No matter if used with a group or a single person, in a professional setting or very personal: Questions are the bread-and-butter tools of people leading conversations. The art of asking is important for facilitators and managers, for coaches and counsellors. This is how I introduced the issue to my Toastmasters club:

What is more important: A good question – or the perfect answer? I believe the art of asking questions is one of the most underrated tools in human communication. Yet, it is one of the easiest and most powerful tools to take charge of your own life and to change the world around you. In the next couple of minutes, I am going to show you how you can use questions to improve your everyday communications.

What makes questions so powerful? Questions change every aspect of a conversation. They change me, as the speaker; they change you, as the respondent; and they change us and the relationship between us. How is that? Well, obviously, questions yield answers. In doing so, they give me valuable information that I didn’t have before, and that help me do my work. When I ask a question, I can determine the frame of the answer. I thus take a certain level of control over the process.

But more interesting is what happens on the other side: A good question will make you think in a different way that you did before. It will make you aware of your world as you look for the information. And it might even challenge you to come up with a solution. As this solution is your idea, you will probably feel a lot more motivated to actually implement it.

This is great stuff: Questions create responsibility on both sides. The speaker takes responsibility for the process, and the respondent for the content. Asking questions is a listening skill: You need to pay attention what the other side has to say, and if you ask honest and open questions, the other person will open up and you can grow trust and a fruitful relationship.

Obviously, not all questions are good. What makes a good question? The aim of a question is either to get information or to get people to think. So, if you ask a closed question that can easily be answered with yes or no (‘Did you look at the report?‘ – ‘Sure‘) you don’t get information and the other person doesn’t need to think. Ask for data. Ask what when who where how much. (‘What changes do you propose in the report?‘) will give you better information to work with.

Asking questions is not about you, so stay away from your opinions and judgments (‘Chapter 3 is awful, isn’t it?‘). Another tip for this: Avoid why and how, as they can easily be misunderstood as an accusation (‘Why is our logo not on the report?‘). Better would be ‘I would like to see the report published with our logo. What options do we have to make that happen?‘ So, a good question is open and posed out of real interest, and separate the problem from the person.

But what to ask about, you might wonder. How many times have you remained silent when you didn’t really understand what was going on, or when you weren’t entirely happy with a situation? I bet that 80% of the time you weren’t the only one slightly lost. So in speaking up, you actually help the group and help the process to move forward. You’ve got nothing to loose if you ask a question. But there’s a lot to loose if you do not ask.

So, next time you don’t have the answer to a problem, just ask.
You might be amazed what happens.

Inspiration and material for this speech came from:

• Visualisieren. Präsentieren. Moderieren (Josef W. Seifert)
• Getting it done. How to lead when you’re not in charge (Roger Fisher, Alan Sharp, John Richardson)
• Coaching for Performance (John Whitmore)

Why do I like this word? Just look at it: The spelling equals the meaning. Awkward comes from Old Norse afugr (= turned backward) and is now used in the following contexts:

1. embarrassing: I find myself in an awkward situation.
2. difficult or uncomfortable to use: I find the gear shift very awkward to use when I move the seat forward.
3. performed gracelessly: walked with an awkward gait
4. without graceful coordination: an awkward, gangling adolescent
5. shyly uncomfortable: He was always awkward around kids.

Awkward can be roughly translated with unangenehm or unbeholfen in German.

For my second speech at Toastmasters, I decided to experiment: Take a fairly radical ecological topic, and inspire my audience to take action. The good news: They loved it, said it was timely and important, and even referred to Mr Gore’s sermons.

Here’s the an introduction to the ecological footprint in six minutes:

Help yourselves to a biscuit, take a drink: Today I’m going to speak about consumption, about limits to consumption and particularly how we could measure these limits where they exist.

The measure I want to talk about today is called the ecological footprint. As I assume that most of you will not be familiar with this concept, I’m going to do three things:

1. I’m going to introduce the concept
2. I’m going to give you a couple of figures
3. I’ll propose a couple of areas that influence the ecological footprint.

