Book Briefing: The Art Of Forgiving: When you need to forgive and don’t know how

By: Reham Essam

The Art Of Forgiving: By: Lewis B. Smedes

One of God’s better jokes on us was to give us the power to remember the past and leave us no power to undo it. We have all sometimes been willing to trade almost anything for a magic sponge to wipe just a few moments off the tables of time. But whatever the mind can make of the future, it cannot silence a syllable of the past. There is no delete key for reality. And it comforts us little to know that not even God can undo what has been done.
The remedy has existed since the first wrong done one human being by another. Yet, people still punish themselves with pains of a past long gone. Or punish others in a futile passion to get revenge. Tribes slaughter tribes, ethnic groups assault other ethnic groups, and gangs shoot up other gangs. Couples break their marriages and divide their families into weeping pieces. Why do people surrender their tomorrows to the unfair pain of their yesterdays? The total answer lies buried somewhere in our primitive need to protect our pride, in our trembling fear of feeling weak, and in our moral instincts for justice, all mingled together as a raw passion to see he who wounded us wounded in equal measure. But the answer is also tangled in a web of misunderstandings about forgiveness itself.

What We Do When We Forgive
The Three Stages
Jennifer Klein was the kind of woman you could count on to reach out to a person in trouble. For instance, when Archie, her husband of twelve childless years, came home with a story about this poor kid named Lennie he know at the shop and how her parents had tossed her out in the street, he sparked Jennifer’s inner urge to seek and to save the lost. Without so much as looking up, she said “We’ve got an extra room; maybe we can do her some good. Why don’t you bring her here?” So he did.
Lennie was only seventeen, care and nurture were what the child needed—unconditional love if you will―and Jennifer felt that she had a calling to give them. Meanwhile, she never worried for a minute about leaving a mere child like Lennie hanging around the house alone with Archie. Two months after Lennie had moved in, Jennifer strained her thigh while she worked out at her fitness center and came home a half hour earlier than she said she would. When she got there, she found Archie and the castaway in the family room in a compromising prone position. Jennifer felt she had been mugged inside her soul by a two-ton thug. Is this what a person gets for showing some-body a little tender mercy?
Jennifer wasted no time. She found herself an apartment and left Archie the very next day. Now, two years later, her spirit is still aching and wracked in pain. She still has a hankering to kill the two of them. Somebody had told Jennifer that if she forgave Archie she would put the episode behind her, forget the whole thing, go back to him, accept who he is, and get on with their life together. As if nothing ever happened. But this sounded phony to Jennifer, and she knew she could not do it anyway. “Are you supposed to swallow hard, let him off the hook, and pretend the whole thing never happened? If that is what forgiving is about, “Jennifer said, “I would rather buy a gun and shoot them both.”  When we forgive someone, we all perform the same basic transformation inside our inner selves. Each person’s healing follows the same basic script. This is why, for all of us, no matter how badly we have been wronged. Each of us naturally puts their special spin on the inner process of forgiving the wrong, and each of us makes his own decision about how to relate to someone after forgiving.
Rediscover the Humanity of the person who hurt us
80%of what we see lies behind our eyes. If this is true, 80% of what we see when we look at a person who recently wronged and deeply wounded us must lie behind our eyes in the memory of our pain. We shrink him to the size of what he did to us; he becomes the wrong he did. If he has done something truly horrible. We say stuff like, “He is nothing but a cheat.” He is only, he is totally, the sinner who did us wrong. Forgiving our enemy doesn’t turn him into a close friend or a promising husband or a trustworthy partner. We do not diminish the wrongness of what he did to us. We do not blind ourselves to the reality that he is perfectly capable of doing it again. But we take him back into our private world as a person who shares our faulty humanity, bruised like us, faulty like us, still thoroughly blamable for what he did to us. Yet, human like us. We begin to see our enemy through a cleaner lens, less smudged by hate without shadows of his soul.

Surrendering Our Right to Get Even
We want our enemy to suffer, but we also want him to know that he is suffering only because of what he did to us. We don’t want him to admit he made a mistake, flip an apology in our direction like a fifty-cent gratuity, and go on as if he had done nothing worse than burping before dessert. But take care when you give up vengeance; make sure you are not giving up on justice. The line between the two is faint, unsteady, and fine. As Vengeance is our own pleasure of seeing someone who hurt us getting it back and then some. Justice, on the other hand, is secured when someone pays a fair penalty for wronging another even if the injured person takes no pleasure in the transaction.

Revising Our Feelings
Once we have rediscovered our offender’s humanity and given up our right to enjoy getting even, we begin to feel new feelings toward him personally. We feel him differently after we see him differently.
What we felt before was simple hate. Whether passive or aggressive hate, our hurt left us calling heaven to make bad things to them. But if we feel  any stirrings of benevolence inside us, any hint that it will be all right with us if some modest bit of good fortune comes our enemy’s way, we can be sure that we are teamed with God in a modest miracle of healing.
The three stages of the art of forgiving―restoring humanity to the person who wronged us, surrendering our right to get even, and beginning to bless the person we forgive―are the fundamentals of the healing process.
There are general rules to know what to forgive and what not to forgive
We forgive persons
We can only forgive persons. But the link between persons and their organizations can be very close. Forgiving is for persons so when corporations use their impersonal powers to our hurt and sometimes our ruin, and we don’t have someone to blame, we should let it just go.

We forgive persons for what they do, not for what they are
They do not wrong us by being untrustworthy; they wrong us by betraying our trust. It’s too hard to forgive people for what they are, but let us not make it harder than it is. It’s always better to narrow things down to something specific.
We forgive people who wound us seriously
We may couldn’t get back to the things we lost by forgiving someone, forgiveness won’t pay the bills, the pain that forgiving can heal is the pain of a wounded memory. If these pains of spirit ever get healed, you will be in better condition to control your impulses to trust people too soon.
We forgive people for wronging us

Forgiving is not meant for every pain people cause us. When we forgive people for things that don’t need forgiving we dilute the power, spoil the beauty, and interrupt the healing of forgiveness. When we forgive the things forgiving is for, we copy God’s own art.

Forgiving doesn’t mean Reunion
There are three reasons why the popular notion that forgiving and reunion always go together is a major misconception:
• Forgiving happens inside the person who does it
• Forgiving is not about reunion
• Forgiving does not obligate us to go back

Forgiving is completed in the mind of the person who forgives. When we forgive we see the person who wounded us as a fellow human being worthy of our love, and in that sense we reconcile ourselves to him. If we have forgiven, we have removed one obstacle to reunion―the wall of our own bitterness. Whether we heal the relationship depends pretty much on the forgiven person.

Forgiving Doesn’t mean Restoring
All of our human idols fall, sooner or later. Some of them repent. Some of those who repent get forgiven. But should we give them their old jobs back? It is all depends.
Easy forgivers sometimes get confused about the difference between forgiving someone and restoring that person to the place he held before he did whatever it was that he needed to be forgiven for. Their confusion grows out of the love and loyalty they had for him before his lapse. They felt such a special attachment to him, felt that his fall somehow diminished them, that they need―for their own sakes as much as for his―to see him back in his trusted slot again. If we keep all these things―forgiving and judgment and good sense― in their right places, we can let the miracle of forgiving do its own proper work of healing and leave the restoration of the offender to other practical considerations.

