretely makes it easier to remember, once you’re home, where you meant to start.

When you’re willing to write your question down concretely, you’re already on the way to an answer.

Thanks to the market

Thanks to the organiser @mbshmarket. The event went really well, and the stamp bingo made people keen to try every stall. And thanks to everyone who sat down and used the question formula with me to write their questions clearly.

If there’s something you’ve been thinking about for a long time, try it with a sheet of paper. You don’t have to write it all at once; start with the one line you most want to ask.

Common questions