Basically, we’re talking about measuring the use of natural resources. Use of natural resources, that’s two things:

1. The stuff that we take out of nature: Our food, our fuels; and
2. The stuff that we dump back into nature: Our wastes, but also our carbon emissions.

You can take all these figures and calculate the actual area that would be needed to produce all these resources on the one hand – and to absorb the wastes on the other. What you come up with in the end is a number of hectares, the footprint that you need to stand on to sustain your lifestyle and your consumption. You calculate a footprint for individuals, but you can also do that for whole nations or even the entire planet. And then you can go on and compare it with the area that’s actually available on this planet.

And when you do that, you will notice that the global ecological footprint is about a quarter larger than planet Earth. That means we’re consuming more than nature is producing, and that is already the case since the 1980′s. Every economist in the room will know what’s happening when consumption is larger than production: Yes, you need to spend your capital. Capital in this case is not money, but it means we’re losing our forests, we’re destroying our fisheries and we’re playing with the atmosphere’s capacity to regulate the climate.

While this is already pretty startling, it becomes more severe when you look at the footprints of individual nations. If for example, everyone on this planet had the same lifestyle as the average US American, we would need not one planet, we would need five. That means we’re borrowing heavily from the people in the South to sustain our lifestyle. And at the same time, as these countries develop, there is a large population that aspires to have the same lifestyle as we in the North have.

The numbers are slightly better in Europe, but not quite. We would still need three planets, but we only have one. So it’s very clear that if you put any trust into these figures, something needs to happen. And while there are a lot of things that society can do, I would like to focus on three areas where we personally can make an impact.

• The first is food. It does make a difference if our apples come from New Zealand or from Belgium, and it does make a difference how much processing needed to happen to our food on its way from the field to the plate.
• The second is mobility. How much do we travel, how much do we need to travel, and how efficient do we do that? There is a difference between a 4×4 and a hybrid car, between a train and a plane, between a motorbike and a pair of running shoes.
• The third area is housing. We can choose where we live – and that impacts on how much we need to travel – but we can also choose how much stuff and energy we need, how often we use it, and how soon we throw things away.

And if you take all this together, I think it’s very clear that, yes, lifestyles and consumption do matter. And it’s also very clear that lifestyles and consumption in the North will need to change – if we want to give this planet a chance. So, what I’d like to ask you is – if you liked what I just said, and if you maybe had one or two ideas what you personally could do – write them down, take them home, and then – make them happen.

You can calculate your own ecological footprint with the Ecological Footprint Quiz. For more information about the methodology, visit the Global Footprint Network.

I’ve recently joined a bilingual Toastmasters club to improve my public speaking skills. I was asked to introduce myself in my first speaking assignment, the so-called Icebreaker. Here it is:

My name is Zarah Minor, I’m 27 years old, and am working as a communications officer with an environmental organization here in Brussels.

This was the short story. However, I had no intention to end up in Belgium, and neither did I study anything remotely related to what I’m doing now. Let me tell you how it all began:

As a teenager, I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do with my life. So when they took us to the job information center, I sat down at one of these computers that would ask you questions about what you like doing, whether you like to work with people, etc. So I did that, and in the end the thing said: Zarah, you’re going to be a university professor. Great, I thought. Now – which subject? But that the machine couldn’t tell.

As I had Maths as a major at the time, I was happy when a friend suggested I try computer science, because I felt Maths would be too theoretical and out-of-this-world. So I went into Computer Science, but what I didn’t know was that once you take a left turn at Safety Critical Systems, and then a right turn at Algorithms on Graphs and then go straight on to that door called Algebraic Specification – you’re as far into the ivory tower of theoretical informatics as you can get.

So at one point I had to admit that this was not where I wanted to be for the rest of my life, and that I needed to find something else. But – I had done a gap year with an environmental organization before studying – and for some reason kept this engagement up since. And as this felt really meaningful to me, and was a lot of fun, I decided to give it a try and to turn this voluntary work into a paid job.

This was quite a scary decision at the time, but I’ve been incredibly lucky. I graduated two and a half years ago, and have been working for environmental organizations ever since.

My name is Zarah Minor, I’m 27 years old and working as a communications officer with an environmental organization here in Brussels.