Who Can Do It?
In order to qualify for forgiving we need only to meet three requirements, it is not an easy job but this is just the license to practice
• We need to bear the wounds ourselves
• We need to know we have been wronged
• We need to have an inner push to forgive

Why We Forgive?
The Case Against Forgiving
Sometimes forgiving seems like exactly the wrong thing, even a bad thing, to do. In fact there are profound thinkers who say that― as a regular way to deal with monsters that do very bad things to people―forgiving can be precisely the wrong thing to do. Their objection is fiercely moral. It is not that forgiving is a foolish thing to do. It is that forgiving bad people can be morally wrong. One can’t and should not go around happily killing and torturing and then, when the moment has come, simply ask and receive forgiving.
Some critics indicate some cases that work against forgiving
• No one has a right to forgive someone unless he himself had been injured by the person.
• The crime was too horrible to be forgiven by anyone.
• It is dishonest. In the name of a cruel kindness, it denies reality. The reality is that someone wronged another human being. We will sweep it all under the magic carpet called forgiving and pretend it never happened.
• It contradicts human nature. Our nature is to get even. Forgiving may be divine, but what is natural to human beings is to pin the abusers of the world to the floor and make them pay.
In Defense Of Forgiving
We know the charges critics have leveled against forgiving― that forgiving makes things unfair, that it is dishonest, and that it goes against human nature. But forgiving offers the best hope of creating a new fairness out of past unfairness. The challenge that it is dishonest by saying that forgiving cannot happen without severe truthfulness. And to the charge that forgiving goes against the human nature, we can say forgiving follows the impulses of our true and better natures.
There are some stubborn distortions of the meaning of forgiving, we should clear up before answering those critics:
• Forgiving someone who did us wrong does not mean that we tolerate the wrong he did.
• Forgiving does not mean that we want to forget what happened.
• Forgiving does not mean that we excuse the person who did it.
• Forgiving does not mean that we take the edge off the evil of what was done to us.
• Forgiving does not mean that we invite someone who hurt us once to hurt us again.
Moving on from assumptions, we need to defend forgiving against the explicit criticisms that have been mentioned.
• Forgiving Is Fair: It is the only way for any fairness to rise from the ashes of unfairness.
• The Only Alternative To Forgiving Perpetuates Unfairness: Vengeance is the only alternative to forgiving.
• Forgiving Gives Future Fairness A Chance: It always opens the future to better possibilities.
• Forgiving is a severe honesty: Anyone can lie about forgiving, but you needn’t to prove it to anybody but yourself.
• Forgiving doesn’t falsify reality: You don’t act like nothing happened; you are healing the wounds of a world hacked apart by memories of wounds and wrongs we know we did not deserve.
Forgiving tolerates no disguising, no denying, no diminishing, and no ignoring of what happened.
• Forgiving is honest about the responsibility of the person who committed the wrong
• Forgiving is honest about the accountability of the person who did it
• Forgiving is honest about the price of any reunion
• Forgiving is honest about the person who wounded us
• Forgiving requires honesty with ourselves
• Forgiving is honest about future possibilities

In view of all these facts about forgiving, there is never any real forgiving at all unless it first be honest. Beyond that, we get ourselves free from the trap of persistent and unfair pain. It’s the only way for a victim to be fair to themselves.
Because It Suits Us
Some people believe that we do only the things we really want to do. They believe we do what we do because it will reward us more than if we do something else. Increase our pleasure and avoid our pain―this is the motivation for all human action.
We end up doing what we think will give us more pleasure and less pain, but this is not true. We sometimes do the right thing even if we know that it will cost us a lot of pain. We do what is right simply because we believe it is right. You can even say that the quality of our lives is measured by our willingness to do the right thing― even when we know it will make us pay dearly.
On the other hand, somethings are just not meant to be done simply because it is our duty to do them. Some things are meant to be done only because we want to do them. Some can be done for no other reason. If we are not led to do them by our own inner impulses, they won’t get done at all. Or at least they will not get done well. Forgiving is one of these things. We forgive when we discover that we really want to forgive, and we want to forgive when we want to heal ourselves from the hangover of a wounded past.
For Our Own Sakes
When we forgive we become our own good physician and the remedy we use percolates from warm, beating heart of the universe. We are working with the healing energy of the creator himself. This is why forgiveness does its first good work inside us, and wishing the other person well is precisely what we do when we forgive.

We Only Forgive The Ones We Blames
If we dare not judge, we dare not forgive. We can blame somebody and refuse to forgive him. But we cannot forgive him if we dare not blame him. Blame not, forgive not, and there’s the end of it. The anti-blame people are victims of certain fallacies that are no less fallacious for being attractive to the relativists of our age. We want to run through few of them and explain why they are balderdash.
The “Who Am I to Judge?” Fallacy
If this fallacy were true, nobody should ever blame anybody. But it is not true, and for obvious reasons. When we blame wrongdoers for doing wrong, we are only holding them accountable on earth for one piece of bad action. We size up peoples actions the best we can and to assign responsibility for them. So, the imperfect people have not only the right but an obligation to blame people.

The Blame-Share Fallacy 
Anyone who shares responsibility for what went wrong forfeits their right to blame the person who did it. The truth is that we must blame people who do wrong even if we helped make the wrong possible. But humble blaming is still blaming. And humble blaming leads to humble forgiving.
The “To Understand All Is to Forgive All” Fallacy
We forgive someone when we cannot understand why he did. If we understand we will keep creating excuses, and we don’t need to forgive him because we only forgive the ones we blame.

The Fatalist Fallacy
Blaming people for doing whatever bad things they do, does not mean we think everyone is totally responsible for everything they do. Nor does it mean that we think all people are equally responsible. Whatever evil influences were buzzing around them or inside them when they did the bad things, they still had the power not to do them. Therefore we blame them. And only then, if we are so inclined, do we forgive them. All we need to do is hold on to a belief that, in spite of all the influences on us, we do have power to act on our own initiative, we do not have to do what we do, and to that extent we are accountable for what we do. We should remember that blaming a person who wronged us is one of the better compliments we can ever pay her.

If what they did wounded and wronged you personally, you blame them. Only then do you consider forgiving them. You must remember that they might be wrong, and it always possible that they might be wholly innocent. So let no one rush to blame. Therefore, the point is only that forgiving always comes with blame attached. If we dare not blame, we dare not forgive. Forgiving is for people who know their own faults but who recognize a wrong and dare to name it when they feel it done to them and have the wisdom and grace to forgive it.
Forgiving People Who Don’t Say They Are Sorry
There are strong arguments against forgiving an unrepentant enemy, and we respect them even though we are not persuaded by them. We can count five plausible reasons not to forgive people who do not say they are sorry.
• If a person who wrongs us does not repent, he doesn’t deserve to be forgiven: Forgiving flows from grace―unearned, undeserved favor.
• Forgiving someone who does not repent is just too hard to do: It is a no-lose opportunity, difficult to do but with a harvest of healing.
• To forgive an unrepentant person is not fair to ourselves: Yes, but we are fair to ourselves when we prolong a bitterness that is shriveling our spirits.
• To forgive an unrepentant person is dangerous; If he feels no sorrow for what he did, he is likely to do it again: When we forgive, we don’t forget, and we do not intend to let it happen again.
• The Bible says that we have to repent before we can get forgiven:
 A person who wrongs God should not expect God to forgive him unless he is really sorry.
 When people want to be forgiven by God, they want to be reunited with him at the same time, but God want reunion with integrity.
Repentance is nothing but simple honesty about what we did to break our connection with God. This is why a person cannot expect to be forgiven by God unless he first repents. On the other side, the person who hurt us should not be the person who decides whether or when we should recover from the pain he brought us. A wounded person should no put their future happiness in the hands of the person who made them miserable.
Forgiving Ourselves
Forgiving takes two―someone who forgives and someone who gets forgiven, and there is a moral problem to hurt someone and forgive myself, I suggest we take on these four problems, one at a time.
• Does it make sense to forgive ourselves?
We are ripped apart inside, and forgiving ourselves is the only way we heal the split.
• Who gives us the right to forgive ourselves?
Only victims have a right to forgive. Self-forgiveness license comes from two authorities the victim and God.
• What do we forgive ourselves for?
 We forgive ourselves for what we did, not for what we are
 We forgive ourselves for specific things we did
 We forgive ourselves for wrongful things that we deserve blame for doing
 We forgive ourselves for what we blame ourselves for
 We forgive ourselves for what we feel forgiven for
• How can we go about forgiving ourselves?
 We tell it to ourselves
 We repeat it
 We keep it to ourselves
 We act like it even if we don’t talk about it
 We do something extravagant

