I just got an assignment in my transformations lab at the Wright Leadership Institute – asking inappropriate questions. Say what?
See, in my family, we never asked any questions at all. In fact we didn’t communicate in the extreme. My folks didn’t tell many stories about their childhoods and growing up. We didn’t talk about what happened during our day at school. We didn’t share a lot of personal information with one another. We kept secrets. As kids, we learned that asking questions was somehow intrusive. Don’t ask, don’t tell was the unspoken policy. For a long time, I call this “respecting others boundaries.”
Recently I’ve come to see how this so-called respect has actually distanced me from others and kept me from experiencing true intimacy. So now I’m experimenting with pushing those boundaries, being outrageously curious, and asking the unspoken question. I’m learning to be impertinent. And I’m also learning that others want to share themselves, and that they open up to genuine curiosity. I’m learning how to be nourished by and intimate with others.
