The default American question “What do you do?” doesn’t suffice. Here are six of my favorite questions to ask people instead, and why they work. Asking people better questions is a great way into a more interesting conversation.
In my twenties, I was on track to fulfill all the obligations of being a woman in this society: engaged to be married, great job, graduate degree education, wanted to have kids. Society was happy for me, and that ring on my finger was the icing on the cake. The problem? I didn’t like the job, and I was wildly uncertain about the prospect of getting married, even though I’d said yes to the proposal. Then, over the span of a year, I lost my rib (it was taken out of my body through emergency surgery), I lost my fiancé, and I found myself in completely new territory. What happens after the fairy-tale ending? In most books, my engagement would have been the happily-ever-after. Here, I had a new lease on life, and finally, slowly, started listening to myself and what I wanted, instead.
There are many ways to go about a day. It’s not always as important what gets done as it is *how* I am showing up, and *who I’m being* in the process of all the doing and non-doing that I’m engaged in. In my mastermind circles, we call this “ways of being.” We work through three major phases and processes in our work together, which I describe in this post.
July was a busy reading month. I was focused on recording and prepping interviews for my upcoming maternity leave, and with all the extra interviews scheduled, I had quite a list of books I needed to read to prepare! Here’s the complete list of books I read over the last month: one of them, Overwhelmed, is one of the best books I’ve read so far all year.