Forgiving God
We sometimes have question of how God carries on when people are wronged and what we should do about him when things go badly wrong with us whether it might ever make sense to forgive God of unfair wounds. But when we stop, we will see that pain is God’s way of getting us to listen to him, when we forget to keep tuned in to God. We get to be better persons for having felt the bad pain. God always has a good purpose for allowing unfair pain to happen to us.
How God Forgives
God invented forgiving as a remedy for a past that not even he could change and not even he could forget. His way of forgiving is the model for our forgiving. Forgive each other the way God forgives us, because we forgive for our own sake. We forgive as we rediscover the person behind the offense, as we surrender our right to revenge, and as we wish good things for the person who did bad things to us, just as father deal with his son mercifully, we can heal our own spirits, alone, and get the first benefit of forgiving, we can open ourselves to the possibilities of reunion. But when it comes to the happy endings, we can never be sure. There is something unfinished about forgiving someone who does not come back to you.

Owning Our Pain
Forgiving is a remedy for pain, but not for anybody else’s pain, just our own. But no pain is really our pain until we own it; we own something when we take personal responsibility and give a name to our feelings.
We begin to take responsibility for our pain when we listen to its question. We begin to heal our pain when we give the right answer. We won’t take healing action against unfair pain until we own the pain we want to heal. It is not enough to feel pain; we need to admit we feel it.

Taking our Time
We worry about fast forgivers. They tend to forgive quickly in order to avoid their pain. Or they forgive fast in order to get an advantage over the people they forgive. And their instant forgiving only makes things worse. Shock may be a temporary pain-blocker, but forgiveness within shock or using forgiveness as shield against the pain that is sure will come later. People who forgives to avoid conformation, because they think it is vulgar, so unpleasant, to escape the ugly scene. However, we should worry most about those who resort to fast forgiving as a trick to gain advantage. Quickly done to gain advantage, but here forgiveness is the smelliest if dirty tricks. People who have badly wounded should give themselves space and time to start forgiving through the following:
• Think of what actually happened
• Evaluate what is behind the scenes
• Talk to a friend or counselor
• Feel and take time to be alone without any distractions and put a name on what they feel
• Pray, be honest , and admit that they need help
Postponements have made it severely hard. There is a right moment to forgive, we can’t predict it in advance; we can only get ourselves ready for it when it arrives. Consequently, the unscientific advice here is not to do it too quickly, but don’t wait too long; only the wounded person who can pinpoint that right moment to forgive.

We Don’t Have To Say So
It’s a happy ending too, but we shouldn’t suppose that we must tell. Silent forgiving can be just as real and just as effective as spoken forgiving. Sometimes good intentions badly botched, so it is better to keep quiet. There are some tips if you want to share the good news, but it all depends on the situation and the person, if you are not totally ready, forget about them.
• Take your time
• Size up the risk
• Wait for a signal
• Do it sideways
• Begin at the end
• Don’t claim holy motives
• Improvise
• Make it short
• Keep it light
• Give the other person time
These strategies for those who want to initiate the conversation on their own. If the other person comes to you with sorrow, you don’t need any strategy just follow your heart and you will take the perfect decision if you are honest, but remember it is always good to forgive and never bad to say so. But if the response is not what you hoped for, you can go home and enjoy our healing in private.
How  Often?
As Often As We Need To
There are three fundamental facts of forgiving:
• Forgiving is not obligation.
• Forgiving is not about letting people get away with something.
• Forgiving is not about reunion with people who are hurting us.
Don’t make forgiving a matter of number, we should focus on healing our memories of a wound that someone’s wrong etched in our past.  The right question is how many times we need to forgive. Forgiving is a gift not a duty, use the gift to set yourself free from the miserable past.
When We Are Not Sure We Have Done It
When you discover that you don’t like the person you thought you had forgiven anymore, and you start to wonder whether you have failed at forgiving just take it easy, and expect some relapses. Forgiving does not clear everything up. We need sometimes to wash the mirror of everything up, we need to wash the mirror of our memories, and we may need someone to lend us a sponge. It’s only slip on the way to success not a failure.
Forgive And Remember
Healed memory is not a deleted memory. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future, also the other dilemma created by combination of power and weakness, power of imagining the future and weakness of not controlling it. And the way to hope for a better future after a bad past is the way of forgiving.
• We remember the good parts of the bad past
• We remember the past with truth
• We remember with a new respect for ourselves
• We remember with sadness
• We remember without illusions
One way to regain hope is to choose the new way of remembering that comes with forgiving the wrongs of the pasts and don’t lose hope when the vision of tomorrow is clouded by the wrong of yesterday. It is a new path to change a bitter memory into a grateful memory, an enslaved memory into a free memory. We reflect light to our darkness, we open door for unseen future, and remind us how good it is to be healed.

Book Breifing:Girl, Stop Apologizing: A Shame-Free Plan For Embracing And Achieving Your Goals

By: Reham Essam

Girl Stop Apologizing: By Rachel Hollis

It’s no wonder so many woman have lost themselves. Of course they have! If you live your life to please everyone else, you forget what used to make you you.  Unfortunately, many women struggle with what others might think of the goals they have for themselves. So instead of chasing them, they let their dreams die. Or they pursue them in secret or, worse, with a nagging sense of having failed those around them because they’re doing something for themselves instead of everyone else. They live under guilt and shame and fear. As women, we’ve had a lifetime of lies fueling our fears. We’ve had a lifetime of believing that our value lies primarily in our ability to make other people happy. We are afraid of so many things when it comes to our dreams, but the biggest fear is of being judged for having them in the first place.

 The world needs your spark, needs your energy, needs you to show up for your life and take hold of your potential. We need your love and care. We need your passion. We need your business models. We need to celebrate your successes. We need to watch you rise back up after your failures. We need to see your courage. We need to hear your what if. We need you to stop apologizing for being who you are and become who you were meant to be, but to achieve big goals both personally and professionally came down to these three things:

1. Letting go of the excuses that kept you stuck.

2. Adopting great habits and behaviors that set you up for success.

3. Acquiring the skills necessary to make exponential growth possible.

Excuse #1: That’s Not what Other Women Do

 I used to have shark teeth

In a perfect world, they’d encourage you to be yourself while also helping you figure out how to improve in the ways that grow yourself- confidence. But most of us didn’t grow up in that perfect world.

Most of us grew up identifying from early age all the things that were wrong with us. We believed we were too fat, too ugly, and too awkward to be loved and accepted without making some big changes. Some women handle it by sinking further into themselves. Other women handle it by rebelling. By the time you started wondering whether you liked the road you‘d put yourself on, you felt too far gone to turn back, and so you live a double life.

Your dreams weren’t just a part of your identity; they were the core of who I was. They were a gift from God, and if God endowed us with something, how could it be wrong? You will realized that your desire for growth and work only really felt wrong when you start to worry about their point of views, so you think to stay at home as a good personal choice and life calling― but it’s not your own decision, it was what other people wanted for your life.

Excuse #2: I’m Not A Goal-Oriented Person

For the Goal diggers

Dreams are things you hope for, for your life. Dreams are the things that occur to you as you go about your day, a goal is a dream you’ve decided to make real. It’s a destiny, you‘re working toward instead of an idea you’re only considering or hoping for. But, you should take action and plan for your success to achieve new milestones, even little ones, all living organism need to feel so to get busy growing or get busy dying. If you find yourself going through life without anything to work toward or aim for, it’s no wonder that you feel like your life is living you instead of living it your own way. 

Excuse #3: I Don’t Have Time

Time is not enough Myth

It’s not about having time or not, but whether this goal you have is so compelling to your future peace that you are willing to give up a little of today’s rest for tomorrow’s possibilities. You should give up excuses and accept that you are in control of your schedule through the following tips:

1. Make A Timeline for your entire week

Once you are recorded an entire week, find out where you have the time to add five hours a week to work on your goal.

2. Put your schedule and treat your five to strive hours as scared

Once you set your new schedule; commit to five hours to become the person you want to be.

3. Make your Minimum Hours Are Your Best Hours

You have to schedule these hours for when you’ve got the mental capacity to do them well.

4. Plan Your Schedule Weekly

Make sure that you adhere to the plan.

Don’t wait for a moment to be special enough for you to look, feel, and act your best, and the truth us that you don’t need a special moment, or any reason at all, to do that. Stop waiting for someday; someday is a myth. Don’t wait to have the time, and create the time.

Excuse #4: I’m Not Enough To Succeed

Lifelong battle of feeling not good enough

Your feelings of not enough keep you from proving to yourself that you are. You can find that the thing that prevents you from chasing your biggest dream in life has been the belief that you are not smart enough to build big achievement. It’s a pitfall that many of us make on the road to personal growth of any kind, we pinpoint the problem, we decide to fix it, and we admit to fix our personal problem by doing something that personally doesn’t resemble us. Every time the fear of not enough shows up for you in stupid way remind yourself of the truth not the other’s opinion, and if you are hesitating because of someone else telling you that you are not enough, you are still living your life and making choices for yourself, and subsequently, your family based on someone else’s opinion, also you must know what you have been through in the past that affected you in a negative way, holding on to it won’t help you. Therefore, the state of not enough won’t let you get inspired or make great choices in your life.

Excuse #5: I Can’t Pursue My Dream And Still Be A Good Woman

Don’t waste your life trying to please everyone else

You get only one chance at this life―and you have no idea when your chance might be over. You can’t waste it to please others. Of course this is not a call to be selfish, but life is as short as the falling snow and it’s all about you to be happy through being in a family or a relationship or a community means showing up for others. The problem is that women struggle to show up for others instead of showing to themselves. 

On the other hand, work-life balance is a myth, work and personal life will always battle each other for supremacy because both require your full attention to be successful, it’s not bad or wrong; it’s just how life works.  

Prioritize Yourself

Your health and well-being should be your biggest priority, sleep eight hours, work out, carve out several hours a week for prayer, church, and volunteer work because faith is extremely important to feel centered which means to feel grounded and peace with yourself and regardless of chaotic things become keep yourself a priority.

Love Life

We don’t want to have a good marriage or even great one, we want to have exceptional marriage and it requires honest intentions so make sure to have a weekly date night with your husband, and annual vacation together― without the children. Reach to the agreement to make each other a priority. 

Kids

Never easy task but not all women can achieve that goal of having balance, you will miss some moment with your kids but in return you will build yourself and set a good example for them, it was another way of prioritizing kids just with long term vision.

Career

There are times when work won’t take up most of your attention. You will get busy with other stuff in your life like saving your marriage, your health or your kids. You will be off-balance for a while and torn apart between two many things until you can come back to your own direction.

It’s not impossible to pursue something for yourself while simultaneously showing up for people you love. It’s possible to prioritize yourself and not to get overwhelmed by feeling hype, the pressure, and guilt. People’s opinions are true for them not for your circumstances and your feelings.

Excuse #6: I’m Terrified Of Failure

Let them watch the missteps!

You have a dream, but this feeling is holding you back because you are afraid that others will see you stumble. All of us have a list of failure, and we are totally aware of how much time and money they cost us along the way, but those mistakes taught us something to ensure they don’t happen again, and to know that something great can be mined from ashes means we don’t beat ourselves up when we don’t get it right. Consequently, we should be grateful for small spaces we’ve inhabited as they taught us how to be who we are now, for missteps along the way taught us how to run, and for our insecurities to gain a lifetime of confidence through practice and study.

Excuse #7: It’s Been Done Before

Everything has been done before, but the fact that someone has already done the thing you’re dreaming of shouldn’t be depressing; it should be a sign that you are on the right track, and stop comparing your beginning with the middle of anybody‘s road. You are afraid of something you haven’t even attempted, because you think you can’t measure up to how someone else has done it, and there are some reasons like:

• You’ve never done it before

• You fail at everything, so why should you expect anything else?

• At least if you never try, no one― especially you― will be able to confirm that. But first you’ve got to get over the battle with comparison, as if you get over your fear of not doing it as well as they do, you ‘ll never have the opportunity to be a trailblazer for someone else.

Excuse #8: What They think about my actions?

I want someone’s opinion to keep going

You should stop caring about people’s point of views about your action and don’t give power to their opinions. You should be able to differentiate between hearing their point of views about something and needing their approval or confirmation for your ideas. Sometimes their opinions takes you out of trying, you should be certain that nobody can make your ideas or decision valid except you. It’s a hard habit to break, but it’s a choice as well.

When you hear a negative opinion about you in a hurtful way, know that this person’s behavior has no place in your life. Nobody deserves mental abuse, every time you are giving that person permission to treat you that way. On the other hand, we have two types of opinions, and the first one comes from a place of love, but also you will accept it if it’s right for you. The second type isn’t constructive, and you should reject it, presenting any opinion without love shouldn’t be approved. Beyond that, make sure that your mind didn’t let you feel bad about your actions because the bright side that nobody is actually thinking about you. No one cares about your decisions and if they don’t like your idea then it doesn’t matter .Let us put assumption that someone think that you are the worst and they don’t have real evidence, it will be a deep misunderstanding if you ruin your life by giving them the power to judge you but it’s a choice and your choice is not to believe it. It’s all about what do you think about yourself and that attitude will set you free.

Excuse #9: Good Girl Don’t Hustle

Focus to change the world not to give weight of their opinion

If you want to control your own life, you have to be financially independent. People think that good girls don’t talk about money, and they certainly don’t claim it as a life goal, regardless of their reasons, but if you want to be a master of your fate, you should work to achieve self satisfaction, and to earn your own money should be one of your main targets. You have to work on getting more access, experiences, and knowledge.

When you become a working-mother you may find an open disagreement to your plan to build your own career besides being a mother, you may resist for years but you people’s opinion began to wear you down and turning you into pieces of glass that gets thrown in the ocean, but the only dilemma is how badly you want those dreams and what you’re willing to do to reach your goal. So, ladies don’t stay in  the comfort zone because you are afraid of what they are going to say about you, living with full potential worth the effort we put to get over any obstacle that faces us. Live for the world you are going to make not for their judgments. You have to let go these nine excuses and adopt new behaviors if you want to move forward your dreams.

Behavior #1: Stop Asking Permission

You’re the master of your fate

It was the idea that for most of us, the voice of authority in our lives growing up was male, even when you grew up and get married; the voice of power remained male, but it’s absolutely possible to manage your priorities, your responsibilities, and your personal desire in a good way and this will happen when you stop asking for permission for who you are and stop caring about what they think of your decisions, when you give more time for self-caring than you persuade others with your plan.

Behavior #2: Choose One Goal and Go for it

When everything is important, nothing is important

If you want to achieve a dream don’t look for back up plan. Just find another way to achieve the same dream according to your circumstances, but go all in that one single dream and when it is accomplished move forward to the next one. Don’t district your energy on s many ways to make much progress. Put all your energy into an area can have a deep impact on all other aspects of your life. Close your eyes and imagine your best version after ten year and take the first step; that’s you in ten years then turn those years into ten specific dreams. You have to know where you are heading to, and the reason of doing it.

Behavior #3: Embrace Your Ambitions

Ambition looks like adopting a willingness to do research or ask for help

Ambitious people create opportunities for themselves and for others, ambition is not shameful for any women who want to achieve something it requires strong desire and determination. It’s like living in a way others won’t so you will have a unique life other’s can’t.

Behavior #4: Ask For Help

Many women are afraid to ask for help because they are afraid to admit the fact that they don’t know enough about a certain topic or their physical power don’t help them enough. So they act like super women, but the truth is if we can’t do something all alone doesn’t mean we are weak, even the most powerful people hire many teams to get the mission done. If you want something raise your hand and ask for help, regardless of what anyone else thinks about it. Don’t pretend that you are strong and can stand all alone, because no one can live all alone.

Behavior #5: Build Foundations for Success

There are some principles we should have before we move forward to achieve our goals. If you want to reach your targets you need to build up yourself to win. Always fill your glass with water as we women often think about others not ourselves, we give our energy for people round us and destroy ourselves in the process or we may completely lose ourselves. Also, if you feel upset about your life and your heart is aching; it is a clear indicator that you are not stand on strong foundation, but it’s never too late to start right now through the following:

• Get Healthy

1. Hydration

Drink much water every day like half of your weight and divide them through the whole day.

2. Wake Up Early

The additional hour before your family gets up is the key.

3. Give Up One Category of Food for Thirty Days

Keep your word to avoid a certain type of food.

4. Exercise and let your body move daily

Move your body or work out for just 30 minutes.

5. Be Grateful everyday

Spend your day looking for blessing.

• It’s Your Right to have personal space

Your house is a reflection of what’s going on your life and how you figure out stuff.

• Build great connections

Choose wisely people who pull you up and motivate you.

• Develop your Habits

If you are emotional eater, you have to get rid of this bad habit, and learn brand new habit.

• Create A Morning Routine

1. Wake up at 5:00AM

2. After Finishing My Morning Work, do some meditation 

3. Write Your Journal

4. Once you are mentally prepared to be your best; take care of your kids

5. After the kids are at school, listen to some music

6. Drink a healthy smoothie

7. Write down the list of the ten dreams and the first step

Behavior #6: Stop Allowing Them To Talk You Out Of It

If you want to change someone else, change yourself as people always change their attitude when they are inspired by someone else’s example. If you want to achieve something have courage and the will to change yourself and it is ok if they are not persuaded with the road that you are going to take. It’s not an easy process to change yourself you will be hard on yourself to compromise to do what you want and at the same time don’t hurt the people who matter to you. So, make sure that you are surrounded by good people who mean to you through the following you can have self- regulation to follow with the outside world.

• Ask yourself if those people should be in your life

• Prepare Before You See Mean people

• Plan to take it easy because they things are not going to be simple

Behavior #7: Don’t Hesitate To Reject Anything

If you want to reach your goals like achieving personal growth, unique marriage life, and create your own business; you have to say No without a minute of shame or guilt. It’s like the magical wound that will let you control your own life. Through practice you can gain this skill.

• Respond As fast As you can

Not to use perhaps code for the things that you don’t want to do.

• Be Polite And Honest

Set your own agenda first and show them your commitment to it.

• Be Firm

With yourself unless you are certain that you will get back to your agenda again.

Skills To Gain

Skill #1: Road-Map Strategy

You can’t go anywhere until you know which road to take and some basic details about it; otherwise you are going with the flow to enjoy the ride not to reach a certain goal. And the key here is to start from the ending line; to pinpoint the target. And there are some stages to take you to the next step toward your dream, and let you avoid unproductive attempts.

• The Finish Line

• The Starting Point

• Write Down the Little Steps That Take You Closer 

• Take Massive Action Immediately

Skill #2: Confidence

The concept that you can depend on yourself, and it’s an acquired skill not a character that you should have since you are just a kid. It’s something you can work on to improve if you weren’t so lucky to acquire before, and the key here not to have a great appearance, but to have a personal style. The opportunity to create progress is to ask questions and do researches to find out the weakness points in your appearance and work on fixing them with the way that resonate you. Invest in yourself and use technology to learn what’s new to develop your appearance, and another stage is to surround yourself with people who are confident.

Skill #3: Persistence

People say that a goal is a dream with a timetable, but the truth is some personal dreams can take a long interval of time to be achieved. We all fall in the same mistake of comparing our beginnings with someone’s middle accomplishment; consequently we feel depressed and may not complete the journey. At a certain point, this journey will need you to fight to get where you want to go, as you are not chasing a temporary dream. So, train harder to reach your target, and be aware that the training should never stop. Nowadays, when we ask a question or do a research we are bombarded with a million different answers, in which all of them are confusing. Be patient and know that no matter how long it takes, you will reach if you work hard and dig in your hidden depth. At this moment, you will catch your dream, and you are ready to go for another one. 

Skill #4: Effectiveness

When you work on a goal, putting in all kinds of efforts, and not making any concrete progress that means that you don’t know which road to take or you focus on the wrong direction. You think you need more time to fulfill your needs, but all what you need is to use the time you have in effective way to be productive and highly efficient. 

• Replace Your Task List With A Result List

Keep yourself updated in your field through focusing on accomplishing the right tasks.

• Reevaluate Efficiency

Ask yourself the right question if there is a better way to have a certain accomplishment.

• Create Suitable Environment To Have Progress

There is nothing in the outside world will make you productive and figure out the best version of you.

• Know What Distracts You and Avoid That Things

Shut down all things that steal your attention then focus on what you want to achieve.

• Be on the Right Track

Switch your focus when you are side tracked, it will be such a great loss to give up on your great idea because of trivial reasons. 

Skill #5: Positivity

The first thing you will realize is how negative emotions affect us: they have proven many times to narrow our focus and scope of work. It’s one of the most powerful ways shut our minds off to opportunities or new ideas. This is why listening with intent to agree is so great—it encourages listening with a positive emotion in mind, so that our minds will more naturally open up to what the speaker is saying. Positive thinking can actually improve our overall happiness. Noting down things you are grateful for on a regular basis and how that can improve our happiness. You have t choose to be positive and see possibilities stop any negative idea run through your mind.

Skill #6: Lead-Her-Ship

Some people believe that leaders are born, not made. Others, however, think leadership skills can be developed, just like any other ability. Leaders of the future will know how to tirelessly encourage the dreams of those around them while diffusing their fears. This requires leaders to have unshakable certainty in themselves and a willingness to be generous with those they lead. Always see yourself on stage in spite of how scary and uncomfortable it feels at times; embrace your calling and refuse to hide your shining parts. You can be the light for yourself and you can reflect some light to lead other who will follow your lead.

Epilogue 

The ability to believe in yourself can change your life. The key is to be true to yourself, to be true to the very best that is in you, and to live your life consistent with your highest values and aspirations. This is the only way to truly learn how to believe in yourself. Take some time to think about who you are and what you believe in and what is important to you. If you want to change your life by becoming an author, believe that you can do it. The hardest step in that journey is finding the confidence to learn how to write a book. Once you get a hold of a proven system to plan, produce, and publish your work, the larger goal becomes easier to attain. By believing in yourself, you will find the courage to take immediate action on your goals. And this, as you may know, is the key to success.

 I encourage you to never compromise your integrity by trying to be or say or feel something that is not true for you. If you believe in yourself to be a good person, you will expect good things to happen to you. If you expect good things to happen to you, you will be positive cheerful, and future-oriented. You will look for the good in other people and situations. Your actions on the outside will ultimately be a reflection of your innermost values, beliefs, and expectations on the inside. This is why what you achieve in life and work will be determined more by what is going on inside of you than by any other factor. Live fully into that call on your heart-in spite of how scary it might feel some time. Fight for your dreams and reflect the light for those who come along behind you, but don't be like burned-candle to please others.

Book Briefing: Questions Are The Answers: A Breakthrough Approach to Your Most Vexing Problems at Work and in Life

By: Reham Essam

Questions Are The Answers By: Hal Gregersen

Most of us don’t live or work in conditions so primed for questioning. We don’t even think much about questions and how, by asking more and better ones, we might unlock entirely different answers. We started out life with great creative curiosity, but we lost it along the way. Over the years I came to appreciate that perspective-changing inquiry wasn’t just about business innovation and organizational change. Questions have a curious power to unlock new insights and positive behavior change in every part of our lives. They can get people unstuck and open new directions for progress no matter what they are struggling with. Reframed questions, in whatever setting, turn out to have some fundamental things in common.
For one thing, they have a paradoxical quality of being utterly surprising in the moment they are asked but in retrospect seeming obvious. In other words they carry with them a quality of inevitability without having been inevitable at all. For another thing, they are generative. They open up space for people to do their best thinking. They don’t put anyone on the spot, demanding correct, often predetermined answers under threat of public humiliation. They invite people down an intriguing new line of thought that offers some promise of solving a problem they care about. They act like catalysts in chemical processes; they knock down barriers to thinking and channel energy down more productive pathways. On a personal level, I keep discovering how crucial it is to raise the right questions—sometimes by being caught out by not asking them.

What’s Harder than Finding New Answers?
The key to find better answers is to start by asking better questions, and it is possible to build habits of pausing to revisit questions before rushing to formulate new answers, you need to appreciate first the power of a certain kind of questioning, and avoid the traps of only working to solve problems presented in the same old ways.

Behind Every breakthrough Is A Better Question
There are things that are important to your success that you know all about, and other things unknown to you. The other axis reflects how cognizant you are of those knowledge assets and gaps; that is, you may or may not be aware that there is a piece of information out there that you need to solve your problem. Thus, there are things you know you don’t know. Better Solution are possible with a better question.

It Pays To Focus on Questioning Skills
By getting better at questioning, you raise your chances of unlocking better answers. A lot of times the question is harder than the answer, we typically worry about answers more than questions. On the other hand, some people think that computers are useless; they can only give you answers. You might start to see calls for better questions everywhere. Understanding the power of questions and emphasizing that you should get better at asking them offers a critical choice. You can begin to ask: What am I doing today and tomorrow and the next day so that better questions come into my work and my world?

Not All Questions Are Good Ones
Meanwhile, the goodness or badness of a question is also determined by the spirit in which it’s asked. The best questions are catalytic; that is, they dissolve barriers—which, in idea generation, usually come in the form of false assumptions—and channel energy down new, more productive pathways. 
Great Questions Break down Assumptions
Some questions knock down the walls that have been constraining a problem-solver’s thinking. They remove one or more of the givens in a line of thinking and open up space for inquiry that had been closed off. We commonly call this reframing. Always, the effort starts with an attempt to map the problem space correctly before jumping into building a solution. If for example, a company produces cars, it should not fall into the trap of saying “what would make our cars better?” It should take the larger perspective of remembering that a car is just a solution the customer hires to get a job done, which is to transport people to where they need to go. Think in terms of “How can we transport the customer better?” and the frame for innovation in the company’s offerings suddenly will become vastly larger.

Great Questions Engage and Energize
Questions, when they are seen as sincere requests for help, invite creative contributions from others rather than merely campaigning for their support. In most cases that additional thinking makes for better solutions, but if nothing else it generates more active support. People who cognitively engage with an issue become more invested in getting it resolved. Since so much of what we struggle with in life and work is bigger than we are, it is essential that we use the tools we have to recruit help from others, and good questions are among the best of those tools.

Time to Go Beyond Answering
Importantly, though, he always stresses the need to approach these questions with a “beginner’s mind”—constantly seeing the world with fresh eyes. You need to have a beginner’s mind to create bold innovation. Focusing on answers to settled questions is fine in many situations. In fact, it’s essential that good questions. In fact, it’s essential that good questions should lead to periods of good answering. The point is not to remain in constant questioning mode, always stepping back to rethink things instead of stepping up to make a decision and get on with life. But answering yesterday’s questions is not good enough at times when we are feeling stuck, or when innovation is imperative, or when change must happen more continuously.

The More Ways we are Stuck, The More Questions We Need
As it happens, we are collectively—and in many cases individually—in need of the power of innovation in numerous realms. There are scientific mysteries to unravel, social issues to resolve, personal difficulties to overcome. In many of these areas, progress has stalled as old ideas have run their repetitive course. Only new questions can shows the ways forward. Nothing fixed, someone seeing a problem that has others throwing up their hands, and then finding an unexpected new angle to approach it from.

Time to Get Better At Questioning
Indeed, the questions raised in many settings are time-wasting diversions if not downright toxic. Instead, it’s a certain kind of question that inspires creative problem-solving because it energizes collective thinking, inspiring collaborative work to make serious progress. By keeping a focus these questions, we can learn how to bring more of them to the surface of our lives and work.

Why Don’t We Ask More?
Learning Not to Ask
The first reason that questions don’t spring naturally to many people’s lips is that, early in life, the natural desire to ask them was checked many time— so much so that questioning impulses weakened and the desire withered away. The process takes place at school and at home, and continues as young people head off to work. By the time they are in positions where they feel at liberty to ask challenging questions, and are even required to do so for their own good that of others, they don’t know how to do it.
Anyone who has spent much time around kids knows that humans start out full of questions and are uninhibited about asking them. Most of this questioning is simple knowledge seeking and sense making, but mixed in with the factual questions are inevitably some discomfiting ones, and now and again there’s one that touches a third rail, however inadvertently. As their questions provoke responses, kids learn on two levels. They get answers (when they’re lucky) to what they are curious about, and at the same time they get signals about whether they should keep asking. Stopping to consider how a problem might be solved differently, or how a different problem might be solved differently, or how a different problem might get solved, is a regrettable cause for delay and, if the question is re-ally challenging, can bring activity to a halt, this love of productivity is a reason why questioners are discouraged, but usually it is not the whole reason. The bigger, darker reason for shutting down questioning is that these settings are also rife with power struggles.

Power Corrupts the Questioning Process
These are a more common kind of question— a kind that is easily deployed as a weapon. We see this all time in a political affair. Those attempting to gain or maintain power don’t use questions to ask permission, gain others’ perspectives, and get to know other better, or seek their counsel. They use questions to put others in their places, to catch them out and make them look stupid, or to remind them that they are obliged to stop whatever they’re doing to respond. The power hungry aren’t seekers of truth; they are seekers of advantage. Power-seeking people are tuned in to the fact that questions steer the course of conversations and that the ones doing the asking are therefore in the driver’s seat. They use questions to maintain control and, when others pose questions, ignore them or try to turn them to their advantage.
There are good questioners and bad questioners, and the worst questioners make use of questions to dominate others. But most people never pause to think that questions come in different shades of good and bad, and therefore the stinging effects of toxic questioning taint all questioning activity for them. On a deep level the come to believe that to ask a question—especially one that challenges an edge of the status quo—is to behave obnoxiously. The higher that people rise in hierarchies—based on position, expertise, ownership, charisma, or heaven forbid, all four the more their questions tend to pack a wallop and fail to encourage the challenging inquiry that could lead them and others to better ways of thinking and doing. Power tends to corrupt the questioning process and absolute power corrupts the questioning process absolutely.

Lacking the growth Mindset
Our need to safety plays itself out at many levels other than the original, familial one, and this is why we follow leaders in everyday life. To be a well-behaved child is generally no to question the teacher even when the teacher is somehow bad. When we are adults on the job it’s the same: By and large we toe the line. We do what we’re told and play by the rules, even when the rules are unfair, and those who set them badly equipped or disposed. We follow because the cost of not following is, more often than not, high.
People often hesitate to ask questions because they would rather not gain information that would make them confront a need for change. Even when, rationally, it is evident that things are not going as well as they could, there is something within individuals that is ferociously protective of the status quo. For most people, that territory is blocked off by various barriers, including emotional ones that keep them from wanting venture into it.

Where in the World Do Questions Thrives?
Questions tend to suffer, as people value the stable knowledge that is foundational to their mutual understanding and cooperation over transformative knowledge that might disrupt many existing arrangements. For those of us particularly interested in questioning behaviors, it also reinforces the notion that the natural curiosity humans are born with can be encouraged or discouraged to very different degrees depending on the circumstances in which they find themselves. If we acknowledge that whole societies, and certainly whole organizations, can trend toward keeping questions from surfacing, that should reinforce our resolve to crave out the special places in which we know they can flourish.

Cleaning a Space for Inquiry?
Parker palmer, an educator and activist when he was offered a plum job as a college president. He asked to have a “clearness committee” a process in which he group refrains from giving you advice but spends three hours asking you honest open questions to help you discover your own inner truth. Human begin life as active questioners, but as childhood progresses and the years pass that quality fades. We may not be able to change the whole world into a questioning place, but we can carve out spaces in which we establish question-friendly conditions.
What If We Brainstormed For Questions?
Over the years, I have come to realize that it is a simple matter of creating a different kind of space for people, in which the usual rules and norms are suspended and different behaviors are encouraged. More broadly, the small-scale exercise has convinced me that breakthrough thinking isn’t just a product of superior gray matter. It’s not all about the cognitive processes going on inside people’s heads. To a great degree it’s a matter of the conditions in which they find themselves—which usually discourage questioning but can be altered to invite it. If you want different behaviors to take hold, you must start by changing the setting in which people find themselves by creating a space for conversations that will spark ideas and therefore yield what we call a return on collisions.

A Small- Scale Reset
Question Burst may be an exercise that you will want to try if you are, individually or as part of a group, looking for new insights to solve a problem you care about. It consists of three steps:
1. Set the Stage
Select a challenge you care deeply about, you give it your full attention and want to engage others in thinking about it, and check your emotions about it because emotions have an impact on creative energy.
2. Generate the Questions
Brainstorm some questions within 4 mins, and once the timer goes off, do the second quick emotional check about the challenge, and get rid of negative feeling of being stuck.
3. Unpack the Questions
Study the questions and make a new path after feeling more energized by the possibility of making progress. This exercise produces at least one question that usefully reframes the problem and provides a new angle for solving it; it can help create a boarder culture of collective problem-solving and truth seeking. So these artificial conditions make people value questions and think more broadly about the conditions that favor them.

Other Forcing Functions
Some people don’t know that they don’t know the answer, so a father credits a series of gathering in places away from home where the family engaged in activities they didn’t usually pursue, creating a climate in which they could ask the right questions. If you want people to think differently, you need to put them in a different space.

Safely Unsafe Spaces
What I am advocating are spaces where people can dare to take in disconfirming information and where the questions occurring to them as a result—questions that might well be perceived as contrarian, or annoying, or flaky—can be voiced and heard. These are spaces for exploration beyond safe comfort zones. The key to feel safe was having a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up.

Creating Conditions for yourself and others
The space in which question thrive are spaces where different conditions prevail, individuals can get themselves into such productive circumstances in three ways:
First, they can consciously seek out more settings where questioning conditions prevail—a carved-out safe space for questioning that doesn’t resemble the normal conditions in which one operates.
Second, you can create those conditions in pockets around you—and not only for yourself but perhaps for other as well.
Third, in your daily comings and goings in circumstances you can’t easily change, you can pack a long the condition of assuming greater wrongness as a purely personal perspective. You can make a questioning space for yourself to refuse to capitulate to the conditions that are suppressing your imagination and voice.

Who revels in Being Wrong?
The point is acquiring the questioning habit, and to keeps looking at problems from different angles. This is why a different question could penetrate thoughts in the first place, and it’s also why some people stopped to engage with it. And it’s a habit we should even love to see in others. The model of colleagues are challengers—since they challenge the status quo— who wake up in the morning asking questions, because they understand that the world is bigger than what they can see. They accomplish great things because they always suspect there is some other, better way to get something done, or another thing they can do, and they put a question mark on everything we are doing, all the time.

Wrongness As A Condition
Nothing shuts down questioning activity more than the determination to be—and be seen to be—unquestionably right. When we are sure we are right, or convinced that a decision must be made without delay, we leap to ready answers and shut down further inquiry. We resist opening up the discovery process and pressure others to close it down. Questions don’t arise whenever we are wrong. It’s only on those rare occasions when we think we’re wrong. And for most of us it’s only when we are practically hit in the face with how wrong we have been that questions start to get our attention. Sometimes new information makes it obvious. This tends to be the way with scientific discovery. If you want to find a new angle on a problem and ultimately find a breakthrough solution, you must rid yourself of the impulse always to display deep competence. For the right questions to surface, you must spend more time feeling mistaken.

Stale Mental Models
By focusing on mental models, you go straight to the deepest level of potential wrongness, the level that is hardest and most valuable for us to question in ourselves. It’s hardest for a few reasons: it requires not just learning but unlearning; it’s the kind of questioning that we get the least practice doing; and it exposes a layer of knowledge most people give no thought to all.

Try Being Wrong More
You should be very thoughtful about how to overcome this natural resistance to push yourself to move further into the territory of what of what you don’t know you don’t know, always listening for the weak signals you might be missing. In order to develop a more prevailing suspicion that you might be wrong—and not just at the top layer of facts but at the deeper layer of assumptions and mental models—is to educate yourself about cognitive biases. This is the very human habit of seeing what we want to see. Having formed a hypothesis that something is true about the world, we are more apt to note and file away evidence that helps to confirm that while passing over the evidence around us that would suggest otherwise. This isn’t a deliberate refusal to acknowledge the challenging data; missing it is an unconscious phenomenon. That’s just one from cognitive bias; some attempts to list all the others run to over a hundred entries.

Check Your Certitude
Despite there are many books about our limiting cognitive habits, and despite the fact that we live in an era where it is easy to access information that could reveal so much of our wrongness to us, people become less willing to entertain doubts about their rightness. Our increasingly digitally intermediated lives also grant us a greater ability to surround ourselves with inputs that only reinforce our going-in assumptions and exclude ones that challenge us. Some people spent most of their lives being wrong, and the whole story is about civilization’s progress, is repeated discovery that some beliefs, assumptions, or conventional wisdom that guided people in the past were deeply wrong. Yet we go through life without doubting that these days we have it right. If you are certain that you are looking in the eyes of the truth, you won’t even attempt to find a better solution, and you will be trapped into either/or decisions.
Getting Systematic About It
Five ways to learn that you are wrong and adjust your path, a state of doubt about your rightness:
1. Ask fir brutally honest reports from the people who work directly for you
2. Check in with different vantage points
3. Explain to people why you depend on them to educate you
4. Find ways for people to say you don’t get it
5. Encourage the issue raisers in the ranks

Why Would Anyone Seek Discomfort?
You should know that where you stumble, there your treasure lies, if you want to come up with better questions and better solutions—you should spend more time in conditions where questions thrive.

Beware the Bubble
Privileged people now live in a bubble, but no wonder moving out of your element transforms you into a more active seeker. You need to go to places that you are not feeling comfortable; you need to try to push and find out where are the boundaries to pinpoint the blind spot there.

Benefits of Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone
Famously, discomfort spurs a lot f innovation. Problem-solvers habitually focus on pain points. 
The Element of Surprise:
It’s challenging to work with others, who don’t resemble you on multiple dimensions, but from that discomfort, catalytic questions arise and creative insights are born.

The Power of Distraction: 
Better results came with task switching, because distractions create time and space for mind the surface questions and insights that otherwise can’t happen.
The Benefit of Conflict:
Many of us feel discomfiture when we suddenly see an assumption we have been making or something we have been missing, and we feel awkward or guilty about it, and then we realize how we are profoundly disconnected from consequences of our own choices and actions. So don’t surrender to normal circumstances and isolate yourself, you should hear and see things you normally won’t know about them.
Practice to Do This with Some Discipline
Few suggestions to understand logically how uncomfortable conditions can yield benefits and another to actually seek them out:
1. Live somewhere else far away
2. Take the scenic route
3. Shake your entourage
4. Face your critics
5. Head for the cheap seats
6. Don’t overdo it
7. Audit your comfort level

The Dreaded Comfy Chair
The point of travelling is to journey into complication, even contradiction; to confront the questions that you never have to think about at home and you are not sure can ever be easily answered.

Will You Be Quiet?
Successful individuals compose and wait. Composing these steady-state layers deliberately, think conditions of being more wrong and uncomfortable, they can then wait—impatiently, but with confidence that some valuable insight will materialize. 
1. Transmission Trouble
2. Listen For the Unexpected
3. Silence Your Own Voice
4. Get Ready For Surprises
5. Become Approachable
6. Actively Seek Passive Data
7. Silent Mode Thinking Time
8. Read Daily, Read Deeply
9. Clear Your Head and Heart
10. The Sound Of Silence


How Do You Channel The Energy?
People who are able to transform their questions and ideas into actual accomplishments are people who really uplift society.

Six Stages to channel the energy:

1. Escalating the Questions: Look for the next, bigger implication of the question to solve it.
2. Cascading the Questions: Use energizing question to achieve impact.
3. Managing the Emotional Arc: Unlock answers hold the power to spark our imagination, and give us reason to hope. But, negative mood makes us miss interesting solution. 
4. What A great Coach Does: A Coach changes the internal environment of people by questions to be productive.
5. Questioning Capital: Same question is posed by different people creates very different responses.
6. Learning to tell the tale: Use character-driven stories with emotional content to make key points.

Can We Raise A Next Generation of Questioners?
Most of the great innovators in multiple stages of their lives were around adults who taught them the act of asking and gave them opportunities to engage in the act of creation.

Seven stages to raise whole generation of good questioners:

1. Schooled in Questioning
2. Drawing on a Box of Questions
3. Nothing The Question That produced The Answer
4. Increasing Wait time
5. Celebrating Questioners
6. Learning on Ed Tech to Achieve Answer Recall
7. Shifting to Project-Centered Learning

What Age Can you Start Being an Artist?
Giving voice for voiceless will create many better questions among them from the very beginning through the following:

1. Extracurricular Questioning: Create better space for questioning in schools.
2. A Digital Heaven for Questioning—Or Hell: Although it empowered conservative people to ask questions regarding sensitive subjects, but it let some wait for the right answer, instead of trying.
3. Questioning Begins At Home: The greatest thing is to grow up in a family that encourages intellectual curiosity.
4. The Campus Challenge: As a student, you are judged by how well you answer questions .But in life, you are judged by your questions.
5. Never Too Late: Speak up in support of the questioners among your colleagues.
6. Expect Different Questions: Don’t shut down any voice.

Why Not Aim for the Biggest Questions?
The bigger the problem or the opportunity in the world, the bigger the insight we need—and the bigger the questions we should be prepared to ask.

• To Ask A Mighty Question: If you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part.
• Learning To Live the Questions: Have patience with everything unsolved in your heart, then you will find the way into the answer perhaps someday far in the future.
• Stepping Up to the Big Picture: The process of asking questions helps make sure that we haven’t missed larger and fundamental issues.
• In The Business of Questioning: They ask big questions even as they are making the world much more aware of the power of raising them.
• Asking the Big Social Questions: Use the power to translate the questions into a serious sense of resolve and find their ways to energizing answers.
• Big Means Fundamental: Powerful questions should be long term, and strong enough to survive and surpass setback, delays, pain, and failure.

Epilogue

What Will You Ask of Yourself?
We all have keystone questions guiding us through life—whether or not we are consciously aware of them. People who have spent time clarifying their purpose have often distilled it down to a compelling motto of some kind, or declaration of intent. Nevertheless, with what you have you can reflect light into the dark places of this world—into the dreary places in the heart of others—and change some things in some people. Perhaps other may see and do likewise. Ask yourself what dark place will I find in need of light, and how will I manage to reflect some into it?
It’s a wonderful thing when someone perceives at early age the question that drives their journey of discovery through life. On the other side of the coin, failure is not trying, and if you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much space; you should try new things to spread your wings in life. If you didn’t try, you would realize later it was because you had let the wrong question take hold of your life early and never brought it clearly out into the cold light of the day to examine it.
Learning to compose and wait means consciously deciding to spend some period of time being rather quiet, feeling rather uncomfortable, and accepting that you might just be wrong. It directly serves the purpose of forging better questions. Look for the photograph in a different way, inviting people to challenge your fundamental assumptions with their content.
You can shift your keystone question, moreover, fate and endless conversation with friends will open up your heart to live on its outside to enjoy the complex beauty of the door’s surface and not be pulled into the darkness of that hole. Discover the questions to live by, and allow them to reflect light in your life.